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Google employees who work from home could lose money

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121–130 of 699 posts

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#121
(Acknowledgement that there are always life situations which demand abandoning convenience)

The solution to this regional pay for remotes nonsense is not to interview with companies which practice it. Same as with the hybrid remote weirdness that's the new hotness.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#122

The cost of commuting on the environment is extremely high. We should be offering incentives to companies to switch to remote work. If 20% of jobs permanently switched to remote, the impact on carbon emissions would be immediate, and extremely positive.

Yes but that isn't typically how the value-cost balance between employee and employer works, unless there is regulation in play. Working from home is a benefit which many people would be willing to trade X% salary for. This is just market forces at work. I've been curious how the market for remote work would play out - I'm especially interested in knowing what X ends up being.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#123

It's weird how directly the incentive is to increase your carbon footprint. They'll essentially pay you more for contributing to congestion and pollution.

Because employees in the office are more productive.

That's a very absolutist statement, personally I'm more productive at home where I don't have the interruptions of an open office and there's no feeling of having people watching over my shoulder.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because employees in the office are more productive.

The planet is actually on fire, right now, as you read this. So fuck productivity. We can manage. We must sacrifice the inconvenience of wasting our time commuting because of some arbitrary productivity definition to stop the surface of the planet from being engulfed in flames. There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million people because productivity is apparently more important than containing the outbreak of a…

Fires like the ones in Athens are happening more often globally and they are a legitimate issue. Washington and California in the last year, Portugal 2 years ago.

I agree with your general idea, but society is a mechanism and many people in lower positions of power simply follow the incentives regardless of intention or impact around them.

We need people in higher positions of power, who have influence over those incentives and that believe in those climate issues, to change those incentives so that lower level power positions adopt the needed measures.

Sadly, I suspect previous generations will need to retire and new ones with direct awareness of those issues to take their place. And that will sadly take its sweet time...

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#125

Companies were never paying based on value provided. They pay market rate which, until recently, was artificially limited to a few expensive markets. With remote, these companies are now able to do what every other large labor driven industry has done and lower their costs by finding labor in cheaper markets.

This is a good thing, it's not healthy to have all your wealth in one small region of a country.

wait till the even wider proliferation of offshoring of remote technical roles. The wealth will be even more concentrated, except only the executives, while the workers will have even less

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#126
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sources please. Edit: The OP makes an extraordinary claim about remote work and reduction in CO2. I would assume members of HN would be intellectually curious enough to want to dig deeper.

You really need sources to decide that reducing commuting is a good idea for the environment?

The question is what affect it would have. If it’s minuscule compared to a single bulk cargo freighter it may just be window dressing and greenwashing.

If it would reduce 20% of all energy usage worldwide it would hugely significant.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#127
Interestingly, in Spain this would be illegal.

After a law introduced last year, long-term remote working (>30% of hours outside the office for 3+ months) now requires the worker and company to agree written terms (who'll pay for costs, how much remote is allowed, what worker monitoring will be used, if any, on what schedule does the worker have to be available, etc).

As part of that, there's legal protections against discrimination in salary, promotions, working hours etc. You cannot employ a remote worker and an in-office worker in Spain and pay the remote worker less money just because they're remote.

More details: https://parakar.eu/sp/remote-working-in-spain-covered-by-law...

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#128

It's weird how directly the incentive is to increase your carbon footprint. They'll essentially pay you more for contributing to congestion and pollution.

How's that? If you live in NYC, you get paid more. People who live in NYC have the amongst the lowest carbon footprint in the nation. If you live in a dense urban area, you generally will have a lower carbon footprint.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#129

I can see why you’d pay a remote staff member differently from an on-prem staff member. As others have said if you’re hiring remote then your talent pool is effectively the whole world, so price competition is fiercer. But if everyone is remote or everyone is on-prem, then location-dependent pricing is complete nonsense. The employees are all still providing the same value to the company. Claiming that you can’t pay…

If you remove location-dependent pricing, which location do you align the new single price on? Mountain View? London? Hyderabad?

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#130
post #103
post #44

Class A office space in Manhattan is about $70/sqft, and the average office employee gets 150 sqft allocated (desk, hallway, conference room, supply closets...) Google is probably 170. That's $11900 annually that they save by not having an employee take up office space. No, it's not fungible on a small scale, but it's certainly fungible on a large scale: reduce your office needs by 100 people and you can rearrange de…

Manhattan leases also famously start at 10 year terms as the shortest. With all the secrets going around your average FAANG office, no way would any company sublease a partial floor. Maybe an entire floor, but that creates more issues with the complicated separate lobby and elevator systems they previously built These companies could maybe cut the costs in a few years, maybe in 10-15. Most of these employees working…

Companies at Google's scale have a lot more ability to move headcount across geographies so they can work around lease constraints to maximize benefits.
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