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 highly debatable.
Google employees who work from home could lose money
171–180 of 699 posts
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#172I think that lots of people will be willing to reduce pay, to stay home. That will also act as an incentive to corporations, to use remote workers.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#173It'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.
Not everyone who works in NYC is a NYC resident. The entire state of NJ basically exists for people commuting to NYC. half of the entire state is basically highways and parking lots.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#174Earlier 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.
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t... . > A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. > This assumes the average gasoline vehicle on the road today has a fuel economy of about 22.0 miles per gallon and drives around 11,500 miles per year.
22mpg sounds like fleet average. I don't think the average commuter who could work from home is getting 22mpg, probably close to 30 average. I don't think the frequency of trucks and vans relative to cars and crossovers is not high enough within those demographics to drag down the average that far.
I'd pad the estimate for carbon saved and say like 3.5ton/yr per work from home employee.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#175The 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.
I'm used to the conversation in here being extremely US-centric, but realize that this is much less true for European cities with good public transportation. I haven't ever used a car to go to work in my life. I'm also very concerned about this better world where people stay home to save the planet. The common level of social interactions in the modern world is already low enough in my opinion. EDIT: It rarely happen…
The European vision of living in dense, walkable neighborhoods, with easy access to quality amenities without the need to drive makes sense, to me at least, as the answer to this problem.
I'm not advocating for staying home; I'm advocating for less driving. It may not make as much of a difference in the E.U., but if we're aiming to be carbon neutral, less driving will be necessary, or, at least, extremely helpful in achieving that goal.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#176The 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.
I'm used to the conversation in here being extremely US-centric, but realize that this is much less true for European cities with good public transportation. I haven't ever used a car to go to work in my life. I'm also very concerned about this better world where people stay home to save the planet. The common level of social interactions in the modern world is already low enough in my opinion. EDIT: It rarely happen…
Lots of people in Europe also take the car to work. At my work I would say definitely more than 50%.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#177Class 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…
> If Googlers had any collective bargaining power, they wouldn't be getting salary reductions: they would be getting extra expense money for desks, chairs, and ISP upgrades. Since Google already pays the most, where do you threaten to leave to while bargaining?
Google pays well, but not the most. (Unless things have changed recently.)
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm used to the conversation in here being extremely US-centric, but realize that this is much less true for European cities with good public transportation. I haven't ever used a car to go to work in my life. I'm also very concerned about this better world where people stay home to save the planet. The common level of social interactions in the modern world is already low enough in my opinion. EDIT: It rarely happen…
> good public transportation. Public transportation has a higher environment cost than staying at home to work. That should be fairly obvious.
Public transportation doesn't do autoscaling.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a ridiculous argument. How could a company continue to function in this case? A pot of gold or some other form of magic? The point is, compensation is inequitable. Upper management at most tech companies is paid 20-50x what a worker is paid. Do you think that is reasonable?
Of course compensation is inequitable. I don't think anyone outside fringe leftist politicos have ever suggested it should be otherwise? And if your company continues to print money decade after decade while paying upper management 20-50x what a worker makes, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.
> And if your company continues to print money decade after decade while paying upper management 20-50x what a worker makes, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.
This seems at odds with the normal HN view of Google, which is that they can't do anything right but have such a good thing going with ads that they basically cannot fail. If this is true, then an inanimate object could lead the company to success. I am not convinced it is so extreme, but I am definitely not convinced that paying Sundar billions and billions less would actually change the company.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#180Earlier 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?
I need sources on two claims:
> The cost of commuting on the environment is extremely high.
Reasonable, but source please so I can learn more.
> If 20% of jobs permanently switched to remote, the impact on carbon emissions would be immediate, and extremely positive.
A more extraordinary claim. I also need sources to learn more.