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Google employees who work from home could lose money

reuters.com

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Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#211

Post by namdnay »

gowld wrote: post #184
namdnay wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why even less? remote work has been a great boost for lots of workers. I see the effect of it here in Europe, in the past year average hire salaries have gone up by at least 10% due to the competition with fully remote orgs

Even less for US workers, they mean.

I imagine the effect is similar for the job market in small US towns? If you're in the middle of Idaho or whatever you've suddenly gone from having a single tech employer within a 1h radius to having hundreds of remote opportunities

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#212

Post by eru »

gmadsen wrote: post #125
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would the company splurge on executives, and not drive down their wages, too, if that's so easy?

Executive cost money, too. They are also employees.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#213

Post by sdevonoes »

tzs wrote: post #201

> Screenshots of Google's internal salary calculator seen by Reuters show that an employee living in Stamford, Connecticut - an hour from New York City by train - would be paid 15% less if she worked from home, while a colleague from the same office living in New York City would see no cut from working from home. Screenshots showed 5% and 10% differences in the Seattle, Boston and San Francisco areas. This makes no s…

> If that means that the rate is too low for people in NYC why should the company care as long as they can get enough people from Stamford and other places with lower costs of living than NYC?

Exactly. Google doesn't care, and as any other "good" company out there: money comes first, employees are peons.

The thing I hope we are discussing here is: what (Google) employees can do about it? Can they do something at all? And if they can't, well, this basically means that in the near future every IT company out there will be doing the same. Sad, but hey, if we let companies do this sort of things, well, we deserve it.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#214

Post by eru »

namdnay wrote: post #150
minikites wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finding cheaper labor elsewhere further concentrates wealth. The only way to spread out the wealth would be to mandate the same salary across regions.

That sounds good, but how do you determine this new universal salary? It's either going to be absurdly over market (are you going to pay fresh grads in Hyderabad 150k USD a year?) or absurdly under market (are you going to pay fresh grads in Mountain View 30k USD a year?)

Yes. And how do you determine which two jobs are similar enough to warrant the same salary by law? Where do you draw the lines?

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#215

Post by ashtonkem »

gmadsen wrote: post #125
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I’m old enough to remember this being a threat a few decades ago. Most of those roles came back to the US. If it was that easy, they would’ve moved long before Covid.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#216

Post by throwaway6734 »

dsr_ wrote: 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…

I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of power employees at Google have. It's one of the most desirable places to work in the world and they routinely turn down quality candidates (similar to ivy league schools).

There are plenty of people in smaller tech markets that would work remotely at Google at the reduced rates because it would still result in pay bumps

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#217

Post by erinan »

mumblemumble wrote: post #156

> One Google employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation, typically commutes to the Seattle office from a nearby county and would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time, according estimates by the company's Work Location Tool launched in June. > The employee was considering remote work but decided to keep going to the office - despite the two-hour commute. This seems…

2-hour commute? I'll take the pay cut anytime, like is too short... (and maybe start looking for another job, easier to do with all that "extra" time)

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#218

Post by ghaff »

bennyp101 wrote: post #186
boplicity wrote: post #99

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.

I guess in a purely commuting way, perhaps. But if 100 employees are all at home and are heating/cooling their houses all with different levels of insulation and efficiency, how does that compare to an office building that is controlled and built to be efficient? Or the amount of electric they use to power their home workstation and radio, rather than a shared office radio? Or lower power machines. Or the more shoppi…

If people own a house anyway, working in it during the day doesn't really add much in the energy use. Maybe there's a few degrees more heating or cooling at the margins. Maybe there are more trips to a store--on the other hand, restaurants and cafeterias aren't necessarily super-efficient.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#219

Post by Raphael_Amiard »

boplicity wrote: post #175
Raphael_Amiard wrote: post #140

Earlier 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…

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…

Ok! Sorry about the violent agreement message then. Yes, there is definitely a balance to be found between individual freedom and collective well being here.

I guess what I'm getting at is that if people drive less, they'll realize that their car-centered lifestyles don't work anymore, and will have to find alternatives. Let's hope that's easier than what I envision :)

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#220

Post by eru »

kristopolous wrote: post #23

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.

Well, Germany has (or used to have) a tax subsidy for commuting, too.

See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendlerpauschale (might need Google Translate).

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