Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s also awful timing. After what, 18 months of productive WFH now they want to cut salary?
Why wouldn't they? Any "sane" company out there will cut your salary as soon as they find a good excuse to do so. Working from home VS working from the office is the perfect excuse. Productivity doesn't matter because if you go below the minimum bar, you are lay off.
Google employees who work from home could lose money
331–340 of 699 posts
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#332> 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…
It's fair in the sense that they provide each with the means to live at roughy the same standard-of-life: a Stamford $ has more buying power because local prices are lower, so they need fewer of them. Or, one could simply see it as answering a different question. Not "how much are you worth", but rather "how much do you need". If that sounds unfair, consider that it's close to the principle by which most parents care…
Being "fair" then becomes risky from the point of view of everyone as they'll actually find it unfair. I think it's easier to align on market demand on which case I agree with OP - market rate adjustments by location don't make sense for remote workers.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you sure it's that simple? Google was previously known in the wider world for imposing longer than average work days under the guise of "you love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock climbing". It wasn't about extracting productivity, it was about imposing culture.
Imposing culture and keeping people around at all hours was in the service of company productivity. At least that is their philosophy. It really is that simple.
This is the only thing I question, given the mix of data suggesting the opposite is true. Stanford ran a project about it some time ago: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunc...
That may boil down to execution, though. That project emerged out of pretty scathing posts from the boiler room programming environments of EA. I'm pretty confident Google operates very differently, and probably learned from those calamities.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Perhaps, but anecdotally my electricity and gas bills have been much higher since I've been working at home - YMMV of course
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of people in Europe also take the car to work. At my work I would say definitely more than 50%.
As other people pointed out: this varies wildly by city or region. In urban areas cars are really not incredibly common. In Berlin you'll find that only 1/3 of people even own a car. Of course, even fewer go to work by car. In Munich, you'll find 1/2 of people owning a car.
E.g. the 2 biggest employers in Oxford UK are the University, where almost no one would commute by car, and the MINI car factory, where almost everyone would. That's because the University is in the historic part of town, with good bus service, near the main train station, easy cycling and no parking, but the car factory is at the edge of town, with good access to the road network and lots of parking.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#336The 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…
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't they? Any "sane" company out there will cut your salary as soon as they find a good excuse to do so. Working from home VS working from the office is the perfect excuse. Productivity doesn't matter because if you go below the minimum bar, you are lay off.
This might be a good heuristic if we were talking about a factory job, but this is a job at a tech company. Competition for talent is pretty fierce, a good enough reason not to cut someone's salary is that it's likely they can go elsewhere and make what they're making now, plus a signing bonus.
> Competition for talent is pretty fierce, a good enough reason not to cut someone's salary is that it's likely they can go elsewhere and make what they're making now, plus a signing bonus
I really hope that scenario will happen. IT companies tend to repeat what Google, Amazon, and other tech giants do; so I expect most IT companies will follow Google regarding the topic we are discussing here. I hope am wrong.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#338Despite the headlines, this has little to do with companies taking advantage of remote workers to safe cost and more with companies using pre-pandemic comp mechanisms in a post-pandemic. Comp in the vast majority of companies is based on cost of labor in the market the employee is located at. Software developers are cheaper in Alaska than in SF and even cheaper in Costa Rica, Ukraine or India. And yes, also cheaper i…
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't they? Any "sane" company out there will cut your salary as soon as they find a good excuse to do so. Working from home VS working from the office is the perfect excuse. Productivity doesn't matter because if you go below the minimum bar, you are lay off.
This might be a good heuristic if we were talking about a factory job, but this is a job at a tech company. Competition for talent is pretty fierce, a good enough reason not to cut someone's salary is that it's likely they can go elsewhere and make what they're making now, plus a signing bonus.
The industry has done everything in its power to try and retain people through disincentives (interview processes, on boarding process, expectations of often absurd spinup to productivity times, etc.) while not focusing on the incentives (increased pay, more time off, better work life balance, etc.). All of this, acting as sort of collusion agreement proxy to reduce poaching across the industry, makes it less attractive to jump ship and businesses know that.
Spending the time to update my resume, market it a bit, deal with a mixture of mostly sweatshops with some reasonable employers mixed in, and a few actual good employers hiring processes (recruiter spam, LC gauntlets, full day technical interviews) and often employers expecting you to clairvoyantly know their idiosyncrasies (internal infrastructure, business processes, pre-existing code bases and dozens of arbitrary dependencies they chose and worked with for years)--all of which businesses pretend aren't costs and externalize on employees, makes it less attractive.
Let's add in the mix of normal/traditional job switches: meeting and meshing with new coworkers, changing your commute which may not be insignificant, overhead of switching and moving your benefits packages around, delays for building/taking time off, new uncertainties/risks about stability, etc. and suddenly, that sign-on bonus with the near same package doesn't look so attractive.
Anymore, for me to even consider jumping ship I'd need a pretty hefty sign-on bonus just to deal with the rest that will turn into lost personal time and stress. I really need a significant TC bump and hopefully, better work/life balance and/or a combination of my current employer TC degrading due to increased demand, hours, stress, stagnant growth, etc. otherwise, industry has created so many disincentive barriers that I'll stay where I am.
Maybe it's not as tiresome/costly for some, but it certainly is for me.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#340Class 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…
Just started procurement activity targeting a buildout to be done Q2/Q3 2022.