381–390 of 699 posts
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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)
Some individuals have routines built into the commute that aren’t necessarily swapped when working from home. I read my email/catch-up on slack/read the newspaper during my 45 minute commute in the morning. While wfh I spend the time doing something pretty similar.
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Exactly. When I left California I fully expected my pay to get reduced, I’m not going to blind myself and think that it wouldn’t happen because of my move to a lower cost of living area. I’m lucky that that wasn’t the case but it was a pleasant surprise more than something I expected and demanded.
I still think everyone should fight against it if they think it's going to happen, whether they've come to terms with it or not. I heard about an employee who moved to Canada, got her manager to agree to no pay cut, but HR went over the manager's head. Certainly a rage-quit moment if it had been me, though of course international concerns were a factor. Admittedly it's easier to fight if your move is domestic. "Cost…
> 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…
I mean, if they were paying him 10% more based on home location and commuting then there is a somewhat reasonable argument to be made. But of course, almost none of these companies are actually paying the people who live further away more, it's just management trying to enforce their will over the "peons". Our company is trying to force everyone back into the office 5 days a week. Their arguments for doing so were "p…
The problem is too many upper managers think their role should be tactical. They want frequent status reports to know if their long term vision is going to be met, and then any area it doesn't match up, rather than modify the vision, or seek to empower people to change things up to deliver on the vision, they'll instead choose to get involved. This despite not really having the details of why things are working or not working; this is where micromanagement comes in, daily status reports and other time sucks, etc.
But staying strategic and unblocking people below them can look like doing little. Inaction in the face of delays and things, even when warranted, may still look and feel bad to them, and so rather than have an org wide retro or similar to figure out what happened and if/how to avoid it in the future, they'll instead reason "something must be done!" at which point anything counts as something. Remote work is an easy target; it was an unplanned change forced upon them, so blaming issues on it means no one actually gets blamed.
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Buildings generally lose or gain heat throughout the day, proportional to the indoor-outdoor temperature differential. So a building that maintains livable temperatures for say, 12h a day, will still have those energy leaks when the owner is out, and they would have to compensate in the evening the exact amount of energy lost or gained to get back to comfortable temperatures. So unless your home has such ridiculously…
A home that has AC running half of the day will use a lot less energy in total than one running all day long. There are substantial efficiency losses from heat leaking in, which will be exacerbated by trying to maintain a larger temperature delta 24 hours of each day. A house is not a perfect temperature battery on the scale of hours, far from it.
I think this is making a whole lot of out nothing, or at least not much. Google would determine your pay based on your work location, regardless of whether that's your home or the office. As a result people that lived far from the office in a typically less expensive area could see their pay drop.
Do you think they should reduce salary for people who have paid off their mortgage? Those people also have lower cost of living.
Or does it only count if you're talking someone's sole and primary mortgage and where that's physically located? Even mortgages can vary wildly. In my city I can buy a condo for $100k or I could buy a mansion for 5 million dollars. My cost of living will vary drastically depending on what I decide to get.
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I mean, if they were paying him 10% more based on home location and commuting then there is a somewhat reasonable argument to be made. But of course, almost none of these companies are actually paying the people who live further away more, it's just management trying to enforce their will over the "peons". Our company is trying to force everyone back into the office 5 days a week. Their arguments for doing so were "p…
> My working theory is that the upper management's jobs are more boring, and harder to coast on, when they can't "count heads" and have the illusion of progress. It's really exposed good and bad managers this past 1.5 years. A lot of upper management jobs consist solely of attending meetings for projects they are only vaguely aware of so that they can ask questions about irrelevant things, interrupting people who are…
I can't locate it, but I've noticed similar effects, and this pandemic seems to support it also (even after compensating for my likely confirmation bias).
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Given what we know about longer hours and productivity, plus Google’s low retention figures, I’m going to go with the latter.
What do we know about Google's retention figures?
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This reductive argument is rather tiresome. All human activity has a cost. Humans are social beings. HN may want to shill for being cooped up but that doesn't represent how most of the world live or want to live
Isn't this story about people who want to work from home?