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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

#391

Post by vitus »

agnosticmantis wrote: post #271
vitus wrote: post #89

If anyone's curious about the underlying details: Each state has an associated salary band. For certain metropolitan statistical areas (defined by the OMB to encompass certain counties), as noted in the article, there is an overriding (typically higher) salary band. This leads to quirks like someone in Milford, PA (~70 miles northwest of NYC) being paid top dollar, as part of the NYC metro area, but someone in Bethle…

Is there a public data set of these salary bands? Combining that with housing data would allow one to optimize the salary-to-expense ratio. I think that’d be a valuable service.

I'm not aware of any public datasets, unfortunately.

There are many internal maps; in short the winner was "cheap housing in the Atlanta metro area".

(I'm glad that Atlanta's finally seeing increased engineering investment! It always felt like a shame that our only tech presence in the area was for datacenter work, given the proximity to Georgia Tech. I guess Google Fiber too...)

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#392

Post by lostcolony »

lumost wrote: post #373
EspadaV9 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the commute is really mostly work time then, right? Do you get to clock in/out 45 minutes late/early?

Yes, I usually leave at 9:15 arrive around 10 and leave around 5 or 6. As a software engineer my deadlines etc don’t lend themselves to a strict 9-5 approach.

So you're working 9+ hours daily, given the time on email/slack during your commute? I'm not sure that's better than the people using their commute for audiobooks or whathaveyou, since that's at least personal time.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#393

Post by vitus »

jsjohnst wrote: post #119
vitus wrote: post #89

If anyone's curious about the underlying details: Each state has an associated salary band. For certain metropolitan statistical areas (defined by the OMB to encompass certain counties), as noted in the article, there is an overriding (typically higher) salary band. This leads to quirks like someone in Milford, PA (~70 miles northwest of NYC) being paid top dollar, as part of the NYC metro area, but someone in Bethle…

> The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely cherrypicked as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is in a lower band than California The majority of Tahoe is in California.

Yes, and California outside of the Bay Area is all the same salary band, whereas if you move across the border to NV, you get bumped down a band.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#396

Post by ridaj »

Why isn't the "market area" that sets pay levels for a remote worker defined by timezone, not by CBSA? After all, from the work-being-done perspective, a remote worker in rural Oregon is the same as if they were working from home in high-cost Palo Alto. People working remotely from high-cost Zurich do the same work in the same timezone as people working remotely from lower cost Prague or Tunisia.

It seems like a not very sound principle to pay people whose work comes in as IP packets based on the geographic origin of those packets, and likely ripe for abuse (why tell Google I moved to Lake Tahoe and get a 25% pay cut? Keep an "address" with a friend in SF where they can mail me stuff, keep the pay...)

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#397

Post by khuey »

lostcolony wrote: post #392
lumost wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I usually leave at 9:15 arrive around 10 and leave around 5 or 6. As a software engineer my deadlines etc don’t lend themselves to a strict 9-5 approach.

So you're working 9+ hours daily, given the time on email/slack during your commute? I'm not sure that's better than the people using their commute for audiobooks or whathaveyou, since that's at least personal time.

Presumably there's a lunch break in there.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#398

Post by stackbutterflow »

echelon wrote: post #242
chitowneats wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google felt that WFH had no negative effect on productivity, they could go the route of Twitter and others. The C-level clearly disagrees that this arrangement is ideal for the company, and are disincentivizing it with pay cuts.

Really ironic given how Google isn't innovating anymore (relative to their market cap). I'd argue the company itself isn't very productive and is just treading water with its ridiculously profitable cash cow and moat. That's a C-suite bug.

One might wonder whether google employees are even creating value at this point or if they are just burning cash. What was the last product launched by Google that was a success? Which Google product hasn't gotten worse in the last 10 years? Gmail, google search, the 50 flavors of google chat, youtube, all were better 10 years ago. Maps stayed the same which is an achievement compared to any other Google products.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#400

Post by _fat_santa »

misnome wrote: post #259
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…

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…

At my company one silver lining I've noticed due to the pandemic is how managers "count heads". Used to yeah you'd be at the office and my boss would see me. Now working remotely, out managers do the same thing by looking at slack. Yeah it's a little annoying having the "gotta check in on slack" in the back of your head when working but I'll gladly trade having to send a few slack messages for a 2 hour commute
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