411–420 of 699 posts
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.
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.
I'd bet a lot of money this doesn't apply to executives, however.
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh...
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There may be some enterprising startups that could take advantage of this situation where people have experienced the states of working at home (and the lockdown) that has broken employees away from the prevailing rat race system that had them ensnared in making money to squander money and showboat money. The window of opportunity is very small and those high value employees who the big corporates can ensnare with hi…
Like I said, I think that this period has starkly divided the good and bad managers, and really shown the value of someone who actually cares about what their team needs, what's stopping that, and how to support/cover them from wider company politics.
Unfortunately, I think in any oppressive company (which seems to be most of them once they get to medium-large) the selective pressure is against these managers staying, as they often don't get this reciprocity from their managers, or somewhere above that, and at some point it becomes too much, and you basically have to write off the whole team as the things that actually let them be productive are removed and they drift away.
> a bigger factor that is corporate finance and accounting driven
I mean, we are a national facility, so the space is to a certain point already "priced in" since the physical machine it's built around isn't going anywhere. But we were struggling to accommodate new people and even embarking of plans for an expensive new building on campus. WFH or hybrid working would completely solve that without big expensive investments.
All the people I know "IRL" working with small companies and startups dropped the rented office space as soon as they could last year (sensibly) and probably aren't going to go back at all.
It really will be interesting how this affects things long term, but I am afraid that you are probably right about things reverting towards the mean, and the momentum against change at large companies meaning that the average experience is only being slightly affected by this year's "experiment".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
So the higher you climb in management the more strategic your role -should- be. Long time horizons, collecting enough data to make organizational decisions, set priorities and direction, etc. 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 vi…
"The problem is too many upper managers think their role should be tactical. "
So this is a little bit mythologizing and there's a couple problems with this perception:
1) Everything is operational, and operations require material leadership at every level, there is no escaping it. Meaning, that there's a very material 'hands-on' component to even in higher level leadership.
The constancy of major decisions can have greater consequences and there are many more moving pieces, so it's hard.
Putting out fires and dealing with these grinding can easily overwhelm leaders but that's the reality of it, always.
Execs should usually have a much broader perspective that can help and guide decisions making.
Obviously, too much micro detail can be a problem, but that should be addressed by leadership that is willing to just listen and react accordingly.
I've been overridden by 'bad executive fiat' o occasion ... but also made forays where I shouldn't have because I didn't have the bigger picture.
2) Strategy is the most overused concept in all of business. While it's an important function it's usually a collective pursuit, involves input from various places - and most importantly, depends on details, i.e. downward facing.
Was Steve Jobs a relaxed, high level person setting strategy? Letting the details be worked out?
Musk?
Ford?
Bezos?
Not really.
There's a thoughtless comment floating here that points to 'Executives Asking Bad Questions To Seem Important' which is mostly wrong. They're asking questions to become informed. Some details matter, some don't but informing execs with a material understanding of the situation is a fundamental aspect of organizational communication.
The Tom Hanks film Greyhound is a neat study in that (He's the captain of a US ship leading a convoy in the Atlantic in WW2 getting hunted by German UBoats) - it's fully real time, you see a commander in the hot seat, and tons of activity around him. It's kind of interesting to see how information is propagated up and down and at what details. Obviously they're not building products.
Strategy, in the end, if it's done well should seem fairly obvious, even boring.
We have such lofty expectations of the term, that we expect 'enlightened divination' out of it, but more often than not, the result of good strategy should be a product roadmap that takes into rational consideration the aspects of market dynamics.
I think that having some creative analysts in a staff position to help the CEO maintain a broad perspective and take into consideration the more interesting market trends we often associate with the word 'strategy' is probably enough.
In my experience, I believe that in any company ... there is probably enough collective insight in the organization to set an appropriate strategy, it could only communications could work effectively.
That said, good execs are rare, and employees that are able to wrap their heads around the challenges that upper management faces are just as rare.
Finally ... the over/under managing issue is a really hard one, there are so many factors there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your overall point, but as a (nearly middle aged) American, I've almost never commuted by car or lived in a single family house as an adult. And frankly I'm sick of being lumped in to large generalizations of America that simply don't apply to me or millions of other people living here. The media (including social media, and the internet) largely consists of the most divisive and stereotyped parts of lif…
Of course! But there are some tendencies, or else OP's comment wouldn't have made sense even in the context of the US. My first few times in the US were in NYC, where I found a way of life that is very close to what I know as a Parisian. Imagine my surprise discovering basically any other city in the US. You might not be part of that population, but the US problem goes way beyond a problem of perception, and there ar…
Companies were never paying based on value provided. They pay market rate which, until recently, was artificially limited to a few expensive markets. With remote, these companies are now able to do what every other large labor driven industry has done and lower their costs by finding labor in cheaper markets.
Trying to negotiate salary based on value provided is one of the biggest misconceptions I see online and with in-person mentoring groups.
Compensation is not about value provided. It’s only about market rate and convincing the person to stay at the company.
I encounter a lot of people, especially juniors, who are disgruntled because they think their employers are getting more value out of their work than is being passed along in their paychecks. I usually ask them if their employer sends them a bill every time they fail to deliver a project or make a mistake that costs the company money. That usually makes the disconnect between value provided and compensation click.
I say this as someone who worked remote and managed remote teams before COVID: The reality is they WFH is a perk and WFH employees require some additional management overhead due to reduced communication efficiency and higher collaboration overhead. As much as I love remote work and my remote teams, it would be dishonest to say that we wouldn’t perform better or faster if we were in-person in the same building. It may not be a popular opinion or what people want to hear, but in my direct experience with mixed WFH/remote teams it’s always true. In-person is just too efficient to replace with Zoom and Slack and e-mail.
The second reality is that once you open the doors to full-time WFH, you’ve opened the doors to full-time remote, which means you’ve opened the doors to a much larger labor market. It becomes easy to replace your $200K Silicon Valley hires with someone a couple states away who is thrilled to do the same job for $180K or even $150K. Then you start expanding your search and find people who live in other countries who deliver the same results for $100K or even $80K.
It’s not surprising that companies don’t want to pay the highest salaries in the country for people who aren’t actually in those areas for work. Losing only 10% of their high salaries honestly seems like a bargain.
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Not universally true, indeed. However if you got little children, it is most certainly true.
This is arguably false. Anecdotally, I have small children at home and worked from home even before the pandemic when my company had an office. I have climbed the corporate leader every evaluation period because of my performance, while coworkers who were exclusively in the office weren't so fortunate. It just goes to show that people are very different and it's impossible to generalize statements based on a single v…
Are you responsible for your children? If not, then with regards to work(load) its akin to having no children at all.
You say its arguably false, yet ~90% in my team have children (I'm one of the few with toddlers). And the one who doesn't have children split up recently (due to relationship stress, which now lead to more stress, the irony..). Everyone in my team's productivity suffers since they have to work from home.
And on top of that, there's another data point: mothers. They get structurally paid less than men and other women.