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Google employees who work from home could lose money

reuters.com

421–430 of 699 posts

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#421
Does that mean if I work from home and move to more costly location I get automatic increase?

Does this policy account for the fact people working remotely no longer use up office resources?

No, I didn't think so... so predictable.

These things only ever work one way.

Corporations thrive on being able to outsource large part of their work to cheaper locations. Now they are terrified remote work is eroding that ability so they are trying to find excuses to keep differentiate salary based on your location, even if it doesn't make much sense logically.

If I work remotely, what difference does it make if I physically sit in bay office or in Romania, if I do my job well as other team members?

If I initially sit in LA condo but then move for 2 weeks to Bangalore, am I committing fraud?

What is the utility of restricting people's movement when they do all their work remotely?

Whatever they do, this problem is bound to create tensions.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#422
Relevant goomic: https://goomics.net/347/

For those who can't / don't want to follow the link: it cleverly contrasts how it's perceived as righteous for corporations to engage in tax-arbitrage to maximize profits, but deceptive for employees to engage in cost-of-living arbitrage to maximize quality of life.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#423
post #71

Does this mean employee agreements are up for renegotiating? Salary / compensation for work is the key element to an employee agreement. If employers can change compensation at will without employee consent then the employee agreement is truly meaningless and simply a tool for the employer to wield against the employee. I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract that will test that.

> If employers can change compensation at will without employee consent then the employee agreement is truly meaningless and simply a tool for the employer to wield against the employee.

The employee agreement states a place of work. If they employee stops attending the workplace as defined by the company and without the employer’s agreement, they aren’t entitled to continue receiving the same benefits.

All employment terms are always up for re-negotiation, but the company doesn’t have to accept the proposed terms nor do they have to continue paying the employee when they fail to deliver on the agreed terms.

> I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract that will test that.

No, employees can’t expect to win lawsuits against their employer when the employee breaks the agreement that they willingly entered into.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#424
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not universally true, indeed. However if you got little children, it is most certainly true.

Why would it be more productive to work in the office and have the children at day care than working from home and have the children at day care?

Daycare? In August? Not here. They got vacation. Daycare's closed. School vacation lasts 6-8 weeks (6 for our's). I do have vacation days left, but not for 6 weeks.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#425
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home temperature is fairly consistent over the day. Not having an office to heat or cool more than compensates for the difference. Commuting costs completely dominate in terms of energy costs. As to getting delivery for lunch, that’s well outside of most peoples price range. The vast majority of people are going to simply buy more food on their normal shopping trips. The running the same computer hardware at home or…

I think both of you are making a lot of assumptions without providing any sources to back up your own anecdotal experiences. Also related, but HN could really use an optional country-flag next to each user's name so that we could at least see what country people are referring to respective their experiences which they state as "the way it is". > Home temperature is fairly consistent over the day. You must live in a m…

> Assuming usage of cars. Leave the US and generally public transportation is a thing used by most people. The trains/trams/buses still travel the same routes and times as before-pandemic times.

Across the US and presumably the world mass transit reduced service in response to reduced ridership. If WFH becomes more common that will definitely cover more areas as schedules very much are based on demand. Ex: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/03/24/coronavirus-mta-subw...

> IMO it's futile to even try to calculate this value globally.

Electricity is directly measured at the grid level and 2020 saw a clear reduction, how much of that relates to WFH is more questionable.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#426

> 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…

>But if you frame it as a 10% pay decrease

especially after you have structured your life around having that money and you already know you can handle the commute.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" more strategic your role -should- be. " "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.…

Strategy, in the end, if it's done well should seem fairly obvious, even boring.

a product roadmap that takes into rational consideration the aspects of market dynamics.

If your company is looking to make incremental improvements and not trying to do anything innovative, I agree.

If you’re building the first smart phone where there exists no “roadmap” or “rational consideration”, then it’s neither going to be obvious or boring.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

" more strategic your role -should- be. " "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.…

So I'm not saying strategic vs tactical is a binary; it's a spectrum. And where to fall on it is hard; I think we're in agreement here.

But, you mention you've been overridden by bad executive fiat on occasion, and also made forays where you shouldn't have because you didn't have the bigger picture. The 'right' course of action to address both of those as your manager would be to make sure you understand the bigger picture, and then to let you (or whoever bears the effect of the decision) make the decision, not to make it for you, nor to let you stumble blindly into a bad one.

In terms of Jobs, Musk, Ford, Bezos, strategy informs tactics, and tactics inform strategy; as you say, you have to ask questions and seek to understand; you also need to communicate and help people connect the dots. But that's different than daily status reports and directives. Seeking to understand the why, rather than endlessly try and stay up to date of the what, is the goal. If you've built a healthy org, they'll raise up concerns about the what when they need to; even when they do, the fix for a bad situation is never focusing on the situation ("still in the hole?" "yep"), it's helping navigate a way out of it ("quit digging; here's a ladder, our new goal is climbing out"), and then figure out how to avoid it in the future ("how did we get in that hole? Why did we keep digging ourselves deeper? WHERE DID ALL THESE SHOVELS COME FROM?!").

And, yes, strategy is often boring and predictable; given the same knowledge, the same set of inputs, most people would make the same decision. It's one reason why I don't think executive pay is justified; I'm not intending to mythologize it or something. Just point out that as you climb a management hierarchy, your concerns move along the strategy/tactical axis toward the strategy side, and that oftentimes bad, poorly informed decisions are due to execs moving too far toward the tactical.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#429
post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While good public transport helps to cut the carbon emissions, it also isn't free and can only be established above certain population density. This creates pressure for people to live in a big cities and that causes a lot of problems.

or, get a bike. healthy, no emissions, and on top of that, cheap.

True, but not everyone lives close enough to work or is in physical shape to bike. Most people should, though :)

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#430
post #348
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a trade. The worker just loses.

> It's not a trade. The worker just loses. How so? Money (pay decrease) for time (no commuting = 10 hours of your life back every week) seems like a pretty classic trade.

because that time wasn't spent on work anyways. it was already 'free' for the company. this is literally just trying to claw back money for a perk people really like.

the fact companies pay different rates based on locale is insane given the value of the work a person contributes to a company is independent of said location.

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