Google employees who work from home could lose money • Hacker News Board

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#471

Post by AlbertCory » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:49 PM UTC

I did a search of the comments for "food" before writing this, and I don't think it was adequately covered.

I worked at Google 11 1/2 years, and I've been retired 4 years now. I still bemoan the convenience of being able to have whatever food I want for lunch or dinner, just by walking down to a cafe. Yeah, I buy it now, but I'll never have as much variety as Google did.

The food costs for Google per employee are not insignificant, and they go to zero if you work at home. Same for all the other famous benefits Google has.

I've also developed a theory about management, by the way: do you like it?

Middle managers are the cause of all corporate problems.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#472

Post by drewg123 » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

I'm an Xoogler, and I have to say: Google does all kinds of stupid and annoying things which are horribly counter-productive.

They way they gamified travel was a HUGE waste of time. We had a travel system which required you to come in at the average price of past trips for a trip you're taking (or get VP approval). You could "bank" any $$ you saved if you came in below average. No matter what you did, you had to waste time. You either booked a trip in minutes and likely had to get VP approval for going over the cap, or you set up travel alerts and wound up wasting hours to days booking travel. Did they really intend for engineers making at least $250k in total comp to spend hours booking travel? I doubt it, but that's what happens.

And don't even get me started on REWS ("real estate and workplace services") converting cubed workspaces to tables, while bragging about the open concept micro kitches, waterfalls, and eco walls in public building spaces. We got a regular REWS newsletter about new buildings, and the focus was on the nice public spaces, while never mentioning the spaces where we spent 90% of our time doing actual work. And those spaces kept getting worse and worse.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#473

Post by lostcolony » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

jollybean wrote: post #462

andreilys wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry, but not quite, your own example demonstrates that. So who built the first smartphone? It was probably Nokia. And what happened to them? BlackBerry? They were the one's that made Google and Apple pay attention, because they built the first real baseline use cases for data networks. But was that even a smartphone? Of course, the iPhone was not the first smartphone, but it was a breakthrough of sorts, but if we l…

It was probably IBM; the Simon Personal Communicator in '92. Depends how you define smartphone, but it could take/make calls, send/receive emails and faxes, and had some apps like a calulator and an alarm clock. All for the low low price of $1100 1992 dollars, and rockin' a fat 1 hour worth of battery life.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#474

Post by jdavis703 » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

erinan wrote: post #217

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…

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)

Depends on the commute mode. It sounds like these are people in expensive urban areas, so they probably have transit access. So if they’re commuting by train or bus the morning commute can be spent working and the evening commute streaming TV shows or scrolling through social media.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#475

Post by ghaff » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:52 PM UTC

ryneandal wrote: post #310

glenneroo wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterexample, my company pays us 3€ per day that we WFH in order to compensate for using personal resources. They are also paying for necessary equipment such as office chair, monitor, etc. Than again I presume almost everyone in this thread is speaking about American companies, not that it doesn't happen elsewhere, but generally these (as you put it, "sane") company stories tend to be in the US.

This is a great point, particularly considering here in the US we've lost the ability to claim deductions on a home office if we're a company employee, as of 2018. I've worked remotely for a long time, and have accepted the reality of increased electric bills, but I'm sure this was a surprise to some.

There may be exceptions in hot climates with AC, but I strongly suspect that the far bigger cost for people is now those who need an additional room for work rather than those with a somewhat higher utility bill or footing the cost of a new desk chair.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#476

Post by ridaj » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

myvoiceismypass wrote: post #407

ridaj wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who pays the most?

Netflix pays top of market for Silicon Valley _and_ readjusts your comp (100% cash based) every year to be top of market again.

Do they readjust down when the market goes down?

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#477

Post by pb7 » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

lmilcin wrote: post #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 abilit…

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

Yes.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#478

Post by Mikeb85 » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:53 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #201

> 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…

> This makes no sense.

It makes a ton of sense. Salaries are based on supply/demand, like any other marketplace. Workers in LCOL areas have less options for high pay so you can offer them less money and they'll likely accept it.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#479

Post by justicezyx » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

This has been instated at least before 2016, I was seeking transfer to a Seattle team from Sunnyvale and was told pay will need to be adjusted.

I think this is perfectly reasonable.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#480

Post by pc86 » Tue, Aug 10, 2021, 3:54 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #179

pc86 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course compensation is inequitable. I don't think anyone outside fringe leftist politicos have ever suggested it should be otherwise? And if your company continues to print money decade after decade while paying upper management 20-50x what a worker makes, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.

> And if your company continues to print money decade after decade while paying upper management 20-50x what a worker makes, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world. This seems at odds with the normal HN view of Google, which is that they can't do anything right but have such a good thing going with ads that they basically cannot fail. If this is true, then an inanimate object could lead the company to success.…

Sundar made $8 million total comp in 2020 and $280 million in 2019 ($276 of which was stock). So I'm not sure paying him "billions and billions less" is appropriate or accurate framing.

But even if it was, you're probably right that a massive pay cut to the CEO would have no effect if the CEO stayed. However, if a CEO can reasonably command a 9-figure salary, and that gets slashed, they have an incentive to go somewhere that will pay them a 9-figure salary. So that company now has to hire or promote a new CEO willing to do the work for "less" money (I consider myself a capitalist through and through but even I have trouble calling multi-million dollar comp packages "less" in any reasonable sense). There's a decent chance that CEO is going to be worse. So there could definitely be negative effects as a direct result of decreasing executive compensation.

It's the same argument as with developers except there are just more zeros involved. If you want to make the most money possible as a dev, you're probably applying to companies like Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, etc. The folks who can't make the cut there go to "worse" places for "less" money. Not saying there aren't idiots that make it into Facebook or genius coders that don't want to work at FAANG-level companies, but it's common wisdom in part because it's accurate more often than it's wrong.