501–510 of 699 posts
> Facebook (FB.O) and Twitter (TWTR.N) also cut pay for remote employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller companies including Reddit and Zillow (ZG.O) have shifted to location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to hiring, retention and diversity.
I can't find discussions related to the other companies referenced here. Did those not make it to hacker news?
> 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…
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Are you sure it's that simple? Google was previously known in the wider world for imposing longer than average work days under the guise of "you love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock climbing". It wasn't about extracting productivity, it was about imposing culture.
> Google was previously known in the wider world for imposing longer than average work days under the guise of "you love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock climbing". Honesty, in my experience this impression is just desperate cope from people with worse work environments. My time at Google was the easiest/most relaxing of my career by far. Hell, that's why I left. But whenever people would ask me about…
Would you mind if I reach out to you? I'd be curious to learn more about your life/career path, if you're willing to share.
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I've worked from home for almost 12 years now, and I have always thought about the reverse. How much of an increase in pay would it take for me to go back into the office? Probably about 20% at least. If I were working in an office with a 2 hour commute I'd definitely take that 10% paycut to live a much better life.
I've been working from home for 18 years and there's no amount of money that would make me commute to a job. I'd take another job or work for myself rather than do it.
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…
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
The cost of commuting on the environment is extremely high. We should be offering incentives to companies to switch to remote work. If 20% of jobs permanently switched to remote, the impact on carbon emissions would be immediate, and extremely positive.
I'm used to the conversation in here being extremely US-centric, but realize that this is much less true for European cities with good public transportation. I haven't ever used a car to go to work in my life. I'm also very concerned about this better world where people stay home to save the planet. The common level of social interactions in the modern world is already low enough in my opinion. EDIT: It rarely happen…
The difference, briefly: bright greens (I prefer Viridian†) support a high-technology road to sustainability, while crunchy greens are about bringing our carbon footprint down to sane parameters through traditional lifeways and reduction in energy use.
† https://www.viridiandesign.org
Simply, we don't have time to indulge the crunchies any longer. Carbon zero isn't going to cut it, we need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and that calls for substantial additional energy.
Either we get everyone up to a nearly-American energy budget, with plenty left over for carbon capture, or we reduce everyone's standard to that of an Indian peasant and still roast.
There are Americans living in big houses, with good insulation and heat pumps, solar, and a battery bank, whose homes are net exporters of energy. This is not a total accounting due to embodied energy, but it points the way.
To me the solution has always been simple: tax carbon and apply the proceeds directly to subsidizing replacements for polluting technology. If you ask people to give up their lifestyle to 'save the planet' they're just going to ignore you, and if you try and force them, expect violent resistance.
The hard truth is that America has already flattened carbon emissions, and given our great wealth we're uniquely positioned to pay the new-technology premium to fund the transition to a sustainable technology stack. Most of us are willing, some of us are stubborn, but insisting that everyone live in a pod and eat bugs isn't a winning move. We're wealthy, relatively far north, and well armed: why should we?
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 wast…
REWS made themselves a quiet walled office for themselves on the top floor.
Google is a dysfunctional organization. The day I joined Google was the best day of my life. A few years later, the day I left Google was the new best day of my life. I have photos from both days, with big smiles.
Google's dysfunction is Larry & Sergey's fault. They control the board. They refuse to put in a CEO who will fix the incentive structure to make Googlers focus on users.
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> 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…
> 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 trying to get work done to ask them how long the work they were doing before being interrupted will take to do (more time now that I've been interrupted again, thanks) and other needless tasks. I mean, _explicitly_ this, t…
Sadly this is all too common. It's the case in my large publicly traded company. Was the same when I was in 5-20 person startups. Our society needs people to have jobs so they can keep propping up the illusion of growth by buying more junk. This means there are many people (and entire organisations) which contribute nothing but consume time.
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> Google was previously known in the wider world for imposing longer than average work days under the guise of "you love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock climbing". Honesty, in my experience this impression is just desperate cope from people with worse work environments. My time at Google was the easiest/most relaxing of my career by far. Hell, that's why I left. But whenever people would ask me about…
Hey hey—I didn't say one way or the other whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. But I've been in and out of Google (Waterloo). They were there long, long hours often. Just the same, people seemed happy and fulfilled. I don't think I would be—I covet my time. But I recognize that it wasn't designed around me, so whatever. It's a fact of the process though: Google wanted people in the office longer, so they insta…