541–550 of 699 posts
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wait till the even wider proliferation of offshoring of remote technical roles. The wealth will be even more concentrated, except only the executives, while the workers will have even less
I’m old enough to remember this being a threat a few decades ago. Most of those roles came back to the US. If it was that easy, they would’ve moved long before Covid.
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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.
you wouldn't do it for an extra 10mil a year?
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> He is so rich I doubt he is compensated in any way that's meaningful to him today. Yet they still pay him a ton (executive comp is public). Weird.
To keep him from having a seat at a different table.
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"Google is probably 170. That's $11900 annually that they save by not having an employee take up office space." They are locked into leases and/or have purchased the buildings outright. So the cost is sunk. This is why google is upset and will take salary away from remote workers.
Building costs are relatively small vs productivity costs. If the mass of employess is 30% less productive from home, it is way more expensive than the buildings.
You'll have people who are more productive working from home and some of them will even do more work for the company [as opposed to quietly working half as many hours while getting just as much done]. You'll have others who are less productive. Some of them will also work more hours to make up for at least some of their lost productivity.
Given that companies are now open to it, I think we can infer that WFH productivity is no lower than 80-90% of WFO productivity, averaged across the workforce. Whether WFH = 90%, 100% or 110% WFO productivity, I couldn't guess.
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wait till the even wider proliferation of offshoring of remote technical roles. The wealth will be even more concentrated, except only the executives, while the workers will have even less
Yeah been waiting for that to happen for the past 20 years...
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What do we know about Google's retention figures?
I'd like to know that too. Anecdotally, in the past 6 months 7 people I've previously worked with on projects at Google left after having been there about 10 years.
Market realist: Google are just taking their cut of the profit opportunity a lower cost of living provides.
Social: it wouldn’t be fair to pay everyone the same if cost of living differs.
WTF: Are Google trying to ensure housing costs stay high in urban areas?
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I guess in a purely commuting way, perhaps. But if 100 employees are all at home and are heating/cooling their houses all with different levels of insulation and efficiency, how does that compare to an office building that is controlled and built to be efficient? Or the amount of electric they use to power their home workstation and radio, rather than a shared office radio? Or lower power machines. Or the more shoppi…
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…
Surely cooling/heating 1000 separate homes would cost more than an office space optimized for it, right?
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Some companies don’t want attrition, particularly considering that there is a “shortage of qualified engineers” which is a political way of saying the software industry is underpaid already.
> there is a "shortage of qualified engineers" Do we still believe this is true? I mean, if that were true, then why Google (probably the IT company in need of the most talented engineers out there) is thinking about applying a measure that will scare away their most talented engineers? It doesn't hold. If there were a "shortage of qualified engineers", Google would have already said "all of our engineers can work fr…
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.
This. I've been saying for a decade that if the city of Austin was really serious about doing something about its traffic problem and reducing CO2 emissions, they should incentivize local businesses via tax deductions and/or credits to promote remote work for those who can do it. It'd do a helluva lot more than building new roads and light-rail lines combined.