Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google employees who work from home could lose money

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

561–570 of 699 posts

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#561

Post by [deleted] »

guyzero wrote: post #510
52-6F-62 wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Depending which team you're on, just work west coast hours from Waterloo. No one will notice.

[deleted]

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#562

Post by BluePen8 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #324
erinan wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

I would too, but if you've committed 100% of your income to expenses, you don't have that freedom. Another argument for saving a little each month.

Sure but in this scenario it's a high earning google employee. I'm sure there's something they can cut back on.

For anyone average or lower earning, a 2 hour commute would cost you at least 10% of your income anyways (after tax).

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#563

Post by WalterBright »

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…

I'd absolutely take a 10% pay cut to save 4 hours of my life every workday.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#564

Post by igetspam »

nullc wrote: post #551
igetspam wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here looking for this. Back in my G days, before they were the high paying behemoth they are now, there were regular complaints about compensation. The first corporate response was absolutely tone-deaf. They created a tool for you to see your total compensation that included all-in values like on-site amenities. The natural response was one of unhappiness and people requesting to opt out of eating at work and pr…

> before they were the high paying behemoth they are now, there were regular complaints about compensation. You mean back when they were illegally colluding with Apple and other technology companies to suppress wages. > The next response came much later and it was a broad leveling of pay. I got a 20% pay bump after the wage fixing scheme collapsed and those pay resets happened, and my employer was in no way involved…

Good point. Tone-deaf was how we took it.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#565

Post by discreteevent »

jollybean wrote: post #417
lostcolony wrote: post #383

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.…

Gates?

Also not really.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#566

Post by igetspam »

oceanplexian wrote: post #443
igetspam wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here looking for this. Back in my G days, before they were the high paying behemoth they are now, there were regular complaints about compensation. The first corporate response was absolutely tone-deaf. They created a tool for you to see your total compensation that included all-in values like on-site amenities. The natural response was one of unhappiness and people requesting to opt out of eating at work and pr…

The cost of the A/C and janitorial staff is peanuts compared to the money they spent on commercial real estate. If they don’t get ROI, someone is going to be held accountable. If the offices close and the value of commercial real estate plummets there are huge players that are going to be wiped out, with macro-economic ramifications. It’s a perfect example of sunk cost fallacy, but on the scale of billions of dollars…

It's been a while for me but I recall that a significant amount of the real estate already existed. I worked in a number of buildings in MTV, starting before the SGI retrofit. Most were old and had little done to them. There was new construction (mYbe the Zurich office, with Urs' apartment on top?) but way more remodeling. I know they built the housing near moffet but how much other real estate did they really do from the ground up? And how a big of a dent is that? (I'd eager there's some tax magic there too.)

My point is, G can afford the losses on selling some buildings and have unused capacity without hurting their stock price.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#569

Post by chrisseaton »

ghaff wrote: post #494
chrisseaton wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the calculator is public. It used to be and last time I tried it the results were terrible for my area I guess because there just aren’t any other technologists here so nothing to compare to - but that doesn’t say anything about me or how much I’m worth! Also when you looked in the data file you could see little pockets of higher paying areas - I guess if they can’t recruit you they create a little high…

My sense from looking at it a couple of times was that there was more and more "exception handling" over time, primarily to handle relatively high CoL places, e.g. nice college towns, in generally cheap rural locales.

Right - and I guess the way you got an exception made was by making a fuss… which means it’s just as personality driven as before and isn’t really the open system it thinks it is.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#570

Post by vel0city »

bovine3dom wrote: post #557
vel0city wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might not hear about it as much because sadly the mass transit is underutilized by a lot of my neighbors. Also, people usually really prefer the freedom of having private transportation. Like, just riding a bicycle so max of ~5mi or so, I have maybe an option of three different supermarkets (six if you include pharmacies, which usually do stock some groceries). If you add a simple bus route, that adds maybe anoth…

Thanks for replying, it's really fascinating. I think part of the difference is density - my city is only about 3km x 3km. If I cycled 5 miles I'd end up in the next town along. I just looked on TripAdvisor to see how many restaurants were within that range but it maxxed out at 1,000+. We do have big supermarkets too, at the edge of the city - about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth, apparently only a bit sma…

> about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth, apparently only a bit smaller than the average Walmart

The average Walmart is twice that size at ~180,000sqft.

Post reply on HN