Remember that work is about compensation per time. If you don’t get that 10% raise you wanted, work smarter and 10% less to give yourself a raise.
Use that extra time, because it’s all we have.
Google employees who work from home could lose money
571–580 of 699 posts
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The number I saw was 100,000 sqft - it seems like it depends on whether you exclude the smallest Walmarts : )
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
the difference is the mass forced remote work has made companies do the necessary work to effectively do this
I disagree. It was already possible and cheap to setup satellite offices in foreign countries in order to exploit labor differences, and so far this effort has usually failed. There’s no reason to believe that Covid has knocked down the final barrier to offshoring more work.
More frankly, I think that the cost savings in offshoring are a false promise. You can hire very cheap programmers in India and similar, and they are not very good. Those programmers that are very good at their job either immigrate to the US, and start earning an American salary, or they raise their prices high enough so that the benefits of offshoring are less clear cut.
As far as working with remote employees off shore, time zone and language regularly remains the biggest barrier; Covid hasn’t fixed that.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#574> 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.
The point is that when it comes to full time remote work workers in LCOL areas and workers in HCOL areas are in the same marketplace selling the same product.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given what we know about longer hours and productivity, plus Google’s low retention figures, I’m going to go with the latter.
What do we know about Google's retention figures?
Can’t speak post Covid, but last time I checked they weren’t terribly impressive. IIRC the median was 1.1 years. Facebook usually tops the FAANG charts for retention, but the numbers still aren’t great.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Imposing culture and keeping people around at all hours was in the service of company productivity. At least that is their philosophy. It really is that simple.
I doubt it.
We know that over work reduces creativity and productivity. Hell, as an outsider you can practically see this in what Google offers; they’ve totally lost their way and keep rehashing the same products in repeatedly inferior ways.
Rather, I think that they feel that it’s more productive or that it gives them more control. Neither of which is a rational argument
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In the last few decades, technology has progressed and made a lot of tools available to facilitate remote work. Then the pandemic came along and forced everyone to adopt those tools. A lot of companies have now noticed that they can just go all-in on these tools, expand their talent pool and lower their hiring costs.
As described here[1], my company already has a majority of the new headcount in the non-US countries. The only caution they are taking is to avoid tough timezones like India. But it doesn't matter to a team if the new team member is from Colombia or Canada or Kansas, while it matters a great deal to the execs to hire that person outside US since that saves a lot of money to the company.
Who benefits? Shareholders, execs and the middle class in the non-US countries. Who loses? US middle class. We have seen this movie before with manufacturing.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#578Point from Corey Quinn; there sure are a lot of companies registered in Delaware that want to reduce their workers comp based on location.
Apparently what’s good for the Goose is not good for the Gander, according to executives.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#579Earlier 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…
Apple didn't build the first smartphone; they made it mass market because the technology (which Apple did not invent) had gotten to where bundling it into a smartphone would provide sufficient value to a consumer to be worth paying for. There were other mass market smartphones even then; what the iphone brought was UX (so kudos for Jobs for hiring Jony Ive) and an app store (so kudos for Jobs either for recognizing t…
Did Jony Ive have anything to do with the original iPhones UI/UX? I thought he was just involved in the physical design.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
If Google felt that WFH had no negative effect on productivity, they could go the route of Twitter and others. The C-level clearly disagrees that this arrangement is ideal for the company, and are disincentivizing it with pay cuts.
You're wasting your breath. It took me many years to reach this conclusion, but HN threads about Google are the official meeting place of people bitter about their failed interviews. Just look around this thread to see how wild-eyed and frothing the conspiracy theories can get
For the record, I passed my Google interview, and they demanded that I move to NYC which I was unwilling to do. I ended up taking other work, and haven’t bothered with them since.
So perhaps don’t jump to conclusions, especially when you’re doing it to impugn other people. It’s a bad look.