621–630 of 699 posts
One thing that was included here is that Google is now also reducing your equity compensation as a part of relocation. Changing the salary I understand and there are a lot of valid points and counterpoints on why it should or should not change based on your cost of living in the city/supply vs.demand in the city for the job. I really dislike equity compensation being reduced because equity is supposed to be a direct…
Class A office space in Manhattan is about $70/sqft, and the average office employee gets 150 sqft allocated (desk, hallway, conference room, supply closets...) Google is probably 170. That's $11900 annually that they save by not having an employee take up office space. No, it's not fungible on a small scale, but it's certainly fungible on a large scale: reduce your office needs by 100 people and you can rearrange de…
Manhattan leases also famously start at 10 year terms as the shortest. With all the secrets going around your average FAANG office, no way would any company sublease a partial floor. Maybe an entire floor, but that creates more issues with the complicated separate lobby and elevator systems they previously built These companies could maybe cut the costs in a few years, maybe in 10-15. Most of these employees working…
I think this is making a whole lot of out nothing, or at least not much. Google would determine your pay based on your work location, regardless of whether that's your home or the office. As a result people that lived far from the office in a typically less expensive area could see their pay drop.
It's a weird policy though. If I'm remote, why does my location matter to Google?
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Who do you think decides executive wages?
Directly: executives higher up. And at the highest level, the shareholders. The last is a bit tenuous because shareholder capitalism is more of an aspiration than reality. But that line of argument could only argue for extravagant CEO pay, not high pay for executive in general. (Especially since CEOs get a lot of their pay in shares, so are incentived to get the shareholders more money; eg by driving lower ranking ex…
This would imply a coupling between corporate expenses and share price that is much tighter than I understand to be the case.
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Location is in the contract, you sign a new offer in order to move
If Location is in the contract, and location should be considered an aspect of compensation, then its value should be int he contract and location itself should be an element of compensation. Base pay: $X Location pay: $Y Benefits: $ Options: $ This way you can see what the company is valuing you as an employee and valuing the location as compensation.
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Yes, for the FAANG at which I was gainfully employed for a number of years.
Well I guess I have some egg on my face. They must know the market in London isn't competitive so they just pay a competitive rate in the market. It seems like salaries are generally going to go up everywhere for top talent but down in markets like Seattle and SV. Another interesting aspect of London is that it is in a TZ so far away that there isnt any overlap with PST in the states, so they kind of know you are scr…
Another interesting fact about London is that it has some of the highest rents in Europe.
And as someone in said timezone who works with the west coast, it's OK as long as you travel once a quarter, and both you and your west coast colleagues take meetings from home because of timezones.
> They must know the market in London isn't competitive so they just pay a competitive rate in the market
It's actually worse than this, finance companies (hedge funds et al) actually pay really really well (like US FAANG well, with better bonuses), but all of the FAANGs have decided not to benchmark against finance, for bullshit reasons.
Essentially then, the only people who work for FAANG in London work for a year, then transfer to the US on an L1/L2 to actually get paid well.
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Some individuals have routines built into the commute that aren’t necessarily swapped when working from home. I read my email/catch-up on slack/read the newspaper during my 45 minute commute in the morning. While wfh I spend the time doing something pretty similar.
At first I was thinking "that's not safe while you're driving", then I realized you're probably not driving.
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I said "town" due to the geographic size of ~3km^2. My "town", really a small city, is ~70km^2 and a population of ~100k. It is surrounded by other towns/cities forming the Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex, which metro area is 24,000km^2 with ~6 million people in that space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_metr... I just checked Google Maps, there are almost a dozen of these 180,000sqft Walmarts with…
Hah, I've actually looked at Dallas-Fort Worth before and been horrified at how so much of its residential green space is golf courses. Is most of the conurbation as well served by non-car transport or is your area a special case? It looks so low density that it's hard to imagine anything being economically viable. Then again, bike lanes and bike racks are so cheap that they're pretty much free. I do understand conso…
I'm definitely in the more special case kind of area, by choice. There were many reasons why I picked the place where I live, and transit options were one of the key ones.
> Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I just don't have.
I feel you on this idea. I'm not really a huge fan of these ridiculously giant stores with absolutely massive parking lots, I'd like for smaller grocers to be more popular. In the US at least, smaller grocers are dying, and grocers surviving are building bigger stores to try and compete more on the level of those 180,000sqft behemoths. The death of the smaller grocers leave behind 15-20,0000sqft largely empty retail storefronts around, at least in the big cities.
> horrified at how so much of its residential green space is golf courses.
There's a municipal golf course real close to my house, at the edge of my neighborhood. What is so horrifying about it? This land was prairie land, so its not like we're greenifying the desert or something like that. It would have been a bunch of small rolling hills, creeks, small ponds, and grasses before it was a golf course. The people in the area like to golf, why is it any worse than it just being a more generic park? Would you have also expressed such horror if it was filled with frisbee golf courses, or soccer fields?
That said, within my neighborhood there's a several acre park that is a bit more of generic greenspace. It has playgrounds for kids, a fishing pond, a soccer field, a baseball field, a softball field, etc. It also has a bunch of picnic tables and grills scattered at the tree lines. These kinds of parks are pretty common around where I live as well. It is not like all parks are golf courses. Certainly more than what you'd see in France, but golf is also significantly more popular here than in urban areas of France I'd imagine. If nobody was using them I'd get the point of them being horrified at the waste, but for many of the golf courses you need to book your tee time days in advance.