641–650 of 699 posts
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Because they no longer have to incentivize you to move to a very high cost of living location.
Exactly, so why have disparate pay by location? I'd expect all remote workers to get the same salary, perhaps a bit lower than onsite workers to account for productivity loss.
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Exactly, so why have disparate pay by location? I'd expect all remote workers to get the same salary, perhaps a bit lower than onsite workers to account for productivity loss.
I'd still expect valuable employees to flock to population centers (e.g. for education), you want to remain competitive in those areas.
If they are only going to work remotely (i.e. in a remote market), I don't see how this works steady-state. If there's no benefit to having an employee in SF vs. Austin, I'll just start paying a premium to non-SF residents and pull away non-SF talent from Google. Eventually, this should all equalize to remote workers being paid equally.
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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.
The C-level have had months to prepare and show data about productivity dropping and have, so far, refused to do so. At this point, they can put up or shut up. I refuse to just believe them because they say so.
> 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…
He could easily handle the promotion aspect by framing it this way:
"As a promotion, I now don't have to drive 2 hours a day, and I still get the same pay!" That's a nice promotion, two prime hours of waking life 5 times a week. Not to mention the stress and gas/maintenance.
Any time you can exchange money for time, do it.
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I mean, if they were paying him 10% more based on home location and commuting then there is a somewhat reasonable argument to be made. But of course, almost none of these companies are actually paying the people who live further away more, it's just management trying to enforce their will over the "peons". Our company is trying to force everyone back into the office 5 days a week. Their arguments for doing so were "p…
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…
Everyone, no matter how many "executives" or "vices" in their title, is simply reacting to what the person above them is on about that day. Everyone is reacting. No one is planning, unless they've just been asked for a plan to present "next week". Then they will have a portion of the plan to assign you, but it will already be narrowly defined per what the boss's boss has already indicated they're expecting to see. And you'll need to complete it in two days, so there are a few days to make changes. I was never privy to any long range planning, and I came to realize that's because if there was any of that happening (I'm very skeptical) it had to be happening at the board of directors level.
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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.
I 100% don't doubt that there are individual people here that have irrational feelings about Google for reasons other than the one I mentioned, or that have rational-but-uncharitable feelings about them. I'm not even particularly bothered by the target: Google in 2021 has a mountain of things to answer for that I think it deserves very harsh criticism for.
But the collective IQ of HN drops about 30 points whenever they come up, far beyond the level of the general anti-big-tech attitude you generally see here. The amount of circular reasoning and comments that don't stand up to a second's scrutiny is palpably higher than in the average HN thread, and over the last almost-decade of observing this fascinating dynamic, the one constant I've noticed has been a deep and abiding bitterness. Contrast this with, say, Facebook: while they get plenty of HN hate, it's of the same type that you find anywhere, and lacks a lot of the pitiful contortions you find HNers squeezing themselves into on the topic of Google.
> 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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It depends a lot on the mode of transportation. The Seattle employee referenced in the article may commute by ferry, which is about as relaxing of a commute as possible. The Seattle ferries are very nice; you can sit in a booth and eat breakfast and read the newspaper. Here's a photo of what it looks like: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/travel/vashon-island-near... . I'd totally be willing to do that for an hour…
We should probably assume that people commute via car unless noted otherwise, since it is by far the most common method.
I agree 100% that 2 hour commutes are crappy, but a 2-hour commute on a nice form of public transit is very different than 2 hours of being stuck in traffic and stressed out.
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It depends a lot on the mode of transportation. The Seattle employee referenced in the article may commute by ferry, which is about as relaxing of a commute as possible. The Seattle ferries are very nice; you can sit in a booth and eat breakfast and read the newspaper. Here's a photo of what it looks like: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/travel/vashon-island-near... . I'd totally be willing to do that for an hour…
But would you do it for 4? I thought when people said they had an X hour commute they typically meant that they traveled for X hours to work and X hours from work
I wonder what percentage of people interpret it to mean one way vs. both ways.
Does this mean employee agreements are up for renegotiating? Salary / compensation for work is the key element to an employee agreement. If employers can change compensation at will without employee consent then the employee agreement is truly meaningless and simply a tool for the employer to wield against the employee. I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract that will test that.
Yes, absolutely, 100%, every single job offer I ever laid eyes on has this sort of language:
"You agree you are an employee at will"
"Nothing about this offer should be constitute a guarantee of future employment"
"Either you or {company} may terminate this agreement at any time for any reason or no reason at all"
And even once "this job offer is not an employment contract."
Stuff like that. You only avoid it if you have a union that negotiated an actual contract for you.
Google has decided to end that original agreement and offer you a different one. You can take it or leave it.
>I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract that will test that.
Lol, no, its extremely common for employers to change compensation or benefits unilaterally without notice, at the very least it usually happens every couple years when insurance rates are renegotiated and new benefits packages are put together.
I once worked somewhere where on a random Friday an email went out saying "we will no longer have any 401k match." Bam, I just lost thousands of dollars in compensation with no warning or fanfare. A few weeks later it was another email - "here's the new PTO accrual." A week vacation taken away from me, just like that.