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Google employees who work from home could lose money

reuters.com

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Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#661

Post by throw123123123 »

vetinari wrote: post #603
throw123123123 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workers collectively dont get to value their own labor. There price is the market price, and remote work always paid a lot less than in-office work, for obvious economic reasons.

Please elaborate more on the "obvious economic reasons". For some reason, I don't see anything economic (do you care where stuff is made? I don't, really, only that it gets made, the rest is irrelevant detail), nor obvious here.

There are more people in the remote pool than in the in-office pool. Also it is better for employees to be remote than to be in the office, meaning they are willing to get a paycut to get it. Lastly COL and tax adjustments.

There are perfectly capable engineers in this world making under 1000U$S a month, they are just not in the US.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#662

Post by EspadaV9 »

lumost wrote: post #373
EspadaV9 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like the commute is really mostly work time then, right? Do you get to clock in/out 45 minutes late/early?

Yes, I usually leave at 9:15 arrive around 10 and leave around 5 or 6. As a software engineer my deadlines etc don’t lend themselves to a strict 9-5 approach.

That's not so bad then. I don't know many (any!?) places that would let their teams count that though, so glad to know some places do.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#663

Post by fivefifty »

erinan wrote: post #217
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…

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)

This is exactly right, I had a 1.5 hour each way commute before we switched to work from home last year. I calculated that I saved around AU$5000 a year just from not having to commute or buy food/coffee out let alone the massive time saved. Not to mention the reason I had such a long commute in the first place is that I chose to live further away from the city to save money and actually afford to buy a home.

Plus as you say the 15 hours a week I get back on average, is basically another part time job or contract work I could pick up if I really wanted to earn some more on top.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#665

Post by tonyedgecombe »

RestlessMind wrote: post #582
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good thing, it's not healthy to have all your wealth in one small region of a country.

If you come up with a way to spread that wealth in the different regions of a country, shareholders and execs will leverage that to get work done from even cheaper countries. A worker in Colombia or Mexico is much cheaper than someone in Kansas or Maryland. Btw, I am seeing this happening at my current workplace where a majority of the new headcount is for non-US countries. So be careful what you wish for. We have se…

>So be careful what you wish for.

I see that as a good thing as well. If it is a problem to have all the wealth of a country in a few regions then it is equally bad to have the wealth of the world in a few countries.

It might have been painful for some Americans but globalisation has been a success for most of the world.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#666

Post by bodge5000 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #104
bodge5000 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats quite the leap of judgement, and I'd say its almost certainly not true (and quite possibly the opposite, I know thats been the case for me).

In big corporations, especially not the best working ones (tons of internal politics, people ignoring emails/calls etc.), it is unfortunately true for many complex processes. I could achieve before some tasks in 3 mins by just going to respective folks, interrupting them nicely and get the stuff done. Now I am chasing them for a week for same trivial task. May not be an issue at Google, I would expect them to be less…

I'd say its true for some individuals, not corporations. I don't want to give a blanket statement and say everyone works better from home, thats my whole problem with the blanket statement that everyone works better from the office. Give people a choice where they can still do their job either way

As for my current position, its certainly not Google, and I wouldn't call it a well oiled machine. Don't get me wrong, its a really nice place to work, but yeh, we have a few of our own problems ;)

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#668

Post by eru »

Aunche wrote: post #380
norov wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rest of the world does not necessarily have decent labor laws. What if you end up cheering on a terrible employment standard & reward anti-worker countries and economies?

Salary is a function of supply and demand. By expanding to Poland, the supply of labor increases, so overall SWE compensation goes down. Collective bargaining can only work by artificially constraining the supply of labor such as preventing a Polish SWE from having the ability to undercut an American SWE's salary, which disincentivizes hiring in Poland.

Sort-of. But programmers tend to create more work for programmers.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#669

Post by eru »

smabie wrote: post #507
coopierez wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prop trading firms pay more, I don't know if they pay the _most_ however.

For front office work, they definitely do pay the most.

Though not necessarily per hour.

(Ok, probably still per hour. But hours can be quite long.)

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#670

Post by eru »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #318
eru wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But: if you can add a benefit that employees value a lot at zero or negative cost to the company, competition will go that way. No need for regulation in this regard: greed will do the work. Of course, if the cost to companies is positive, things are less clear cut. If you want any regulation here, the boring standard econ answer applies: a carbon tax.

Yes one of the most interesting bits of information we will get from the market forces of remote work is seeing how much value being in the office brings to an employer. Obviously this will vary by industry, but if we see huge differences in salary between in-office and remote employees, then that means companies are willing to pay that premium to some people to be in the office. If there is no/little difference in s…

I agree.

I suspect that there are investments with large fixed costs companies can make to make remote productivity go up. (Not so much investments in eg actual hardware, but eg in how you set up team processes.)

That would explain heavy pushback from companies before the pandemic, but also that things seem to be running ok now.

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