It only seems fair that employees also make financial sacrifices when working from home, considering that the employer is also sacrificing a lot of expenses related to providing office space for the employee, and since productivity has been shown to grow when working from home, which means the employer suddenly has to do a lot more to keep track of all the increased profits. /S
Google employees who work from home could lose money
671–680 of 699 posts
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#672Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Higher productivity is the way out of this mess. Lower consumption might also help.
Not gonna happen
It's already happening. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#673Yeah I think we've been through this. Your salary isn't purely a function of how much value you bring to the company. It also depends on how much other people are willing to work for. That's how markets work.
This doesn't sound right. Google gets millions of applicants per year. Surely some of those appliacants would be willing to work for less.
They don't get millions of good applicants that are willing to live in SV and work for less.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#674Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been working from home for 18 years and there's no amount of money that would make me commute to a job. I'd take another job or work for myself rather than do it.
Kudos for 18 years at home, that's incredible! I've done ~5 years for the majority of time now, and now with four kids that need extensive time with me, I will forever take a WFH position. With discipline, it makes for an exceptional work/life balance.
I’ve done ~3 years now - and my work is my life. I do 18+ hour days and frequent 24-36-almost-48 hour stretches because I want to.
I hate it - and I love it - and I can’t stop. Part of me is concerned for my health, the other part of me is concerned the other-part is going to end the dream.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#675Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kudos for 18 years at home, that's incredible! I've done ~5 years for the majority of time now, and now with four kids that need extensive time with me, I will forever take a WFH position. With discipline, it makes for an exceptional work/life balance.
I’ve done ~3 years now - and my work is my life. I do 18+ hour days and frequent 24-36-almost-48 hour stretches because I want to . I hate it - and I love it - and I can’t stop. Part of me is concerned for my health, the other part of me is concerned the other-part is going to end the dream.
I run a startup at home. We became fully virtual a while back and now have people all over the world.
You have to set some boundaries. My big one is that I don’t work on weekends unless something is on fire. I may glance at emails but that’s it.
I also don’t live alone. I have a wife and kids and will take breaks to see them. I do work pretty long hours during the week but it’s punctuated with some positive human interaction. My wife stays home with the kids right now, so they are here.
I think if I lived alone I’d be prone to do what you do, and I’m not sure it would actually increase my productivity. There’s a point where you hit diminishing returns for any knowledge work. The brain needs rest like any other thing. I think if I lived alone I’d be forced to set weekday time boundaries to keep from going nuts.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#676Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a big fan of mass transit. I live in the US, but traveled regularly to Tokyo for over 20 years. Their mass transit system is awesome . The social interaction thing is a big deal, but I don't think remote work will be the coffin nail, there. In fact, it could improve social interactions between neighbors. There's a school of thought, that the air conditioner has been the true bane of social interaction, as everyon…
In Germany we used to have unbearably hot weather for maybe a week a year. You just suffered through it, coping with going to the swimming pool or going to the ice cream parlour. All very social activities. Now we are slowly getting used to the new reality of hot weather for weeks or months each year, and getting air conditioning is something many people think about (but most still put off because electricity is expe…
IMHO it’s a policy failure (for climate, economics, and equality) to make electricity so expensive people are less likely to electrify things like their car and heating.
The ratio of gasoline to electricity price in Germany is slightly smaller than that in the US, so the incentive to electrify is proportionally smaller. This is bad. We shouldn’t be paying for renewable energy subsidies via consumer electricity prices; the US does this right by funding it from the general budget instead, which encourages electrification.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#677What are people complaining about?
A cost of living (COL) variable in your compensation keeps things rational.
Plus people are missing the fact that the original compensation of X was established in the context of some geographical region. So people complain if their COL adjustment decreases their pay but all good if COL increases their pay?
You gotta have it working in both ways.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#678Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
A super genius could most likely bargain for a pay/bonus cut and 40 hour weeks for 7 figures easily after a few years of demonstrated performance.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#679Class 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…
> If Googlers had any collective bargaining power, they wouldn't be getting salary reductions: they would be getting extra expense money for desks, chairs, and ISP upgrades. Since Google already pays the most, where do you threaten to leave to while bargaining?
Hedge funds and trading firms. Google doesn't pay the most.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#680> 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 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…
Your working theory is spot on. Coasting is almost impossible unless you constantly keep showing that you are valuable to the company. So yeah I did 100 meetings is one easy way of quantifying your presence.
What I am really surprised at - companies have been blind to these bad managers and are letting them run the show. Just blindly fire them. Life becomes simpler for everyone, including the company.
Remote is a win-win for everyone except the bad managers. Why keep them then. Is this so hard to realise ?