Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 355 posts

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#251

Post by jjav »

dcolkitt wrote: post #61
beambot wrote: post #4

Google may save $1B this year on the P&L, but I can assure you that a large cohort of employees are vastly less effective (especially parents!). Time will tell how wfh pans out in terms of long-term enterprise value creation, after confounding variables (i.e. COVID) are removed. Source: A lot of my Googler friends are itching to get back into the office -- whether parents or people whose social lives centered around…

I'm a parent, who does WFH, and definitely disagree about the preferability of office work. Sure my kids will occasionally pop their heads in the door to say hello. I guess that's an occasional distraction, which has some small productivity cost. You know what hurts productivity more? The soul-crushing experience of missing out on watching your kids grow up because you're spending all day in an office or commuting. I…

> You know what hurts productivity more? The soul-crushing experience of missing out on watching your kids grow up because you're spending all day in an office or commuting.

Yes!

And I'm renting a small office near the house for pandemic purposes to have a quiet space to work. But being two minutes away instead of an hour away is night and day. I can be home and back multiple times a day, in same time than it took to walk to the snack dispenser at the office.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#252

Post by spurgu »

Retric wrote: post #110
UncleMeat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't a criticism of OKRs. That is a criticism of literally any and all metrics.

There is nothing wrong with metrics, the issue is optimizing for them which is what OKRs are trying to do.

Yeah metrics are fine as long as they're not being manipulated. Then you can be aware of their inherent inaccuracy. Amazon reviews springs to mind. If the only inaccuracies is that people tend to be binary in their choices and either give 1 or 5 star reviews then you can for example adjust by giving more weight to the 4 star reviews. But with the current landscape of all of them being highly manipulated the numbers almost don't even matter anymore.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#253

Post by spurgu »

paxys wrote: post #189
spurgu wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is arguably stupid as it makes you focus on improving specific numbers instead of your product/service. Crude example: OKR: Improve customer feedback ratings from 4.2 to 4.5+ stars Result: Customer support personnel start handing out free upgrades/bonuses/merchandise to complaining customers, resulting in many 5 stars reviews and while not solving any problems customers are facing, still achieving the OKR. Meas…

Relying on personal judgement of a small set of managers is the fastest way to kill any product. Plus, your example isn't really using the process correctly. Improved feedback rating is a result, not an objective on its own. It could be filed under, say, "improve customer experience with the app". That objective would have many (3-5) results that you track, with improving feedback being just one of them. Others could…

What I guess I'm saying is that it's insanely difficult to come up with good OKR's and so many good things aren't measurable, while the fans of OKR's don't seem to want to take this into account.

Whatever alternative methods (judgement of managers) is up for debate though, I didn't say I had a good one. Just that OKR's in my mind are a waste of time for the most part, especially when you make the whole organization do them.

And look at products like Facebook, they seem to be built solely on OKR's.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#254

Post by jjav »

txtx wrote: post #176
astrange wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Senior eng makes $400k+ TC. This is not true. Maybe people are confusing principal with senior? That or you're counting multi-year stock grants in the current year.

Senior engineers at Google/Facebook (L5) make at minimum $300K, and with stock appreciation / refreshers $500K+ is not uncommon. Netflix is also well known for paying essentially all of their engineers at least $400K. Principal engineers (L8) at Google/Facebook make around $1M a year, and $1.5-2M is not unheard of.

I have a lot of difficulty believing any of these numbers.

Source: spouse is management level at G of FAANG. Those numbers don't match up with reality in general. For a few edge cases, sure. Not for most people.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#255

Post by PoignardAzur »

Google234 wrote: post #206
ryandrake wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea commute + kid is the key motivation for WFH for me. My Bay Area commute is 4+ hours per day, depending on traffic. This means in order to guarantee I can be at work for my first 8AM meeting, I need to wake up around 5AM and leave the house at 5:30. My day is over at around 5PM (thankfully I don't work for a workaholic culture start-up), but this still means I'm home by 7:30-8PM most days. I'm basically driving 50…

Why do you live 2 hours away?

Property prices, I assume?

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#256

Post by throwaway2037 »

akomtu wrote: post #123
lamontcg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've been paying rent on their offices the whole time. If they went permanent WFH they could sell/lease those spaces and probably save billions. Not to mention the cost all the employees have to endure for traveling to work, wear on vehicles, gas, repairs, collisions, insurance, medical payouts due to car accidents, etc. Plus just generally the externalities of higher carbon emissions.

This is actually the biggest proof that the big players, including the gov, don't take co2 emissions seriously. If JP Morgan's Dimon is bragging about how he'll pull employees back to offices and the WH pretends to look the other way, it's safe to assume they don't give two shits about the carbon whatever. Real estate prices is what really matters to them.

If you read his comments closely, he was specifically talking about investment bankers. He talked about how it was hard to train junior bankers on deal making if not face-to-face. I think he used the term "apprenticeship". Even in the era of unlimited voice calls, emails, and video calls, as I understand, most M&A and IPO deals are still done face-to-face.

For the investment bank, many of the employees work in New York City and use a train (or bus) to commute. That is pretty low carbon intensity.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#257

Post by LightG »

jjav wrote: post #240
EvilEy3 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much cost they will endure when their employees start getting insane from all the zoom meetings and working with a monitor instead of a real person?

> working with a monitor instead of a real person Pre and post pandemic I'm still communicating with coworkers via email and slack, on the monitor. No difference at all. Well, one difference is I used be able to hear them munch on their snacks a couple cubicles over, but I can do without that part. Also, erasing the two hour commute, total win.

We both win with WFH.

I have a co-worker (generally a lovely person) who is about ready to explode when she hears someone crunching on an apple.

WFH, I can now eat an apple without self-consciously slow-crunching.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#258

Post by throwaway3699 »

jjav wrote: post #247
throwawayboise wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's groundhog day. Wake up, make coffee, sit down at the computer. Everything having anything to do with work happens on that screen. Every day is the same.

But what's different? Before, it was: Wake up, make coffee, drive an hour to work, sit down at the computer. Everything having anything to do with work happens on that screen. Every day is the same.

I hate to be cliche, but social encounters and the mythical "hallway conversations" are what stop work from being groundhog day for me. Very little productivity happens on the computer, that's just the time to write up whatever solution I've spent my day working on away from said desk.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#259

Post by mrisoli »

SilverRed wrote: post #204
quantumsequoia wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is one of the most sought after companies, but this is due to them actively advertising Google as a great place to work. Actually talking to someone who works at Google makes it more real and attainable in candidates minds and reinforces Google as a desirable place to work If Google were to stop attending, they risk newer generations of engineers shifting their perspective on Google, especially these days when…

Sounds about right. The OP sounds like "Why does coke advertise their product so much when they are the most well known product in existence" Because that status will decline without advertising.

I always thought about this, but not about Coca-Cola, since people actually need to want to buy it to acquire it, but Visa and Mastercard have huge advertising budgets, notably for events like the World Cup and the Olympics, and I never met someone who actively pursued a specific card flag when getting a new card and instead just get whichever their bank has to offer.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#260

Post by underwater »

throwawayboise wrote: post #220
bseidensticker wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the annual increase is capped at 2% and inflation is >2% then the value reaped by property tax will eventually go to 0. Similar to how if you rent the same place for long enough and it's rent controlled your rent effectively gets cheaper even though it's going up.

Can't they game their way around that though by just increasing the assessed the value of the property? That's how my town effectively raises property taxes beyond the statutory limits. Sure you can appeal the assessed valuation but most people don't. It is expensive and time-consuming.

No, it's fixed at when the house was built. You'll see "renovations" where the entire house minus one wall is demolished, and the new structure built around it. This allows the owners to avoid reassessment.
Post reply on HN