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

latimes.com

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

#291

Post by oblio »

thrower123 wrote: post #270
seoaeu wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like one expense they saved on is sending out recruiters and engineers to likely thousands of career fairs, recruiting sessions, etc. Nobody would reasonably argue that skipping all of them is a sustainable strategy long term even if it hasn't hurt them much so far.

Why exactly would Google need to do any of that? They're Google, people will come to them for as long as they are Google (and as long as they hand out very generous six-figure salaries).

Better signal to noise ratio.

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

#292

Post by somesoftdev »

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…

That's probably a case-by-case scenario but the last year has been a struggle for me. I much more prefer my usual 30m commute over working from our 45m2 apartment with my wife doing the same, my daughter attending online classes and few apartments in my building being renovated during work hours. Man, I miss my office and my desk.

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

#293

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

bpodgursky wrote: post #33
guyzero wrote: post #10

There's a lot of employee travel at big companies. Many times of the year you can hardly book a hotel room around Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Palo Alto. I think the pandemic has shown how non-essential a lot of that really was.

I think a big question is not how essential it is in a vacuum, but how important sales travel is in a competitive landscape. ie, sales would work equally well if everyone did it via Zoom calls. But if one competitor is willing to send reps in-house for in-person meetings, and the rest are just scheduling Zooms... I can see the industry quickly collapsing back into constant sales travel, if there's even a small margin…

Ive worked cloud sales for Azure and GCP. Zoom/Teams/Meet is not a replacement for in-person sales. In large Enterprises, you would be surprised by how much of the outcome is determined by relationship rather than technology decisions. There is no substitute for shared experiences with customers or randomly bumping into a friend as you’re walking the hallways of your customer. Sometimes it just comes down to who they like better and building rapport over video chat is hard.

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

#294

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

amscanne wrote: post #40
guyzero wrote: post #10

There's a lot of employee travel at big companies. Many times of the year you can hardly book a hotel room around Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Palo Alto. I think the pandemic has shown how non-essential a lot of that really was.

What does “essential” mean? I don’t think anyone viewed travel as essential — they just viewed it as “worth it” to facilitate collaboration/communication, build relationships, etc. This is still easier in person.

'Worth it' in cash terms, while the plane fuel is subsidised and the negative externalities are forced on everyone else.

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

#295

Post by schnable »

bartc wrote: post #224
squaredisk wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Google saved that much money and the business didn't see a considerable negative impact (34% increase? Quite the opposite in fact.), then that news should be telling not just for Google, but for every company that previously catered to spoiled employees who jump on an airplane just to have lunch with the customer. Two lies COVID has forcibly flushed out and helped dispel: Lie #1: Remote work, cannot work. Lie #2:…

This is only true in an environment where nobody from any company travels. However in a world where one company travels for conferences, lunches, in-person events, then that company will clearly have an advantage over the company that did none of those things.

True, but visits to far away intra-company campuses I suspect to be highly curtailed across the board when remote communications has been shown to work well.

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

#296

Post by schnable »

jwogrady wrote: post #121
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.

Once an employee has built a report with their team, knows their roll, is fully trained, properly equipped, and demonstrates proficiency at their job..... then I'm cool letting staff work from home. I suspect Google has the leadership, supervision, and infrastructure to do all those things at a large scale. Unfortunately for my crew I find brining everyone in is waaaaay more efficient....carbon emissions aside.

If the fully onboarded employees are all WFH, what good will bringing in new hires do?

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

#297

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

marmshallow wrote: post #6

It's hard to quantify the potential loss of productivity or collaboration caused by working from home, though. No way to find out either, unfortunately.

I guess that remote workers in the past were those motivated enough to seek it out and thrive despite against a strong sentiment against it. Now, those who weren't have to work remotely anyway.

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

#298

Post by zamalek »

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…

> commuting

Assuming you're driving yourself, this is universally a productivity killer. You risking a huge amount of frustrating and angering situations while your workers are commuting to a central location. I'd put good money on a lot of lost productivity to commute.

Then there's the people who have to commute, due to functionally in-person jobs (artisans, doctors, baristas, etc.). Optional commuters going to the office for their "social fix" are doing so at the expense of forced commuters. Work should be work and social should be social; if you want a social experience during work hours then have a social lunch in your neighborhood.

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

#299

Post by thrwyoilarticle »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #258
jjav wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I used to eat with some colleagues every week despite them being in a different team. Now, I don't bother even dropping a private message. It sounds silly, written out, but it's also means of death of many of my adult friendships and acquantances. And if I had joined the company in this climate, I wouldn't know them at all.

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

#300

Post by free652 »

squaredisk wrote: post #212
paxys wrote: post #81

Google is saving $1 billion per year because of COVID-19, not because employees are working from home. This is literally mentioned in the article, but the headline is twisted (for clicks no doubt): > During the first quarter, Google parent Alphabet Inc. saved $268 million in expenses from company promotions, travel and entertainment, compared with the same period a year earlier, “primarily as a result of COVID-19,” a…

If Google saved that much money and the business didn't see a considerable negative impact (34% increase? Quite the opposite in fact.), then that news should be telling not just for Google, but for every company that previously catered to spoiled employees who jump on an airplane just to have lunch with the customer. Two lies COVID has forcibly flushed out and helped dispel: Lie #1: Remote work, cannot work. Lie #2:…

You are conflating problems. Digital companies gained a lot of revenue when brick and mortar stores were closed, isnt that kinda obvious?
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