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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

#331

Post by ghaff »

yalogin wrote: post #178
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…

I guess it will go up a little, but I am willing to bet that a bunch of the cases you mentioned where they had to send people around are now done online. I will be really shocked if the google IO is not an online conference going forward.

>I will be really shocked if the google IO is not an online conference going forward.

I would be very surprised. I'm connected to the tech events space and the widespread assumption is that events will go back to physical while maintaining a strong online component going forward to continue to reach more people.

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

#332

Post by UncleMeat »

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.

OKRs are the opposite.

In your example, the "O" would be something like "provide a good experience for app users" and a "KR" would be "improve star ratings from 4.2 to 4.5". The "O" helps keep you focused on what you actually care about, making the metric subservient to that goal.

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

#333

Post by UncleMeat »

tolbish wrote: post #183
UncleMeat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 14 day policy cited in the article is wrong. It is more than 14 days of international remote work.

So Google recruiters are telling interviewees in the US that they do not need to move to an office location? From what I understand, you still need to relocate if you get a job offer.

You'll need to relocate after September. Permanent WFH is currently not offered by Google.

But the "you need to formally apply for every remote day and 14 is the absolute cap per year" is not the case.

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

#334

Post by bradlys »

anhner wrote: post #269
gtaylor wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone want to tell this commenter how expensive daycare is?

Nah, obviously everyone who works in IT makes 500k a year, has a spouse who earns the same, and can afford 1 mil houses 5 minutes from where they work. At least from what they say.

If you’re at FAANG, you can - that is the point. I’ve only spoken of FAANG so far. Check levels. A $1mil home is cheap for a FAANG employee.

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

#335

Post by lrem »

vlovich123 wrote: post #266
lrem wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it is causing pain already. Recently I pitched to a friend fixing a component as a great project for a very junior engineer. Only to find out that neither his nor my team has any sufficiently junior engineers on hand. So the oceans will keep getting ever so slightly boiled until we hire some, or one of the too senior engineers runs out of more important things to do. Sure it won't bring Google down right away, bu…

Google cuts epsilon’s in engineering cost that operate on efficiencies of 10s of thousands engineers or engineering components that underpin multiple high-value products. They have entire teams of very senior engineers dedicated to this problem. Conversely, a smaller project wouldn’t demand this kind of attention because solutions don’t scale well and so are managed as local costs at the most local level possible. Wh…

We're SREs working on the rollout system used for vast majority of internal software. The component in quesiton collected enough tech debt to start showing "unfixable" defects, but still not enough to justify anything more than "make it retry harder". Any year now it will become worthwile to quantify the actual impact.

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

#336

Post by Apocryphon »

EvilEy3 wrote: post #228
Apocryphon wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the standard work environment has been wrong and should be changed and WFH is the way to do it.

Or you're just spoiled.

I'm blessed. But the idea of civilizational progress is to get everyone at that level, as a baseline.

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

#337

Post by cco »

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…

The secret you learn is that many people that like work a lot, actually fundamentally don't like their home lives, whether that be their spouses or their children.

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

#338

Post by Retric »

UncleMeat wrote: post #332
Retric wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

OKRs are the opposite. In your example, the "O" would be something like "provide a good experience for app users" and a "KR" would be "improve star ratings from 4.2 to 4.5". The "O" helps keep you focused on what you actually care about, making the metric subservient to that goal.

Only in theory, in practice success is measured by the associated metric. And as constantly demonstrated, anytime you measure people’s performance by some metric that metric becomes gamed.

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

#339

Post by [deleted] »

lolinder wrote: post #186
notatoad wrote: post #185

Isn't the whole point of a company that spending money is more productive than keeping it in a savings account? Google didn't save $1bn, Google was unable to make use of $1bn in potential spending because of the pandemic. If that counts as a win, they're doing something very wrong.

What makes you think they didn't find something else to spend that money on?

[deleted]

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

#340

Post by guyzero »

smueller1234 wrote: post #278
amscanne wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I work at Google and never saw such an expectation (though it’s just my experience). I suspect most travel at large companies is dominated by individuals making decisions about what allows them to be most effective in accomplishing their goals (as long as it’s aligned with company travel policies).

It really depends on your job and location. I think the "your boss expects/forces you to" interpretation from the grand parent isn't generally what happens (at Google). I haven't seen that at all. It's rather more common that you realize on your own that a certain amount of travel is highly effective for building and maintaining the relationships you need to do your job. This is extremely strongly correlated with you…

Sure, this is definitely an "eating your seed corn" sort of situation. And it's definitely very asymmetric at Google - a senior director outside of MTV definitely has to come to meet people in Mountain View from time to time. A senior director in MTV just expects everyone to come to them.
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