[HN Gopher] Google employees who work from home could lose money
___________________________________________________________________
Google employees who work from home could lose money
Author : pseudolus
Score : 328 points
Date : 2021-08-10 10:55 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| I have not read the counter to this - the cost reduction of
| office overhead that Google does not have to pay for the
| employee. No building, no heat/cooling, no building maintenance,
| no office furniture, no electricity, no networking, no parking,
| no janitorial service, no security guards, and so on.
| textbookrental wrote:
| It was always a HN mantra that one got paid for the value they
| create. I guess it is more likely that where you sit is more
| important than what you do.
|
| Also, I see a lot of comments about higher productivity in the
| office. Google has had record revenue and profits during this
| time. Clearly that wouldn't be the case if productivity was
| negatively impacted.
|
| This seems to be more about what's good for managers and less
| about what's good for the company. Managers usually are
| incentivized to grow their budgets, not shrink them.
| textbookrental wrote:
| Or it could be that technology companies will start to use the
| investment banking model. Where the only way to tell if someone
| will make a good investment banker is to see if they can spend
| 100 hours a week in the office doing the most mundane work for
| a couple of years.
| Gatsky wrote:
| I have noticed that any HN front page thread about compensation
| has at least 300 comments.
| Lariscus wrote:
| Don't forget, to the CEO and their cronies you are all just
| peons. If they could pay you nothing at all they would absolutely
| do so.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Exactly. Not sure why people get surprised, this sort of things
| (company wins, employees lose) happen all the time. I imagine
| that since this is HN, people here have Google in some kind of
| a throne and they think Google employees (engineers, mainly)
| have some sort of privileges that make them immune. Well,
| Google is just like any other company out there and Google
| engineers are just like any other employees out there, peons
| with zero power of decision. I hope I'm wrong and Google
| engineers take a step forward to avoid this pay cut, otherwise
| this will happen in every dumb IT company out there as well
| (because, if Google does it, it must be good).
| system16 wrote:
| What a bizarre statement. If you could just not pay your
| mortgage, or not make your car payments, or just walk out of a
| restaurant without paying and no repercussions, wouldn't you?
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Generally yes, but you also don't consider your relationship
| with your bank to be "a family". It is useful for employees
| to recognize that despite everything that bosses say this is
| still an adversarial transaction where the bosses want to get
| the most labor out of the least cost.
| system16 wrote:
| Fair enough. I guess I've never felt that loyalty to any
| company and always view employment as a business agreement.
| "Family" rhetoric has always come off to me as marketing
| fluff.
| [deleted]
| lultimouomo wrote:
| If you could have your company pay you all the money they have
| (but still magically continue to function), wouldn't you?
| whydid wrote:
| This is a ridiculous argument. How could a company continue
| to function in this case? A pot of gold or some other form of
| magic?
|
| The point is, compensation is inequitable. Upper management
| at most tech companies is paid 20-50x what a worker is paid.
| Do you think that is reasonable?
| pc86 wrote:
| Of course compensation is inequitable. I don't think anyone
| outside fringe leftist politicos have ever suggested it
| should be otherwise?
|
| And if your company continues to print money decade after
| decade while paying upper management 20-50x what a worker
| makes, maybe that's not the worst thing in the world.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > And if your company continues to print money decade
| after decade while paying upper management 20-50x what a
| worker makes, maybe that's not the worst thing in the
| world.
|
| This seems at odds with the normal HN view of Google,
| which is that they can't do anything right but have such
| a good thing going with ads that they basically cannot
| fail. If this is true, then an inanimate object could
| lead the company to success. I am not convinced it is so
| extreme, but I am definitely not convinced that paying
| Sundar billions and billions less would actually change
| the company.
| pc86 wrote:
| Sundar made $8 million total comp in 2020 and $280
| million in 2019 ($276 of which was stock). So I'm not
| sure paying him "billions and billions less" is
| appropriate or accurate framing.
|
| But even if it was, you're probably right that a massive
| pay cut to the CEO would have no effect _if the CEO
| stayed_. However, if a CEO can reasonably command a
| 9-figure salary, and that gets slashed, they have an
| incentive to go somewhere that will pay them a 9-figure
| salary. So that company now has to hire or promote a new
| CEO willing to do the work for "less" money (I consider
| myself a capitalist through and through but even I have
| trouble calling multi-million dollar comp packages "less"
| in any reasonable sense). There's a decent chance that
| CEO is going to be worse. So there could definitely be
| negative effects as a direct result of decreasing
| executive compensation.
|
| It's the same argument as with developers except there
| are just more zeros involved. If you want to make the
| most money possible as a dev, you're probably applying to
| companies like Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, etc. The folks
| who can't make the cut there go to "worse" places for
| "less" money. Not saying there aren't idiots that make it
| into Facebook or genius coders that don't want to work at
| FAANG-level companies, but it's common wisdom in part
| because it's accurate more often than it's wrong.
| lultimouomo wrote:
| Of course it is a ridiculous argument. Same as GP. How
| would you live and be able to work for your company if it
| didn't pay you at all?
|
| The fact is that the employer/employee relation is a
| business one, in which each party looks for his own
| interest first and foremost. The interest of the other
| party is only instrumental.
|
| There are power asymmetries, and we can agree that the
| average guy gets, on average, shafted, while someone born
| "on the right side of the table" is always dealt the good
| cards[0].
|
| But I don't think the nature of the employer/employee
| relation is the problem. The problem is the vast inequality
| of opportunity at birth.
|
| [0] Though I shall note that in a sense pretty much
| everyone on this website is born on the right side of the
| table, and doesn't seem to feel too guilty about that.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I did a search of the comments for "food" before writing this,
| and I don't think it was adequately covered.
|
| I worked at Google 11 1/2 years, and I've been retired 4 years
| now. I _still_ bemoan the convenience of being able to have
| whatever food I want for lunch or dinner, just by walking down to
| a cafe. Yeah, I buy it now, but I 'll never have as much variety
| as Google did.
|
| The food costs for Google per employee are not insignificant, and
| they go to zero if you work at home. Same for all the other
| famous benefits Google has.
|
| I've also developed a theory about management, by the way: do you
| like it?
|
| _Middle managers are the cause of all corporate problems._
| chronolitus wrote:
| Have you heard of the Gervais Principle[1]?
|
| [1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-
| principle-...
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Great article, thanks.
|
| It needs an editor, though. Way too long.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Oops, never mind. Most of that is comments.
| rStar wrote:
| google be losing employees then.
| drewg123 wrote:
| I'm an Xoogler, and I have to say: Google does all kinds of
| stupid and annoying things which are horribly counter-productive.
|
| They way they gamified travel was a HUGE waste of time. We had a
| travel system which required you to come in at the average price
| of past trips for a trip you're taking (or get VP approval). You
| could "bank" any $$ you saved if you came in below average. No
| matter what you did, you had to waste time. You either booked a
| trip in minutes and likely had to get VP approval for going over
| the cap, or you set up travel alerts and wound up wasting hours
| to days booking travel. Did they really intend for engineers
| making at least $250k in total comp to spend hours booking
| travel? I doubt it, but that's what happens.
|
| And don't even get me started on REWS ("real estate and workplace
| services") converting cubed workspaces to tables, while bragging
| about the open concept micro kitches, waterfalls, and eco walls
| in public building spaces. We got a regular REWS newsletter about
| new buildings, and the focus was on the nice public spaces, while
| never mentioning the spaces where we spent 90% of our time doing
| actual work. And those spaces kept getting worse and worse.
| mleonhard wrote:
| In SFO-SPE (345 Spear St), REWS took away the walls and merged
| the little offices into one giant open-plan acoustic hellscape.
| Concrete walkways ensure that every person with wooden-soled
| shoes will disturb 50 engineers every time they walk to a
| meeting/cafe/microkitchen/restroom ( _clop-clop-clop-clop-clop_
| ).
|
| REWS made themselves a quiet walled office for themselves on
| the top floor.
|
| Google is a dysfunctional organization. The day I joined Google
| was the best day of my life. A few years later, the day I left
| Google was the new best day of my life. I have photos from both
| days, with big smiles.
|
| Google's dysfunction is Larry & Sergey's fault. They control
| the board. They refuse to put in a CEO who will fix the
| incentive structure to make Googlers focus on users.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Shortly after I left, they moved my team from Plymouth Rd (on
| the main campus) to a new building in Santa Clara. The old
| setup had high-walled cubes with 6 people per cube (which is
| objectively horrific, but good by Google standards). The new
| setup was a large room with nothing but tables and hard
| surfaces.
|
| Worse, the new location was off the main campus, away from
| every single other group we collaborated with (and away from
| all the good food, activities, etc). After the move, most of
| my group either left or retired.
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's weird how directly the incentive is to increase your carbon
| footprint.
|
| They'll essentially pay you more for contributing to congestion
| and pollution.
| nostrebored wrote:
| Because employees in the office are more productive.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Of course its different for everybody, but for a recent study
| of "IT professionals", productivity goes down but the amount
| of work goes up:
|
| https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2021-56/
|
| This was early on in the COVID lockdown, presumably better
| remote centered management/tools would increase productivity.
| nlitened wrote:
| On one hand we say that IT professional's work cannot
| reasonably be quantified in a scalar KPI measured by
| management, on the other hand we like to say that "recent
| studies" show that some numeric expression of productivity
| or work done improves with remote work.
|
| Sounds kind of hypocritical to me.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| That's not what they're doing at all. The pay is based on
| location, not whether you're in an office or not. Work out of
| an office in a lower cost-of-living region and you still earn
| less than someone working from home in a higher cost-of-
| living region.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| That's a very absolutist statement, personally I'm more
| productive at home where I don't have the interruptions of an
| open office and there's no feeling of having people watching
| over my shoulder.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| 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).
| Fnoord wrote:
| Not universally true, indeed. However if you got little
| children, it is most certainly true.
| mingusrude wrote:
| Why would it be more productive to work in the office and
| have the children at day care than working from home and
| have the children at day care?
| Fnoord wrote:
| Daycare? In August? Not here. They got vacation.
| Daycare's closed. School vacation lasts 6-8 weeks (6 for
| our's). I do have vacation days left, but not for 6
| weeks.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| I can see why you'd think that, but again having worked
| with many people who do, I don't see a difference.
|
| Of course personal experience is far from hard data, but
| with a lack of decent data to go off on the subject
| (partially to do with the fact that productivity is a
| very vague term, with many disagreeing on how it should
| be measured, especially with the constant number of
| external factors affecting it), I can only go by what I
| experience. I also notice those with children think
| they're being less productive, whereas the rest of the
| team doesn't actually notice, so that could be a factor.
|
| Thats not saying that WFH is beneficial to all, of course
| not. I think theres a massive range of factors, children
| of course being one of them, but I think it comes down to
| the individual, rather than any broad strokes we can
| attempt to make.
| thegginthesky wrote:
| This is arguably false.
|
| Anecdotally, I have small children at home and worked
| from home even before the pandemic when my company had an
| office. I have climbed the corporate leader every
| evaluation period because of my performance, while
| coworkers who were exclusively in the office weren't so
| fortunate.
|
| It just goes to show that people are very different and
| it's impossible to generalize statements based on a
| single variable (has_children=True)
| Fnoord wrote:
| I was talking about little/small children, not children
| in general. I believe the point is true for children in
| general as well (during vacation / lockdown
| specifically), but toddlers and babies require a lot of
| attention and maintenance.
|
| Are you responsible for your children? If not, then with
| regards to work(load) its akin to having no children at
| all.
|
| You say its arguably false, yet ~90% in my team have
| children (I'm one of the few with toddlers). And the one
| who doesn't have children split up recently (due to
| relationship stress, which now lead to more stress, the
| irony..). _Everyone_ in my team 's productivity suffers
| since they have to work from home.
|
| And on top of that, there's another data point: mothers.
| They get structurally paid less than men and other women.
| pc86 wrote:
| Are productivity and successfully playing office politics
| to get a promotion related?
| thegginthesky wrote:
| I never had to play office politics, because the
| opportunities for doing so while doing remote work is
| close to none.
|
| I guess I have the habit of keeping my work documented
| which helps when I'm asked for proof of anything. But at
| the same time people can see how much work I do at any
| time too.
| matthewowen wrote:
| Not at all - I use daycare the same whether remote or in
| the office, as do basically all my coworkers with kids. I
| do save time tho by only having to travel between two
| locations rather than three.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| 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 dysfunctional then our broken corp, but most
| multinationals are super far from well oiled machine.
| darkerside wrote:
| More productive can be different from more effective.
| Sometimes I'm more productive from home, but it takes longer
| to realize we've built the wrong thing. That said, I agree
| that organizations tend to optimize for productivity as a
| proxy for effectiveness, so I agree with you in that way.
| ekianjo wrote:
| That's highly debatable.
| kristopolous wrote:
| The planet is actually on fire, right now, as you read this.
|
| So fuck productivity. We can manage.
|
| We must sacrifice the inconvenience of wasting our time
| commuting because of some arbitrary productivity definition
| to stop the surface of the planet from being engulfed in
| flames.
|
| There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million people
| because productivity is apparently more important than
| containing the outbreak of a deadly disease.
|
| Really, to hell with that.
| unmole wrote:
| > The planet is actually on fire, right now, as you read
| this.
|
| This really isn't different from the person who brought a
| snowball into the US Senate.
|
| > There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million
|
| Google requires employees working from the office to be
| vaccinated.
| rescripting wrote:
| It's just a hyperbolic way of saying "climate change is
| real". Bringing a snowball into the US Senate is a
| hyperbolic way of denying reality. So they're different
| in that sense.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| Fires like the ones in Athens are happening more often
| globally and they are a legitimate issue. Washington and
| California in the last year, Portugal 2 years ago.
|
| I agree with your general idea, but society is a mechanism
| and many people in lower positions of power simply follow
| the incentives regardless of intention or impact around
| them.
|
| We need people in higher positions of power, who have
| influence over those incentives and that believe in those
| climate issues, to change those incentives so that lower
| level power positions adopt the needed measures.
|
| Sadly, I suspect previous generations will need to retire
| and new ones with direct awareness of those issues to take
| their place. And that will sadly take its sweet time...
| eru wrote:
| > So fuck productivity. We can manage.
|
| Higher productivity is the way out of this mess.
|
| > There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million people
| because productivity is apparently more important than
| containing the outbreak of a deadly disease.
|
| No. See eg the covid sections in
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/adumbrations-of-
| aducan...
| jfk13 wrote:
| > Higher productivity is the way out of this mess.
|
| Lower consumption might also help.
| smabie wrote:
| Not gonna happen
| pc86 wrote:
| The planet is always on fire in a couple dozen places. This
| is about as useful as saying "The planet is actually
| underwater, right now, as you read this." Of course it is.
| That's sort of how it works. Whether or not someone rides
| the train isn't going to change anything.
| deathgripsss wrote:
| I think the fire is metaphorical
| kristopolous wrote:
| Not really. They have become way worse as a direct result
| of climate change because of the way we run our
| civilization. It's systemic things like this (a cultural
| affectation for working in an office) that influence
| this. It's a societal problem that can't be fixed with
| individual action. We've tried to neoliberal our way out
| of it for 40 years ever since the bottling industry made
| the crying indian ad to blame the individual and it
| hasn't helped.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| But it'll change if you get significant portions of the
| behave differently. During the beginning of the pandemic
| there were loads of stories of wildlife coming back to
| certain areas, pollution disappearing. So everyone WFH
| will in fact have an impact.
|
| I took a bit of a pay cut during the pandemic too. All
| this staring at my screen for longer hours was really
| taking a toll. Maybe this is a good time to think about
| what kind of lifestyle you want and how to get it. If
| Googlers really believe in the work they are doing and
| they are treated well, maybe stay. If you only want the
| money quit and don't look back.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> During the beginning of the pandemic there were loads
| of stories of wildlife coming back to certain areas,
| pollution disappearing._
|
| Most of that was fake: https://www.snopes.com/fact-
| check/dolphins-swans-italy-lockd...
|
| "The dolphins shown in the video, it turns out, were not
| swimming in the iconic canals of Venice, but off the
| coast of Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean
| Sea. Dolphin sightings in that area are not a new
| phenomenon, as a 2017 video demonstrates.
|
| National Geographic pointed out that the swan sightings
| were real, but not described accurately. "The swans in
| the viral posts regularly appear in the canals of Burano,
| a small island in the greater Venice metropolitan area,
| where the photos were taken," National Geographic
| reported."
| wayoutthere wrote:
| This has not been my experience; my teams are actually more
| productive from home. And not by a small amount.
|
| In a vacuum this isn't a trend, but remote work does work
| well for so many _people_ that the jobs that offer fully
| remote options are going to capture the lion's share of the
| talent. There's not a whole lot (if any) of competitive
| disadvantage in doing so, but there's a whole lot of
| competitive disadvantage in not offering remote work to all
| employees. The Nash equilibrium is to offer remote work for
| all those who want it, so that's what most companies will do.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| They'll essentially pay you more for being more productive.
|
| There are very few people that are more productive out of the
| office.
|
| Google/Facebook/Apple have the stats ... if they want you back
| in the office it's because they've seen productivity go down.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Where is the data that shows this? I've worked remotely since
| 2015 and I don't buy this.
| dijit wrote:
| Also if they're suddenly paying more for productivity: how
| do you explain the rise of the open office- proven over and
| over to decrease productivity?
| Cederfjard wrote:
| I don't have any data either way, but it could
| technically be the case that the productivity gains from
| working in an open plan office offset the costs compared
| to allowing people to work from home, but that the same
| is not true when comparing an open office to a
| traditional one. I guess it depends on if you believe
| these companies work off good data or not.
| Xevi wrote:
| I don't believe it either. I work for a company that has
| hundreds of remote employees right now and it's been going
| really well for the past 1.5 years now.
| bodge5000 wrote:
| You don't need to see the data, just believe the big 3 tech
| companies, they'd never lead you astray
| UncleMeat wrote:
| If this were the plan, then this would be addressable in
| performance review. Remote workers would be less productive
| and get lower performance reviews and get paid less.
|
| Further, working remotely from Idaho and working remotely
| from just outside NYC would presumably have the same
| productivity hit, but they lead to very different pay rates.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| How's that? If you live in NYC, you get paid more. People who
| live in NYC have the amongst the lowest carbon footprint in the
| nation. If you live in a dense urban area, you generally will
| have a lower carbon footprint.
| schnable wrote:
| I wonder if that holds up for remote workers outside of dense
| metros who don't have to commute.
| namdnay wrote:
| I think the argument is that it encourages working from a big
| office, but actually living far away. So you're getting paid
| a manhattan salary but you're living in new jersey or
| wherever. And you're spewing out CO2 to get from one to the
| other every day
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Most people living in NJ but working in NYC are taking
| trains or buses into the city, so the marginal carbon
| footprint there isn't as big as you might think.
|
| There's only a couple suitable river crossings for this
| commute and they're already facing hour-long delays during
| commuting hours, so there's no room to add more cars
| commuting into NYC (nor anywhere for them to park in NYC
| anyway). Fortunately these river crossings have dedicated
| bus lanes during rush hour, which move more people than all
| the other lanes combined.
| snicker7 wrote:
| Not everyone who works in NYC is a NYC resident. The entire
| state of NJ basically exists for people commuting to NYC.
| half of the entire state is basically highways and parking
| lots.
| gowld wrote:
| But WFH is not commuting.
| eru wrote:
| Well, Germany has (or used to have) a tax subsidy for
| commuting, too.
|
| See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendlerpauschale (might need
| Google Translate).
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Companies never lose an opportunity to cut costs.
|
| They sense that many employees _prefer_ to work from home, so
| that they may be willing to essentially pay for the privilege.
| valevk wrote:
| But wouldn't companies also save money by using smaller offices
| (and maybe by cutting the micro managers who control employees
| in an office environment)? What you are saying is that
| companies are capitalizing on the preference rather than any
| real cost of working from home?
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| Cut office costs _and_ salary costs.
|
| I don't see this as a signal that these companies necessarily
| want employees back into offices: If employees do prefer WFH
| then, as I mentioned, companies may be betting that they will
| accept a level of cut.
| vmception wrote:
| Given how many new ways there are to divide the eligible universe
| of workers (remote/office/mask/vax/woke), all while the sector is
| still expanding, I'm really excited to see the comp packages
| skyrocket, for those willing to optimize!
|
| The pay is starting to get interesting!
| tzs wrote:
| > Screenshots of Google's internal salary calculator seen by
| Reuters show that an employee living in Stamford, Connecticut -
| an hour from New York City by train - would be paid 15% less if
| she worked from home, while a colleague from the same office
| living in New York City would see no cut from working from home.
| Screenshots showed 5% and 10% differences in the Seattle, Boston
| and San Francisco areas.
|
| This makes no sense.
|
| For employees who are required to work in the office it makes
| sense to pay more at offices in places with higher costs of
| living. That's because your pool of potential employees is only
| people who live there or will move there. The company is
| requiring that employees live in a specific area so must pay
| based on the costs of that area.
|
| For full time work from home employees the company has no reason
| to care where the employee lives (other than regulatory--they
| might not want employees who live in areas where dealing with
| taxes or regulations are complex or costly). Hence the company
| should have one uniform rate for full time work at home
| employees, high enough so that they can get fill all their
| openings.
|
| If that means that the rate is too low for people in NYC why
| should the company care as long as they can get enough people
| from Stamford and other places with lower costs of living than
| NYC?
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > This makes no sense.
|
| It makes a ton of sense. Salaries are based on supply/demand,
| like any other marketplace. Workers in LCOL areas have less
| options for high pay so you can offer them less money and
| they'll likely accept it.
| tzs wrote:
| The point is that when it comes to full time remote work
| workers in LCOL areas and workers in HCOL areas are in the
| same marketplace selling the same product.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| And the counterpoint is that there are few enough companies
| offering sv salaries to remote workers in Topeka that it
| doesn't matter.
|
| Put another way, if you live in X location your job market
| is local jobs + remote jobs. The remote jobs are constant
| everywhere, so there's a relatively high demand. Unless the
| remote market absolutely dominates the local market, remote
| jobs can still compete with local ones.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| But wherever there's an arbritage opportunity, people take
| it.
|
| If you're offering your services for $500k but you live in
| NY, I can move to say, Ukraine, and charge only $400k,
| undercutting you to get the job. There's no point holding
| out for more when I can accept less and give myself a
| better chance of getting the job.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > If that means that the rate is too low for people in NYC why
| should the company care as long as they can get enough people
| from Stamford and other places with lower costs of living than
| NYC?
|
| Exactly. Google doesn't care, and as any other "good" company
| out there: money comes first, employees are peons.
|
| The thing I hope we are discussing here is: what (Google)
| employees can do about it? Can they do something at all? And if
| they can't, well, this basically means that in the near future
| every IT company out there will be doing the same. Sad, but
| hey, if we let companies do this sort of things, well, we
| deserve it.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Even if Google et al go remote, not everyone will. The NY
| market will still be more competitive than a suburb. Prices
| might reflect that.
| IfOnlyYouKnew wrote:
| It's fair in the sense that they provide each with the means to
| live at roughy the same standard-of-life: a Stamford $ has more
| buying power because local prices are lower, so they need fewer
| of them.
|
| Or, one could simply see it as answering a different question.
| Not "how much are you worth", but rather "how much do you
| need". If that sounds unfair, consider that it's close to the
| principle by which most parents care for their children' needs.
|
| Or, more prosaically, the New York employee simply has more
| options besides Google, and they might chose to work in an
| office if it means a 15% difference.
| dougmwne wrote:
| Should companies provide salary adjustments for each child an
| employee has so they can maintain a certain quality of life?
| Should the company reduce the salary of employees that have
| lots of investments so that they don't have a higher quality
| of life than someone with fewer assets? Should companies pay
| people with chronic health conditions more than healthy
| people so they can live a more equal life?
| usaar333 wrote:
| The problem with COL adjustments is that they are very crude.
| Different workers consume more (and consume different
| baskets), so see wildly different impacts.
|
| Being "fair" then becomes risky from the point of view of
| everyone as they'll actually find it unfair. I think it's
| easier to align on market demand on which case I agree with
| OP - market rate adjustments by location don't make sense for
| remote workers.
| ridaj wrote:
| Cost of living adjustments aren't necessarily fair either.
| Between two office workers who do the same job in the same
| location, should the one being thrifty by choosing to live in a
| lower cost area farther away from the office be paid less than
| the one who lives in a glitzy neighborhood close by?
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Hence the company should have one uniform rate for full time
| work at home employees, high enough so that they can get fill
| all their openings.
|
| There's a common misconception that engineers are paid for the
| value they provide or according to how expensive their cost of
| living is. It's not true, though.
|
| We're paid market rate, which is a balance of supply and demand
| that determines whether or not someone is incentivized to take
| and keep a job relative to their other options. If someone
| lives somewhere where they have more local options, it makes
| sense to pay them more even if they're working remotely.
|
| If you try to push companies to having one WFH rate for
| everyone, the end result isn't high salaries for all. The end
| result is a median salary for everyone that eliminates anyone
| living in a high cost of living area. The company starts
| scouring the country and eventually the world for bargain
| employees who will accept lower and lower salaries. The end
| result is a much lower fixed salary for everyone.
|
| So no, you do not actually want a one-size-fits-all WFH
| compensation if you live basically anywhere in the US, unless
| you're cool with salaries going down to match the much lower
| global median wages for developers.
| ghaff wrote:
| Even within the US, if a large company were to have uniform
| pay scales everywhere, they'd probably be pegged to somewhere
| like Chicago rather than SF. Effectively, that already
| happens to some degree today. If you want to work at Google
| or Facebook and land a job in the Bay Area, there are a lot
| of tech employers who probably won't salary match.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Wages are sticky and employers have gotten used to paying a
| certain rate for employees and employees have gotten used to
| be paid that rate.
|
| If Google wants to try to cut that rate, its likely that
| someone else who is hungry for Google engineers (like
| Facebook which is going full-time WFH) will be willing to pay
| that rate (also understanding that they have some terrible PR
| issues and will need to pay a bit higher due to that).
|
| That is likely to cap how much Google is actually able to do
| this if someone can phone up Facebook and get an immediate
| >20% raise over what Google will "calculate" their pay should
| be.
| sshagent wrote:
| Back in 2009 i took a PS10k pay cut as my deal to work from home.
| That was easy math back then, not only was i reclaiming 4 hours
| of my life...but the train season ticket was PS6k which at that
| tax bracket made it PS10k. I'd wager people in similar positions
| could do such a thing to sweeten the deal if needed
| timpez wrote:
| Imagine working from home, and you're doing doubling your
| productivity. It's crazy how they can invalidate the
| contributions of working from home and decide to cut the
| employees' salaries.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Translation: Don't you dare try to accumulate wealth and retire
| early.
|
| Also, I wonder how much more likely upper managers are to own
| real estate in areas near Google offices.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| So, just a tip for anyone who is really hit by this...
|
| Czech railway workers used to strike against Nazis by rigorously
| and pedantically following all the valid regulations. Even Nazis
| could not really do anything against that; the Reich was very
| process-oriented, after all.
|
| Do the same to your employer. Follow every idiotic rule to a
| letter. After all, it is your duty and their rules.
| c0g wrote:
| Given some tech companies are trying to move some jobs out of the
| Bay to compete less on salary, can I get hired at a lower pay
| satellite office then move to the Bay Area and get the salary
| bump?
| rexreed wrote:
| Does this mean employee agreements are up for renegotiating?
| Salary / compensation for work is the key element to an employee
| agreement. If employers can change compensation at will without
| employee consent then the employee agreement is truly meaningless
| and simply a tool for the employer to wield against the employee.
| I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract that
| will test that.
| astura wrote:
| >Does this mean employee agreements are up for renegotiating?
|
| Yes, absolutely, 100%, every single job offer I ever laid eyes
| on has this sort of language:
|
| "You agree you are an employee at will"
|
| "Nothing about this offer should be constitute a guarantee of
| future employment"
|
| "Either you or {company} may terminate this agreement at any
| time for any reason or no reason at all"
|
| And even once "this job offer is not an employment contract."
|
| Stuff like that. You only avoid it if you have a union that
| negotiated an actual contract for you.
|
| Google has decided to end that original agreement and offer you
| a different one. You can take it or leave it.
|
| >I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract that
| will test that.
|
| Lol, no, its extremely common for employers to change
| compensation or benefits unilaterally without notice, at the
| very least it usually happens every couple years when insurance
| rates are renegotiated.
|
| I once worked somewhere where on a random Friday an email went
| out saying "we will no longer have any 401k match." Bam, I just
| lost thousands of dollars in compensation with no warning or
| fanfare. A few weeks later it was another email - "here's the
| new PTO accrual." A week vacation taken away from me, just like
| that.
| minikites wrote:
| >If employers can change compensation at will without employee
| consent then the employee agreement is truly meaningless and
| simply a tool for the employer to wield against the employee.
|
| Welcome to the last 40+ years of corporate economics. The only
| power that employees can have against employers is through
| collective action. It's unfortunate that most people in tech
| see themselves as too good for labor unions.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > If employers can change compensation at will without employee
| consent then the employee agreement is truly meaningless and
| simply a tool for the employer to wield against the employee.
|
| The employee agreement states a place of work. If they employee
| stops attending the workplace as defined by the company and
| without the employer's agreement, they aren't entitled to
| continue receiving the same benefits.
|
| All employment terms are always up for re-negotiation, but the
| company doesn't have to accept the proposed terms nor do they
| have to continue paying the employee when they fail to deliver
| on the agreed terms.
|
| > I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract
| that will test that.
|
| No, employees can't expect to win lawsuits against their
| employer when the employee breaks the agreement that they
| willingly entered into.
| jffry wrote:
| Barring specific states or specific circumstances (e.g.
| negotiated terms with a union), yes that is the way it works in
| most of the US.
|
| Your employer _cannot_ retroactively change your compensation
| for work already performed, but they can, at any time, tell you
| that your compensation is changing and all future work will be
| paid at a new (usually lower) rate.
|
| Depending on jurisdiction, if you were to quit in the face of a
| significant enough pay cut, you might still qualify for
| unemployment. It's very fact dependent, your former employer
| will likely contest it (requiring an appeal on your part), and
| you should talk to an employment lawyer.
| rexreed wrote:
| If employers have the right to make arbitrary compensation
| changes for future work, they they should lose any rights to
| enforce non-competition clauses in employee agreements. Non-
| competition introduces asymmetric decision-making since the
| employee cannot arbitrarily decide to leave for a matter as
| straightforward as a compensation change because they will no
| longer be able to work in their desired industry or market or
| job role.
| jffry wrote:
| Some states, like California, do place stricter limits or
| outright on non-competes, and it's gaining steam in other
| places.
|
| Worker's rights in the US are generally terrible so it's a
| giant patchwork of varying quality.
| astura wrote:
| The legality of a non-compete agreement depends entirely on
| local and state laws and the exact language in the non-
| compete.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yes, in the sense that you can leave the company. You can
| always try to negotiate your salary. Google will just say "no"
| unless you've got enormous weight behind you, which is nearly
| impossible for most engineers without collective action.
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| I'd say the logic is "We entered this agreement with the
| understanding that you would be in the office x% of the time.
| We would like you to return to the office at that original
| capacity. If you would not like to do so, we need to
| renegotiate our agreement."
|
| Not that I agree with any of this, nor am I sure that any of
| this is even written, but that's probably what it is. All of
| these gigs being at will employment certainly doesn't help the
| employee here.
| ghaff wrote:
| Many/most contracts--to the degree they're even contracts in
| this case--embody common understandings. In the case of
| employment agreements, they usually assume that, absent
| agreements to the contrary, you're usually coming into some
| particular office 5 days per week, between the hours of
| whatever, unless you're traveling.
| rexreed wrote:
| Sounds like the common understanding about location of work
| is about to change / already changed and is no longer a
| common understanding. The benefits of getting stuff in
| writing.
| rexreed wrote:
| "With the understanding that" is not a legal framework.
| Anything that's key to the understanding of a contract needs
| to be in a contract. Implicit "I always thought that" doesn't
| hold water.
|
| If I entered into an employee contract with the understanding
| that I would be given responsibility of a team or project,
| even though such an understanding was not in the contract,
| and then the management decides to take away that
| responsibility, can I say that they are in breach because it
| was "my understanding" that I would be given responsibility?
| It would be just as much of an "understanding" as saying that
| there was an implicit agreement about location of work when
| that's not in the contract either.
| jffry wrote:
| Ah. "Employment Contracts" are not really a thing in most
| of the US, at least not like they are in Europe.
|
| Yes, employers will have you sign an official looking
| employment agreement, which basically serves as
| documentation that they're currently compensating you at X
| rate, and that you agree to be bound by specific employer
| rules (like employee handbooks / policies / etc).
|
| Those are not legally binding contracts. At-will workers
| can leave at any time and can be fired at any time for any
| reason or no reason, aside from for specific things
| protected by law (like organizing a union drive, or
| reporting sexual harassment)
| rexreed wrote:
| As non-legally binding contracts, can employers force
| employees to sign them? If they can, then would they have
| force of law? If not, then how can employers enforce non-
| competition, non-solicitation, non-disparagement, and
| non-disclosure clauses?
| jffry wrote:
| I believe the legal theory is that your employment and
| pay are compensation for agreeing to those terms, in
| terms of making it legally binding (offer, acceptance,
| and compensation)
|
| It's crummy and it's my opinion that non-competes should
| either be illegal everywhere or require employers to
| continue paying your salary during that period.
|
| But the laws as they stand broadly favor employers in
| this matter, and the reality of a large well-resourced
| corporation with a stable of lawyers makes it difficult
| for employees to fight even in situations where they are
| in the right.
| diogofranco wrote:
| Location is in the contract, you sign a new offer in order to
| move
| rexreed wrote:
| If Location is in the contract, and location should be
| considered an aspect of compensation, then its value should
| be int he contract and location itself should be an element
| of compensation.
|
| Base pay: $X
|
| Location pay: $Y
|
| Benefits: $
|
| Options: $
|
| This way you can see what the company is valuing you as an
| employee and valuing the location as compensation.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Well, the base pay would be 0 since if you want to work
| from Iran, Google can not employ you.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Unless it isn't, as is the case with every offer I've signed
| since 2009 when I went full time remote.
| diogofranco wrote:
| I meant for Google, where it is. Working from home or the
| office doesn't really affect compensation, location is the
| variable.
| ridaj wrote:
| Why isn't the "market area" that sets pay levels for a remote
| worker defined by timezone, not by CBSA? After all, from the
| work-being-done perspective, a remote worker in rural Oregon is
| the same as if they were working from home in high-cost Palo
| Alto. People working remotely from high-cost Zurich do the same
| work in the same timezone as people working remotely from lower
| cost Prague or Tunisia.
|
| It seems like a not very sound principle to pay people whose work
| comes in as IP packets based on the geographic origin of those
| packets, and likely ripe for abuse (why tell Google I moved to
| Lake Tahoe and get a 25% pay cut? Keep an "address" with a friend
| in SF where they can mail me stuff, keep the pay...)
| dbg31415 wrote:
| Location-based pay is a stupid way to determine pay.
| justicezyx wrote:
| This has been instated at least before 2016, I was seeking
| transfer to a Seattle team from Sunnyvale and was told pay will
| need to be adjusted.
|
| I think this is perfectly reasonable.
| aeharding wrote:
| In my opinion, there should be pay cuts to continue coming to the
| office with a 2 hour commute by car.
|
| Google's proposal incentivizes the wrong thing.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Point from Corey Quinn; there sure are a lot of companies
| registered in Delaware that want to reduce their workers comp
| based on location.
|
| Apparently what's good for the Goose is not good for the Gander,
| according to executives.
| andrew_ wrote:
| _(Acknowledgement that there are always life situations which
| demand abandoning convenience)_
|
| The solution to this regional pay for remotes nonsense is not to
| interview with companies which practice it. Same as with the
| hybrid remote weirdness that's the new hotness.
| OnionBlender wrote:
| I'm not interested in returning to the office to work in the
| noisy open floor plan. If they gave me an office I'd consider it
| but I doubt they would ever do that.
| MartinMcGirk wrote:
| I can see why you'd pay a remote staff member differently from an
| on-prem staff member. As others have said if you're hiring remote
| then your talent pool is effectively the whole world, so price
| competition is fiercer.
|
| But if everyone is remote or everyone is on-prem, then location-
| dependent pricing is complete nonsense. The employees are all
| still providing the same value to the company. Claiming that you
| can't pay someone as much because they live in some rural town
| somewhere is just the company finding an excuse to keep a larger
| share of the value created by that employee.
| namdnay wrote:
| If you remove location-dependent pricing, which location do you
| align the new single price on? Mountain View? London?
| Hyderabad?
| tzs wrote:
| You don't align the price for remote work to a location. You
| set it to whatever it takes to get enough qualified people to
| do the work you need done.
| namdnay wrote:
| Fair enough, but that basically means no more employees in
| the US
| fakedang wrote:
| Isn't Google pushing for a return to on-prem though? So it's
| the first situation that you mentioned.
| MartinMcGirk wrote:
| Yeah my comment is kind of tangential to the post and aimed
| more at the general idea of location-dependent salaries.
|
| I don't argue with the concept of saying "we want you back in
| the office, if you don't want to come to the office then take
| a pay cut" like is going on here.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Not obviously one way. There's more staff globally but there's
| also more places they can work.
|
| This seems like it will turn out in favour of employers with
| the world being the way it is, with a lot of people in poor
| places.
|
| But I've been a remote hiring manager before, and it happens
| that people turn down an offer in favour of another remote
| firm.
| wayanon wrote:
| Endless loop: you need a higher salary to live where you have
| space to work from home.
| dagw wrote:
| I thought the argument went the other way. If you work from
| home you might as well live in East Bumblefuck where 10k sq ft.
| houses are $100k each.
| intricatedetail wrote:
| So Google is okay paying landlords for the offices but won't pay
| workers for use of home as office? Okay.
|
| Sounds like the landlord deals could have something to do with
| tax avoidance?
| lmilcin wrote:
| Does that mean if I work from home and move to more costly
| location I get automatic increase?
|
| Does this policy account for the fact people working remotely no
| longer use up office resources?
|
| No, I didn't think so... so predictable.
|
| These things only ever work one way.
|
| Corporations thrive on being able to outsource large part of
| their work to cheaper locations. Now they are terrified remote
| work is eroding that ability so they are trying to find excuses
| to keep differentiate salary based on your location, even if it
| doesn't make much sense logically.
|
| If I work remotely, what difference does it make if I physically
| sit in bay office or in Romania, if I do my job well as other
| team members?
|
| If I initially sit in LA condo but then move for 2 weeks to
| Bangalore, am I committing fraud?
|
| What is the utility of restricting people's movement when they do
| all their work remotely?
|
| Whatever they do, this problem is bound to create tensions.
| pb7 wrote:
| >Does that mean if I work from home and move to more costly
| location I get automatic increase?
|
| Yes.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| To your first question. Yes, if you move to a more expensive
| location based on the bands Google provides, you will
| automatically see an increase in compensation.
| rStar wrote:
| working from home allows me to be productive while getting more
| sleep instead of commuting. getting enough sleep makes your life
| _much_ better. who knew?
| rebuilder wrote:
| So many different ways to view this.
|
| Market realist: Google are just taking their cut of the profit
| opportunity a lower cost of living provides.
|
| Social: it wouldn't be fair to pay everyone the same if cost of
| living differs.
|
| WTF: Are Google trying to ensure housing costs stay high in urban
| areas?
| pimterry wrote:
| Interestingly, in Spain this would be illegal.
|
| After a law introduced last year, long-term remote working (>30%
| of hours outside the office for 3+ months) now requires the
| worker and company to agree written terms (who'll pay for costs,
| how much remote is allowed, what worker monitoring will be used,
| if any, on what schedule does the worker have to be available,
| etc).
|
| As part of that, there's legal protections against discrimination
| in salary, promotions, working hours etc. You cannot employ a
| remote worker and an in-office worker in Spain and pay the remote
| worker less money just because they're remote.
|
| More details: https://parakar.eu/sp/remote-working-in-spain-
| covered-by-law...
| biztos wrote:
| Until recently I had a home-office contract in Germany. The
| contract gave them the right to relocate me, which seemed like
| a funny clause 15 years ago, nowadays I might worry about them
| actually doing it as part of some policy alignment.
| midnightcity wrote:
| I wonder at what point it becomes cheaper to simply establish
| an office in a different jurisdiction for the purpose of hiring
| remote workers...
| pimterry wrote:
| The same applies to absolutely all employee protections,
| right?
|
| Rather than providing paid holiday, paying overheads like
| social security, and following other anti-discrimination
| laws, you could always hire your local workers as non-
| employee contractors via a foreign jurisdiction. Most
| companies don't, for lots of good reasons. Remote work makes
| such tricks a little easier, but not dramatically so.
| glued wrote:
| Working from home / remote has had significant effects on
| collaboration and execution especially for more junior employees.
| Only a handful of more senior engineers have been more productive
| from my experience. Additionally, company politics are real and
| if you work remote, you may miss out on opportunities for growth.
| gen220 wrote:
| Relevant goomic: https://goomics.net/347/
|
| For those who can't / don't want to follow the link: it cleverly
| contrasts how it's perceived as righteous for corporations to
| engage in tax-arbitrage to maximize profits, but deceptive for
| employees to engage in cost-of-living arbitrage to maximize
| quality of life.
| effingwewt wrote:
| Once I was a 'Roadside Assistance Agent' (call center chair-
| warmer).
|
| When I applied it was for a different LOB (line of business). I
| was applying for tmobile customer service. I did their tests,
| we spoke of compensation, hours, days available, all that good
| stuff. I told them I was tired of being on call 24/7 and wanted
| regular scheduled hours, so I could know exactly when I get off
| work, plan accordingly and have a life.
|
| They told me I was going to be interviewing with three senior
| people from my team.
|
| They kept asking me weird questions that had nothing to do with
| the job I had applied for (T-mobile customer service).
|
| At the end they told me I was hired, but at the very end they
| tell me its for a totally different LOB (applied and tested for
| tmobile, was instead hired for Goodsam Roadside Assistance).
|
| They told me everything would remain the same- hours, comp,
| everything.
|
| All lies of course.
|
| So I get to training and find out hours are all over the place,
| no set schedule, and even better? -I never knew when I would
| get off work. Once we took a call we _had_ to complete it.
|
| Imagine someone in BFE Canada, with a 40' RV, with a busted
| axle, and I have to now manually call all over Canada for 8+
| hours to find a mobile mechanic willing to go for our paltry
| rates,oh and it's three ferrys to get there!
|
| They would not let us hand off calls, we could not take breaks
| even for restroom while on a call. Some calls went well over 8
| hours. It was fucking disgusting.
|
| When I had enough of this they kept reiterating that we owed
| the company our time since it was _our_ responsibility. When we
| accepted the job we took on a responsibility to our customers,
| our coworkers but most importantly to Qualfon. When they gave
| us a schedule we had to adhere to it or be fired...but they
| could change our hours /days on a whim and we had to take it.
| When they had mandatory overtime we would be fired if we didn't
| work it as it now counted as 'scheduled time'
|
| They didn't seem phased when I mentioned that what they were
| doing was illegal AF (no breaks, no telling about hours,
| refusing to let you off calls etc). When I bitched about not
| having a life because I never knew when I got off work, and how
| this LOB was a bait and switch, they kept reiterating we needed
| to keep our promises. I asked what about what we were promised
| by goodsam and qualfon, how they needed to adhere to our
| scheduled hours, stop changing days/hours, etc. I was pulled
| into an office where the site supervisor tried to bully me (a
| giant dude used to getting his way) we had a screaming match
| and I offered to take it outside. I mean if you get out of your
| chair while screaming and stand in my face jamming a finger in
| my chest, the way I see it you want a fight and I'm happy to
| oblige.
|
| Then starts the screaming for security (which we didn't even
| have!), which caused laughter since everyone heard what was
| happening.
|
| Anyways I and half the floor walked out that day, and
| _everyone_ above a phone operator was fired and replaced within
| a month.
|
| This was the same company that when covid started refused to
| allow social distancing as it meant wasted space, and refused
| to allow masks as they 'muffled the operator's voice'
|
| Moral of the story is every company, every single one, sees
| what they do as 'good' and anything the employees do/want is
| 'bad'.
|
| They will, with a straight face, fuck you over and expect you
| to say 'thank you, sir, may I have another' .
|
| And they all wonder why no one wants to be in these situations
| anymore, especially not for bullshit comp.
| Cd00d wrote:
| Oh wow. Now _this_ :point-up: is a comment!
|
| I don't have anything to add. It's just startlingly
| entertaining.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| One thing that was included here is that Google is now also
| reducing your equity compensation as a part of relocation.
| Changing the salary I understand and there are a lot of valid
| points and counterpoints on why it should or should not change
| based on your cost of living in the city/supply vs.demand in the
| city for the job.
|
| I really dislike equity compensation being reduced because equity
| is supposed to be a direct reward for the value you generate for
| the company. Why does someone who lives in Zurich/SFO/NYC have
| any more impact vs. someone who lives in Kansas. Both are
| contributing the same and their equity should reflect that...
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Why do you think the very same points about cost of living not
| apply here?
| gowan wrote:
| i like how the us military makes cost of living adjustments. you
| have your base pay determined my your rank which is _not_
| adjusted by where you live. in addition to that you get a housing
| stipend (BAH and BAS) that is adjusted by where you live. if i
| remember correctly the housing stipend is before tax.
|
| google is essentially forcing a pay cut to your base salary in
| addition to the portion of your salary you use for housing.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| Companies were never paying based on value provided. They pay
| market rate which, until recently, was artificially limited to a
| few expensive markets.
|
| With remote, these companies are now able to do what every other
| large labor driven industry has done and lower their costs by
| finding labor in cheaper markets.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > Companies were never paying based on value provided. They pay
| market rate
|
| Trying to negotiate salary based on value provided is one of
| the biggest misconceptions I see online and with in-person
| mentoring groups.
|
| Compensation is not about value provided. It's only about
| market rate and convincing the person to stay at the company.
|
| I encounter a lot of people, especially juniors, who are
| disgruntled because they think their employers are getting more
| value out of their work than is being passed along in their
| paychecks. I usually ask them if their employer sends them a
| bill every time they fail to deliver a project or make a
| mistake that costs the company money. That usually makes the
| disconnect between value provided and compensation click.
|
| I say this as someone who worked remote and managed remote
| teams before COVID: The reality is they WFH is a perk and WFH
| employees require some additional management overhead due to
| reduced communication efficiency and higher collaboration
| overhead. As much as I love remote work and my remote teams, it
| would be dishonest to say that we wouldn't perform better or
| faster if we were in-person in the same building. It may not be
| a popular opinion or what people want to hear, but in my direct
| experience with mixed WFH/remote teams it's always true. In-
| person is just too efficient to replace with Zoom and Slack and
| e-mail.
|
| The second reality is that once you open the doors to full-time
| WFH, you've opened the doors to full-time remote, which means
| you've opened the doors to a much larger labor market. It
| becomes easy to replace your $200K Silicon Valley hires with
| someone a couple states away who is thrilled to do the same job
| for $180K or even $150K. Then you start expanding your search
| and find people who live in other countries who deliver the
| same results for $100K or even $80K.
|
| It's not surprising that companies don't want to pay the
| highest salaries in the country for people who aren't actually
| in those areas for work. Losing only 10% of their high salaries
| honestly seems like a bargain.
| djoldman wrote:
| > Compensation is not about value provided. It's only about
| market rate and convincing the person to stay at the company.
|
| I don't think reasonable people would disagree with this
| statement about compensation. That being said, I don't
| believe it says much.
|
| "Only about market rate" allows for tautological reasoning in
| that the market rate is just whatever you end up getting
| paid.
|
| A stricter definition of market rate as "you get paid what
| people like you get paid" doesn't seem to say much either:
| when you get a promotion, did you suddenly start producing
| more for your employer? Or did they suddenly realize you
| produced more for them?
|
| As most pricing goes, so does employee pay: you're paid the
| salary to which you agree. You can increase your salary by 1.
| threatening to quit your current employer unless pay rises or
| by 2. convincing some other employer to pay you more.
| dragonsngoblins wrote:
| > "it would be dishonest to say that we wouldn't perform
| better or faster if we were in-person in the same building.
| It may not be a popular opinion or what people want to hear,
| but in my direct experience with mixed WFH/remote teams it's
| always true. In-person is just too efficient to replace with
| Zoom and Slack and e-mail."
|
| So I agree with the above in that being in person definitely
| makes collaboration easier. But on the other hand I feel like
| I personally am more productive when working from home
| because I have more energy. I always found the commute in the
| morning draining and by the time I'd gotten dressed and
| showered, into a crowded train, to my desk, out of my coat,
| put my bag down, set up my workstation if I had to take my
| laptop home to have an out of hours work meeting where I
| might need to demo something, etc. I'm already feeling a
| little worn out.
|
| Working from home I definitely have found myself stuck
| waiting to hear back from people and similar things, but...
| at the office if at the end of the day I feel close to
| solving a problem I have to weigh up whether or not to stay
| late and keep working or just spend more time the next day
| getting myself back to that headspace. I fairly often will
| just go home because I know that with commuting and
| everything how much I want to just be home will be higher by
| the time I get there, plus I'll have more things I need to do
| at home that I might have been able to do when I get home
| because I'm spending less time there everyday. Not to mention
| the amount of chores I can get done during the workday - I've
| hung laundry while making tea, or done stuff at lunch, etc.
| At the office I'd still be taking a lunch break or making
| that tea, but I'd not be getting other stuff done at the same
| time. I know that those extra house chores aren't
| productivity in the workplace, but having them done makes me
| feel more energetic and clearheaded at work
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| This. I've been saying it all along. This is what is going to
| happen to all the SV bros on their 6 figure salaries.
|
| You're no better than someone on the other side of the globe
| who will have lower living expenses. If your employer doesn't
| see value in having you on site, location is meaningless. If I
| were Google I'd start looking aggressively into labour markets
| that are cheaper but with good education. Poland, Phillipines,
| Romania. Just three I've worked with that have been
| exceptional.
| alex504 wrote:
| Engineers in the US are much more expensive but they have
| experience working in high scale environments that isn't
| widely available in the markets you are talking about. FAANG
| companies and well-funded startups aren't going to substitute
| someone else even if they can theoretically pay 5x less for
| someone 90% as good.
|
| All these companies care about is being as competitive as
| possible. They have a pretty much unlimited supply of money,
| and one of the most primary things driving their business
| success is how good their engineers are.
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| There are plenty of big companies operating at scale in
| those markets. You just haven't heard of them. From
| everything I've heard about FAANG interviews, it's more of
| an exercise in theory rather than hands-on experience
| anyway.
| alex504 wrote:
| Yes there are tons of companies working at scale with
| "cheaper" engineers, in fact the vast majority of
| companies in my experience are doing this. But the types
| of companies in these specific markets where salaries are
| crazy need or think they need the absolute best to
| compete. They really don't care very much about the cost
| relative to other types of businesses.
|
| For most of these companies engineering output is their
| entire product and they are sitting on mountains of
| money. A few good engineers can make a massive difference
| to their products and success while a few bad ones can
| sink the entire business.
|
| FWIW FAANG aren't the only companies paying ridiculous
| salaries, they are a small subset of the SV / Seattle
| markets. I work for a company that pays salaries similar
| to FAANG. We don't interview like they do and if we did
| we would have a harder time hiring good people.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Engineers in the US are much more expensive but they have
| experience working in high scale environments that isn't
| widely available in the markets you are talking about
|
| Then why do the same engineers (pre and post-transfer) get
| paid such ridiculously different salaries between London
| and the valley?
|
| Do you get special scaling powers when they stamp your visa
| at SF?
| alex504 wrote:
| Are these engineers working at the same company?
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yes, for the FAANG at which I was gainfully employed for
| a number of years.
| alex504 wrote:
| Well I guess I have some egg on my face.
|
| They must know the market in London isn't competitive so
| they just pay a competitive rate in the market. It seems
| like salaries are generally going to go up everywhere for
| top talent but down in markets like Seattle and SV.
|
| Another interesting aspect of London is that it is in a
| TZ so far away that there isnt any overlap with PST in
| the states, so they kind of know you are screwed if you
| are working there.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| > Another interesting aspect of London is that it is in a
| TZ so far away that there isnt any overlap with PST in
| the states, so they kind of know you are screwed if you
| are working there.
|
| Another interesting fact about London is that it has some
| of the highest rents in Europe.
|
| And as someone in said timezone who works with the west
| coast, it's OK as long as you travel once a quarter, and
| both you and your west coast colleagues take meetings
| from home because of timezones.
|
| > They must know the market in London isn't competitive
| so they just pay a competitive rate in the market
|
| It's actually worse than this, finance companies (hedge
| funds et al) actually pay really really well (like US
| FAANG well, with better bonuses), but all of the FAANGs
| have decided not to benchmark against finance, for
| bullshit reasons.
|
| Essentially then, the only people who work for FAANG in
| London work for a year, then transfer to the US on an
| L1/L2 to actually get paid well.
| bitbuilder wrote:
| Not OP, but at a former gig I was in a position to know
| the salaries of an engineering team spread out between
| North America and the UK. The UK engineers were doing the
| same work but paid salaries that would be considered
| insulting to most US engineers.
|
| And frankly, the UK team was coding circles around much
| of the US engineers.
|
| It was incredibly eye opening, and humbling.
| alex504 wrote:
| Terrifying
| fzzzy wrote:
| Also disgusting.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| And it makes it plain to see that we need collective action.
| All the people who say "I bring a ton of value to a company and
| therefore can negotiate to capture that value" are fooling
| themselves, because no company willingly pays people based on
| the value they provide.
| eru wrote:
| Huh? I don't see how the need for collective action follows?
|
| Why would I or should I sabotage a trend that spreads wealth
| to poorer parts of the world?
|
| > ..., because no company willingly pays people based on the
| value they provide.
|
| That's what competition is for.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| You get the best of both worlds. Google made like $200,000
| in profit per FTE in 2021.
| norov wrote:
| 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?
| eru wrote:
| Letting people in less fortunate countries work for
| foreign multinationals would give them more alternatives.
|
| Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
| Aunche wrote:
| 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.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| Because if you live in a richer part (=higher costs),
| you'll lose a job, lose your house and end up on the
| street, because you'll be replaced by someone from
| middleofnowhere.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| Yet pay is not based on COL. Google pays people in London
| less than they pay people working remotely in Montana.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| And no person pays their grocery store based on the "value"
| they provide.
|
| People sell things for the highest price they can get paid,
| and people buy things for the lowest price they can pay. The
| buyer and seller agreeing on a number is the only factor in
| determining which price a transaction clears at.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| This is a good thing, it's not healthy to have all your wealth
| in one small region of a country.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Good thin the US has several huge, wealthy metro areas 8 or 9
| states.
| minikites wrote:
| Finding cheaper labor elsewhere further concentrates wealth.
| The only way to spread out the wealth would be to mandate the
| same salary across regions.
| namdnay wrote:
| That sounds good, but how do you determine this new
| universal salary? It's either going to be absurdly over
| market (are you going to pay fresh grads in Hyderabad 150k
| USD a year?) or absurdly under market (are you going to pay
| fresh grads in Mountain View 30k USD a year?)
| gowld wrote:
| Same way oil is priced, at the market clearing rate.
| Maybe it's $60K/yr and we have happy Indians and
| Romanians and no Californians.
| namdnay wrote:
| Yes indeed, at that price you could hoover up all the
| talent in India, China, Russia, Ukraine etc
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| You won't get top talent in Ukraine for 60k.
| namdnay wrote:
| For fresh grads?
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| For fresh grads yes, assuming they don't work for another
| US-based company.
| eru wrote:
| Yes. And how do you determine which two jobs are similar
| enough to warrant the same salary by law? Where do you
| draw the lines?
| gmadsen wrote:
| wait till the even wider proliferation of offshoring of
| remote technical roles. The wealth will be even more
| concentrated, except only the executives, while the workers
| will have even less
| eru wrote:
| Why would the company splurge on executives, and not drive
| down their wages, too, if that's so easy?
|
| Executive cost money, too. They are also employees.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Who do you think decides executive wages?
| eru wrote:
| Directly: executives higher up. And at the highest level,
| the shareholders. The last is a bit tenuous because
| shareholder capitalism is more of an aspiration than
| reality.
|
| But that line of argument could only argue for
| extravagant CEO pay, not high pay for executive in
| general. (Especially since CEOs get a lot of their pay in
| shares, so are incentived to get the shareholders more
| money; eg by driving lower ranking executives' pay down.)
|
| Indirectly: competition between companies and workers
| (including executives) determines pay.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > (Especially since CEOs get a lot of their pay in
| shares, so are incentived to get the shareholders more
| money; eg by driving lower ranking executives' pay down.)
|
| This would imply a coupling between corporate expenses
| and share price that is much tighter than I understand to
| be the case.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I'm old enough to remember this being a threat a few
| decades ago. Most of those roles came back to the US. If it
| was that easy, they would've moved long before Covid.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| In the last few decades, technology has progressed and
| made a lot of tools available to facilitate remote work.
| Then the pandemic came along and forced everyone to adopt
| those tools. A lot of companies have now noticed that
| they can just go all-in on these tools, expand their
| talent pool and lower their hiring costs.
|
| As described here[1], my company already has a majority
| of the new headcount in the non-US countries. The only
| caution they are taking is to avoid tough timezones like
| India. But it doesn't matter to a team if the new team
| member is from Colombia or Canada or Kansas, while it
| matters a great deal to the execs to hire that person
| outside US since that saves a lot of money to the
| company.
|
| Who benefits? Shareholders, execs and the middle class in
| the non-US countries. Who loses? US middle class. We have
| seen this movie before with manufacturing.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27696235
| gmadsen wrote:
| the difference is the mass forced remote work has made
| companies do the necessary work to effectively do this
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I disagree. It was already possible and cheap to setup
| satellite offices in foreign countries in order to
| exploit labor differences, and so far this effort has
| usually failed. There's no reason to believe that Covid
| has knocked down the final barrier to offshoring more
| work.
|
| More frankly, I think that the cost savings in offshoring
| are a false promise. You can hire very cheap programmers
| in India and similar, and they are not very good. Those
| programmers that are very good at their job either
| immigrate to the US, and start earning an American
| salary, or they raise their prices high enough so that
| the benefits of offshoring are less clear cut.
|
| As far as working with remote employees off shore, time
| zone and language regularly remains the biggest barrier;
| Covid hasn't fixed that.
| namdnay wrote:
| why even less? remote work has been a great boost for lots
| of workers. I see the effect of it here in Europe, in the
| past year average hire salaries have gone up by at least
| 10% due to the competition with fully remote orgs
| gowld wrote:
| Even less for US workers, they mean.
| namdnay wrote:
| I imagine the effect is similar for the job market in
| small US towns? If you're in the middle of Idaho or
| whatever you've suddenly gone from having a single tech
| employer within a 1h radius to having hundreds of remote
| opportunities
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Yeah been waiting for that to happen for the past 20
| years...
| gmadsen wrote:
| well the last 20 years didn't have a mass forced remote
| work event
| RestlessMind wrote:
| 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 seen this movie before with manufacturing. The
| winners of this move will be the shareholders / execs and the
| middle class in cheap countries. The losers will be the
| American middle class.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Class 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 desks and sublet that 17000 sqft.
|
| Google has other famous in-office benefits that cost per-person,
| so $12K per remote is a baseline savings. 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.
| bartread wrote:
| > sublet that 17000 sqft.
|
| Who to if everybody is working from home?
|
| Not that they are but there also aren't an infinite supply of
| companies that want to rent office space when many workers are
| now either WFH or hybrid working and only going in a couple of
| days each week.
| ghaff wrote:
| >when many workers are now either WFH or hybrid working and
| only going in a couple of days each week.
|
| Probably depends on how companies do hybrid although the ones
| I've heard plans from seem to be looking at hoteling
| arrangements which will cut total space.
| throwaway6734 wrote:
| I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of power
| employees at Google have. It's one of the most desirable places
| to work in the world and they routinely turn down quality
| candidates (similar to ivy league schools).
|
| There are plenty of people in smaller tech markets that would
| work remotely at Google at the reduced rates because it would
| still result in pay bumps
| norov wrote:
| This is the reason the pay cuts are happening. That is the
| current market for a remote Google job.
| ransom1538 wrote:
| "Google is probably 170. That's $11900 annually that they save
| by not having an employee take up office space."
|
| They are locked into leases and/or have purchased the buildings
| outright. So the cost is sunk. This is why google is upset and
| will take salary away from remote workers.
| throw123123123 wrote:
| Building costs are relatively small vs productivity costs.
|
| If the mass of employess is 30% less productive from home, it
| is way more expensive than the buildings.
| saalweachter wrote:
| Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if the data behind large
| tech companies becoming remote friendly is that it is
| largely a wash.
|
| You'll have people who are more productive working from
| home and some of them will even do more work for the
| company [as opposed to quietly working half as many hours
| while getting just as much done]. You'll have others who
| are less productive. Some of them will also work more hours
| to make up for at least some of their lost productivity.
|
| Given that companies are now open to it, I think we can
| infer that WFH productivity is no lower than 80-90% of WFO
| productivity, averaged across the workforce. Whether WFH =
| 90%, 100% or 110% WFO productivity, I couldn't guess.
| eru wrote:
| Google is continuously hiring and growing.
|
| If they can slow down the growing of office space without
| slowing down hiring, that's a win.
|
| Yes, they are locked in to some leases and have bought some
| buildings. But at any one time, some leases will run out, and
| some buildings will be transacted.
| bogomipz wrote:
| I'm not sure that calculus is correct as Google bought all 3 of
| the buildings they have in Chelsea in NYC. The most famous of
| which is the old Port Authority which is 3 million square feet
| and takes up an entire city block.[1][2][3] I'm not sure
| they're saving anything with empty office space. They kicked
| all previous non-Google tenants years ago. Further there is now
| a current glut of NYC office space with a vacancy rate of
| almost 19%.[4]
|
| [1]https://www.wired.com/2010/12/google-nyc/
|
| [2] https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/20/google-bought-
| manhattans-c...
|
| [3] https://therealdeal.com/2019/05/22/google-scoops-up-
| another-...
|
| [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/nyregion/manhattan-
| vacant...
| eru wrote:
| Why do they need collective bargaining power? They need
| competing employers.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > 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?
| londons_explore wrote:
| "I'll leave to do a startup, and you'll have to hire some new
| grad and train them for years till they're as good as me" is
| a common threat.
| jeswin wrote:
| At that point, it's better to let the employee go.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Except that seems to be in the minds of a large chunk of
| FAANG employees... They can't let them all go. So they
| give payrises instead
| sjg007 wrote:
| It's probably cheaper to give them all pay raises. Even
| if they all left and started startups there will be 1 or
| 2 that hit it big and probably eat Google's lunch. That
| will probably happen anyway by an outsider but the odds
| are less.
| biztos wrote:
| That's not what the threat is supposed to be. The threat is
| supposed to be that all the engineers will step away from
| their keyboards and the ginormous money machine will grind to
| a halt.
|
| But since Google pays so much it'd be both really hard to
| convince people to take the risk, and really easy for the
| company to replace them. Having employees partake of the
| money machine via stock is also a factor.
|
| I don't think Google would unionize unless the vast majority
| of coders worldwide were already active members of the
| International Brotherhood of Logicians and had already won
| some big concessions from other FAANGs.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| > The threat is supposed to be that all the engineers will
| step away from their keyboards
|
| The problem with threats is the company might call your
| bluff. You have to be prepared to actually walk away to
| have real leverage and Google pays well enough that most
| engineers would probably take reduced pay over walking
| away.
|
| The reason strike tactics worked historically is that the
| work conditions were actually *that* bad and there was also
| the component of striking workers threatening scabs.
| burkaman wrote:
| You don't threaten to leave, the whole point of unions is to
| attempt to equalize a negotiation when workers can't easily
| get another job. Dockworkers don't threaten to go work at a
| competing port, they threaten to stop working and shut down
| the dock.
| newsclues wrote:
| The threat of starting a new Google?
| peakaboo wrote:
| Not everyone picks jobs based on top salary. I wouldn't work
| for Google even if they doubled my salary.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Not everyone picks jobs based on top salary. I wouldn't
| work for Google even if they doubled my salary.
|
| So? I don't really like this kind of non-response response.
| It's like the guy who joins every conversation to point out
| that they don't, in fact, own a TV (Onion article, look it
| up).
|
| I mean, sure, there are people who have enough that they
| won't take a new job for double the money, but they are so
| few and far between that it doesn't make sense to structure
| the argument around them.
|
| _You_ may not want double your salary, but for every one
| of _you_ there are a few thousand _others_ who want a nicer
| house, or better schools for their kids, or nice vacations,
| or an earlier retirement.
|
| When you say you won't even consider doubling your salary
| because you don't want to work for a perfectly legal
| company, in reality you are saying that a) you have no one
| who depends on you and your income for success, and b) you
| don't care to retire early to do your own thing.
|
| You are _NOT_ saying anything about your principles, even
| though you think you are.
| eru wrote:
| You can interpret the comment you are replying to a bit
| more charitably.
|
| Basically, people have concerns other than money. And on
| the margin, those concerns make differences. (Just like
| on the margin, extra dollars also add up. Even if the
| impact of any one extra dollar is very _marginal_.)
| 3princip wrote:
| Don't be ridiculous, you're just making assumptions based
| on your value system. I have children and I've passed on
| higher paying jobs (perhaps not double but 50%) out of
| principle. I also wouldn't work for Google whatever the
| compensation, and there are plenty of people who don't
| value money above everything else.
| passivate wrote:
| We all know people value things other than money, that
| was not the point.
|
| The point here is whether there are a large number of
| people who would refuse a job Google for 2x their salary.
| On that specific point, I agree with the parent post,
| that there aren't that many.
| haswell wrote:
| > _I mean, sure, there are people who have enough that
| they won 't take a new job for double the money_
|
| You're making a big leap (and judgement here) by assuming
| willingness to take lower pay is primarily based on
| already "having enough". I know plenty of folks who find
| most of FANG highly distasteful and would never take a
| job there _despite_ not "having enough".
|
| > _When you say you won 't even consider doubling your
| salary because you don't want to work for a perfectly
| legal company_
|
| "Perfectly legal" has little bearing on how ethically or
| morally a company behaves. Most folks don't use legality
| as a measuring stick when evaluating the merits of say, a
| payday loan company, and that measuring stick shouldn't
| be used here, either. Amazon is a "perfectly legal"
| company well known for poor working conditions and major
| work/life balance problems.
|
| > _You are NOT saying anything about your principles,
| even though you think you are._
|
| What makes you believe this? OP made a salient point:
| many people do not in fact choose jobs purely based on
| salary. Anecdotally I know this to be true, and whether
| or not there are people willing to take those jobs has no
| bearing on a principled stance taken by someone that
| chooses to prioritize those principles.
|
| I also can't cast aspersions on someone willing to work
| there, but arguably it's a good thing that at least some
| folks stick to their principles. Admittedly this is
| easier to do when you "have enough", but it's insulting
| to those who don't to assume this is the only factor in
| making principled decisions.
| Panini_Jones wrote:
| Google does not already pay the most. In recent years,
| they've been known to even 'lowball' SWE candidates with no
| leverage.
|
| Source: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Micro
| soft&tr...
| gravypod wrote:
| Anacdata: My personal comp is on the lower half of the
| spectrum for my level. Took a small pay cut from the
| startup I came from.
|
| Left for Google because I was tired of proposing changes,
| having someone else in the org disagree, and then having
| someone high up say "I talked to my friend at Google and he
| likes my way better so it's better than yours". Now I'm
| going to be the Googler and never have to worry about that
| again.
| azornathogron wrote:
| You think you'll join a giant company and that there will
| be _less_ need to get organisational buy-in for your
| proposals than there was in a startup? That 's a take I
| haven't heard before...
| gravypod wrote:
| No, I thought that people would have the experience to
| evaluate my proposals on their merits, not on if they
| contain buzz words. So far that's been pretty true. :)
|
| On the way to launching my first large internal service
| in the next few weeks.
| [deleted]
| garyfirestorm wrote:
| But _my friend_ from google likes _my way_ better
| eru wrote:
| Google pays well, but not the most. (Unless things have
| changed recently.)
| ridaj wrote:
| Who pays the most?
| coopierez wrote:
| Prop trading firms pay more, I don't know if they pay the
| _most_ however.
| smabie wrote:
| For front office work, they definitely do pay the most.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| Netflix pays top of market for Silicon Valley _and_
| readjusts your comp (100% cash based) every year to be
| top of market again.
| ridaj wrote:
| Do they readjust down when the market goes down?
| Necromant2005 wrote:
| Sounds funny. The real reason for google office is unlimited
| work, you have food, relax aka dance/yoga classes on site. It's
| not necessary to have a home. Home is a rudimentary stuff for
| google workers. The whole your life is your work. It's great
| for a company.
|
| But keep8ng employees on long distance force people to look
| around: on a local restoran, outside activities, local
| community. And in one moment person who wasn't involved at to
| the life, started to wake up - finding interest outside of
| work, so the work is not a top priority any more. And it's bad
| for a company, because independent people has a decision power
| in comparison to dependent one
| novok wrote:
| In practice the only 'extra work time' created benefit is
| food, and that mostly started because the google campus was
| in a suburban restaurant desert on the other side of a
| highway, the minimum time it took to get to downtown mountain
| view was 20 minutes, and that is very time consuming, along
| with all the traffic that it would generate and so on.
|
| If you knew how little many google workers work, you wouldn't
| say this lol. Barely anyone is doing all the extras. Google
| shuttle and google food is the most of it. Some might gym
| too.
| [deleted]
| notsureaboutpg wrote:
| I work longer now that I am permanent WFH, so I wonder what
| that means about office perks
| shmatt wrote:
| Manhattan leases also famously start at 10 year terms as the
| shortest.
|
| With all the secrets going around your average FAANG office, no
| way would any company sublease a partial floor. Maybe an entire
| floor, but that creates more issues with the complicated
| separate lobby and elevator systems they previously built
|
| These companies could maybe cut the costs in a few years, maybe
| in 10-15. Most of these employees working from home probably
| won't work there by that time
|
| I really doubt we see headlines such as 'Google leaves 2 floors
| in Chelsea office' anytime soon, with or without workers in
| office. They'll just keep paying for empty office space. maybe
| convert empty cubicles into another smoothie or burrito bar
| JoshTko wrote:
| Companies at Google's scale have a lot more ability to move
| headcount across geographies so they can work around lease
| constraints to maximize benefits.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _no way would any company sublease a partial floor_
|
| Why not? Turn it into a co-working space. Lease it to a
| start-up and put up a divider.
| inetknght wrote:
| If Google can't fill the offices because of work from home
| then what makes you think a start-up would be able to?
| vel0city wrote:
| Loads of companies routinely lease partial floors. Its really
| not that crazy of a concept.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You can slow down acquisition. I hired about 60 people in the
| last year, and setup 0 workspaces in my full offices.
|
| Just started procurement activity targeting a buildout to be
| done Q2/Q3 2022.
| sjg007 wrote:
| Google owns the buildings.. they bought them outright.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Though a lot of the space inside is still leased out to
| external tenants, so space used for Google employees does
| have the opportunity cost that you're not instead earning
| rent on it.
|
| Google doesn't really want to be a landlord though -- other
| than the retail first floor of Chelsea Market, I think the
| long-term goal is to get the rest of the tenants out. The
| landlording is already contracted out anyway.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| At first this policy seemed kind of weird. It doesn't actually
| seem tied to remote work per se, but rather distance to office.
|
| So what it seems is that google sees a lot of people wanting to
| work remote. With this, they say you can work remote..but if you
| choose to live away from office, you will earn less.
|
| Now why do they want "remote" employees close to the office? My
| guess is one of two things: 1) it's easier to require folks to
| come into office for random events like team building. Less room
| to squabble if you live in same city 2) it's a long term play to
| "pull" people back into office. When you live in same city as
| office, it's a much easier choice to decide "hey maybe I should
| just go back to office."
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Despite the headlines, this has little to do with companies
| taking advantage of remote workers to safe cost and more with
| companies using pre-pandemic comp mechanisms in a post-pandemic.
| Comp in the vast majority of companies is based on cost of labor
| in the market the employee is located at. Software developers are
| cheaper in Alaska than in SF and even cheaper in Costa Rica,
| Ukraine or India. And yes, also cheaper in Sacramento than in
| Palo Alto, even though the difference is much much smaller.
| Companies are just sticking to that model because it requires
| little changes on their part and there are so many unknowns about
| how work will look in a few years.
|
| I'd argue that a reasonable model divides roles into ones that
| benefit from being local and ones that don't. Only ones that need
| to be local and in person should be subject to local labor costs.
| Unfortunately, this also might mean that salaries for remote
| folks will adjust across geographies and could probably roughly
| align by something like time zones, resulting in lower pay for
| your average Bay Area developer who's salary is high because they
| are in the Bay Area and not because they are world class (I
| expect comp for world class developers to go up regardless of
| location)
| deanclatworthy wrote:
| There's no way Google is going to pay a "world class" developer
| the same salary in SV as in Ukraine. Not unless everyone in SV
| takes giant pay cuts.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Definitely not right now. Let's see how things look in 5
| years
| lordnacho wrote:
| So it's based on where you live? Isn't it just a matter of some
| employees getting together to rent a cheap flat in a high-income
| area? Or you "swap" homes with your single city-dweller friend,
| who "moves" to a family home in the suburbs...
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Remember that work is about compensation per time. If you don't
| get that 10% raise you wanted, work smarter and 10% less to give
| yourself a raise.
|
| Use that extra time, because it's all we have.
| tsjq wrote:
| beancounter MBAs
| falcor84 wrote:
| You make it sound derogatory, but counting the figurative beans
| is part of their job description, and someone has to do it.
| I've had the misfortune of working in places where no one is
| willing and able to count the beans, and I promise you that
| didn't go too well. As with most everything, the difficulty in
| making an org run well seems to be in finding (and keeping)
| that fleeting balance between vision and bean counting.
| blamestross wrote:
| Being remote puts you in a broader labor market. This move will
| lower EVERYONE's salaries in the long run. If big tech companies
| decide it doesn't impact performance too bad, they want this.
|
| I also work for a FAANG remotely with a rare skillset and an
| autoimmune condition, so this had impacted me less than it will
| others. For my health and my lifestyle, the pay cut is easily
| worth it.
| mnd999 wrote:
| And they no longer need a desk in an expensive office building,
| or free food. Triple win.
| underseacables wrote:
| Or massages, child care, game rooms, or any of the other
| ridiculous perks. The company could start rolling those back if
| enough people wfh.
| tester34 wrote:
| There'll always be people at office, so I don't think so.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| The reason why they have it all there is specifically to
| abuse your work hours. Hungry, don't have any food? Go back
| to the office real quick to grab a snack on a Sunday. And
| well you might have just figured out something so you might
| end up back at your desk.
|
| There are enough studies on why those campuses are designed
| that way. The convenience is designed at making sure you
| spend more time at work.
| alphabetting wrote:
| The actual reason they have the perks is talent attraction
| and retention
| Jach wrote:
| That's one reason, not the reason. However it's interesting
| to note that the convenience factor aimed at getting people
| to do "just a little more" is even more greatly amplified
| by just enabling WFH. Indeed a lot of companies noticed
| that people were working way more after WFH than
| beforehand, but after a while they had to start messaging
| against it because that burns people out. Unfortunately the
| concept of "work-life balance" was selected to increase
| focus on, but it seems to be better than nothing.
| system16 wrote:
| > convenience factor aimed at getting people to do "just
| a little more" is even more greatly amplified by just
| enabling WFH
|
| I can absolutely attest to this. Since WFH, at least a
| couple of times a week or on the weekend I'll have little
| a-ha moments or things I want to test. I reason I'll just
| quickly log in to my work laptop to play around for a few
| minutes... that often turns into a couple of hours. It
| usually results in the problem being solved and me riding
| the 'high' for the rest of the evening/weekend.
|
| That never would have happened without WFH. I'm not even
| complaining because I'm doing it on my own terms and am
| in no way obligated to do it.
| agilob wrote:
| and electricity and water and water cooler breaks
| cabraca wrote:
| don't forget the coffee ... lots of coffee.
| memling wrote:
| anecdotally my 150-person office consumed about $40k in
| coffee each year. not a huge amount compared to salary and
| benefits, but not peanuts either.
| aynyc wrote:
| Don't forget the service contract to maintain the
| machines, etc.. it's not cheap. My old job switch from
| service contract to the pods machines and still came out
| ahead.
| oakfr wrote:
| << the company will not change an employee's salary based on them
| going from office work to being fully remote in the city where
| the office is located" -> that's a huge saving for the company
| right there when you consider the price/sqft of offices in dense
| areas
| drewg123 wrote:
| Are they going to cut Urs' salary due to him working from NZ? Or
| are upper level execs exempt?
| whoknew1122 wrote:
| This sort of thing is why there needs to be some sort of labor
| movement. Are unions perfect? No. But something needs to happen.
|
| You don't magically provide less value to a company by moving to
| a place with a lower cost of living. But businesses are using the
| lower cost of living as an excuse to cut payroll costs. It's
| disrespectful to the employee, but unfortunately there's nothing
| an individual employee can do other than quit.
| dougSF70 wrote:
| I suppose Google's argument could be: if I am going to allow
| remote work for this role then let's go the whole hog and move
| the role off-shore. There also a lot of comments in this thread
| confusing large organizations with individual ineptitide. Don't
| blame individual managers for spending time in internal meetings
| unless you only have 10 people working there. It's hard to
| organize corporations and get people behind the mission
| especially with a tendency to "insubordination" , also evidenced
| in the comments here. While many people are more individually
| effective working alone (at home) corporations are more effective
| when people work together and have more chance collaborations.
| IMO, the commute issue is a problem that most US cities have
| sucky public transport that many people won't use. The only
| exception is NYC. Solve that and commuting could be less
| stressful.
| arwhatever wrote:
| I was hopeful, perhaps naively, that sending some knowledge
| workers into the rural regions of our country (U.S.) might help
| to alleviate both the cultural and economic divides that plague
| our society.
|
| But I guess Google & others don't care.
| omoikane wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Facebook (FB.O) and Twitter (TWTR.N) also cut pay for remote
| employees who move to less expensive areas, while smaller
| companies including Reddit and Zillow (ZG.O) have shifted to
| location-agnostic pay models, citing advantages when it comes to
| hiring, retention and diversity.
|
| I can't find discussions related to the other companies
| referenced here. Did those not make it to hacker news?
| dvtrn wrote:
| Is anyone familiar enough with the generalities of contract law
| to speak on that angle of the discussion? I tried searching
| through the comments but I've been wondering lately: if a Googler
| (or any worker, really) signs an employment contract that lays
| out salary, pay frequency and similar, but doesn't specify that
| said pay, pay frequency and similar are a condition of one's
| physical location, do they have standing to sue their employer
| for breach of contract if said employer tries to change their
| salary when that employee packs up their bags and relocates?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| > 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 like a nice little meditation on the loss aversion
| heuristic. I doubt many people would accept a 25% increase in the
| amount of their time that's committed to work in exchange for a
| paltry 11% pay increase. But if you frame it as a 10% pay
| decrease in exchange for a 20% reduction in how much of your life
| is devoted to work, it suddenly becomes a lot less palatable.
| globular-toast wrote:
| It's also a good reason to live below your means. The main
| reason why people can't take a pay cut is it would mean a
| lifestyle cut. If you require 100% of your pay for your
| expected lifestyle then your employer pretty much has you by
| the balls.
| spfzero wrote:
| Wow, I read that and thought I hope he's not working in
| finance!
|
| He could easily handle the promotion aspect by framing it this
| way:
|
| "As a promotion, I now don't have to drive 2 hours a day, and I
| still get the same pay!" That's a nice promotion, two prime
| hours of waking life 5 times a week. Not to mention the stress
| and gas/maintenance.
|
| Any time you can exchange money for time, do it.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Here is the thing: All of this money as a whole amount makes
| the choice seem silly.
|
| What happens when you factor in cost of living is that the 10%
| starts growing incredibly fast.
|
| If their current spend is 80% of their salary, then the 10% is
| actually a 50% post-expense difference. Suddenly that drive
| makes sense.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| If you're making 200K plus and spend 80% of your take home
| you've got serious issues.
| hyperpape wrote:
| Also, it is much easier to not start spending money, than it
| is to give up expensive habits that you've acquired.
|
| This goes double, once you're a family. Negotiating between
| partners and children about which things to cut back on is
| unpleasant.
|
| My advice (which I've followed imperfectly) is that if you
| have the income to make this reasonable, leave a cushion
| where you can handle setbacks without having to make the hard
| choices.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| On the other hand, if your marginal tax rate is 38%, a 10%
| pay cut will only cut your take home pay by around 4%.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| This is an interesting and thought-provoking way of framing
| this! I'd never thought of pay increases/decreases in these
| terms before (or not consciously), so thanks for sharing
| this.
| omgwtfbbq wrote:
| >But if you frame it as a 10% pay decrease in exchange for a
| 20% reduction in how much of your life is devoted to work, it
| suddenly becomes a lot less palatable.
|
| If some avg Google Seattle employee was making 250k and that
| got reduced to 225K I don't think their life materially changes
| in any way. You aren't going to retire significantly faster,
| you aren't going to be priced out of your home, you aren't
| going to have to change your lifestyle really in any way I'd
| think so what's the possible downside?
| jjav wrote:
| > would likely see their pay cut by about 10%
|
| I assume they're not taking RSUs away, so the cut is only to
| base salary (maybe bonus also?). Since RSUs tend to be over 50%
| of total comp, that's less than 5% cut in reality.
|
| I can't relate to how one wouldn't take a 5% pay cut to
| eliminate a two hour commute! Heck I'd take a full 10% cut to
| avoid commuting two hours a day. At a typical goog salary one
| doesn't even notice 5% or 10%, but two hour commute sure
| changes life.
| Lammy wrote:
| You can do things while you're in Seattle other than than just
| go to the office and then straight back home.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Those choosing to work in the office can still WFH two days a
| week, so it's a 10% decrease for a 12% reduction in time spent
| at or going to work.
| erinan wrote:
| 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)
| lumost wrote:
| Some individuals have routines built into the commute that
| aren't necessarily swapped when working from home.
|
| I read my email/catch-up on slack/read the newspaper during
| my 45 minute commute in the morning. While wfh I spend the
| time doing something pretty similar.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Commutes wouldn't bother me if I could consider them work
| time and get paid for them. Instead, they're uncovered
| overhead costs of work I have to pay daily because I'm
| driving. That's why the more WFH I get, the less lost time
| I have driving, fuel/car maintenance/value depreciation
| costs, less time preparing (I just do hygiene at home, no
| dressing up to present myself because pajamas are great).
| The savings have been adding up in both time and money.
|
| Even if there was a great public transit option for my
| commute, I'd have to focus on aspects of work I could do
| because I get motion sickness pretty easily. Reading a
| laptop on a moving bus, train, or whatever is going to have
| me dizzy with a massive headache, then a lost hour
| recovering when I actually arrive. I do envy those who have
| the opportunity and capability to do this though.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| For me it was principle more than anything. As a
| programmer I know I can do my job anywhere, and I know my
| team can do their jobs anywhere. So coming into the
| office always sucked because you knew this work could
| just as easily be done at home without having to waste
| all morning getting ready and commuting.
| greedo wrote:
| I think for a lot of workers being coerced/forced back to
| the office, there will be a lot of resentment. In my
| company, only part of the IT staff will be in the office,
| the majority look to be fully remote. That will breed so
| much conflict/antagonism/resentment that management seems
| oblivious to.
| EspadaV9 wrote:
| That sounds like the commute is really mostly work time
| then, right? Do you get to clock in/out 45 minutes
| late/early?
| lumost wrote:
| 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.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So you're working 9+ hours daily, given the time on
| email/slack during your commute? I'm not sure that's
| better than the people using their commute for audiobooks
| or whathaveyou, since that's at least personal time.
| khuey wrote:
| Presumably there's a lunch break in there.
| lostcolony wrote:
| If that includes an hour long lunch break, then the
| parent is basically just saying their employer pays them
| for their commute (especially since it sounds like they
| take the train or similar, and that probably is covered
| by their employer as well). Pretty sure most people who
| object to commutes do so because that time is
| uncompensated (and that people who demand them back in
| the office expect them in the office 8 hours a day),
| putting this into a squarely different bucket
| engineer_22 wrote:
| At first I was thinking "that's not safe while you're
| driving", then I realized you're probably not driving.
| lumost wrote:
| Aye this is done via train in the Boston metro area.
| Despite Bostonians love of MBTA complaints, it's a
| completely viable means of commuting and few companies
| don't build on major transit lines.
| [deleted]
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Depends on the commute mode. It sounds like these are people
| in expensive urban areas, so they probably have transit
| access. So if they're commuting by train or bus the morning
| commute can be spent working and the evening commute
| streaming TV shows or scrolling through social media.
| Germanika wrote:
| Is this supposed to be an argument in favour of the 2 hour
| commute? Because that still sounds like a miserable waste
| of time to me. I would take the pay cut, look for a new
| job, or move closer to work. No job in the world is worth
| putting up with that kind of a commute to me.
| panda888888 wrote:
| A 2 hour commute isn't necessarily good, but it's also
| not necessarily horrible. The Seattle employee referenced
| in the article might commute by public ferry, which is
| very pleasant. A 10-minute drive to the ferry terminal, 5
| mins waiting for the ferry, a 30 minute ferry ride, 5
| mins disembarking, and 10 more mins to the office is not
| bad. Repeat for the evening commute.
|
| The ride is beautiful and the interior of the ferries are
| very nice; you can sit at a booth and drink coffee and
| eat breakfast. If you're lucky, you might see some orca
| whales while you're out on the water.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I've been living upstate and commuting to NYC for the last
| ~10 years.
|
| A pay cut going full remote would _basically_ cancel out my
| commuting costs. I might end up with slightly more money in
| my pocket once taxes and snacks are accounted for.
|
| That said, when things "get back to normal" I don't
| currently intend to apply for full remote. I didn't mind my
| commute two years ago. Maybe I will when I have to start
| doing it again.
| ghaff wrote:
| As someone who _can_ do a 90-120 minute door to door
| commute into our city office or an event in the city, it 's
| still awful. I did it about half-time for about 18 months
| at another company. I would get up at 6am to drive to the
| train station, get to the office by about 8:30, get home
| 7ish--maybe somewhat later if I grabbed dinner in the city.
|
| Yes, I could read and so forth and it was better than
| driving, but it still meant I had maybe 3 hours to myself
| in the evening.
|
| It's _OK_ as a very sometime thing but I 'd certainly
| prefer not to do it even a couple days a week.
| sshagent wrote:
| totally. i did this back in 2009. 20% pay cut, to reclaim 50%
| of my day (in just travel time). And for that, they've got
| someone who rarely is off sick, isn't too bothered if work
| runs over my usual office hours...and I've rejected multiple
| "in the office" jobs for up to twice my wages.
| krferriter wrote:
| Yeah no way I'm doing a 2 hr commute just for a 10% higher
| pay if there's another option available. That's months of
| life gone just on commuting that can be regained by paying
| 10% of pre-tax income? Seems like a no-brainer. Time is
| money.
| panda888888 wrote:
| It depends a lot on the mode of transportation. The Seattle
| employee referenced in the article may commute by ferry,
| which is about as relaxing of a commute as possible. The
| Seattle ferries are very nice; you can sit in a booth and
| eat breakfast and read the newspaper. Here's a photo of
| what it looks like:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/travel/vashon-island-
| near.... I'd totally be willing to do that for an hour
| every morning and evening.
| mywittyname wrote:
| We should probably assume that people commute via car
| unless noted otherwise, since it is by far the most
| common method.
| panda888888 wrote:
| Generally speaking, I agree, but for three example
| locations that were given in the article, that's not the
| case. Google's offices tend to be in major cities,
| especially more liberal ones, and those often have good
| public transit. Both Seattle and NYC have more people who
| commute to the city center via public transit than by
| car; I'm not sure about the numbers for SF.
|
| I agree 100% that 2 hour commutes are crappy, but a
| 2-hour commute on a nice form of public transit is very
| different than 2 hours of being stuck in traffic and
| stressed out.
| dragonsngoblins wrote:
| But would you do it for 4?
|
| I thought when people said they had an X hour commute
| they typically meant that they traveled for X hours to
| work and X hours from work
| panda888888 wrote:
| Good point. Where I am, people usually use "X hour
| commute" to mean the full amount in a day.
|
| I wonder what percentage of people interpret it to mean
| one way vs. both ways.
| dragonsngoblins wrote:
| Yeah I was wondering to what degree it is a regional
| thing. I'm from Australia and most people seem to mean it
| one way, but I've been wondering how many times I've
| misunderstood people online
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I would too, but if you've committed 100% of your income to
| expenses, you don't have that freedom.
|
| Another argument for saving a little each month.
| BluePen8 wrote:
| Sure but in this scenario it's a high earning google
| employee. I'm sure there's something they can cut back on.
|
| For anyone average or lower earning, a 2 hour commute would
| cost you at least 10% of your income anyways (after tax).
| [deleted]
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yeah, it would be a total no-brainer. Especially given that
| we're likely talking about a six-figure salary in the first
| place...
| tshaddox wrote:
| Or the person just needs their current pay to pay for their
| current obligations.
| mojuba wrote:
| > a 25% increase in the amount of their time that's committed
| to work
|
| I think you mean committed to life rather than work? Remember,
| people normally commute outside of work hours.
|
| Therefore your math doesn't add up. 2hr commute against 8 hours
| of work is not a 25% increase.
|
| But I think your point is still valid. Personally I'd "buy" my
| extra 2 hours of daily life for a 10% decrease in salary. Given
| that I'm awake for 17 hours, 2 hours saved is 11% of my waking
| time. Not a bad deal if you value your free time, or say you
| work on a side project.
|
| Edit: see the correction below. It's still 25%, I was wrong.
| [deleted]
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Therefore your math doesn't add up. 2hr commute against 8
| hours of work is not a 25% increase.
|
| What? Going from 8 to 10 hours is absolutely a 25% increase.
| 10 is 125% of 8
| throwaway3b03 wrote:
| The situation is a bit more complex than that. First,
| people don't live in the office, so even if you live closer
| to the workplace, you still spend a non-negligible amount
| of time preparing and getting there. It can easily amount
| to more than 30 minutes a day.
|
| And secondly, an office job can be stressful, consuming, in
| a way that commuting isn't (if done by train or bicycle for
| instance). So i wouldn't put them all in the same box as
| time devoted to work.
| UglyToad wrote:
| There's a world of difference between going for a nice
| cycle or taking the train to see a new place or even
| going for a drive in the country versus cramming onto a
| standing-room-only train or risking your life in rush
| hour traffic or crawling along the highway in a tailback.
| Commuting is absolutely part of work, it's an unpaid part
| sure, but people aren't choosing it of their own free
| will.
| l-lousy wrote:
| This is mainly discussing WFH, so in this case people
| actually are living in the office.
| mojuba wrote:
| You are right, I was wrong.
|
| But I was mainly arguing that the commute time shouldn't be
| counted against work time, it really isn't: you can listen
| to radio, or read if you are on public transport. Rather,
| I'd count the saved commute against my life (as in, not
| work) time.
| ihattendorf wrote:
| But I can listen to music while I work 90% of the time if
| I want to.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'd absolutely take a 10% pay cut to save 4 hours of my life
| every workday.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| > despite the two-hour commute
|
| I've lived/worked in the Seattle area.
|
| I've also, in a different location, had a similarly long
| commute.
|
| In either case, I would have gladly taken a 10% hit to save all
| that time, stress, and car wear against myself.
| hrgames wrote:
| At our office, HR and Finance magically turned into "No Home
| Office" which means that when salaries are re-adjusted to
| discount WFH, they dont get paycuts in HR/Finance. Basically
| they gamed the system to show they were never paid a premium
| due to a home office (despite working out of the SF office) and
| hence shouldnt get a paycut now.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >But if you frame it as a 10% pay decrease
|
| especially after you have structured your life around having
| that money and you already know you can handle the commute.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| it's such a mind game. Google no longer will provide that
| employee with $10 of thousands of office space, and $1000s in
| perks when the employee is remote. Having an employee
| transition from in office to remote is _already_ saving the
| employer money as the employee now pays for the sq footage (and
| food, foosball, and gardens) ... But of course this is
| doublespeak to confuse employees.
| toss1 wrote:
| Indeed, framing the question can have a big influence on the
| answer.
|
| An online survey found that 65% of American workers who said
| their jobs could be done entirely remotely were willing to take
| a pay cut of 5% -- which could represent several years of
| annual raises -- to stay at home. [1]
|
| There's no question that there's a reasonable bargain to be
| struck, the question is the terms.
|
| When the work is just as productive, both employer and employee
| can gain time. The employer can reduce their office space
| expense, which benefits should be shard by the employer, at
| least to the extent of helping outfit the home offices (e.g.,
| they'd have to buy workstations & chairs anyway). OTOH, the
| employee gets huge benefits of time avoiding commuting, and
| reduced automobile expenses...
|
| It'll be interesting to see how the new bargain shakes out.
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-03/return-
| to...
| bnycum wrote:
| I've worked from home for almost 12 years now, and I have
| always thought about the reverse. How much of an increase in
| pay would it take for me to go back into the office? Probably
| about 20% at least. If I were working in an office with a 2
| hour commute I'd definitely take that 10% paycut to live a much
| better life.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| ryneandal wrote:
| 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.
| papito wrote:
| Is it so black and white, though. I admit that commuting 5
| days a week now seems like a completely wild idea, but I am
| ok with getting out of the house every once in a while.
| smabie wrote:
| you wouldn't do it for an extra 10mil a year?
| ghaff wrote:
| Sure, there are a lot of things I'd do for $10m so long
| as they're legal and not unduly dangerous. For maybe a
| year. Of course, that option isn't really on the table
| most of the time.
| misnome wrote:
| 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 "projects have
| been late" and pointed at projects that were delayed due to
| unrelated external supplier reasons as justification.
|
| They claim the benefit of people paying less to heat their
| houses, as though people don't have pets/family.
|
| My working theory is that the upper management's jobs are more
| boring, and harder to coast on, when they can't "count heads"
| and have the illusion of progress. It's really exposed good and
| bad managers this past 1.5 years.
|
| In theory, this is exactly what unions are supposed to be for,
| I guess we'll see from this if the ones that are there, are
| worth anything.
| frankfrankfrank wrote:
| There may be some enterprising startups that could take
| advantage of this situation where people have experienced the
| states of working at home (and the lockdown) that has broken
| employees away from the prevailing rat race system that had
| them ensnared in making money to squander money and showboat
| money.
|
| The window of opportunity is very small and those high value
| employees who the big corporates can ensnare with high
| salaries are surely willing to value or prioritize other
| criteria for the time being. That window will surely close
| soon if the choked out economy is throttled back up again and
| the neo-slaves go back to their bread and circus to keep them
| distracted.
|
| You do point out one main driver, manager anxiety about
| justifying their existence (I am not saying they should not
| exist, only that it is a high anxiety position), but there is
| also a bigger factor that is corporate finance and accounting
| driven. Massive investments in capital assets in the form of
| real estate and their overhead costs that are also collateral
| and backs all kinds of other derivative things like
| valuations. For example, institutional value investors look
| to book assets for investment cues. If the justification for
| office space breaks and is sold or even leases are cancelled,
| it will skew the numbers and institutional investors (private
| and public) that divine those numbers who rely on or are even
| legally compelled by past patterns, are not necessarily
| adapted to these new or future patterns and changing
| realities.
|
| The system, any system is inherently driven to revert to the
| mean. This community, over most other communities, should
| realize that.
| misnome wrote:
| > You do point out one main driver, manager anxiety about
| justifying their existence (I am not saying they should not
| exist, only that it is a high anxiety position)
|
| Like I said, I think that this period has starkly divided
| the good and bad managers, and really shown the value of
| someone who actually cares about what their team needs,
| what's stopping that, and how to support/cover them from
| wider company politics.
|
| Unfortunately, I think in any oppressive company (which
| seems to be most of them once they get to medium-large) the
| selective pressure is against these managers staying, as
| they often don't get this reciprocity from their managers,
| or somewhere above that, and at some point it becomes too
| much, and you basically have to write off the whole team as
| the things that actually let them be productive are removed
| and they drift away.
|
| > a bigger factor that is corporate finance and accounting
| driven
|
| I mean, we are a national facility, so the space is to a
| certain point already "priced in" since the physical
| machine it's built around isn't going anywhere. But we were
| struggling to accommodate new people and even embarking of
| plans for an expensive new building on campus. WFH or
| hybrid working would completely solve that without big
| expensive investments.
|
| All the people I know "IRL" working with small companies
| and startups dropped the rented office space as soon as
| they could last year (sensibly) and probably aren't going
| to go back at all.
|
| It really will be interesting how this affects things long
| term, but I am afraid that you are probably right about
| things reverting towards the mean, and the momentum against
| change at large companies meaning that the average
| experience is only being slightly affected by this year's
| "experiment".
| _fat_santa wrote:
| At my company one silver lining I've noticed due to the
| pandemic is how managers "count heads". Used to yeah you'd be
| at the office and my boss would see me. Now working remotely,
| out managers do the same thing by looking at slack. Yeah it's
| a little annoying having the "gotta check in on slack" in the
| back of your head when working but I'll gladly trade having
| to send a few slack messages for a 2 hour commute
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| > My working theory is that the upper management's jobs are
| more boring, and harder to coast on, when they can't "count
| heads" and have the illusion of progress. It's really exposed
| good and bad managers this past 1.5 years.
|
| A lot of upper management jobs consist solely of attending
| meetings for projects they are only vaguely aware of so that
| they can ask questions about irrelevant things, interrupting
| people who are trying to get work done to ask them how long
| the work they were doing before being interrupted will take
| to do (more time now that I've been interrupted again,
| thanks) and other needless tasks.
| misnome wrote:
| > A lot of upper management jobs consist solely of
| attending meetings for projects they are only vaguely aware
| of so that they can ask questions about irrelevant things,
| interrupting people who are trying to get work done to ask
| them how long the work they were doing before being
| interrupted will take to do (more time now that I've been
| interrupted again, thanks) and other needless tasks.
|
| I mean, _explicitly_ this, to the point that I almost
| included it in the initial reply. The reason they think no
| projects have moved is that they can't sit in endless,
| pointless meetings making unhelpful suggestions to feel
| justified. Meanwhile, the scientists and developers who
| actually build things haven't been pulled all over the
| research campus to sit in these pointless meetings all day
| any more, so the "real" work being done, and incident
| response timing, has drastically improved.
|
| Literally no projects have run any later than they always
| did (by initial plans, at least, they normally tended to
| restrospectively "move the goalposts" so that historically
| past projects are defined as having delivered "on time"),
| but this is being used as the primary justification for
| forcing everyone back in, full-time, from september.
|
| Maybe I'm just exposing the dysfunction of my hybrid
| academic/industry working place, at this point. We had
| trouble recruiting before, will be interesting to see how
| many people leave because of this; informally many are
| searching for alternative employment.
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| > Maybe I'm just exposing the dysfunction of my hybrid
| academic/industry working place, at this point
|
| Sadly this is all too common. It's the case in my large
| publicly traded company. Was the same when I was in 5-20
| person startups. Our society needs people to have jobs so
| they can keep propping up the illusion of growth by
| buying more junk. This means there are many people (and
| entire organisations) which contribute nothing but
| consume time.
| handrous wrote:
| I have had a little exposure to high-end (you know the
| company) management consultants. They have far more
| exposure to C-suite folks than most. Their view of them
| is... not flattering. Which is kinda funny considering how
| many of the consultants will end up in those positions--
| though, I mean, who wouldn't want to, if you knew how well
| they're paid, the kinds of perks and deference they get,
| the coddling, the valuable information and opportunities
| that are _handed to them_ , and yet how little actual work
| they can do for all that (remember the experienced CEO who
| came in to be the real pro manager in charge of the company
| early-ish in the show Silicon Valley, but was absent
| screwing around with his hobbies or other business ventures
| half the time? That's not fiction).
| toss1 wrote:
| Yup. I recall reading of a study 5+ years ago where the
| result was basically that remote work made good managers
| better (their teams became more productive), and bad
| managers worse (really revealing their weaknesses).
|
| I can't locate it, but I've noticed similar effects, and
| this pandemic seems to support it also (even after
| compensating for my likely confirmation bias).
| lostcolony wrote:
| So the higher you climb in management the more strategic your
| role -should- be. Long time horizons, collecting enough data
| to make organizational decisions, set priorities and
| direction, etc.
|
| The problem is too many upper managers think their role
| should be tactical. They want frequent status reports to know
| if their long term vision is going to be met, and then any
| area it doesn't match up, rather than modify the vision, or
| seek to empower people to change things up to deliver on the
| vision, they'll instead choose to get involved. This despite
| not really having the details of why things are working or
| not working; this is where micromanagement comes in, daily
| status reports and other time sucks, etc.
|
| But staying strategic and unblocking people below them can
| look like doing little. Inaction in the face of delays and
| things, even when warranted, may still look and feel bad to
| them, and so rather than have an org wide retro or similar to
| figure out what happened and if/how to avoid it in the
| future, they'll instead reason "something must be done!" at
| which point anything counts as something. Remote work is an
| easy target; it was an unplanned change forced upon them, so
| blaming issues on it means no one actually gets blamed.
| jollybean wrote:
| " more strategic your role -should- be. "
|
| "The problem is too many upper managers think their role
| should be tactical. "
|
| So this is a little bit mythologizing and there's a couple
| problems with this perception:
|
| 1) Everything is operational, and operations require
| material leadership at every level, there is no escaping
| it. Meaning, that there's a very material 'hands-on'
| component to even in higher level leadership.
|
| The constancy of major decisions can have greater
| consequences and there are many more moving pieces, so it's
| hard.
|
| Putting out fires and dealing with these grinding can
| easily overwhelm leaders but that's the reality of it,
| always.
|
| Execs should usually have a much broader perspective that
| can help and guide decisions making.
|
| Obviously, too much micro detail can be a problem, but that
| should be addressed by leadership that is willing to just
| listen and react accordingly.
|
| I've been overridden by 'bad executive fiat' o occasion ...
| but also made forays where I shouldn't have because I
| didn't have the bigger picture.
|
| 2) Strategy is the most overused concept in all of
| business. While it's an important function it's usually a
| collective pursuit, involves input from various places -
| and most importantly, depends on details, i.e. downward
| facing.
|
| Was Steve Jobs a relaxed, high level person setting
| strategy? Letting the details be worked out?
|
| Musk?
|
| Ford?
|
| Bezos?
|
| Not really.
|
| There's a thoughtless comment floating here that points to
| 'Executives Asking Bad Questions To Seem Important' which
| is mostly wrong. They're asking questions to become
| informed. Some details matter, some don't but informing
| execs with a material understanding of the situation is a
| fundamental aspect of organizational communication.
|
| The Tom Hanks film Greyhound is a neat study in that (He's
| the captain of a US ship leading a convoy in the Atlantic
| in WW2 getting hunted by German UBoats) - it's fully real
| time, you see a commander in the hot seat, and tons of
| activity around him. It's kind of interesting to see how
| information is propagated up and down and at what details.
| Obviously they're not building products.
|
| Strategy, in the end, if it's done well should seem fairly
| obvious, even boring.
|
| We have such lofty expectations of the term, that we expect
| 'enlightened divination' out of it, but more often than
| not, the result of good strategy should be a product
| roadmap that takes into rational consideration the aspects
| of market dynamics.
|
| I think that having some creative analysts in a staff
| position to help the CEO maintain a broad perspective and
| take into consideration the more interesting market trends
| we often associate with the word 'strategy' is probably
| enough.
|
| In my experience, I believe that in any company ... there
| is probably enough collective insight in the organization
| to set an appropriate strategy, it could only
| communications could work effectively.
|
| That said, good execs are rare, and employees that are able
| to wrap their heads around the challenges that upper
| management faces are just as rare.
|
| Finally ... the over/under managing issue is a really hard
| one, there are so many factors there.
| misnome wrote:
| I think you make some good points - and the downvotes are
| a little unfair - we are by requirement painting broad
| strokes here, because going into specific examples are
| veering somewhat offtopic and putting people at higher
| risk of being overspecific and identifiable.
|
| > They're asking questions to become informed. Some
| details matter
|
| This is true, but like you say -
|
| > That said, good execs are rare
|
| and the difference, in these meetings between the good
| asking probing questions and the bad doing it out of
| unaware self-justification in this case naively look
| somewhat the same. To go back to broad strokes, it seems
| easy to convince yourself that once the dysfunction sets
| in - that as good/motivated people leave over lack of
| being able to make progress, it's easier to maintain the
| dysfunction than fix it.
|
| I'm in a part-academic, part-business company associated
| with a national lab, which means that commercial
| pressures towards growth are somewhat missing or ill-
| defined. There are lots of good people who truly believe
| in what they are doing, but it remains a truth that it's
| a lot easier to just move people around or let their
| contracts play out (if not permanent) than fire them, and
| there is clearly a reticence to promote useful or
| "essential" people out of the job where they are
| supporting things more critically that their position
| technically describes.
| andreilys wrote:
| _Strategy, in the end, if it 's done well should seem
| fairly obvious, even boring._
|
| _a product roadmap that takes into rational
| consideration the aspects of market dynamics._
|
| If your company is looking to make incremental
| improvements and not trying to do anything innovative, I
| agree.
|
| If you're building the first smart phone where there
| exists no "roadmap" or "rational consideration", then
| it's neither going to be obvious or boring.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I'd say that Apple's big innovation was a user
| interaction method that made their device intuitive to
| use.
|
| >Chris DeSalvo's reaction to the iPhone was immediate and
| visceral. "As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one
| immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought 'We're
| going to have to start over.'"
|
| "What we had suddenly looked just so . . . nineties,"
| DeSalvo said. "It's just one of those things that are
| obvious when you see it."
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/th
| e-d...
| jollybean wrote:
| Sorry, but not quite, your own example demonstrates that.
|
| So who built the first smartphone?
|
| It was probably Nokia. And what happened to them?
|
| BlackBerry? They were the one's that made Google and
| Apple pay attention, because they built the first real
| baseline use cases for data networks. But was that even a
| smartphone?
|
| Of course, the iPhone was not the first smartphone, but
| it was a breakthrough of sorts, but if we leave that
| product - that aside, how many companies can you think of
| that generally create this level of 'breakthrough'
| product?
|
| Almost none.
|
| 'Disruption' almost always comes from smaller, newer
| companies, where there is a fundamentally new strategy
| that is at the core of the companies existence, i.e. it's
| inherent in the nature of the company itself.
|
| The reason you might misunderstand this is likely due to
| the fact that popular understanding of the business world
| is completely skewed towards interesting and novel
| companies and technology.
|
| 'Business' is not what we see on TechCrunch or even the
| more classical business press really. The Economy is
| mostly made up of classical companies of varying sizes
| wherein my comments apply even more appropriately.
| lostcolony wrote:
| It was probably IBM; the Simon Personal Communicator in
| '92. Depends how you define smartphone, but it could
| take/make calls, send/receive emails and faxes, and had
| some apps like a calulator and an alarm clock. All for
| the low low price of $1100 1992 dollars, and rockin' a
| fat 1 hour worth of battery life.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Apple didn't build the first smartphone; they made it
| mass market because the technology (which Apple did not
| invent) had gotten to where bundling it into a smartphone
| would provide sufficient value to a consumer to be worth
| paying for. There were other mass market smartphones even
| then; what the iphone brought was UX (so kudos for Jobs
| for hiring Jony Ive) and an app store (so kudos for Jobs
| either for recognizing the benefit of allowing others to
| do the work to extend the iphone's software capabilities,
| or for hiring someone who did).
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Apple didn't build the first smartphone; they made it
| mass market because the technology (which Apple did not
| invent) had gotten to where bundling it into a smartphone
| would provide sufficient value to a consumer to be worth
| paying for.
|
| IIRC, that was already true for business customers before
| the iPhone.
|
| > There were other mass market smartphones even then;
| what the iphone brought was UX (so kudos for Jobs for
| hiring Jony Ive) and an app store (so kudos for Jobs
| either for recognizing the benefit of allowing others to
| do the work to extend the iphone's software capabilities,
| or for hiring someone who did).
|
| IIRC, the previous smartphone brought email, what the
| iPhone brought was email _and the Web_. With regard to
| the app store, I 'm not sure if Jobs really deserves much
| kudos for accepting what users were already doing with
| their devices rather than continuing to try to force his
| original vision (first party native apps and web apps
| only, no third party native apps).
| lostcolony wrote:
| "that was already true for business customers before the
| iPhone." - Hence my use of the term "mass market"
|
| "what the iPhone brought was email _and the Web_ " - So I
| never mentioned email re: the iPhone, that was supported
| back in the first smartphone in 92. For the web, I saw an
| article that mentioned that, but that doesn't jibe with
| what I remember or can find elsewhere. There were
| definitely phones that allowed you to browse the web, as
| early as the Nokia 9000 Communicator. I think it was the
| first to have 'unlimited' internet plans due to their
| partnership with AT&T, but I'm not sure that's nearly as
| convincing an innovation as 'the web'. Maybe the fact
| that mobile Safari had a look and feel similar to desktop
| Safari.
|
| I list the app store from
| https://time.com/4837176/iphone-10th-anniversary/ and
| https://www.vox.com/2017/6/26/15821652/iphone-
| apple-10-year-... (though to be fair, the latter also
| includes the web), and because it jibes with my own
| recollections; I don't recollect app stores before the
| iPhone (though it came after launch). Yes, I remember
| user customizations, but not an official, searchable
| repository of them.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > There were definitely phones that allowed you to browse
| the web, as early as the Nokia 9000 Communicator. I think
| it was the first to have 'unlimited' internet plans due
| to their partnership with AT&T, but I'm not sure that's
| nearly as convincing an innovation as 'the web'. Maybe
| the fact that mobile Safari had a look and feel similar
| to desktop Safari.
|
| My understanding is that "the web" on mobile phones was
| crippled and unappealing prior to the iPhone. Sure you
| could "use" it, but most people didn't want to. In 2007
| the web was on the desktop, and the iPhone bringing a
| desktop-like experience to a phone was a game-changer.
| touisteur wrote:
| I remember how I switched almost overnight from consuming
| Web things and personal email on my trusty laptop to my
| ipod touch (iPhone without 3g really) and one month in I
| had almost forgotten I could do it on my laptop.
|
| The Web and mail experience on ipod touch was simply
| great, not sure I could explain it better than 'just
| great'. Nothing world shattering, but it seemed the thing
| was just natural for surfing and emails. And music of
| course (but heh, ipod). Didn't care about apps, or
| anything (or plants vs zombie was a great fun time
| waster). The thing was thin, nice to hold, nice large
| screen, capacitive keyboard and... So much better than my
| n900 or my palmshits for Web and personal email. No 3g
| then! Just WiFi. It was a simple, nice blend.
|
| As soon as I got hooked up on this, next phone-break I
| bought... A galaxy s2 then stayed android (mostly because
| iTunes, iTunes and iTunes, which I hated as much as I can
| hate any software... Talk about learned helplessness...).
|
| The original ipod touch was the best Web terminal at that
| time, I think.
| greedo wrote:
| Did Jony Ive have anything to do with the original
| iPhones UI/UX? I thought he was just involved in the
| physical design.
| lostcolony wrote:
| So I'm not saying strategic vs tactical is a binary; it's
| a spectrum. And where to fall on it is hard; I think
| we're in agreement here.
|
| But, you mention you've been overridden by bad executive
| fiat on occasion, and also made forays where you
| shouldn't have because you didn't have the bigger
| picture. The 'right' course of action to address both of
| those as your manager would be to make sure you
| understand the bigger picture, and then to let you (or
| whoever bears the effect of the decision) make the
| decision, not to make it for you, nor to let you stumble
| blindly into a bad one.
|
| In terms of Jobs, Musk, Ford, Bezos, strategy informs
| tactics, and tactics inform strategy; as you say, you
| have to ask questions and seek to understand; you also
| need to communicate and help people connect the dots. But
| that's different than daily status reports and
| directives. Seeking to understand the why, rather than
| endlessly try and stay up to date of the what, is the
| goal. If you've built a healthy org, they'll raise up
| concerns about the what when they need to; even when they
| do, the fix for a bad situation is never focusing on the
| situation ("still in the hole?" "yep"), it's helping
| navigate a way out of it ("quit digging; here's a ladder,
| our new goal is climbing out"), and then figure out how
| to avoid it in the future ("how did we get in that hole?
| Why did we keep digging ourselves deeper? WHERE DID ALL
| THESE SHOVELS COME FROM?!").
|
| And, yes, strategy is often boring and predictable; given
| the same knowledge, the same set of inputs, most people
| would make the same decision. It's one reason why I don't
| think executive pay is justified; I'm not intending to
| mythologize it or something. Just point out that as you
| climb a management hierarchy, your concerns move along
| the strategy/tactical axis toward the strategy side, and
| that oftentimes bad, poorly informed decisions are due to
| execs moving too far toward the tactical.
| jollybean wrote:
| The example I gave involved information persistence,
| lawyers and and government national security apparatus
| i.e. way above my pay grade.
|
| So many issues transcend the narrow scope of some
| product, which is why 'the effect' as you say, generally
| goes pretty far, meaning, executive leadership input
| which is essentially necessary.
|
| It's also a good example of how circumstances can create
| existential scenarios that have nothing to do with
| classical strategy and yet take up so much time and be
| pretty important to a companies evolution.
|
| To me, strategic issues like acquisitions, major product
| extensions or internalizing parts of the supply chain
| (i.e. Apple doing cars, their new ASIC chips) are big,
| CEO level things, those are not general executive
| strategic things.
|
| The VP at Apple in charge of desktop software products
| has a 'strategy' that is not going to remotely sound like
| a 'strategy'.
|
| I believe that the iPhone, since it's inception, has
| evolved along the lines of efficient product operations,
| not strategy. Or rather, their 'strategy' would be
| summarized by choosing 1-3 major consumer issues to focus
| on, having a new physical design to support that, and all
| of the marketing, carrier sales, ops and production
| issues resonating efficiently around it. Their 'strategy'
| is in a way just 'effective and coordinated product,
| product marketing, manufacturing, marketing operations'
| etc..
| lostcolony wrote:
| "The example I gave involved information persistence,
| lawyers and and government national security apparatus
| i.e. way above my pay grade."
|
| My reply still stands. "Hey soandso, we need to change
| our persistence strategy for this information due to
| regulatory compliance" "Uh, okay. What are the
| specifics?" "I'm not entirely sure; I've already reached
| out to soandso in legal/whatever to let them know we're
| working on this, reach out to them" "Got it"
|
| You haven't been blindsided, nor have you been told what
| to do by fiat; you've been informed about a new
| stakeholder and been empowered to collect requirements
| from them.
| jollybean wrote:
| So you wouldn't be in a position to know this - but that
| would be a dramatic oversimplification of the situation,
| though my anecdote is specific, I think it highlights how
| scope is often broader than we think in general.
|
| 'The situation' involved legal overview of ambiguous
| legal statutes, to the point wherein we had to engage
| specialized, outside law firms. Even just making that
| determination, and the wherewithal to know hat we needed
| outside help, the type of help, the firm to use ... way
| beyond me. We're dealing with a government agency using
| those 'backdoor' channels within the bureaucracy, very
| sensitive, political, relationship based.
|
| In that context, the 'product part' (my job) was frankly
| the easiest, most obvious thing. It was all of the 'other
| things' that made it very difficult to navigate.
|
| In the other anecdote, where I was 'blindsided' by an
| executive requiring a specific thing for a product
| without much discussion, there were broader issues at
| play, I think your assessment of 'context' might have
| helped, but even then, it still would have required
| coordination.
|
| So these things all touch each other, and where they do,
| there's an VP involved, having to make decisions, every
| day.
|
| I'm really wary of some of the commentary here that is
| dismissive of the kind of work executives do, I think
| those comments lack a kind of organizational maturity.
| Director and VP level jobs are the most brutal kinds of
| work, they're very stressful and operationally oriented,
| they are not these 'big office grand strategy' type jobs
| that I think maybe some people think they are. Though
| obviously 'it depends'.
| lostcolony wrote:
| That's all fair, but I think you're mixing my intent a
| bit.
|
| I would not call "telling me what/how to do something in
| an area I am completely lost in" as "by fiat". By fiat
| implies they're telling you what/how to do something by
| the authority in their title.
|
| And when it comes to giving details, I am not trying to
| say there isn't coordination or similar involved. This,
| again, has to do with the level of delegation. There are
| 10 I've seen discussed in coaching literature, and they
| range from "I am literally telling you ever step to
| take", up to "I gave you a broad desire I have, and now I
| walk away". What is right in a given situation varies,
| but the way you figure out what amount is right is by
| having a respectful conversation.
|
| But I agree, operating at that level is not cushy. At the
| same time, I don't think it has to be as hard as it
| oftentimes is...but I think that to be true at every
| level. When a given position is really hard, it's because
| of bad management above them, I've generally found, but
| I've not observed many C-levels so can't comment there.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Gates?
|
| Also not really.
| spfzero wrote:
| One thing I learned when climbing up that ladder. Not only
| do you not get to start making strategic decisions, the
| person above you is also not doing that, nor is the person
| above them.
|
| Everyone, no matter how many "executives" or "vices" in
| their title, is simply reacting to what the person above
| them is on about that day. Everyone is reacting. No one is
| planning, unless they've just been asked for a plan to
| present "next week". Then they will have a portion of the
| plan to assign you, but it will already be narrowly defined
| per what the boss's boss has already indicated they're
| expecting to see. And you'll need to complete it in two
| days, so there are a few days to make changes. I was never
| privy to any long range planning, and I came to realize
| that's because if there was any of that happening (I'm very
| skeptical) it had to be happening at the board of directors
| level.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I like to say that a lot of mediocre managers kludge
| through with "management-by-osmosis". They kinda just stand
| around their direct reports, occasionally making chit chat,
| and hope that's enough to get a sense of what's going on
| and convey upstream priorities downstream.
| papito wrote:
| Most work happens despite the managers - not because of
| them. The overzealous workaholic bees can be safely
| expected to perform heroics to get things done, ad astra
| per aspera. For a manager - it's a safe bet.
|
| Only rarely that gambit doesn't work, the sacrifice ritual
| is performed, and the manager gets a new, even better gig
| elsewhere.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Most work happens despite the managers because most
| managers are bad managers.
|
| I've had my manager change out above me, and the
| difference has been night and day. The good ones gave me
| a defined goal, then stayed out of my way, yes, but they
| also listened when I raised concerns, and brought me
| answers and solutions, and provided cover when I needed
| it. They made my job easier. The bad ones made my job
| harder.
| gowld wrote:
| Hours and $ are different units with nonlinear impact on
| happiness, so comparing percentages is fraught.
|
| It's not a 25% increase in work time, it's a 50+% reduction in
| free time.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| It's also awful timing. After what, 18 months of productive WFH
| _now_ they want to cut salary?
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Companies are finally accepting that covid is here to stay
| and they're adjusting their game plan accordingly. The laid-
| back attitude was a PR stunt to look cool and caring. With
| things still getting worse, it's clear that this isn't going
| to end soon, so companies are going to drop the nice guy act
| and revert to the usual expectation of "in-office, heads-
| down, do what it takes to make that happen"
| chitowneats wrote:
| If Google felt that WFH had no negative effect on
| productivity, they could go the route of Twitter and others.
| The C-level clearly disagrees that this arrangement is ideal
| for the company, and are disincentivizing it with pay cuts.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| You're wasting your breath. It took me many years to reach
| this conclusion, but HN threads about Google are the
| official meeting place of people bitter about their failed
| interviews.
|
| Just look around this thread to see how wild-eyed and
| frothing the conspiracy theories can get
| ashtonkem wrote:
| For the record, I passed my Google interview, and they
| demanded that I move to NYC which I was unwilling to do.
| I ended up taking other work, and haven't bothered with
| them since.
|
| So perhaps don't jump to conclusions, especially when
| you're doing it to impugn other people. It's a bad look.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > So perhaps don't jump to conclusions, especially when
| you're doing it to impugn other people. It's a bad look.
|
| I 100% don't doubt that there are individual people here
| that have irrational feelings about Google for reasons
| other than the one I mentioned, or that have rational-
| but-uncharitable feelings about them. I'm not even
| particularly bothered by the target: Google in 2021 has a
| mountain of things to answer for that I think it deserves
| very harsh criticism for.
|
| But the collective IQ of HN drops about 30 points
| whenever they come up, far beyond the level of the
| general anti-big-tech attitude you generally see here.
| The amount of circular reasoning and comments that don't
| stand up to a second's scrutiny is palpably higher than
| in the average HN thread, and over the last almost-decade
| of observing this fascinating dynamic, the one constant
| I've noticed has been a deep and abiding bitterness.
| Contrast this with, say, Facebook: while they get plenty
| of HN hate, it's of the same type that you find anywhere,
| and lacks a lot of the pitiful contortions you find HNers
| squeezing themselves into on the topic of Google.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I think that the c suite makes these decisions on a much
| more emotional basis than they let on.
|
| Honestly, I think they're sad seeing their big, expensive
| office spaces not being fully utilized, and want to be able
| around and physically see workers working.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Current management practices are very inefficient. When
| not actively engaging with subordinates, most of the rest
| of their time is finger fiddling (meetings and what-not
| with other managers and such take up the remainder of
| their time, but those meetings themselves are usually not
| as productive as they would let on). They _need_ subs in
| seats or they 'll have to admit how inefficient their job
| is.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Are you sure it's that simple?
|
| Google was previously known in the wider world for imposing
| _longer_ than average work days under the guise of "you
| love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock
| climbing".
|
| It wasn't about extracting productivity, it was about
| imposing culture.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Google was previously known in the wider world for
| imposing longer than average work days under the guise of
| "you love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock
| climbing".
|
| Honesty, in my experience this impression is just
| desperate cope from people with worse work environments.
| My time at Google was the easiest/most relaxing of my
| career by far. Hell, that's why I left.
|
| But whenever people would ask me about all the flashy
| perks and I'd confirm we had them, 100% of the time
| they'd follow up by _telling_ me (not asking): "they work
| you like a dog though". It was an early and dramatic
| lesson in how powerfully people are chained to the just-
| world fallacy: their emotional incontinence was severe
| enough that it literally prevented them from conceiving
| of a work environment that was simply more pleasant than
| theirs.
|
| Google's perk-filled environment doesn't need to be
| explained by anything but golden handcuffs + productivity
| boosts from having recreation/convenience onsite.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Hey hey--I didn't say one way or the other whether it was
| a good thing or a bad thing.
|
| But I've been in and out of Google (Waterloo). They were
| there long, long hours often. Just the same, people
| seemed happy and fulfilled.
|
| I don't think I would be--I covet my time. But I
| recognize that it wasn't designed around me, so whatever.
|
| It's a fact of the process though: Google wanted people
| in the office longer, so they installed resources to keep
| people in the office longer. In that way, it's not overly
| surprising to me that they're trying to get people back
| into the office. Similarly with Apple: they didn't build
| that big fancy ring for nothing.
| guyzero wrote:
| Depending which team you're on, just work west coast
| hours from Waterloo. No one will notice.
| [deleted]
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > Hey hey--I didn't say one way or the other whether it
| was a good thing or a bad thing. But I've been in and out
| of Google (Waterloo). They were there long, long hours
| often. Just the same, people seemed happy and fulfilled.
|
| "Imposing" in your original comment is doing a lot of
| work here. Creating an environment that benefits your
| employees and allows them to be happier, more fulfilled,
| _and_ more productive doesn't quite fit the framing of
| being "imposed" upon.
|
| You could just as well say that companies who allow
| remote work are "imposing" longer hours/more productivity
| on those for whom a flexible schedule is a better fit.
| But that renders the point meaningless.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| But they do impose it. The 40-hour workweek was a hard
| fought-for standard. I would call anything above that
| standard as imposing. It's not a rare concept. It's why
| billing for overtime at an increased rate is common
| practice--because the extra time spent is an imposition.
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| > My time at Google was the easiest/most relaxing of my
| career by far. Hell, that's why I left.
|
| Would you mind if I reach out to you? I'd be curious to
| learn more about your life/career path, if you're willing
| to share.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Sure, how can I reach you
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| definitelynotmmmmmbop [at] gmail [dot] com
| chitowneats wrote:
| Imposing culture and keeping people around at all hours
| was in the service of company productivity. At least that
| is their philosophy. It really is that simple.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I doubt it.
|
| We know that over work reduces creativity and
| productivity. Hell, as an outsider you can practically
| see this in what Google offers; they've totally lost
| their way and keep rehashing the same products in
| repeatedly inferior ways.
|
| Rather, I think that they _feel_ that it's more
| productive or that it gives them more control. Neither of
| which is a rational argument
| igetspam wrote:
| I can confirm that we happily worked nitty days for a
| very long time and the perks helped keep us happy and
| sane. After some number of years though, your personal
| well of energy starts to dry up and no amount of weird
| crap in a fridge is going to solve it. We were very
| productive until that point though.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| > _in the service of company productivity_
|
| This is the only thing I question, given the mix of data
| suggesting the opposite is true. Stanford ran a project
| about it some time ago: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/er
| oberts/cs201/projects/crunc...
|
| That may boil down to execution, though. That project
| emerged out of pretty scathing posts from the boiler room
| programming environments of EA. I'm pretty confident
| Google operates very differently, and probably learned
| from those calamities.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Given what we know about longer hours and productivity,
| plus Google's low retention figures, I'm going to go with
| the latter.
| arebop wrote:
| What do we know about Google's retention figures?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Can't speak post Covid, but last time I checked they
| weren't terribly impressive. IIRC the median was 1.1
| years. Facebook usually tops the FAANG charts for
| retention, but the numbers still aren't great.
| norov wrote:
| They are low.
| steelframe wrote:
| I'd like to know that too. Anecdotally, in the past 6
| months 7 people I've previously worked with on projects
| at Google left after having been there about 10 years.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know how good the data out there is but the meme
| seems to be that people are moving around a lot right
| now. Certainly I've seen a disproportionate number of
| long term employees I know deciding to either retire or
| switch jobs.
| echelon wrote:
| Really ironic given how Google isn't innovating anymore
| (relative to their market cap).
|
| I'd argue the company itself isn't very productive and is
| just treading water with its ridiculously profitable cash
| cow and moat.
|
| That's a C-suite bug.
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Given the fact that they can't even put together a decent
| chat application it's pretty embarrassing. Hangouts was
| bereft of features, and the new Chat replacement adds a
| few more features only to be incredibly slow. Progress?
| Nope.
|
| Most people I know at G are working on something related
| to the cash cow of "spying on people to sell them more
| stuff better". The number of folks working on actual hard
| problems seems to be very slim, though highly publicized.
| stackbutterflow wrote:
| One might wonder whether google employees are even
| creating value at this point or if they are just burning
| cash. What was the last product launched by Google that
| was a success? Which Google product hasn't gotten worse
| in the last 10 years? Gmail, google search, the 50
| flavors of google chat, youtube, all were better 10 years
| ago. Maps stayed the same which is an achievement
| compared to any other Google products.
| p_j_w wrote:
| The C-level have had months to prepare and show data about
| productivity dropping and have, so far, refused to do so.
| At this point, they can put up or shut up. I refuse to just
| believe them because they say so.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| The empty platitudes of "we work better together" is a
| giveaway that they don't have that data.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| maybe it's OK in the short term - they can keep the lights
| on keep current initiatives going - but it might have an
| impact on the process for developing new strategic
| initiatives. people can be 'productive' in one sense, but
| it might still be in the interest of the company to have
| some class of workers 'on site' vs WFH as a default.
|
| I'm not saying this is definitely the case in google's
| situation, just... "effect on productivity" is hard to
| measure, and may have more than one measurement.
| ascar wrote:
| I think people overestimate the short term impact of
| C-levels in these giant organizations. Google isn't run
| like a startup anymore. There is an existing compensation
| structure at place that pays employees differently based on
| the location they are working in. The HR and legal
| department has probably a pretty firm stance on assuring
| these structures are applied fairly and unequivocally. And
| if the C-suit is presented the options of cutting pay of
| some or raising pay of many others, we all know what a
| business would go for.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| Why wouldn't they? Any "sane" company out there will cut your
| salary as soon as they find a good excuse to do so. Working
| from home VS working from the office is the perfect excuse.
| Productivity doesn't matter because if you go below the
| minimum bar, you are lay off.
| ant6n wrote:
| Pissing off your employees and finding excuses to cut
| salary is what a "sane" company does? Sounds short sighted
| at best.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| It's quoted ("sane"). I meant: most successful companies
| maximize for profit, they usually don't care about
| employees. So the context here is "sane: from an economic
| point of view".
|
| > Sounds short sighted at best.
|
| I would say so, but history says otherwise (e.g., Amazon)
| glenneroo wrote:
| As a counterexample, my company pays us 3EUR per day that
| we WFH in order to compensate for using personal resources.
| They are also paying for necessary equipment such as office
| chair, monitor, etc.
|
| Than again I presume almost everyone in this thread is
| speaking about American companies, not that it doesn't
| happen elsewhere, but generally these (as you put it,
| "sane") company stories tend to be in the US.
| ryneandal wrote:
| This is a great point, particularly considering here in
| the US we've lost the ability to claim deductions on a
| home office if we're a company employee, as of 2018.
|
| I've worked remotely for a long time, and have accepted
| the reality of increased electric bills, but I'm sure
| this was a surprise to some.
| ghaff wrote:
| There may be exceptions in hot climates with AC, but I
| strongly suspect that the _far_ bigger cost for people is
| now those who need an additional room for work rather
| than those with a somewhat higher utility bill or footing
| the cost of a new desk chair.
| ryneandal wrote:
| Continual draw for external monitors and PCs adds up.
| Anecdotal, but I know quite a few devs in this area had a
| pretty easy time fitting a desk into their master bedroom
| when needed.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Some companies don't want attrition, particularly
| considering that there is a "shortage of qualified
| engineers" which is a political way of saying the software
| industry is underpaid already.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| > there is a "shortage of qualified engineers"
|
| Do we still believe this is true? I mean, if that were
| true, then why Google (probably the IT company in need of
| the most talented engineers out there) is thinking about
| applying a measure that will scare away their most
| talented engineers? It doesn't hold.
|
| If there were a "shortage of qualified engineers", Google
| would have already said "all of our engineers can work
| from home if they want to. The ones who want to work from
| our offices can do so as well". I mean, that's the best
| strategy to keep and attract the best of the best, isn't
| it?
| tester756 wrote:
| there's still shitton of skilled people that are
| interested in working for Google
| dboreham wrote:
| Because whoever is imposing the salary reduction is not
| the person who will suffer the consequences of the
| company not having good engineers. They're likely high
| fiving due to meeting their KPI.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| > Do we still believe this is true?
|
| No, hence the rest of the sentence:
|
| > which is a political way of saying the software
| industry is underpaid already
|
| To be clear, it's FAANG who are saying there is a
| shortage of qualified engineers in their campaign to
| procure more foreign labor, but really this means they
| don't want to have to pay domestic engineers what they're
| worth (they want more H1-B visas to increase the supply
| and thus decrease the unit cost of engineers--with the
| nice bonus that H1-B holders are more easily abused
| because the employer has the power to effectively have
| these holders deported).
|
| > is thinking about applying a measure that will scare
| away their most talented engineers? It doesn't hold.
|
| A couple of possibilities:
|
| 1. Google is fallible
|
| 2. Google may be exceptional in the software industry
| (e.g., they may be okay with some attrition because
| they're playing a longer game than others in the
| industry, or perhaps because they already pay top-tier
| salaries and don't believe attrition will affect them)
| paulgb wrote:
| This might be a good heuristic if we were talking about a
| factory job, but this is a job at a tech company.
| Competition for talent is pretty fierce, a good enough
| reason not to cut someone's salary is that it's likely they
| can go elsewhere and make what they're making now, plus a
| signing bonus.
| sdevonoes wrote:
| I used to believe the tech industry was better than other
| industries.
|
| > Competition for talent is pretty fierce, a good enough
| reason not to cut someone's salary is that it's likely
| they can go elsewhere and make what they're making now,
| plus a signing bonus
|
| I really hope that scenario will happen. IT companies
| tend to repeat what Google, Amazon, and other tech giants
| do; so I expect most IT companies will follow Google
| regarding the topic we are discussing here. I hope am
| wrong.
| Frost1x wrote:
| Less the costs of transferring jobs.
|
| The industry has done everything in its power to try and
| retain people through disincentives (interview processes,
| on boarding process, expectations of often absurd spinup
| to productivity times, etc.) while not focusing on the
| incentives (increased pay, more time off, better work
| life balance, etc.). All of this, acting as sort of
| collusion agreement proxy to reduce poaching across the
| industry, makes it less attractive to jump ship and
| businesses know that.
|
| Spending the time to update my resume, market it a bit,
| deal with a mixture of mostly sweatshops with some
| reasonable employers mixed in, and a few actual good
| employers hiring processes (recruiter spam, LC gauntlets,
| full day technical interviews) and often employers
| expecting you to clairvoyantly know their idiosyncrasies
| (internal infrastructure, business processes, pre-
| existing code bases and dozens of arbitrary dependencies
| they chose and worked with for years)--all of which
| businesses pretend aren't costs and externalize on
| employees, makes it less attractive.
|
| Let's add in the mix of normal/traditional job switches:
| meeting and meshing with new coworkers, changing your
| commute which may not be insignificant, overhead of
| switching and moving your benefits packages around,
| delays for building/taking time off, new
| uncertainties/risks about stability, etc. and suddenly,
| that sign-on bonus with the near same package doesn't
| look so attractive.
|
| Anymore, for me to even consider jumping ship I'd need a
| pretty hefty sign-on bonus just to deal with the rest
| that will turn into lost personal time and stress. I
| really need a significant TC bump and hopefully, better
| work/life balance and/or a combination of my current
| employer TC degrading due to increased demand, hours,
| stress, stagnant growth, etc. otherwise, industry has
| created so many disincentive barriers that I'll stay
| where I am.
|
| Maybe it's not as tiresome/costly for some, but it
| certainly is for me.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| People collectively don't seem to know how to value their
| labor. If anything, they should argue for a pay increase to
| offset the costs Google is externalizing in utilities, on-
| site benefits, need for security, food, space, etc.
|
| If Google is progressive, they should buck the trend and do
| something like build sound-proof office-apartments that
| employees can hotel in for a few days at a time, and allow
| children. That would be worth a 10% "pay cut" to at least
| some of the people they want to remain on site.
|
| We're in a new world. There's no reason to make employees
| suffer because someone did things a certain way a generation
| or two ago.
| igetspam wrote:
| Came here looking for this. Back in my G days, before they
| were the high paying behemoth they are now, there were
| regular complaints about compensation. The first corporate
| response was absolutely tone-deaf. They created a tool for
| you to see your total compensation that included all-in
| values like on-site amenities. The natural response was one
| of unhappiness and people requesting to opt out of eating
| at work and promising to never use the laundry facilities
| or the gym or many of the other bits of bait they use to
| lure new grads. The next response came much later and it
| was a broad leveling of pay. Obviously the second pass was
| better.
|
| Alphabet will save a lot of money by not having so many
| warm bodies in the office. They eat less, they poop less,
| they generate less heat and make the AC work better, they
| require fewer support staff to be in the buildings, etc.
| Reducing pay because you're using fewer company paid
| resources is just as tone-deaf as that first try.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| The cost of the A/C and janitorial staff is peanuts
| compared to the money they spent on commercial real
| estate. If they don't get ROI, someone is going to be
| held accountable. If the offices close and the value of
| commercial real estate plummets there are huge players
| that are going to be wiped out, with macro-economic
| ramifications. It's a perfect example of sunk cost
| fallacy, but on the scale of billions of dollars.
| igetspam wrote:
| It's been a while for me but I recall that a significant
| amount of the real estate already existed. I worked in a
| number of buildings in MTV, starting before the SGI
| retrofit. Most were old and had little done to them.
| There was new construction (mYbe the Zurich office, with
| Urs' apartment on top?) but way more remodeling. I know
| they built the housing near moffet but how much other
| real estate did they really do from the ground up? And
| how a big of a dent is that? (I'd eager there's some tax
| magic there too.)
|
| My point is, G can afford the losses on selling some
| buildings and have unused capacity without hurting their
| stock price.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| Google has something close to $50B in real estate
| holdings. They announced $7B in real estate spending in
| 2021. [1]
|
| That press release reads more like a "head of state"
| spending in key constituent areas for some policy changes
| needed. Shovels in dirt wins politicians, and Google
| needs all the help it can get with the looming antitrust
| issues.
|
| [1] - https://blog.google/inside-google/company-
| announcements/inve...
| steelframe wrote:
| > they poop less
|
| I worked at Google for about 10 years. Never having to
| hunt for an open bathroom stall while under a certain
| degree of physiological distress has perhaps been the
| greatest benefit to WFH for me.
| chitowneats wrote:
| Alphabet made the calculation a long time ago that paying
| for you to poop in the building is a rounding error
| compared to the extra productivity doing so allows them
| to squeeze out of you. That hasn't changed and it's
| unclear to me why the pandemic would change it.
| nullc wrote:
| > before they were the high paying behemoth they are now,
| there were regular complaints about compensation.
|
| You mean back when they were illegally colluding with
| Apple and other technology companies to suppress wages.
|
| > The next response came much later and it was a broad
| leveling of pay.
|
| I got a 20% pay bump after the wage fixing scheme
| collapsed and those pay resets happened, and my employer
| was in no way involved in it-- Apple and Google's
| conspiracy just suppressed wages far beyond the active
| participants.
|
| It's not about tone-deafness it's about maximizing
| profit. Parties that will willfully and knowingly break
| the law to conspire to fix wages aren't going to be
| bothered by moves which seem a little cruel or illogical.
| igetspam wrote:
| Good point. Tone-deaf was how we took it.
| hh3k0 wrote:
| > If anything, they should argue for a pay increase to
| offset the costs Google is externalizing in utilities, on-
| site benefits, need for security, food, space, etc.
|
| This is absolutely correct.
|
| If Google would tell me that I'll see my pay cut by about
| 10% for working remotely, I'd put in 25% less effort - 15%
| for space, power, etc., and 10% to make up for the cut.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| You misunderstand how companies decide salaries. You aren't
| paid the value you provide your company. You don't get a
| raise if you save the company money.
|
| You are paid the least the company thinks it can pay to get
| an acceptable applicant to fill your position. The truth is
| that there are many capable people who would prefer to work
| remote, and they're willing to take a pay cut to make that
| happen. Therefore companies don't need to pay remote
| workers as much.
| throw123123123 wrote:
| 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.
| vetinari wrote:
| 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.
| docflabby wrote:
| Google finaly completes its transformation into the new IBM.
| sneak wrote:
| There are lots of other companies hiring, and if you're getting a
| pay cut, you already have big G on your resume.
|
| Don't think you have to keep working for a company that has
| previously conspired to price-fix wages and defraud its workforce
| out of billions of dollars of wages.
|
| https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/04/apple-googl...
|
| Eric Schmidt, conspirator in this fraud, had a long and
| successful career there even after it was discovered.
| kstenerud wrote:
| This will continue until enough high profile people publicly
| leave their jobs, and specifically mention how their new company
| doesn't cheat them out of the market rate based on their
| lifestyle choices.
| ascar wrote:
| That is based on the pretty bold assumption that SV salaries
| are the actual "market rate" while it is much more likely that
| the true market rate is much lower and SV salaries are
| inflated.
|
| There is enough talent outside of SV that is willing to work
| for much lower salaries. Actually there is orders of magnitude
| more talent of similar quality/intelligence available globally.
| lexapro wrote:
| >Actually there is orders of magnitude more talent of similar
| quality/intelligence available globally.
|
| Yes and now they don't even have to move to SV anymore.
| jstx1 wrote:
| The other side of this is that if you're a high profile person
| at Google, there are few companies that can give you similar or
| higher compensation. Even fewer if you only consider remote.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I don't think market rate means what you think it means.
|
| The way for this to balance is for good people to get remote
| jobs to pay them enough to stay. The difficulty is that more
| good people are now available via remote, to press down on
| salaries.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Right - a cleaner brings massive value (no one will work in an
| insanitary environment, so they in a sense underpin all work)
| but seeing as the labour pool is large, cleaners don't get paid
| a lot of money.
| WJW wrote:
| Everybody was so sure that working from home in a low cost of
| living region with SF salaries was going to make them rich. The
| few voices who warned that it also meant a bigger pool of
| potential employees with lower salary demands were ignored.
|
| And so the cycle continues.
| lexapro wrote:
| The value you bring to the company is almost irrelevant. It's
| all supply and demand. Of course if you bring a lot of value
| that _might_ increase demand for you, especially if few are
| able to provide that amount of value.
|
| Also, no market is perfect. There are (well-paid) employees
| that bring zero or even negative value without anyone noticing.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| Theoretically the value you bring should always be higher
| than what you're paid, since it would be uneconomical to
| employ you otherwise. That said your second paragraph is
| absolutely right, there are plenty of failures. In a modern
| bigcorp I'd be willing to wager that value is created on a
| bell curve relative to a given salary level (so for example
| if you take a bunch of people making $60,000 in the same
| company, some produce no value or negative value, some
| produce moderate value, some produce extreme value). If I had
| to guess complexity actually allows the information
| asymmetries to flourish, so the market is probably extremely
| distorted and that's why you see the effect.
| textbookrental wrote:
| This doesn't sound right. Google gets millions of applicants
| per year. Surely some of those appliacants would be willing to
| work for less.
| shell0x wrote:
| I think I'd rather take a pay cut and live in a place I actually
| like.
|
| I have been working remotely for more than 2 years and I can't
| imagine going back to an office every day. The open-plan layout,
| the noise, the struggle to find a room to have a call, the slow
| internet connection(Australian internet is already slow, but at
| least at home it's just me using it).
|
| I also heard that some people absolutely detest WFH, but they
| have kids or rent a studio apartment. A hybrid model seems to be
| the best solution going forward.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I mean isn't this just removing comp for commuting ? Assuming you
| got compensated based on commute time, 2 hours commuting a day
| does not sound worth the 10% to me - do some moonlighting if
| you're that bent on converting all your time to money.
| brown9-2 wrote:
| No, the article makes it pretty clear that it's a cost of
| living adjustment
| agilob wrote:
| but my cost of living is now higher when Im using more
| electricity and water at home, and i had to refurbish my room
| for home office.
| underseacables wrote:
| You could return to the office.
| eloisant wrote:
| We're talking about employees moving to cheaper areas. I'm
| pretty sure the housing costs (mortgage or rent) largely
| offsets the additional costs.
|
| I still think Google shouldn't do that, it's cheap to do
| that and they don't have to. However even with a 10% pay
| cut, employees moving from expensive areas such as Silicon
| Valley or the Seattle area to a cheaper one like some city
| in Oregon, the standard of living still goes up.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Is it really that significantly higher? I can't imagine
| you've increased usage of those to the tune of thousands of
| dollars a year.
| ryan93 wrote:
| You can buy a home for 7 figures cheaper if you leave
| silicon valley. Why are you worried about a water bill/
| UncleMeat wrote:
| It is cost of labor, not cost of living. The pay cut to move
| to hawaii is the same as the pay cut to move to montana.
| moonchrome wrote:
| I see, still seems like a good deal to me - cutting 2 hours
| for 10% that is. Depends on how much you value your free time
| I guess.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > One Google employee ..would likely see their pay cut by about
| 10% by working from home full-time > The employee was considering
| remote work but decided to keep going to the office - despite the
| two-hour commute.
|
| 10% paycut in place of 10 hours of commute seems a good deal to
| me.
| paulcole wrote:
| Unless you need that 10% of your salary.
| pc86 wrote:
| I think it's unlikely that Google SDEs are living paycheck to
| paycheck.
| kwere wrote:
| there are always ways to blow your check
| [deleted]
| paulcole wrote:
| You learn to spend what's in your pocket.
| kamaal wrote:
| Once they know you are ready to settle for 10% less. The next
| step is to go after the next 10%.
|
| The only reason why are they are not going for a straight 40%
| cut is because they want to phase it out over time. Else lots
| of people would leave and they'd have to find their
| replacement.
| scollet wrote:
| It's not a trade. The worker just loses.
| remus wrote:
| > It's not a trade. The worker just loses.
|
| How so? Money (pay decrease) for time (no commuting = 10
| hours of your life back every week) seems like a pretty
| classic trade.
| scollet wrote:
| If you're already compensated for the commute then it's a
| different story.
| jatone wrote:
| because that time wasn't spent on work anyways. it was
| already 'free' for the company. this is literally just
| trying to claw back money for a perk people really like.
|
| the fact companies pay different rates based on locale is
| insane given the value of the work a person contributes to
| a company is independent of said location.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I see the point that someone views this as a direct (almost
| arbitrary) loss for the worker. Why should they simply get
| less for working from home? But realistically speaking, let's
| assume 261 working days in a year, which comes out to 522
| hours of commute. That's 522 hours of unpaid travel, every
| year. That's 65 8-hour working days.
|
| How much is your time worth? For me, it's far more than the
| 10% pay cut. And I haven't even included the direct cost of
| travel (gas, wear and tear on vehicle, etc.), just hours
| lost.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| That depends on how you value your freetime.
|
| I once went from a 30min commute to 2 min. Just that small
| amount of freetime (1 hour basically) let me get a lot more
| things done in a day. I could also realistically 'go home for
| lunch'. Which cut my lunch expenses way down.
|
| Now up front if you had said I am going to cut your pay by
| 10% because of that. I would not have done it. But after
| having done it I would _deeply_ consider it.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| the worker can always quit and work elsewhere if he can find
| a better deal. the attitude of entitlement among many bay
| area tech workers is astounding. At the end of the day your
| labor is worth the supply vs. demand market equilibrium. It
| should be obvious to intelligent people like tech workers
| that the ability to remote work expands the labor supply
| dropping wages. You can't expect to have your cake and eat it
| too.
| paulcole wrote:
| What if they need the money?
| loco5niner wrote:
| I imagine they could find some way to make money with an
| extra 10 hours a week.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing. If you can find a way to
| continue trading 10 hours of your work obligations for 10% of
| your salary, you end up getting 40-50% for doing nothing!
| boplicity wrote:
| The cost of commuting in a car 2 hours should be significant;
| the carbon emissions should be the priced into the the
| decision. Right now they're not. That has to change, or we're
| all screwed.
| throwaway_qcjal wrote:
| I think this is making a whole lot of out nothing, or at least
| not much. Google would determine your pay based on your work
| location, regardless of whether that's your home or the office.
| As a result people that lived far from the office in a typically
| less expensive area could see their pay drop.
| dqpb wrote:
| Do you think they should reduce salary for people who have paid
| off their mortgage? Those people also have lower cost of
| living.
| dqpb wrote:
| I try to avoid commenting on downvotes, but I'm really
| curious to know. For those downvoting me, what is your job?
| cableshaft wrote:
| How about people living with multiple roommates, or renting
| out part of their house (I used to live in one of those
| situations)? Those people have a lower cost of living as well
| compared to others in the area.
|
| Or does it only count if you're talking someone's sole and
| primary mortgage and where that's physically located? Even
| mortgages can vary wildly. In my city I can buy a condo for
| $100k or I could buy a mansion for 5 million dollars. My cost
| of living will vary drastically depending on what I decide to
| get.
| dqpb wrote:
| Exactly!
| Sacho wrote:
| Gitlab implements this compensation model openly(to the point
| where there is a calculator for it!) - I don't remember how
| well it was received when it was first announced, but looks
| like Google is applying a similar idea.
| zrail wrote:
| The calculator is no longer public.
| smnrchrds wrote:
| That's a shame. When did they make it non-public?
| licebmi__at__ wrote:
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
| com/-/commit/429302...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| I don't think the calculator is public. It used to be and
| last time I tried it the results were terrible for my area I
| guess because there just aren't any other technologists here
| so nothing to compare to - but that doesn't say anything
| about me or how much I'm worth! Also when you looked in the
| data file you could see little pockets of higher paying areas
| - I guess if they can't recruit you they create a little
| higher paying bubble for you. So I don't think it works well
| and it's also possibly open to distortion.
| ghaff wrote:
| My sense from looking at it a couple of times was that
| there was more and more "exception handling" over time,
| primarily to handle relatively high CoL places, e.g. nice
| college towns, in generally cheap rural locales.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Right - and I guess the way you got an exception made was
| by making a fuss... which means it's just as personality
| driven as before and isn't really the open system it
| thinks it is.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| Exactly. When I left California I fully expected my pay to get
| reduced, I'm not going to blind myself and think that it
| wouldn't happen because of my move to a lower cost of living
| area. I'm lucky that that wasn't the case but it was a pleasant
| surprise more than something I expected and demanded.
| Jach wrote:
| I still think everyone should fight against it if they think
| it's going to happen, whether they've come to terms with it
| or not. I heard about an employee who moved to Canada, got
| her manager to agree to no pay cut, but HR went over the
| manager's head. Certainly a rage-quit moment if it had been
| me, though of course international concerns were a factor.
| Admittedly it's easier to fight if your move is domestic.
|
| "Cost of living" is personal and largely not the company's
| business. If my spend is $X per month, it's $X, it doesn't
| matter what portion of that goes to rent or mortgage. When
| circumstances change that shifts the portion of housing, most
| people don't pocket the savings, but instead just shift it to
| other things. Sometimes even for better housing. It's a rare
| individual who will save instead, and even rarer to
| unnecessarily subject oneself to lower quality something for
| savings, like the SF Google employee living in his car,
| driving his cost of living as far as rent was concerned to
| $0, cheaper even than the corn fields of Iowa.
|
| But companies will keep trying to do these "adjustments" so
| long as they keep getting away with it. Consider fighting it,
| and finding out how valuable you really are in the process.
| Similarly with WFH "adjustments" -- given intent for a coming
| pay reduction, you should instead counter with a demand for a
| pay increase, because you're no longer contributing to the
| costs of having an office space.
| foobar2021 wrote:
| If you replace "cost of living" with "living wage" the
| mainstream opinion very much wants your salary to be the
| company's business. Why this isn't owned by some level
| (state, local) of government I have no idea.
| Jach wrote:
| My salary is already the company's business, they're
| paying it. What's worth fighting against is the idea that
| how I spend (or save) that salary, and worse how some
| average of how everyone independent of job and salary in
| a geographical area spends their money, should directly
| influence the salary itself.
| biztos wrote:
| > "Cost of living" is personal
|
| I live internationally, and the cost of moving between
| countries on a regular basis pretty much negates the
| savings of the cheaper locales vs the more expensive ones.
|
| On the one hand, I don't expect my employer to pay me
| _more_ because I live this way, but on the other hand my
| salary expectations are not calibrated to the cheapest
| locale in the mix because that would be insane.
|
| My hunch is the "WFH == pay cut" thing is just a cover for
| redistributing money to the employees with leverage,
| because they are (perceived to be) more valuable.
| bsagdiyev wrote:
| So I'll be a little blunt about this: why does the employer
| care if the employee is good or bad at finances? I
| understand some places are expensive and that can't be
| helped but living within your means and being financially
| smart are totally possible as much as people love to harp
| about the cost of living. I somehow manage to pay a
| mortgage, day care and still put $xxxx in savings every
| month. What's keeping these people who move to cheaper
| locales from doing the same? They got used to an expensive
| lifestyle? That isn't the fault of the employer.
| Jach wrote:
| > They got used to an expensive lifestyle?
|
| That, among other reasons, like wanting more or nicer
| things, across many possible dimensions of meaning for
| 'nice'. Same reasons at play for why when people get a
| raise, or take a job with higher pay, the surplus is
| rarely converted fully into savings. Another though also
| not the only reason left is a simple "keeping up with the
| Jones'" mentality, though this problem may affect
| Americans more.
|
| It's useful to be aware that the median American
| household has $1000/mo in surplus funds after all
| 'ordinary expenses', which notably are greater than
| 'necessary expenses' the 'living wage' people tend to
| focus on. But that $12k/yr typically gets spent rather
| than saved or invested.
|
| > That isn't the fault of the employer.
|
| Nope, nor is it really their business, so they shouldn't
| try, and people should fight, these underhanded
| "adjustment" tactics of "oh, you moved to an area where
| the average rent is $1000/mo less, these common foods are
| a bit cheaper, etc., so clearly you can get by on less
| now, and so we'll cut your salary by x%." (Typically
| being a percentage cut rather than global absolute amount
| cut is another indicator of its badness.) Even the
| hypothetical reverse case of moving back and getting an
| increase is false generosity; if moving back raises my
| cost floor, I'm not going to do it unless I can afford
| to, automatic adjustment or not, and it's very possible
| the divined adjusted increase might not be high enough.
| gorbachev wrote:
| I'd bet a lot of money this doesn't apply to executives,
| however.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Since you asked:
|
| https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-
| wfh...
| usaar333 wrote:
| It's a weird policy though. If I'm remote, why does my location
| matter to Google?
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| Because they no longer have to incentivize you to move to a
| very high cost of living location.
| usaar333 wrote:
| Exactly, so why have disparate pay by location? I'd expect
| all remote workers to get the same salary, perhaps a bit
| lower than onsite workers to account for productivity loss.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| I'd still expect valuable employees to flock to
| population centers (e.g. for education), you want to
| remain competitive in those areas.
| usaar333 wrote:
| In effect though, this is location pay discrimination
| which only makes sense if you believe the remote people
| have viable onsite alternatives where they are that
| drives their market salary.
|
| If they are only going to work remotely (i.e. in a remote
| market), I don't see how this works steady-state. If
| there's no benefit to having an employee in SF vs.
| Austin, I'll just start paying a premium to non-SF
| residents and pull away non-SF talent from Google.
| Eventually, this should all equalize to remote workers
| being paid equally.
| abunuwas wrote:
| I'm very lucky to be able to work from home in my current
| contract, and it'll probably continue to be like this for another
| year if I manage to renew it. However I'm not kidding myself, I
| know as soon as I land a new contract I'll most likely be
| required to commute. A lot of people I know are already being
| required to go to the office some days a week, or will be
| required to do so from September.
|
| The past year has been one of the most productive times of my
| life, both at work and outside of work, but I reckon productivity
| is only one of many variables that most employers take into
| consideration, and perhaps not the most important. I guess they
| don't even measure productivity by how much you do, but by how
| much you cost?
| brown9-2 wrote:
| Will they adjust Urs Holzle's compensation for working from New
| Zealand?
| PetahNZ wrote:
| Yea its quite expensive to live here so he will probably get a
| pay increase.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Urs is Google employee #8. He is so rich I doubt he is
| compensated in any way that's meaningful to him today.
|
| He probably only works to have a seat at the table and a say in
| how the future of technology is built.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| > He is so rich I doubt he is compensated in any way that's
| meaningful to him today.
|
| Yet they still pay him a ton (executive comp is public).
| Weird.
| pb7 wrote:
| To keep him from having a seat at a different table.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| But why would he go to a different table for more money
| if he has so much money that pay doesn't matter to him?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I think that lots of people will be willing to reduce pay, to
| stay home. That will also act as an incentive to corporations, to
| use remote workers.
| boplicity wrote:
| The cost of commuting on the environment is extremely high. We
| should be offering incentives to companies to switch to remote
| work. If 20% of jobs permanently switched to remote, the impact
| on carbon emissions would be immediate, and extremely positive.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| I guess in a purely commuting way, perhaps.
|
| But if 100 employees are all at home and are heating/cooling
| their houses all with different levels of insulation and
| efficiency, how does that compare to an office building that is
| controlled and built to be efficient?
|
| Or the amount of electric they use to power their home
| workstation and radio, rather than a shared office radio? Or
| lower power machines.
|
| Or the more shopping trips for lunch or deliveroo orders -
| because I can't just walk down the road to grab a sandwich.
|
| Or those who now drive or catch the bus/train after work to go
| for a pint - rather than stopping in on the way back.
|
| I'm totally all for staying working at home, but I do recognise
| that it's not just the commuting that has an effect here
| lamontcg wrote:
| Those are really bizarre levels of trying to be
| counterintuitive. For lunch you can now walk to your
| refrigerator to get a sandwich. It burns much less carbon to
| just walk or drive to your nearest watering hole for a beer
| rather than driving to work in rush hour and then back in
| order to get a beer. Total transportation carbon emissions
| from the average household are also twice the total HVAC
| emissions, and carbon consumption due to appliances like
| refrigerators, washer/driers and hot water heaters should be
| relatively constant (could even go down if you just wear the
| same pair of sweatpants for a week).
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Completely :)
|
| I was just trying to point out that just the fact of
| stopping people commuting doesn't really mean a lot, there
| are a lot more things in play.
|
| I'm in the UK, and our houses are not really built for
| extreme temperature fluctuations, so in the summer I run
| the portable AC - which is terrible but otherwise we can't
| sleep. In the winter, it's crazy cold - but at least now we
| have the log burner in so not as bad.
|
| I think it does depend on where you are in the world, I
| can't walk to a pub, or a shop where I live. I have to
| drive further than my office to get to a supermarket or
| town.
|
| But yes, I may have not made great points in that post!
| ghaff wrote:
| If people own a house anyway, working in it during the day
| doesn't really add much in the energy use. Maybe there's a
| few degrees more heating or cooling at the margins. Maybe
| there are more trips to a store--on the other hand,
| restaurants and cafeterias aren't necessarily super-
| efficient.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Perhaps, but anecdotally my electricity and gas bills have
| been much higher since I've been working at home - YMMV of
| course
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm sure it varies by the house/apartment.
|
| I don't really see a difference in electricity unless I'm
| traveling for an extended period but I have very limited
| AC which I don't use much. As for heat, the difference
| associated with dropping the temperature maybe 10 degrees
| F for 8 hours a day doesn't add up to a lot.
| Retric wrote:
| The question is the relative amount of electrify and gas
| used at home vs the office plus commute. Running the same
| computer at home or the office clearly is irrelevant for
| the environment.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Is it though? Maybe my office uses an electricity
| supplier who charges a bit more, but uses as much
| renewable as possible, but at home my supplier doesn't
| use any renewable, but is cheaper
|
| There are just too many factors involved to make a fair
| comparison - especially across countries
| Retric wrote:
| There is no such thing as a "green" electricity supplier
| in practice. It's the same power plants connected to the
| same grid. Unused solar power isn't going to be wasted in
| favor of gas turbines.
| Retric wrote:
| Home temperature is fairly consistent over the day. Not
| having an office to heat or cool more than compensates for
| the difference.
|
| Commuting costs completely dominate in terms of energy costs.
| As to getting delivery for lunch, that's well outside of most
| peoples price range. The vast majority of people are going to
| simply buy more food on their normal shopping trips.
|
| The running the same computer hardware at home or the office
| is meaningless for the environment, but you will notice the
| difference in your personal electric bill.
|
| Radio's use minimal electricity ~25w depending on volume,
| which is why you can find hand crank models etc.
| glenneroo wrote:
| I think both of you are making a lot of assumptions without
| providing any sources to back up your own anecdotal
| experiences. Also related, but HN could really use an
| optional country-flag next to each user's name so that we
| could at least see what country people are referring to
| respective their experiences which they state as "the way
| it is".
|
| > Home temperature is fairly consistent over the day.
|
| You must live in a mild climate where the outside
| temperature doesn't change much because everywhere I've
| lived in the world, you constantly turn on/off
| heating/fans/air-conditioning depending on the season and
| time of day.
|
| > Commuting costs completely dominate in terms of energy
| costs.
|
| Assuming usage of cars. Leave the US and generally public
| transportation is a thing used by most people. The
| trains/trams/buses still travel the same routes and times
| as before-pandemic times.
|
| > The running the same computer hardware at home or the
| office
|
| Why is that? My PCs at work each use ~150W and I never turn
| them off because Wake-On-Lan doesn't always work. I presume
| it's the same for most of my 700 co-workers who also WFH.
| That's a lot of KW and not to be scoffed at.
|
| > Radio's use minimal electricity ~25w
|
| You are taking the minimal example of radio. I would guess
| that more than a negligible amount of people have something
| more substantial at home which uses more than 25w
| (including amp/speakers/wifi to connect to Alexa, etc),
| granted it's probably still not much and could even balance
| out with people who don't listen to radio while working?
| Who knows, IMO it's futile to even try to calculate this
| value globally.
| Retric wrote:
| > Assuming usage of cars. Leave the US and generally
| public transportation is a thing used by most people. The
| trains/trams/buses still travel the same routes and times
| as before-pandemic times.
|
| Across the US and presumably the world mass transit
| reduced service in response to reduced ridership. If WFH
| becomes more common that will definitely cover more areas
| as schedules very much are based on demand. Ex:
| https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/03/24/coronavirus-mta-
| subw...
|
| > IMO it's futile to even try to calculate this value
| globally.
|
| Electricity is directly measured at the grid level and
| 2020 saw a clear reduction, how much of that relates to
| WFH is more questionable.
| ghaff wrote:
| And then people stop using it as much and, in many cases,
| drive instead because transit becomes less attractive.
| Retric wrote:
| Most people I know avoid using cramped rush hour transit
| when they can. So overall more steady state operation is
| likely to make public transit more appealing. Even if
| they cut back from a train every 8 minutes to one every
| 15 during rush hour.
| sushid wrote:
| Isn't it more productive to have a kitchen staff produce
| food for 1000s of people vs. every person ordering
| delivery, cooking for themselves, etc.?
|
| Surely cooling/heating 1000 separate homes would cost more
| than an office space optimized for it, right?
| Retric wrote:
| > Isn't it more productive to have a kitchen staff
| produce food for 1000s of people vs. every person
| ordering delivery, cooking for themselves, etc.?
|
| Depends on the comparison, someone microwaving lunch at
| home or the office is basically identical. Restaurants
| can be more efficient than cooking at home, but for
| example the open air style refrigerators used in some
| restaurants have terrible energy efficiency.
| https://www.kitchenall.com/open-air-
| merchandisers.html?p=2 At the extreme end when talking
| out door heating for guest comfort etc restaurants can be
| shockingly bad because it's generally the least important
| aspect of the business.
|
| > Surely cooling/heating 1000 separate homes would cost
| more than an office optimized for it.
|
| Depends, the comparison might be to not having an office
| and therefore not needing to heat or cool it at all.
| There is some opportunity to let empty homes get closer
| to ambient temperature and therefore reduce heat gain or
| loss, but it's not clear cut. We can say that total
| electricity demand dropped in the pandemic which suggests
| WFH is likely more energy efficient even with empty
| office space.
|
| So, sure in some cases it's better and in some cases
| worse, but that really doesn't cover the commute costs.
| ctvo wrote:
| Sources please.
|
| Edit: The OP makes an extraordinary claim about remote work and
| reduction in CO2. I would assume members of HN would be
| intellectually curious enough to want to dig deeper.
| judge2020 wrote:
| https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-
| emissions-t....
|
| > A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of
| carbon dioxide per year.
|
| > This assumes the average gasoline vehicle on the road today
| has a fuel economy of about 22.0 miles per gallon and drives
| around 11,500 miles per year.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| 22mpg sounds like fleet average. I don't think the average
| commuter who _could_ work from home is getting 22mpg,
| probably close to 30 average. I don 't think the frequency
| of trucks and vans relative to cars and crossovers is not
| high enough within those demographics to drag down the
| average that far.
|
| I'd pad the estimate for carbon saved and say like
| 3.5ton/yr per work from home employee.
| shagie wrote:
| In a different thread, I found https://www.fueleconomy.go
| v/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=40076 as a useful way of
| looking at CO2. That's got the Honda Fit as that's the
| one that was in discussion previously. Its a 33mpg car
| and the 'energy and environment' tab puts it at 4.4
| tons/year. I've got a 2009 Honda Insight.
|
| > Fuel cost estimates assume national average fuel prices
| and assume you drive 15,000 miles each year, 45% under
| highway driving conditions (steady speeds with little or
| no stopping) and 55% in city driving (low speeds with
| lots of stopping).
|
| Noting that I'm not the typical home worker, but I went
| from an average of 600 miles/month (7200 miles/year) to
| 30 miles/month over the past year and a half. This took
| my carbon footprint for driving from 1.7 T/y to 0.1 T/y.
|
| The flip side of this number is (for me) that I went from
| heating the house only a few hours a day in the winter to
| heating or cooling one room to comfortable. I don't have
| good numbers on my electrical footprint change. This
| would again be different with different life
| circumstances (number of other people in the house, size
| of house / apartment, etc...)
| alistairSH wrote:
| My Honda gets about 20mpg. My BMW about 25mpg. Maybe I'm
| the exception that proves the rule, but I seriously doubt
| 30mpg is remotely close to average (for office workers)
| in the US.
|
| Edit - The Ford F-150 is the best selling "car" in the US
| by a long shot. That isn't all fleet sales - a
| significant number of normal people own trucks for one
| reason or another (myself included - Honda Ridgeline).
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Practically every ~10yo or newer sedan, wagon and "wagon
| pretending to be a crossover" you see is going to get
| nearly 30mpg (or more).
|
| You need a heck of a lot of 10-15mpg vehicles to drag the
| fleet average down to 22. Most white collar employees who
| own trucks aren't commuting in them and even then there's
| more people commuting in 40+mpg subcompacts and hybrids
| so it should more than balance out.
|
| Look at a high class parking garage, 22mpg just doesn't
| pencil out. 28-30mpg sounds believable.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You're vastly underestimating just how many people own
| massive inefficient pickup trucks and SUVs that they use
| for every trip. Maybe you happen to live in a part of the
| country where this problem isn't particularly bad, but
| the other parts of the country are driving that average
| down.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| You're not understanding. The commuting miles saved by
| working from home is not going to be a cross section of
| the commuting population and the bits that are over-
| represented are going to be the white collar employees
| who skew toward more efficient vehicles so you have to
| pad the fuel economy or carbon estimates to reflect that.
| vel0city wrote:
| I look in high class parking garages around me, and
| easily 1/3 of the cars are giant pickup trucks. Around
| here, tons of people will regularly buy a giant cab truck
| with a 6ft bed they'll mostly use to commute to an office
| job.
|
| Welcome to Texas.
| swader999 wrote:
| You really need sources to decide that reducing commuting is
| a good idea for the environment?
| bombcar wrote:
| The question is what affect it would have. If it's
| minuscule compared to a single bulk cargo freighter it may
| just be window dressing and greenwashing.
|
| If it would reduce 20% of all energy usage worldwide it
| would hugely significant.
| gowld wrote:
| Commute less and also buy less junk.
| inputvolch wrote:
| No, I'd imagine they need a source that the cost is
| "extremely high". Are you being purposely disingenuous by
| reframing the question?
| ctvo wrote:
| I need sources on two claims:
|
| > The cost of commuting on the environment is extremely
| high.
|
| Reasonable, but source please so I can learn more.
|
| > If 20% of jobs permanently switched to remote, the impact
| on carbon emissions would be immediate, and extremely
| positive.
|
| A more extraordinary claim. I also need sources to learn
| more.
| what-the-grump wrote:
| Would like sources and measurement as well however, just
| in NYC the lockdown had a significant impact on the
| nature around the city, the air was clean. Unfortunately
| we are back to precovid traffic levels.
| adolph wrote:
| As a natural experiment, observe the affect of C19 on the
| transportation sector in this chart:
|
| https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/browser/?tbl=T02.01#/?f.
| ..
|
| Granted an unknown portion of the reduced transportation was
| decreased economic activity, so presumably the affect of
| permanent remote work would be smaller.
| nullc wrote:
| Google claims to be carbon neutral.
|
| This claim is false when they are forcing employees to commute
| and not offsetting the emissions from this required activity.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| Yes but that isn't typically how the value-cost balance between
| employee and employer works, unless there is regulation in
| play. Working from home is a benefit which many people would be
| willing to trade X% salary for. This is just market forces at
| work. I've been curious how the market for remote work would
| play out - I'm especially interested in knowing what X ends up
| being.
| eru wrote:
| 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.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| 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 salary, then I think it would be
| fair to assume that the value of in-office work to
| employers is negligible. These types of things are rarely
| this simple though, so I'm going to hold off on having any
| strong opinions.
| swiley wrote:
| The cost of commuting to yourself is extremely high: 1-2 hours
| of unpaid time driving, requirement that you buy a house (or
| _rent_ ) in extremely high CoL areas, car
| maintenance/insurance. It probably all ads up to over 20% of
| your salary over the year.
| pak9rabid wrote:
| This. I've been saying for a decade that if the city of Austin
| was really serious about doing something about its traffic
| problem and reducing CO2 emissions, they should incentivize
| local businesses via tax deductions and/or credits to promote
| remote work for those who can do it. It'd do a helluva lot more
| than building new roads and light-rail lines combined.
| Salgat wrote:
| As an Austin area resident who is well aware of their shitty
| infrastructure and horrible traffic, I've been saying this
| for a while now. The best solution to traffic that Austin
| could do is to simply give tax incentives for remote work.
| That way the businesses are still located in Austin and
| paying taxes, even if they have mostly remote workers, while
| we don't have to pay a fortune on road infrastructure.
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| What should the companies then do about their huge campuses
| with all of the fine amenities? Maybe they could make little
| work-hotels and employees could stay for retreats and such?
| Raphael_Amiard wrote:
| I'm used to the conversation in here being extremely US-
| centric, but realize that this is much less true for European
| cities with good public transportation. I haven't ever used a
| car to go to work in my life.
|
| I'm also very concerned about this better world where people
| stay home to save the planet. The common level of social
| interactions in the modern world is already low enough in my
| opinion.
|
| EDIT: It rarely happens this way but in retrospect I feel my
| comment is way too tame. You think your problem is going to
| work. The problem is the whole american lifestyle where you
| live in an individual house and need a car to do anything, your
| house is an ecological disaster in terms of how much energy you
| need to keep it warm/cold, and even bringing food to your house
| will incur a large carbon footprint.
|
| I know the system is hard to changes, but some people need to
| see the bigger picture, even if you can't do anything about it
| yet.
| dagw wrote:
| _much less true for European cities with good public
| transportation._
|
| I live in a "European city with good public transportation"
| and looking out my living room window I can see the main
| motorway into town, and it is bumper to bumper to traffic
| every single morning and evening. So obviously someone here
| is using their cars to get to and from work.
| samatman wrote:
| There has been a long and mostly fruitful conversation
| between the 'bright greens' and the 'crunchy greens', but
| it's time to resolve the difference.
|
| The difference, briefly: bright greens (I prefer Viridian+)
| support a high-technology road to sustainability, while
| crunchy greens are about bringing our carbon footprint down
| to sane parameters through traditional lifeways and reduction
| in energy use.
|
| + https://www.viridiandesign.org
|
| Simply, we don't have time to indulge the crunchies any
| longer. Carbon zero isn't going to cut it, we need to remove
| carbon from the atmosphere and that calls for substantial
| additional energy.
|
| Either we get everyone up to a nearly-American energy budget,
| with plenty left over for carbon capture, or we reduce
| everyone's standard to that of an Indian peasant and still
| roast.
|
| There are Americans living in big houses, with good
| insulation and heat pumps, solar, and a battery bank, whose
| homes are net exporters of energy. This is not a total
| accounting due to embodied energy, but it points the way.
|
| To me the solution has always been simple: tax carbon and
| apply the proceeds directly to subsidizing replacements for
| polluting technology. If you ask people to give up their
| lifestyle to 'save the planet' they're just going to ignore
| you, and if you try and force them, expect violent
| resistance.
|
| The hard truth is that America has already flattened carbon
| emissions, and given our great wealth we're uniquely
| positioned to pay the new-technology premium to fund the
| transition to a sustainable technology stack. Most of us are
| willing, some of us are stubborn, but insisting that everyone
| live in a pod and eat bugs isn't a winning move. We're
| wealthy, relatively far north, and well armed: why should we?
| blueclue78 wrote:
| Whenever this topic comes up people present being social at
| work like a good thing. Everyone in all the jobs I've had
| were big drinkers, some of them probably used drugs, and some
| of them even used to boast about cheating on their wife. Not
| having to deal with these people any more than necessary is a
| blessing.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| The majority of people do need a car even in Europe.
|
| In France, unless you live in central Paris you do. In the
| UK, unless you live in central London yo do. Now, if you live
| around Paris or London you may be able to commute to work by
| public transport, and many people do, indeed, but many also
| commute by car, and the vast majority do outside of these
| areas. I'm sure the same applies to many other countries.
|
| Edit: By the way I am French and living in England, so I know
| full well from experience how important cars are for the
| majority despite small islands of some town centres where
| people can do without.
|
| > _you live in an individual house_
|
| On the other hand, living in an individual house with a
| garden is much nicer than living in a flat and many people
| (including in Europe) either do that or aspire to that.
|
| I'm usually getting a lot of flack here for saying this, but
| if preserving the environment means severe constraints on
| people's lives (housing, diet, transport, etc) then perhaps
| the way forward is to reduce the global population to a point
| where that everyone can enjoy life while still preserving the
| environment.
|
| My vision of an ideal future is everyone able to live in
| nature, in a house with a large garden, rather than in tower
| blocks, in pods, only eating what's allowed.
| tialaramex wrote:
| It's not just London. I live in a city on the UK's south
| coast, I _can_ drive but I don 't, and I have never owned a
| car. Many people I know here also don't own cars, some of
| them can't drive. I've worked for outfits in London, in
| Nottingham (visiting about once a fortnight, train, hotel,
| train back) and here in Southampton, not a problem.
|
| London is better because the Tories weren't able to abolish
| its public transport network and sell it off piecemeal -
| because the government's own workforce lives there and
| can't get anything done without that transport system, but
| even in a city with a dysfunctional semi-privatised mess of
| a transport system it's still just better than trying to
| turn everything into highways stacked upon highways forever
| so everybody can use private cars. There's actually a
| 70s-80s division of my city that was built with that
| approach, over the river, and it's awful there. But it's
| nice here and further into the city.
|
| > perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global
| population to a point where that everyone can enjoy life
|
| I definitely think people who believe this should agree
| which of you will die so that the others can "enjoy life".
| Are you volunteering? Because if not you don't have an
| actual proposal here, just ordinary selfishness.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _I definitely think people who believe this should
| agree which of you will die so that the others can "enjoy
| life". Are you volunteering? Because if not you don't
| have an actual proposal here, just ordinary selfishness._
|
| Why do people feel the need to always make this sort of
| ridiculous comment?
|
| Population cannot keep growing forever but it is still
| seen as positive and needed. First step would be to
| remove all incentive to have more children and to
| prioritise education and family planning worldwide. Then,
| we can think of how to adapt society to the consequences
| (which are coming anyway because that's already starting
| to happen). I'm only suggesting that we should embrace
| the trend instead of trying to delay it.
| bovine3dom wrote:
| Transport options available to me living in mid-sized
| European city:
|
| - Tram
|
| - Train
|
| - Electric bicycle hire
|
| - Electric moped hire
|
| - Bicycle hire
|
| - Foot
|
| - Taxi
|
| - Bus
|
| - Own bicycle / ebike / electric scooter / moped
|
| - Aeroplane
|
| - Own car (if you can afford ~EUR40k to buy a parking
| space)
|
| - Ferry
|
| Transport options available in American suburbs:
|
| - Own car
|
| It seems to me that most Americans are already living under
| severe restrictions : )
| vel0city wrote:
| I'm in an American suburb. Transport options available to
| me:
|
| - Lightrail
|
| - Train (Amtrack station downtown, accessible from
| lightrail)
|
| - Bus (w/bike rack, bus stop 100ft from my front door)
|
| - Electric bicycle hire
|
| - Electric scooter hire
|
| - Foot (nearest grocery is 1.2mi, nearest restaurants are
| 0.8mi)
|
| - Taxi
|
| - Own bicycle (bike trail from neighborhood to the office
| park where I work)
|
| - Aeroplane (lightrail goes to one of the largest
| international airports)
|
| - Own Car (large driveway, two car garage w/ electric
| vehicle charging)
|
| - Own bicycle
|
| - Own Motorcycle
| bovine3dom wrote:
| That sounds great, why aren't there more places like that
| in the US or why don't I hear about them? Do you find you
| have to use your car often?
|
| (Although living 2km away from a supermarket is an alien
| concept to me. I have three within a hundred metres.)
| vel0city wrote:
| You might not hear about it as much because sadly the
| mass transit is underutilized by a lot of my neighbors.
| Also, people usually really prefer the freedom of having
| private transportation. Like, just riding a bicycle so
| max of ~5mi or so, I have maybe an option of three
| different supermarkets (six if you include pharmacies,
| which usually do stock some groceries). If you add a
| simple bus route, that adds maybe another two. If you
| choose to take a car, its literally more than dozen
| different super markets within a 10 minute drive which
| would have been an unrealistic bike ride or a complex bus
| path, which is not something you want to do with a week's
| worth of a family's amount of food you're carrying.
|
| Its then the same thing when it comes to going to
| restaurants. I can easily walk to three or four
| restaurants. Bike, add another handful. Bus, add another
| dozen. A 10min drive? Literally a dozen options of
| practically any kind of food you could possibly imagine.
|
| So you get less choices for more time if you ride a bike
| or take the bus. This is the math that most Americans do.
| Since its somewhat cheap to own a car for most of the US,
| they don't even stop to think of the cost of driving
| versus the cost of riding a bike or walking or taking the
| bus.
|
| As to having a supermarket close by, the supermarkets
| near me as absolutely massive. The Kroger near me has at
| least 30 aisles, a full deli, full bakery, full butcher
| stand, full florist, fresh sushi station, massive produce
| section, and a hot and ready to go meal area. And its
| only about average sized for the area. If you've never
| seen them, modern American supermarkets are incredibly
| massive, larger than what I've seen of most European
| groceries. There's usually a bit of distance between them
| because they're such massive places. Its often not just a
| small hole in the wall grocer with a dozen or so aisles
| and a produce section.
| bovine3dom wrote:
| Thanks for replying, it's really fascinating.
|
| I think part of the difference is density - my city is
| only about 3km x 3km. If I cycled 5 miles I'd end up in
| the next town along. I just looked on TripAdvisor to see
| how many restaurants were within that range but it maxxed
| out at 1,000+.
|
| We do have big supermarkets too, at the edge of the city
| - about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth,
| apparently only a bit smaller than the average Walmart.
| I've never really seen why I would go there, except
| perhaps for ease of parking if I was going to buy a huge
| amount of food with a car. And this is France so even the
| tiny supermarkets make room for a bakery : )
|
| So the maths here is mostly that cars are just negative.
| I'm very optimistic that electric bikes will begin to
| dominate transport in European cities - we just need to
| build the infrastructure to make sure that they're safe
| to ride.
| vel0city wrote:
| > about 75,000 sqft eyeballing it on Google Earth,
| apparently only a bit smaller than the average Walmart
|
| The average Walmart is twice that size at ~180,000sqft.
| bovine3dom wrote:
| The number I saw was 100,000 sqft - it seems like it
| depends on whether you exclude the smallest Walmarts : )
| vel0city wrote:
| They have over 3,400 stores at ~180,000sqft. There are
| three within a short drive from my home. They have ~190
| around 40,000sqft. The ~800 mid-sized "discount" stores
| are mostly closing and don't have groceries, they're
| ~100,000sqft.
|
| Big American stores are absolutely _massive_ , and
| they're all over the place.
|
| https://247wallst.com/retail/2014/03/22/walmart-now-has-
| six-...
|
| You mentioned you had like _one_ of these massive stores
| at the edge of your town, and it was still only half as
| big. I 've got several of these monsters within 8mi of my
| home.
| bovine3dom wrote:
| I'll update the size of American supermarkets in my mind
| by 100% : )
|
| There are broadly 5 big shops within comfortable distance
| of me - one of them is between 150-200,000 sqft [1], so I
| guess a mid-sized American store. But I've only been to
| one of them, when I needed some electronics, because I
| don't see the point otherwise. Presumably other people do
| or the shops wouldn't exist...
|
| Unrelated - does "town" mean something different in
| American English? To me it means a place bigger than a
| village but smaller than a city. The city I'm in has 300k
| - 1m people in it, depending on how you draw the
| boundaries.
|
| [1]: its car park extends onto its roof which I guess
| might be amusing to an American. Land is expensive here.
| vel0city wrote:
| I said "town" due to the geographic size of ~3km^2. My
| "town", really a small city, is ~70km^2 and a population
| of ~100k. It is surrounded by other towns/cities forming
| the Dallas/Ft Worth Metroplex, which metro area is
| 24,000km^2 with ~6 million people in that space.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dallas%E2%80%93Fort_Worth_m
| etr...
|
| I just checked Google Maps, there are almost a dozen of
| these 180,000sqft Walmarts within a 10min drive (a
| "comfortable distance" here) from my home. And that's
| just Walmart, there's also probably another six or so
| Target locations of similar size. I do agree this is
| absolutely excessive and insane though, there's such a
| massive amount of real estate of just big box retail.
|
| The reason why these stores are seemingly dominating
| local retail is the same reason why cars are dominating
| travel in the US or why Amazon seems to be dominating
| internet retail. Apparent convenience. Why bother going
| to a clothier, then go to a cobbler, then go to the
| electronics store, then go to a video store, then go to
| the furniture store, then go to the auto parts store,
| then go to the butcher, then go to the baker, then go to
| the grocer. Instead, you can do practically every bit of
| your shopping in a single store, all at once. Find some
| new linens for your bed, then go grab a new pair of
| shoes, better stock up on some fresh underwear, maybe
| that 40" TV we got a few years ago isn't cutting it get a
| bigger one, then grab some milk and eggs and we'll check
| out in the Auto department to pick up the car after the
| oil change.
| bovine3dom wrote:
| Hah, I've actually looked at Dallas-Fort Worth before and
| been horrified at how so much of its residential green
| space is golf courses. Is most of the conurbation as well
| served by non-car transport or is your area a special
| case? It looks so low density that it's hard to imagine
| anything being economically viable. Then again, bike
| lanes and bike racks are so cheap that they're pretty
| much free.
|
| I do understand consolidating regular purchases into one
| trip - I just go to the supermarket for food (and
| occasionally Asian supermarkets for non-perishables that
| French supermarkets don't sell). I don't see the added
| convenience in doing the same with once-in-5-year
| purchases. If anything I'd probably get fed up with
| walking past loads of things I wasn't remotely interested
| in buying. Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff
| that I just don't have.
| vel0city wrote:
| > Is most of the conurbation as well served by non-car
| transport or is your area a special case?
|
| I'm definitely in the more special case kind of area, by
| choice. There were many reasons why I picked the place
| where I live, and transit options were one of the key
| ones.
|
| > Maybe there's some spontaneity to buying stuff that I
| just don't have.
|
| I feel you on this idea. I'm not really a huge fan of
| these ridiculously giant stores with absolutely massive
| parking lots, I'd like for smaller grocers to be more
| popular. In the US at least, smaller grocers are dying,
| and grocers surviving are building bigger stores to try
| and compete more on the level of those 180,000sqft
| behemoths. The death of the smaller grocers leave behind
| 15-20,0000sqft largely empty retail storefronts around,
| at least in the big cities.
|
| > horrified at how so much of its residential green space
| is golf courses.
|
| There's a municipal golf course real close to my house,
| at the edge of my neighborhood. What is so horrifying
| about it? This land was prairie land, so its not like
| we're greenifying the desert or something like that. It
| would have been a bunch of small rolling hills, creeks,
| small ponds, and grasses before it was a golf course. The
| people in the area like to golf, why is it any worse than
| it just being a more generic park? Would you have also
| expressed such horror if it was filled with frisbee golf
| courses, or soccer fields?
|
| That said, within my neighborhood there's a several acre
| park that _is_ a bit more of generic greenspace. It has
| playgrounds for kids, a fishing pond, a soccer field, a
| baseball field, a softball field, etc. It also has a
| bunch of picnic tables and grills scattered at the tree
| lines. These kinds of parks are pretty common around
| where I live as well. It is not like _all_ parks are golf
| courses. Certainly more than what you 'd see in France,
| but golf is also significantly more popular here than in
| urban areas of France I'd imagine. If nobody was using
| them I'd get the point of them being horrified at the
| waste, but for many of the golf courses you need to book
| your tee time days in advance.
| bovine3dom wrote:
| I don't have anything against golf as such, it's more
| that from a distance they looked like really nice little
| parks that people could use to walk between
| neighbourhoods, socialise, walk dogs, picnic in etc. Then
| I zoomed in and realised it was probably only for people
| playing golf. Football pitches are less well camouflaged
| from satellite pictures, so they wouldn't be as
| disappointing. Golf courses are kind of inherently low
| density too - you can't really cram many more than five
| people onto each hole at once.
|
| FWIW we do have golf clubs here - Cannes / Antibes in
| particular has loads - but that's unrepresentative of
| France as a whole.
|
| Your park does sound nice. I'd heard stories of Americans
| in suburbs having to drive their dogs to places where
| they could be walked - maybe it was an exaggeration.
| vel0city wrote:
| This would be very strange, maybe they meant take outside
| off a leash? I can take my dog to the park in my
| neighborhood but there are leash laws requiring him to be
| on-leash unless at a specified "dog park" fenced in
| space. There are a few dog parks that would be more in
| the driving kind of distance* which have separate fenced
| in areas depending on size. I mostly just take my dog
| around the park on his leash, or walk around the
| neighborhood, or just take advantage of the couple
| thousand square feet of yard I have in my backyard. After
| all, that's one of the many reasons why I _have_ a yard,
| a nice safe place for my child and dog to play around in,
| a private place I can set up amateur radio antennas
| somewhat permanently, a private place I can grill and
| entertain at the private pool, etc. My dog can feel free
| to just leave to the backyard through a doggie door any
| time he wants and chase off the neighborhood cats,
| squirrels, rodents, etc.
|
| At least when it comes to the municipal golf courses,
| those are usually open to the public during the day to
| walk all the trails around the courses. They're often
| also connected to the bike trails in the municipal area
| which are then usually connected to a lot of the other
| parks and nature preserves. There are over 80 miles of
| bike and walking trails in my small city that connect
| most of the parks and greenspaces. They are not bike
| lanes on a busy street; these are separate paths that cut
| through behind neighborhoods, down utility corridors, go
| under busy bridges, etc.
|
| And I do acknowledge many French people love golf and
| there are golf courses around, but especially compared to
| DFW I can't imagine _on average_ its as popular. I 'd
| wager at least 20% of families have at least one full set
| of golf clubs, and a large percentage of them do some
| kind of golf event a few times a year. Dallas is the home
| of places like Top Golf, which is a massively popular
| evening outing. You wouldn't be able to even think about
| building something like this inside most urban areas of
| France, but DFW has four and they're always like a
| 30-40min wait.
|
| https://topgolf.com/us/
|
| * Its only a few miles on walking trails, but my dog
| would probably be halfway worn out just getting to the
| park and would be completely exhausted starting out the
| trip home.
| cycomanic wrote:
| >The majority of people do need a car even in Europe.
|
| >In France, unless you live in central Paris you do. In the
| UK, unless you live in central London yo do. Now, if you
| live around Paris or London you may be able to commute to
| work by public transport, and many people do, indeed, but
| many also commute by car, and the vast majority do outside
| of these areas. I'm sure the same applies to many other
| countries.
|
| Actually in France it's much more than Paris, living in
| Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse, Besancon to name just some cities
| I'm familiar with, you can live without a car. Similarly in
| a lot of German cities even down to population levels of
| 50,000 people you can often live perfectly fine without a
| car.
|
| >> you live in an individual house
|
| >On the other hand, living in an individual house with a
| garden is much nicer than living in a flat and many people
| (including in Europe) either do that or aspire to that.
|
| And a lot of people at the same time want those houses to
| be right in the city centre as well, and can't afford it.
| Also I think the flat vs house trade-off is a huge function
| of type and quality of flats and the city planning.
|
| >I'm usually getting a lot of flack here for saying this,
| but if preserving the environment means severe constraints
| on people's lives (housing, diet, transport, etc) then
| perhaps the way forward is to reduce the global population
| to a point where that everyone can enjoy life while still
| preserving the environment.
|
| Sounds like a great idea. It's funny how people regard
| reducing carbon emissions by changing behaviour (e.g.
| moving to flats, using less cars ...) unrealistic, but then
| put suggestions like this forward. How would you reduce
| earths population by a factor 2 in the next 100 years? Even
| if you could somehow do this, there would be huge economic
| implications (much bigger than going to a zero carbon
| economy in the same time).
|
| > My vision of an ideal future is everyone able to live in
| nature, in a house with a large garden, rather than in
| tower blocks, in pods, only eating what's allowed.
|
| What are you willing to give up for that future, because
| the reduction in population that would make this possible
| doesn't come for free.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _It 's funny how people regard reducing carbon
| emissions by changing behaviour (e.g. moving to flats,
| using less cars ...) unrealistic, but then put
| suggestions like this forward._
|
| I'm not suggesting that this is unrealistic or that we
| should not reduce emissions.
|
| However, my view is that we live and work to make our
| lives more interesting and enjoyable, not to sacrifice
| ourselves for the sake of squeezing ever more of us on
| the planet.
|
| The end of population growth, and even more population
| reduction, are massive changes to the way society and our
| economy work, I fully agree.
|
| But ultimately this is unavoidable if we accept that
| population cannot grow forever on a finite planet (and it
| is already expected that it will stabilise of even
| decrease by the end of the century). I'm suggesting that
| we should therefore embrace this and see it as a positive
| rather than a negative (which is the usual view) because
| it has tremendous potential for making quality of life
| better for all humans in a sustainable way.
| macksd wrote:
| I see a lot of "this is a US-only problem" comments here
| lately on many topics and I just don't get it because it's
| usually just not remotely correct at all, nevermind relevant
| if most of the discussion IS based in the US, like for a US-
| based company. I lived in 3 different countries growing up,
| mostly with far more European influence than the US has now,
| and never at any time did most people I saw live in anything
| but individual houses that needed to be heated in the winter,
| and never at any time did my Dad not spend 1-2 hours
| commuting in a car every day. Yesterday someone was claiming
| MTV was a US-only thing. Sure, it's not universal, but
| claiming that it's US-only says more about their world view
| than any American IMO.
|
| But aside from that, when I started being remote my social
| interactions went way up in terms of quantity and quality. I
| was free to choose where I lived, had lower cost of living,
| and had more time and less stress and other factors that
| would put me in a bad mood. Consequently, I spent more time
| with extended family members on both sides of my family. I
| played more with my children. I picked up healthier hobbies,
| including one where I train with a team at the gym. My social
| circle is far more diverse, more distinct from work. As
| others have experienced during COVID: I got to know my
| neighbors better, and we look out for each other. Having your
| social interaction primarily at work is very far from ideal,
| and in my experience and from many anecdotes here, cutting
| down the work interaction helps most others.
| tener wrote:
| While good public transport helps to cut the carbon
| emissions, it also isn't free and can only be established
| above certain population density. This creates pressure for
| people to live in a big cities and that causes a lot of
| problems.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| or, get a bike. healthy, no emissions, and on top of that,
| cheap.
| reidjs wrote:
| True, but not everyone lives close enough to work or is
| in physical shape to bike. Most people should, though :)
| nend wrote:
| I agree with your overall point, but as a (nearly middle
| aged) American, I've almost never commuted by car or lived in
| a single family house as an adult.
|
| And frankly I'm sick of being lumped in to large
| generalizations of America that simply don't apply to me or
| millions of other people living here.
|
| The media (including social media, and the internet) largely
| consists of the most divisive and stereotyped parts of life.
| America doesn't consist solely of highways and single family
| communities. There isn't just one "American lifestyle."
| Raphael_Amiard wrote:
| Of course! But there are some tendencies, or else OP's
| comment wouldn't have made sense even in the context of the
| US.
|
| My first few times in the US were in NYC, where I found a
| way of life that is very close to what I know as a
| Parisian. Imagine my surprise discovering basically any
| other city in the US.
|
| You might not be part of that population, but the US
| problem goes way beyond a problem of perception, and there
| are numbers to confirm it.
| nend wrote:
| Agreed, I was mostly complaining about using the phrase
| "the American Lifestyle" as if there was one lifestyle we
| all follow. There isn't, and the casual generalization of
| millions of people is inaccurate.
| Igelau wrote:
| It's as annoying as the popular misconception that we have
| any real choices regarding our elected officials and their
| policies. Uhh, yeah, let me just build a whole slew of
| candidates from scratch who actually want to do anything
| about real root cause issues.
|
| Racism is another one. I don't have any fscks left to give
| for anyone who wants to lecture me on racism in America.
| Our racial tensions are only visible because we aren't
| totally marginalizing (or cleansing for that matter) our
| minority populations.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "The problem is the whole american lifestyle"
|
| We're not Europeans here, Raphael. We don't want to be.
|
| Secondly, I've been on business trips to the UK, and the
| motorways are jammed in the morning, as someone else said
| here.
|
| Maybe 20-somethings live in apartments and take the bus, but
| even in your country, home ownership is high and many people
| drive their cars.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > We're not Europeans here, Raphael. We don't want to be.
|
| Speak for yourself. Almost everybody I know would be
| thrilled to see better transit, walking, and bicycle
| options even if it means getting rid of their car and yard.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "Almost everybody I know" is the key phrase there. Does
| that include anyone over 40, or anyone living in a rural
| or semi-rural community?
| barrenko wrote:
| This is also narrowminded as much of Europe (even just EU for
| that matter) does not live in such idealized environment. We
| don't all live in Amsterdam.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| I've only lived in Amsterdam the last decade, the 3 decades
| before that in the 'rural' parts of .nl
|
| I would say this idealized environment is not really
| present in Amsterdam, but it surely is in the rest of .nl
| ekianjo wrote:
| > good public transportation.
|
| Public transportation has a higher environment cost than
| staying at home to work. That should be fairly obvious.
| easytiger wrote:
| This reductive argument is rather tiresome. All human
| activity has a cost. Humans are social beings. HN may want
| to shill for being cooped up but that doesn't represent how
| most of the world live or want to live
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| Isn't this story about people who want to work from home?
| easytiger wrote:
| I'm sorry, I don't see how your point relates to mine,
| nor why it is a question?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Heating and cooling lots of individual homes isn't as
| efficient as office buildings. I'd love to see math on
| which one is better for the environment.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| It's going to vary entirely depending on your dwelling
| type. But that's a red herring I think. We need to make
| homes energy efficient anyway (regardless where people
| work) and once you've insulated/moved to more efficient
| heating/cooling then the cost of keeping your dwelling
| running for the hours you're personally out should be
| pretty low. Not to mention however many households have
| to be kept warm/cool because there are other household
| members home.
| yholio wrote:
| Buildings generally lose or gain heat throughout the day,
| proportional to the indoor-outdoor temperature
| differential. So a building that maintains livable
| temperatures for say, 12h a day, will still have those
| energy leaks when the owner is out, and they would have
| to compensate in the evening the exact amount of energy
| lost or gained to get back to comfortable temperatures.
|
| So unless your home has such ridiculously bad insulation
| that it quickly approaches outside temperature after
| turning off heating/cooling, you won't see significant
| energy savings by going outside of the house half the
| time. Never mind multiple occupants, kids and the
| elderly, pets, diverging working hours etc.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| A home that has AC running half of the day will use a lot
| less energy in total than one running all day long. There
| are substantial efficiency losses from heat leaking in,
| which will be exacerbated by trying to maintain a larger
| temperature delta 24 hours of each day. A house is not a
| perfect temperature battery on the scale of hours, far
| from it.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Maybe the solution is not having the AC running the whole
| time? I mean why do you need your house cooled to 19
| degC?
| zajio1am wrote:
| Depends on house type. For american-style wooden houses
| that might be true, but where buildings are built
| primarily using concrete with outer insulation, their
| thermal mass and inertia is much bigger.
| NhanH wrote:
| Public transportation doesn't do autoscaling.
| rjmunro wrote:
| It can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0ddExZbKD8
|
| Usually it needs to be done by predicting ahead, e.g. so
| you put on more busses when there is a football game, or
| when it's School or University term time.
| justwanttolearn wrote:
| I've had better level of social interactions since I started
| staying home and the quality of my relationships are much
| better than the surface ones I have with my coworkers.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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 everyone used to
| hang outside, and now, they don't.
|
| That said, a whole lot of places are gonna have to get used
| to using air conditioners, and that won't be good for the
| environment.
|
| I remember being in a town in Northern Germany, when a summer
| heat wave hit. It was awful. No one had air conditioning, and
| there were no fans to be found, in any stores.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| It was the same here in NL. I'm thinking of doubling the
| solar panels and getting airco - at least then the
| environmental cost is relatively low.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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 expensive).
|
| I think in general warm weather is conductive to social
| activities (just look at Southern Italy vs Norway, or
| basically any place in Northern Europe vs any place in
| Southern Europe), but air conditioning drives people to
| just stay at home. It will be interesting to see how this
| plays out.
| lwn wrote:
| Interesting hypothesis about airconditioning being the
| reason for staying indoors. I always assumed TV was the
| main cause.
| porknubbins wrote:
| I don't think its necessarily US centric to live in a spread
| out way. Pretty much anywhere you have the combination of
| wealth + open space + uncomfortable weather you will see
| people spread out and drive places- ie Australia, Canada,
| parts of the Middle East. I personally have been happier
| living smaller human scale environments but Europe has a lot
| of natural advantages like milder climate and better social
| fabric/less crime that lets people live like this. When I
| lived in Japan people do actually commute in suits in the
| summer but enduring suffering is kind of a cultural norm
| there. Where I live people are not willing to be drenched in
| sweat walking to/from train stations which is what would
| happen.
| physicsguy wrote:
| > I haven't ever used a car to go to work in my life.
|
| Think that depends a lot on where you live. When I was a
| student, I didn't use a car at all, but my wife did during my
| PhD to get to work, and now we both have to have cars because
| our commutes are not practical by public transport. This is
| living in the Midlands in the UK.
| heipei wrote:
| It's less true, but still very much true. In Germany for
| example, commuting via car unlocks tax incentives per extra
| kilometer traveled.
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| The "Entfernungspauschale" is not tied to the mode of
| transportation. You get a tax write off for the distance
| that you commute (regardless if you walk, drive a car, take
| a bike or ride a train). But I do believe it's the wrong
| incentive.
| boplicity wrote:
| The European vision of living in dense, walkable
| neighborhoods, with easy access to quality amenities without
| the need to drive makes sense, to me at least, as the answer
| to this problem.
|
| I'm not advocating for staying home; I'm advocating for less
| driving. It may not make as much of a difference in the E.U.,
| but if we're aiming to be carbon neutral, less driving _will_
| be necessary, or, at least, extremely helpful in achieving
| that goal.
| Raphael_Amiard wrote:
| Ok! Sorry about the violent agreement message then. Yes,
| there is definitely a balance to be found between
| individual freedom and collective well being here.
|
| I guess what I'm getting at is that if people drive less,
| they'll realize that their car-centered lifestyles don't
| work anymore, and will have to find alternatives. Let's
| hope that's easier than what I envision :)
| barrenko wrote:
| EU vision is never EU reality.
| vp8989 wrote:
| "The European vision of living in dense, walkable
| neighborhoods, with easy access to quality amenities
| without the need to drive makes sense, to me at least, as
| the answer to this problem."
|
| What vision? People in Europe drive cars. The cars are
| smaller and things are less sprawled out than in the US,
| but people still drive. Europe is not just central London
| or Barcelona.
| rtlfe wrote:
| > People in Europe drive cars.
|
| Of course some do, but far fewer than in the US. France
| and UK have roughly half the number of cars per capita
| compared to the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicl
| es_...
| _fizz_buzz_ wrote:
| Lots of people in Europe also take the car to work. At my
| work I would say definitely more than 50%.
| glenneroo wrote:
| To contribute to the anecdotal evidences, at our company I
| would guess 25% and AFAIK they all live in the suburbs and
| drive to the nearest subway station in the city and use
| public transit the rest of the journey because traffic at
| start/end workday hours is a nightmare.
| maweki wrote:
| As other people pointed out: this varies wildly by city or
| region. In urban areas cars are really not incredibly
| common. In Berlin you'll find that only 1/3 of people even
| own a car. Of course, even fewer go to work by car.
|
| In Munich, you'll find 1/2 of people owning a car.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yep, even larger cities may not have public infrastruture
| that matches the requirement of all. I've had all kinds
| of jobs in the same area. One job was perfect for bus,
| another had biking as the fastest option. Current job and
| geography means that I can drive 15 - 20min, bike 60min
| or bus for 90min.
| bosie wrote:
| given that munich isn't a small city either, what's the
| reason for more people owning a car?
| rjmunro wrote:
| I think it's far more localised than "city" or "region".
| It depends on where in the city the place of work is and
| if there is a car park.
|
| E.g. the 2 biggest employers in Oxford UK are the
| University, where almost no one would commute by car, and
| the MINI car factory, where almost everyone would. That's
| because the University is in the historic part of town,
| with good bus service, near the main train station, easy
| cycling and no parking, but the car factory is at the
| edge of town, with good access to the road network and
| lots of parking.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| In the case of the USA, people staying home to work might
| have a positive impact on social interaction in the long run.
|
| I'm pretty sure a large part of the reason why Americans are
| so lonely compared to the rest of the world is that the
| suburban bedroom community model physically divides us and
| makes it much more difficult to get to know one's neighbors.
| By the time you get home from work at 6:30 in the evening,
| it's time to cook dinner, and, once you're done cleaning up,
| there's not much time for anything aside from watching a bit
| of TV before you go to bed.
|
| And then the weekend rolls around, and your time is dominated
| by catching up on all the housework and errands you didn't
| have time to do during the week because of your long commute.
| So you're not really getting to know your neighbors then,
| either.
| arsome wrote:
| Interesting, the opposite has been my experience, friends
| keep talking about how they can now move farther out of
| town and not have to deal with neighbours anymore. I'm
| considering similar.
|
| Ultimately, people are more of a pain to deal with than a
| pleasure until you really get to know them. I suspect this
| is the same reason suburbs seem to be more appealing and
| costly than condos.
| lanstin wrote:
| Yeah I have gotten to know my neighbors a lot better during
| COVID. And it is nice. And when I change jobs I won't loose
| them.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I'm old, I don't really make friends with work people. I
| seem to be in the minority now and maybe that's because
| everyone I work with moved here as soon as they were done
| with school.
|
| It's really strange and I sometimes feel like an
| outsider. But everyone's going on hikes on the weekend
| and going to movies together. I'm not going back into the
| office at this point and one thing that appeals to me
| about remote distributed work is that it's separate from
| the rest of my life. When I walk away from my laptop,
| it's just gone.
| Raphael_Amiard wrote:
| Interesting. I'm symmetrically not used to think about
| those problems from an american perspective. Thanks for the
| insight.
|
| I can indeed see a world where working from home might in
| the short term infuse some life in local life, from
| neighbors to associations etc.. So maybe it's actually a
| positive change!
| jaredmosley wrote:
| It's definitely true for me. Working from home, I see my
| neighbors before work, during lunch, and after work much
| more than when they were going to the office. Especially,
| during lunch time, I see a lot more people that actually
| live near me out and about instead of people that happen
| to work in my general area that I'd typically never see
| after work or on the weekend since they'd go back to
| their own neighborhoods.
| jethro_tell wrote:
| I know that in my city, some restaurants closed in the
| downtown core but out in the population centers new
| restaurants open, a few friends in the business said
| revenue went up mostly in lunch service and afternoon
| happy hour time frame. That's after having 50% less
| tables because inside dining was closed.
|
| The shift from doing lunch with your coworkers to doing
| lunch around your neighbors seems really positive to me.
| ed_balls wrote:
| I only know my neighbours, because of a dog.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| Would it? Remote work might incentive overall less density,
| which, on the whole, leads to a bigger carbon footprint per
| capita.
| eru wrote:
| Depends on where people want to live and work.
|
| But a big part of why lower density is bad is because it
| leads to lots of commuting.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I live in NYC and don't own a car. All my errands are done
| on foot and by bike, and I'm using relatively little power
| because I live in a big apartment building.
|
| If I lived in the suburbs and had to use a car for most
| trips, then my carbon footprint would be substantially
| higher, even without having to commute. This map gets to
| the heart of the issue: https://twitter.com/TheJakeSchmidt/
| status/142478272240963174...
| alistairSH wrote:
| Commuting is no doubt a large contributor to carbon
| emissions. But, suburban and rural living lead to car-
| centric lifestyles in general. Driving to school, to the
| grocer, to entertainment and dining, etc. Plus all the
| infrastructure to support that - more roads, giant parking
| lots, etc.
| eru wrote:
| Yes, perhaps. So a carbon tax is still a good idea. (And
| so is removing things like minimum parking requirements.)
| [deleted]
| FiReaNG3L wrote:
| Turns out competing with the whole world and not who is ready to
| relocate to an extremely expensive area of the world brings
| downsides, who knew.
|
| Time to realize that this 'work from home' push will lead to more
| globalization, and more loss of wealth / quality of life for the
| people of the West.
| wegs wrote:
| I think we'll see more globalization, but I think people
| overstate the level of the transition:
|
| 1) Done well, remote work is at least as effective as office-
| based. However, my experience is that most companies aren't
| doing remote work remotely well, even 15 months in.
|
| 2) Globalization has to do with more than just being remote. An
| issue we still haven't solved are time zones.
|
| I think the first move we'll see is from San Fran, Mountain
| View, etc. to cheaper parts of the US, closer to food
| production, and with more available land.
| runbathtime wrote:
| Somehow I think they will be ok.
|
| Also, the ones that can show their productivity increased at home
| might get a raise.
| [deleted]
| mamaluigie wrote:
| The office at the location that I currently am based in for my
| company includes a courtyard with pond for breaks, an onsite
| massage therapist, food court with good food, workout gym, and
| other things... If I am not getting to use these extra provided
| perks I am expecting for my company to make up for that by paying
| me a portion of what they were spending on all of those in person
| perks. This is prob going to make some developers quit working at
| google I could imagine.
| xcambar wrote:
| I'm hearing more and more that companies cut compensation based
| on remote or onsite work.
|
| But what I've heard only concerns hiring processes, which is
| already alarming, whereas this article mentions during-contract
| salary cut, which I can't comment on since it is just plain
| illegal where I am (Europe) and I'm just educated to react very
| strongly to this madness. See? I just did it :)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Google is punishing its employees for potentially devaluing its
| billions of dollars of investments in campus and office real
| estate.
| vitus wrote:
| If anyone's curious about the underlying details:
|
| Each state has an associated salary band. For certain
| metropolitan statistical areas (defined by the OMB to encompass
| certain counties), as noted in the article, there is an
| overriding (typically higher) salary band.
|
| This leads to quirks like someone in Milford, PA (~70 miles
| northwest of NYC) being paid top dollar, as part of the NYC metro
| area, but someone in Bethlehem (80 miles west of NYC) being paid
| 15% less. Or, if you live in Santa Cruz, you'd be paid about 10%
| less than if you continued working out of the Mountain View
| office (just 30-40 miles to the north).
|
| (The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely cherrypicked
| as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is in a lower
| band than California.)
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely
| cherrypicked as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is
| in a lower band than California
|
| The majority of Tahoe is in California.
| vitus wrote:
| Yes, and California outside of the Bay Area is all the same
| salary band, whereas if you move across the border to NV, you
| get bumped down a band.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| > (The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely
| cherrypicked as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is
| in a lower band than California.)
|
| Nevada doesn't have a state income tax though, so most people
| making that move will barely see a change in net pay.
| Washington is 10% off Bay Area/NYC peak salary for similar
| reasons.
| rowland66 wrote:
| If Google is going to allow US employees to work from anywhere
| in the US, they should not be adjusting wages based on an
| employee's residence. Where an employee chooses to live becomes
| no different from what car they choose to buy. Google should
| pay a consistent wage scale based on a median cost of living
| across the US. This would probably be an unpleasant adjustment
| for many Googlers in high cost locales.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| Is there a public data set of these salary bands? Combining
| that with housing data would allow one to optimize the salary-
| to-expense ratio. I think that'd be a valuable service.
| vitus wrote:
| I'm not aware of any public datasets, unfortunately.
|
| There are many internal maps; in short the winner was "cheap
| housing in the Atlanta metro area".
|
| (I'm glad that Atlanta's finally seeing increased engineering
| investment! It always felt like a shame that our only tech
| presence in the area was for datacenter work, given the
| proximity to Georgia Tech. I guess Google Fiber too...)
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| That's interesting, thanks for sharing.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| You gotta be a special kind of idiot to choose a 2hr commute over
| a 10% pay cut
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| While in general I think work from home, or hybrid is a good
| thing, it is different with Google. I was invited to work there
| as a contractor on one specific project, and being on campus was
| so much fun (food, invited lecturers, walking around during
| breaks). Working remotely wouldn't have been nearly as enjoyable.
| liminal wrote:
| Doesn't the company save a lot of money with remote workers? It
| seems like they could afford to pay _more_ to people who work
| remotely.
| oakfr wrote:
| Am surprise by the census data for Lake Tahoe and the 25% drop in
| salary that goes with it. Isn't this a super wealthy area? This
| is going to hurt the Googlers who where going to trade their
| primary home for their secondary one.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Tahoe is definitely not a super wealthy area for permanent
| residents. It's the same as a lot of tourism driven towns. Lots
| of middle class and lower middle class folks who work in the
| tourism industries (skiing, casinos, etc.).
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