Google employees who work from home could lose money | Hacker News Reader

Google employees who work from home could lose money

reuters.com

380 pointspseudolus681 comments

> 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.

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.

It’s also awful timing. After what, 18 months of productive WFH now they want to cut salary?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Given what we know about longer hours and productivity, plus Google’s low retention figures, I’m going to go with the latter.

What do we know about Google's retention figures?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Depending which team you're on, just work west coast hours from Waterloo. No one will notice.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Sure, how can I reach you

definitelynotmmmmmbop [at] gmail [dot] com

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.

> 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/eroberts/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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

The empty platitudes of “we work better together” is a giveaway that they don’t have that data.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pissing off your employees and finding excuses to cut salary is what a "sane" company does? Sounds short sighted at best.

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)

As a counterexample, my company pays us 3€ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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)

there's still shitton of skilled people that are interested in working for Google

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

> 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.

Good point. Tone-deaf was how we took it.

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.

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.

There are more people in the remote pool than in the in-office pool. Also it is better for employees to be remote than to be in the office, meaning they are willing to get a paycut to get it. Lastly COL and tax adjustments.

There are perfectly capable engineers in this world making under 1000U$S a month, they are just not in the US.

> 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.

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.

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"

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)

Yeah, it would be a total no-brainer. Especially given that we're likely talking about a six-figure salary in the first place…

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.

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.

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.

We should probably assume that people commute via car unless noted otherwise, since it is by far the most common method.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

That sounds like the commute is really mostly work time then, right? Do you get to clock in/out 45 minutes late/early?

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.

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.

Presumably there's a lunch break in there.

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

Pretty sure you're wrong. If you drive, the commute can be a stressful waste of time.

The parent isn't driving.

But, sure, let's go with that line - if you are salaried, and you have an hour each way commute, and your company okayed you working 6 hours a day (since your commute is 2), and they also paid you extra for mileage (to offset fuel and wear and tear), are you saying you'd object as strongly as the people objecting to those 2 hours ON TOP of 8 hours in the office, with no compensation for mileage?

Because that was my point; the general objection to commuting I've heard, and would raise myself, is that it is unpaid personal time. Not that it's just an unpleasant task that the company is compensating me fully for.

That's not so bad then. I don't know many (any!?) places that would let their teams count that though, so glad to know some places do.

The big difference is that I’m visibly working during the commute. Given the nature of the train, the only activities I can’t do are coding and attending a meeting where I am an active participant.

The latter limitation will probably end soon with improved ML based background audio removal.

At first I was thinking "that's not safe while you're driving", then I realized you're probably not driving.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is exactly right, I had a 1.5 hour each way commute before we switched to work from home last year. I calculated that I saved around AU$5000 a year just from not having to commute or buy food/coffee out let alone the massive time saved. Not to mention the reason I had such a long commute in the first place is that I chose to live further away from the city to save money and actually afford to buy a home.

Plus as you say the 15 hours a week I get back on average, is basically another part time job or contract work I could pick up if I really wanted to earn some more on top.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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.

This is mainly discussing WFH, so in this case people actually are living in the office.

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.

But I can listen to music while I work 90% of the time if I want to.

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.

I've been working from home for 18 years and there's no amount of money that would make me commute to a job. I'd take another job or work for myself rather than do it.

Kudos for 18 years at home, that's incredible! I've done ~5 years for the majority of time now, and now with four kids that need extensive time with me, I will forever take a WFH position. With discipline, it makes for an exceptional work/life balance.

I’ve done ~3 years now - and my work is my life. I do 18+ hour days and frequent 24-36-almost-48 hour stretches because I want to.

I hate it - and I love it - and I can’t stop. Part of me is concerned for my health, the other part of me is concerned the other-part is going to end the dream.

I run a startup at home. We became fully virtual a while back and now have people all over the world.

You have to set some boundaries. My big one is that I don’t work on weekends unless something is on fire. I may glance at emails but that’s it.

I also don’t live alone. I have a wife and kids and will take breaks to see them. I do work pretty long hours during the week but it’s punctuated with some positive human interaction. My wife stays home with the kids right now, so they are here.

I think if I lived alone I’d be prone to do what you do, and I’m not sure it would actually increase my productivity. There’s a point where you hit diminishing returns for any knowledge work. The brain needs rest like any other thing. I think if I lived alone I’d be forced to set weekday time boundaries to keep from going nuts.

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.

you wouldn't do it for an extra 10mil a year?

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

> 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.

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).

> 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.

> 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.

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).

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.

" 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

> 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).

"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.

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.

> 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.

Did Jony Ive have anything to do with the original iPhones UI/UX? I thought he was just involved in the physical design.

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/the-d...

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.

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..

"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.

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'.

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.

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.

Gates?

Also not really.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yea, that’s not how my company works. At mine, strategy is not all top down.

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

Your working theory is spot on. Coasting is almost impossible unless you constantly keep showing that you are valuable to the company. So yeah I did 100 meetings is one easy way of quantifying your presence.

What I am really surprised at - companies have been blind to these bad managers and are letting them run the show. Just blindly fire them. Life becomes simpler for everyone, including the company.

Remote is a win-win for everyone except the bad managers. Why keep them then. Is this so hard to realise ?

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.

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.

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...

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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%.

Or the person just needs their current pay to pay for their current obligations.

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.

I'd absolutely take a 10% pay cut to save 4 hours of my life every workday.

> 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.

> 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.

You can do things while you’re in Seattle other than than just go to the office and then straight back home.

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.

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.

> 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?

"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.

At that point, it's better to let the employee go.

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

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.

Not everyone picks jobs based on top salary. I wouldn't work for Google even if they doubled my salary.

> 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.

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_.)

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.

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.

> 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.

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,Microsoft&tr...

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.

But _my friend_ from google likes _my way_ better

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

The threat of starting a new Google?

Google pays well, but not the most. (Unless things have changed recently.)

Who pays the most?

Prop trading firms pay more, I don't know if they pay the _most_ however.

For front office work, they definitely do pay the most.

Though not necessarily per hour.

(Ok, probably still per hour. But hours can be quite long.)

A super genius could most likely bargain for a pay/bonus cut and 40 hour weeks for 7 figures easily after a few years of demonstrated performance.

Yes. Though a super genius also gets special treatment at eg Google and other places.

So it's hard to say anything general about their compensation.

Well it’s a sliding scale sort of thing right. A regular ole’ genius could probably negotiate the same for high six figures.

I've worked for Google, Goldman Sachs, a few others, and now for a prop market maker.

I'd say I'm at best a regular ole' genius, and I can confirm that you can negotiate quite a lot.

Especially when taking a new job, and especially if you arrange for having multiple offers. Negotiating while already on the job faces quite a lot more headwind.

Netflix pays top of market for Silicon Valley _and_ readjusts your comp (100% cash based) every year to be top of market again.

Do they readjust down when the market goes down?

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.

Hedge funds and trading firms. Google doesn't pay the most.

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

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.

> 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.

If Google can't fill the offices because of work from home then what makes you think a start-up would be able to?

Google owns the buildings.. they bought them outright.

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.

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.

Loads of companies routinely lease partial floors. Its really not that crazy of a concept.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm pretty sure it is a lot lower than 90%, because you can very easily compensate that in the open market with some salary adjustments and extra hiring.

It must be something like 50 or 60% of productivity, and at 70% of the speed.

Why do they need collective bargaining power? They need competing employers.

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

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.

> 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.

>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.

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

This is the reason the pay cuts are happening. That is the current market for a remote Google job.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

In a different thread, I found https://www.fueleconomy.gov/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...)

You really need sources to decide that reducing commuting is a good idea for the environment?

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.

Commute less and also buy less junk.

No, I'd imagine they need a source that the cost is "extremely high". Are you being purposely disingenuous by reframing the question?

I guess I just get my fur up about the "Sources" demand I see more and more these days. It feels like it is used to stop meaningful discussion on a topic.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree.

I suspect that there are investments with large fixed costs companies can make to make remote productivity go up. (Not so much investments in eg actual hardware, but eg in how you set up team processes.)

That would explain heavy pushback from companies before the pandemic, but also that things seem to be running ok now.

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.

> good public transportation.

Public transportation has a higher environment cost than staying at home to work. That should be fairly obvious.

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

Isn't this story about people who want to work from home?

I'm sorry, I don't see how your point relates to mine, nor why it is a question?

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.

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.

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.

Maybe the solution is not having the AC running the whole time? I mean why do you need your house cooled to 19 degC?

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.

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.

Public transportation doesn't do autoscaling.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IMHO it’s a policy failure (for climate, economics, and equality) to make electricity so expensive people are less likely to electrify things like their car and heating.

The ratio of gasoline to electricity price in Germany is slightly smaller than that in the US, so the incentive to electrify is proportionally smaller. This is bad. We shouldn’t be paying for renewable energy subsidies via consumer electricity prices; the US does this right by funding it from the general budget instead, which encourages electrification.

Interesting hypothesis about airconditioning being the reason for staying indoors. I always assumed TV was the main cause.

It's less true, but still very much true. In Germany for example, commuting via car unlocks tax incentives per extra kilometer traveled.

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.

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.

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 :)

EU vision is never EU reality.

"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.

> 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_vehicles_...

Lots of people in Europe also take the car to work. At my work I would say definitely more than 50%.

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.

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.

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.

given that munich isn't a small city either, what's the reason for more people owning a car?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

I only know my neighbours, because of a dog.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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 ~€40k 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 : )

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

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.)

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.

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.

> 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.

The number I saw was 100,000 sqft - it seems like it depends on whether you exclude the smallest Walmarts : )

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.

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.

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_metr...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

or, get a bike. healthy, no emissions, and on top of that, cheap.

True, but not everyone lives close enough to work or is in physical shape to bike. Most people should, though :)

The bikes are nice idea, but hardly panacea. You need to design the city around it (costly, conflicts with other usages), isn't possible for variety of people (age, disability, distance).

I used to drive 40km to work every day in single direction. Not gonna happen with a bike.

Electric bikes are a thing ;P

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

"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.

> 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.

"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?

Would it? Remote work might incentive overall less density, which, on the whole, leads to a bigger carbon footprint per capita.

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.

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.

Yes, perhaps. So a carbon tax is still a good idea. (And so is removing things like minimum parking requirements.)

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...

Yes. Though I would hope that some people would use remote as an opportunity to work from other cities, and not just from the suburbs.

(I work from Singapore for a London based company, for example.)

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

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.

Perhaps, but anecdotally my electricity and gas bills have been much higher since I've been working at home - YMMV of course

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

And then people stop using it as much and, in many cases, drive instead because transit becomes less attractive.

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.

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?

> 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.

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).

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

This is a good thing, it's not healthy to have all your wealth in one small region of a country.

Good thin the US has several huge, wealthy metro areas 8 or 9 states.

Finding cheaper labor elsewhere further concentrates wealth. The only way to spread out the wealth would be to mandate the same salary across regions.

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?)

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.

Yes indeed, at that price you could hoover up all the talent in India, China, Russia, Ukraine etc

You won't get top talent in Ukraine for 60k.

For fresh grads?

For fresh grads yes, assuming they don't work for another US-based company.

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?

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

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

Even less for US workers, they mean.

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

Yeah been waiting for that to happen for the past 20 years...

well the last 20 years didn't have a mass forced remote work event

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.

Who do you think decides executive wages?

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.

> (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.

But if there's no coupling, than the argument for why ordinary workers' wages would fall also goes out the window.

You can't have it both ways.

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.

the difference is the mass forced remote work has made companies do the necessary work to effectively do this

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.

Language? I know a lot of people more fluent than a typical US dev. Besides that, how much language do you actually need, some basic vocabulary and grammar to communicate.

Time zone? US has 2 continents + you typically need a maximum of 3 hours overlap a day. This is possible even in Europe-EastCoast setup, I typically wake up 11. In US that's 6am sure, but I end my day at 7pm which at US is 2pm.

Covid has knocked down a lot. The biggest wall to crush was the psychological ones. So its now, not only genius contractors who could negotiate reasonable flexibility. Also when 60% is WFH now, there is little point in fighting/readjusting. If this was 10% you could try and battle or continue to limit that.

Having led international teams, I can tell you that you’re completely wrong about all of this. You are drastically understating the difficulties of working with engineers abroad.

Time zones matter, a lot. Crossing America’s time zones isn’t fun, but it has nothing on Eastern Europe or India. 8pm meetings to interact with your international workers will burn you out quickly. As will suddenly remembering that most of the world doesn’t do DST, so your 8pm meeting just became a 9pm.

You also need to know a hell of a lot more than “some vocabulary” in order to communicate effectively with a boss (me, in this scenario) or a stakeholder. Some consultancies will have specialized personnel whose only job is to translate for engineering teams, but these people are extremely expensive for obvious reasons.

You can overcome these problems, yes. But often a lot of the supposed cost savings of international workers disappears or shrinks massively by the time you’ve found an arrangement that’s as productive as local engineers. Typically the most sustainable approach here is to use one of the larger contracting companies like EPAM or Globant, but that eats up your savings and the attrition rate from those companies is very high. I’ve personally lost contractors because they were tired of the contracting company, not me or my company.

I’ve worked with international teams, and I continue to work with international teams. But the idea that Covid has made replacing domestic teams with international teams does not hold water.

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

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.

>So be careful what you wish for.

I see that as a good thing as well. If it is a problem to have all the wealth of a country in a few regions then it is equally bad to have the wealth of the world in a few countries.

It might have been painful for some Americans but globalisation has been a success for most of the world.

Good for whom? Definitely not for American middle class. So if you are a middle class person in the US, do not root for WFH trend or globalization of Silicon Valley. It will only hurt you while benefiting poorer countries and the shareholders (aka top 1%-ers) in the US.

> globalization has been a success for most of the world

It has led to decimation of big industries in the US / Western Europe, fueling the rise of demagogues (Trump, Le Pen, AfD, ...). It has also given power to despot regimes like Chinese Communist Party.

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.

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.

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?

Letting people in less fortunate countries work for foreign multinationals would give them more alternatives.

Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/

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.

Sort-of. But programmers tend to create more work for programmers.

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.

Yet pay is not based on COL. Google pays people in London less than they pay people working remotely in Montana.

You get the best of both worlds. Google made like $200,000 in profit per FTE in 2021.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

Are these engineers working at the same company?

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.

Terrifying

Also disgusting.

Yes, for the FAANG at which I was gainfully employed for a number of years.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> "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

Nothing is free. If workers deliver something quicker when working in the office, changes are they get burnt out quickly and any gain in productivity would be lost. Plus you may start building resentment in them and I have seen whole teams quitting which cost company fortune.

> Companies were never paying based on value provided.

I’d go even further and say that nothing is paid for in terms of value provided.

Price is a negotiation between two parties, where production and use value form the floor and ceiling price, respectively.

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.

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.

Oh wow. Now this :point-up: is a comment!

I don't have anything to add. It's just startlingly entertaining.

> 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?

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

> 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.

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.

Right, this makes little sense unless there is little market competition.

Alternatively, this might just be a morale thing and remote workers in the Bay Area don't actually make financial sense due to productivity losses. Google will placate existing employees, but they won't hire new remote workers at Bay Area rates.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The calculator is no longer public.

That's a shame. When did they make it non-public?

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/commit/429302...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

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.

> 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.

Do you think they should reduce salary for people who have paid off their mortgage? Those people also have lower cost of living.

I try to avoid commenting on downvotes, but I’m really curious to know. For those downvoting me, what is your job?

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.

Exactly!

The reality is that cost of living is really just a proxy in these conversations, really what we're talking about is the market wage for "premium" developers. I imagine over time remote developers will converge to a single market, but that it will take time, since there isn't as many opportunities for remote developers now there's not much pressure to move towards competing against remote offers. E.g., if I go to my employer and ask for a higher wage working remotely their likely response would be good luck getting a similar remote position. But as more remote opportunities open up you'll likely see more competition.

If there's enough remote positions and they're generally seen as equally desirable as in person positions we might even see everywhere going to a single market within national boundaries regardless of remote or in person, which would be quite interesting.

It's a weird policy though. If I'm remote, why does my location matter to Google?

Because they no longer have to incentivize you to move to a very high cost of living location.

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.

I'd still expect valuable employees to flock to population centers (e.g. for education), you want to remain competitive in those areas.

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.

I'd bet a lot of money this doesn't apply to executives, however.

Since you asked:

https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because employees in the office are more productive.

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).

Not universally true, indeed. However if you got little children, it is most certainly true.

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?

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.

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.

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)

Are productivity and successfully playing office politics to get a promotion related?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'd say its true for some individuals, not corporations. I don't want to give a blanket statement and say everyone works better from home, thats my whole problem with the blanket statement that everyone works better from the office. Give people a choice where they can still do their job either way

As for my current position, its certainly not Google, and I wouldn't call it a well oiled machine. Don't get me wrong, its a really nice place to work, but yeh, we have a few of our own problems ;)

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.

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.

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.

I think the fire is metaphorical

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.

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.

> 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."

> 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.

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.

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...

> 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...

> Higher productivity is the way out of this mess.

Lower consumption might also help.

Not gonna happen

It's already happening. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dematerialization_(economics)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's highly debatable.

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.

Where is the data that shows this? I've worked remotely since 2015 and I don't buy this.

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?

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.

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.

You don't need to see the data, just believe the big 3 tech companies, they'd never lead you astray

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.

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.

I wonder if that holds up for remote workers outside of dense metros who don't have to commute.

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

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.

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.

But WFH is not commuting.

Well, Germany has (or used to have) a tax subsidy for commuting, too.

See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendlerpauschale (might need Google Translate).

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.)

> 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.

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.

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.

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...)

That’s interesting, thanks for sharing.

> (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.

> 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.

Unless you need that 10% of your salary.

I think it's unlikely that Google SDEs are living paycheck to paycheck.

there are always ways to blow your check

You learn to spend what's in your pocket.

It's not a trade. The worker just loses.

What if they need the money?

I imagine they could find some way to make money with an extra 10 hours a week.

They already have! They earn that money while they’re driving to the office.

My company moved from Oregon to Washington. When this happened my commute increased by about 7 hours per week. They didn't suddenly start paying me for the extra time.

> 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.

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.

If you're already compensated for the commute then it's a different story.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

Why do you think the very same points about cost of living not apply here?

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...

I wonder at what point it becomes cheaper to simply establish an office in a different jurisdiction for the purpose of hiring remote workers...

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.

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.

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.

Have you heard of the Gervais Principle[1]?

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Great article, thanks.

It needs an editor, though. Way too long.

Oops, never mind. Most of that is comments.

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.

If you could have your company pay you all the money they have (but still magically continue to function), wouldn't you?

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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

"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.

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)

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?

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.

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.

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.

Location is in the contract, you sign a new offer in order to move

Unless it isn't, as is the case with every offer I've signed since 2009 when I went full time remote.

I meant for Google, where it is. Working from home or the office doesn't really affect compensation, location is the variable.

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.

Well, the base pay would be 0 since if you want to work from Iran, Google can not employ you.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The legality of a non-compete agreement depends entirely on local and state laws and the exact language in the non-compete.

> 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.

>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 and new benefits packages are put together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Isn't Google pushing for a return to on-prem though? So it's the first situation that you mentioned.

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.

If you remove location-dependent pricing, which location do you align the new single price on? Mountain View? London? Hyderabad?

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.

Fair enough, but that basically means no more employees in the US

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.

Every time I've seen this done it has nothing to do with remote work. It has everything to do with a geo-centric pay model. Companies typically calculate the living expenses of a given geography, and slap that on top of a base pay like it's COLA.

The hard part to swallow if you're on the losing end of this equation is that people in high inflation areas have long term assets that inflate as well, like homes. If they receive more long-term appreciating income like RSUs rather than cash then it compounds this problem.

A general rule to retirement that I've constructed is that where you retire will be at least less than the cost of living of where you made your money. So, if you choose remote work early on in your career and live in Oklahoma, the choices of places to retire in are slimmed as compared to someone who does exactly what you do in San Francisco.

The emotional toll of this is equally burdensome when you figure out that in tech we sell a product in large geographies for an equal price; so effectively someone is making more than you just by their very existence in a geography, whether that be a city, county, state, or nation.

And they no longer need a desk in an expensive office building, or free food. Triple win.

and electricity and water and water cooler breaks

don't forget the coffee ... lots of coffee.

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.

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.

Or massages, child care, game rooms, or any of the other ridiculous perks. The company could start rolling those back if enough people wfh.

There'll always be people at office, so I don't think so.

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.

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.

> 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.

The actual reason they have the perks is talent attraction and retention

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.

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.

>Does that mean if I work from home and move to more costly location I get automatic increase?

Yes.

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.

Will they adjust Urs Holzle’s compensation for working from New Zealand?

Yea its quite expensive to live here so he will probably get a pay increase.

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.

> 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.

To keep him from having a seat at a different table.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

No, the article makes it pretty clear that it’s a cost of living adjustment

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.

You could return to the office.

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.

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.

You can buy a home for 7 figures cheaper if you leave silicon valley. Why are you worried about a water bill/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This doesn't sound right. Google gets millions of applicants per year. Surely some of those appliacants would be willing to work for less.

They don't get millions of good applicants that are willing to live in SV and work for less.

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)

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.

Definitely not right now. Let's see how things look in 5 years

Back in 2009 i took a £10k 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 £6k which at that tax bracket made it £10k. I'd wager people in similar positions could do such a thing to sweeten the deal if needed

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.

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?

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.

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?

(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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

« 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

Are they going to cut Urs' salary due to him working from NZ? Or are upper level execs exempt?

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...

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...)

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.

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.).

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?

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

It only seems fair that employees also make financial sacrifices when working from home, considering that the employer is also sacrificing a lot of expenses related to providing office space for the employee, and since productivity has been shown to grow when working from home, which means the employer suddenly has to do a lot more to keep track of all the increased profits. /S

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.

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?

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.

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 :)

What are people complaining about?

A cost of living (COL) variable in your compensation keeps things rational.

Plus people are missing the fact that the original compensation of X was established in the context of some geographical region. So people complain if their COL adjustment decreases their pay but all good if COL increases their pay?

You gotta have it working in both ways.

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.

Google is punishing its employees for potentially devaluing its billions of dollars of investments in campus and office real estate.

I don't really get this, shouldn't you get paid more? If more people worked from home that means the company is paying less expenses. Less floor space, less internet costs, less office supplies. To me, cutting pay for remote workers is basically the company double dipping.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Location-based pay is a stupid way to determine pay.

Google employees could lose money if they stay at google. Great chance for other companies.

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.

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?

Pay is the only leverage bigtech has left

beancounter MBAs

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.

I have noticed that any HN front page thread about compensation has at least 300 comments.

You gotta be a special kind of idiot to choose a 2hr commute over a 10% pay cut

Google finaly completes its transformation into the new IBM.

google be losing employees then.

The reason they want us in offices is real property is the root of power.

If they don’t own all that land they lose influence locally. They can’t put on spectacle in their “stadium”, distracting us from the reality we reconnected to during covid.

Endless loop: you need a higher salary to live where you have space to work from home.

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.

Somehow I think they will be ok.

Also, the ones that can show their productivity increased at home might get a raise.

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?

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!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com