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.
They'll essentially pay you more for contributing to congestion and pollution.
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.
See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendlerpauschale (might need Google Translate).
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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...
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...
Lower consumption might also help.
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.
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.
Sounds kind of hypocritical to me.
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.
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.