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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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_.)

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

Who pays the most?

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?

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.

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.

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.

But _my friend_ from google likes _my way_ better

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

The threat of starting a new Google?

"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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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

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...

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.

> 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.

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

"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.

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