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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
"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."
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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]
« 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
If Google is going to allow US employees to work from anywhere in the US, they should not be adjusting wages based on an employee's residence. Where an employee chooses to live becomes no different from what car they choose to buy. Google should pay a consistent wage scale based on a median cost of living across the US. This would probably be an unpleasant adjustment for many Googlers in high cost locales.
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...)
> (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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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 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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.?
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).
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?
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.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadThey sense that many employees prefer to work from home, so that they may be willing to essentially pay for the privilege.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes and now they don't even have to move to SV anymore.
And so the cycle continues.
Also, no market is perfect. There are (well-paid) employees that bring zero or even negative value without anyone noticing.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh...
He probably only works to have a seat at the table and a say in how the future of technology is built.
Yet they still pay him a ton (executive comp is public). Weird.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
They'll essentially pay you more for contributing to congestion and pollution.
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.
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).
The pay is starting to get interesting!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Executive cost money, too. They are also employees.
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.
This would imply a coupling between corporate expenses and share price that is much tighter than I understand to be the case.
You can't have it both ways.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Compare also https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
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.
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.
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.
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?
And frankly, the UK team was coding circles around much of the US engineers.
It was incredibly eye opening, and humbling.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Since Google already pays the most, where do you threaten to leave to while bargaining?
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.
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_.)
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’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.
Source: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...
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.
On the way to launching my first large internal service in the next few weeks.
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 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.
(Ok, probably still per hour. But hours can be quite long.)
So it's hard to say anything general about their compensation.
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.
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
Why not? Turn it into a co-working space. Lease it to a start-up and put up a divider.
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.
Just started procurement activity targeting a buildout to be done Q2/Q3 2022.
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.
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.
If the mass of employess is 30% less productive from home, it is way more expensive than the buildings.
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.
It must be something like 50 or 60% of productivity, and at 70% of the speed.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
[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...
10% paycut in place of 10 hours of commute seems a good deal to me.
How so? Money (pay decrease) for time (no commuting = 10 hours of your life back every week) seems like a pretty classic trade.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Worker's rights in the US are generally terrible so it's a giant patchwork of varying quality.
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.
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.
google is essentially forcing a pay cut to your base salary in addition to the portion of your salary you use for housing.
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 majority of Tahoe is in California.
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...)
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.
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.
> 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.
I'd pad the estimate for carbon saved and say like 3.5ton/yr per work from home employee.
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).
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.
Welcome to Texas.
> 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...)
If it would reduce 20% of all energy usage worldwide it would hugely significant.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Public transportation has a higher environment cost than staying at home to work. That should be fairly obvious.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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_...
In Munich, you'll find 1/2 of people owning a car.
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.
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.
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.
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!
The shift from doing lunch with your coworkers to doing lunch around your neighbors seems really positive to me.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 : )
- 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
(Although living 2km away from a supermarket is an alien concept to me. I have three within a hundred metres.)
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.
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.
The average Walmart is twice that size at ~180,000sqft.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used to drive 40km to work every day in single direction. Not gonna happen with a bike.
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."
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.
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.
I would say this idealized environment is not really present in Amsterdam, but it surely is in the rest of .nl
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
But a big part of why lower density is bad is because it leads to lots of commuting.
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...
(I work from Singapore for a London based company, for example.)
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
There are just too many factors involved to make a fair comparison - especially across countries
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Surely cooling/heating 1000 separate homes would cost more than an office space optimized for it, right?
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.
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!
This claim is false when they are forcing employees to commute and not offsetting the emissions from this required activity.
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.