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Google rolls out ‘pay calculator’ explaining work-from-home salary cuts
- rmason 5y agoGoogle is sitting on $158 billion in cash and one of their founders is a resident of New Zealand. Seems a strange time to be that tight fisted with all your developers. Or as an outsider am I not seeing it correctly?
- hamburgerwah 5y agoHow did these companies come to literally embody evil?
- velcii 5y agoPublic trading.
- justbaker 5y agoEspecially a company with the Nerve to have a slogan of “Don’t be evil”.
- spicybright 5y agoI think they actually phased that saying out a while ago, lol
- musingsole 5y agoIt was obviously a canary.
- fungiblecog 5y agoWhen the MBA suits take over from the techies this is what happens
- refurb 5y agoAdjusting salaries based on location is, ”evil”?
- jacoblambda 5y agoIt's not just adjusting salaries based on location. It's slashing people's salaries by quarters and halves even if they have been working at the company for years just because they moved somewhere cheaper. Your value hasn't decreased just because you live in Wisconsin instead of California. Your contributions are the same and you are just as productive of an employee. They have no right decreasing your salary just because they can get away with it.
- niij 5y agoShould Wisconsin employers be expected to pay SF-equivalent salaries?
- machinebun 5y agoHave you missed out on the last 50 years of history of American labor and union busting? Programmers are not special snowflakes in this regard, just currently in a very friendly market environment, but don't think for a moment that the people in charge wouldn't do the same thing if they had the option to (which remote work certainly helps with).
- jacoblambda 5y ago
- penultimatebro 5y agoCalled this last year. This will become more prevalent in the industry as time goes on. Tell your boss you’re moving to San Francisco and if your employer bases your salary on your zip code then your pay should be going UP
- dec0dedab0de 5y agoI wonder if people will start renting mailboxes in high income areas.
- mint2 5y agoIt’s just like how businesses love to incorporate in Delaware or tax havens. All Employees can be based out of sf regardless of where they actually do their business. Just make an app to let people rent out their mailbox and forward it. When 500 people use the same address it will be just like the companies do!
- YZF 5y agoThere are some tax and work permit/visa consequences so it's not as simple. E.g. someone who can not legally work in the US may have a problem presenting a US bank account and an SF mailbox. The requirements may vary in different countries/states. But I agree we may be headed towards a future where pay is no longer a function of location. If you can't tell where an employee is physically it's a lot more difficult to have location based payments. A remote employee can be anywhere. When I worked remotely (way before the pandemic) I spent some time working from Hawaii and my employer did not even know.
- NtochkaNzvanova 5y agoAs the sibling commenter suggested, it's not as simple as renting a mailbox -- HR departments and tax collection agencies are not that dumb. However, I suspect that one reason the housing market has gotten so crazy (California perspective here) is that many Silicon Valley tech folks bought houses in Sacramento/Tahoe/$CHEAP_PLACE while also keeping their houses in SV but renting them out. As long as the rent payment covers most of the mortgage, they build equity and eventually own the house, while also having a nice big house to work remote from. And perhaps they quietly keep using the SV house as their official residence for HR/tax purposes.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago> “What’s clear is that Google doesn’t have to do this,” Rosenfeld told Reuters. “Google has paid these workers at 100 percent of their prior wage, by definition. So it’s not like they can’t afford to pay their workers who choose to work remotely the same that they are used to receiving.” This right here is the money quote. Google is rolling in cash while paying its employees $X, no matter where they are. Now, they want to say "Oh, because you live in $PLACE, we're going to pay you less." Did the value to Google of the work these people are doing suddenly go down? No, and not even if they were previously working from San Francisco and now working from South Lake Tahoe, or even Bumfuck Nowhere. Google knows this. That means this can only be either an attempt to force people back into offices (which are located in more expensive areas), or an admission that they're not willing to pay people for the value of their work -- literally, not paying people what they're worth. Either one of these is a really bad look, IMO, and not really a smart move for Google.
- spicybright 5y agoWith a "brand name" like Google, you can certainly get away with a good amount of this sort of behavior.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoMaybe for now. Do you really think they're going to be able to attract top talent in 5 years if this policy continues? I also expect that if this holds, there will be a fairly large exodus from Google to companies that don't have such a policy.
- colinmhayes 5y agoNo company pays employees the value of their work. They pay the minimum they believe an acceptable applicant for the position would accept.
- actually_a_dog 5y agoYou know that, I know that, and Google knows that. But, a lot of people don't, or, at least, they don't admit it to themselves.
- beefjerkins 5y agoThis is, frankly, disgusting. What a way to show how little they actually care about the very people bringing in the tech and fresh ideas that keep Google afloat...
- pasquinelli 5y agothere seems to be a struggle going on between the people that own google and the people that make google, and the owners are winning.
- rswail 5y agoads and android and youtube keep google afloat, the rest of it is vanity projects that sometimes come off.
- wetjen 5y agoNothing new here. Worker compensation in Corporate America has a cost of living adjustment (COLA) multiplier. It’s calculated as part of the salary base and takes into consideration the location of the worker, among other things, in adjusting up or down offered compensation. Google is simply making this transparent to workers. Just because someone was hired in a high COLA multiple location doesn’t mean they’ll keep that multiple when they voluntarily relocate to a low COLA area. This is standard HR practice across all of Fortune 500.
- TulliusCicero 5y agoNot cost of living. Cost of labor. These correlate a fair amount, but not 100%.
- musingsole 5y ago> This is standard HR practice across all of Fortune 500. And it's gross.
- wetjen 5y agoIt’s not gross. It’s an approach to effectively price human capital in disparate markets. By example, it’s unfair to expect workers in New York to work at the wages of workers in Des Moines.
- dave333 5y agodefinition of how to piss off your employees!!
- ronnie2345 5y agowill there also be an adjustment of the fewer resources the employee is going to use while working remotely? Eg, office space, internal food and drink subsidies....
- agent86 5y agoFor participants in this thread that want to reference an earlier discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28127240
- jacknews 5y agoThis is just a cynical attempt to push down wages. They should pay workers (and workers should demand) based on how much they are worth to the company. Remote workers should even get a 'rebate' since they no longer need the company to pay for expensive office space for them.
- pasquinelli 5y agoif they lower pay and still have the workforce they need, then that is their value, right? it goes without saying that a company will cut wages as much as they can. if google paid its workers the value they created, then google would have no money.
- jacknews 5y agobased-on the value they create, not all of it. Of course, there is an argument that the workers should indeed get all of the profits, after costs, including founder's IP, reasonable return to investors, etc, etc, since they are the ones creating those profits.
- fitblipper 5y agoI thought Google was not allowing work-from-home except in exceptional cases. Does this tool mean that is not the case and they are providing the option more generally?
- TulliusCicero 5y agoSundar said they think 20% will be full remote.
- snomad 5y agoIsn't remote work obviously good for the environment, especially in the big cities like SF and Seattle? Shouldn't Google, MSFT, Apple, et al be encouraging more remote work - given their size their local impact on rush hour traffic is likely noticeable. Maybe this is another area where government needs to step in and mandate all employers over a certain size allow work-from-home with no pay consequences.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago> Isn't remote work obviously good for the environment Probably not, since it seems to encourage suburban and rural sprawl? There's commutes to factor in too, true, but I don't know if that's enough. > especially in the big cities like SF and Seattle? Big cities are good for the environment precisely because they keep large numbers of humans within a small area. Imagine if NYC's population suddenly spread out to all live in detached single family homes on large lots. The environmental devastation would be enormous. In any case, commutes don't have to be that bad for environment. Electrically-powered public transit, or biking, have a marginal per-person impact on the environment, relative to the US standard of a person driving themselves a long distance in their gas car, alone.
- neilv 5y agoHas any company said that they think their workers are less productive when WFH? Or less productive when less able to meet in-person on occasion? And so rate less pay for that reason?
- jake_barnett 5y agoLots of people here calling this gross, but at the end of the day I’m willing to bet there a lot of qualified engineers living outside of a Google city who would be stoked to work for 50% of a Google salary, let alone 85. Are they gross for accepting that offer? You’re in the business of selling labor and Google is in the business of buying labor.
- neilv 5y agoAlthough I wonder what will happen to US tech salaries as many companies become even more comfortable with remote work, I'm having trouble finding a way to get upset over this move. At least at the pay grades that greatly exceed comfortable living needs, 5%-15% to WFH could be a great quality of life deal, even before taking possible lower housing&commuting costs into consideration. At lower pay grades, where 5%-15% cut in isolation could be very painful or nonviable, if WFH means a parent doesn't have to pay child care (or pays less for care, like part-time older neighbor kid), is that a good financial deal for the parent? Maybe one situation in which to be upset is if you're much more productive WFH; in which case, even though a pay cut for WFH is a good immediate deal for you, the company is getting much more out of the deal than you are?
- TheChaplain 5y agoUhm I don't get it... Doesn't companies hire you for the value you generate? Doesn't matter if I am in Mountain View or Cokeville WY, I still have the same experience, knowledge and capabilities.
- machinebun 5y agoShort answer is no. There is no good way to measure the value generated by an individual engineer in most cases (in large enough companies), only the total/average value produced by a group of engineers - and even then, it's a first order approximation. Hence, the market is not efficient.
- astatine 5y agoI don't get the angst around this. The happy feeling of getting exactly the same salary as earlier while spending much less wasn't exactly going to last. Companies have to pay lip-service to handling employees well and they managed to keep the salaries flat (at least most of them did). But the expectation that there is no going back to "normal" office life while continuing to get the full salary seems ridiculous and unsustainable. I am sure there are a few people who can demand and get whatever salary they ask for, but that's clearly not going to be true to the vast majority.
- ikerdanzel 5y agoThis will come back and bite Google hard. Either the great resignation coming to Google or majority of Google engineers will actively moonlighting to compensate and earn more. You will see significant stalling of innovation at Google. Already some of people I know will use this opportunity to hunt for talents and paying a fraction of what Google is paying allowing them to still keep their current jobs.
- the_70x 5y agoWas that salary cuts on the signed contract in case of work-from-home situations? If not then I don't see a reason for Google to do salary cuts or explain them to their employees.
- tommiegannert 5y agoThere is an overwhelming part of Google's employees in SV, but seeing this from the company's perspective: they're either going to have to take the battle with all other offices who now want the higher SV salary, or they have to take the battle with only the highest-paying office. It'll be way cheaper--and hence the obvious corp strategy--to lower salaries in SV than increasing them everywhere else (because everyone is already "remote from SV").
- nicholasbraker 5y agoTime to brush up those CV's folks!
- DebtDeflation 5y ago>Screenshots obtained by Reuters show that Google employees who previously commuted an hour to Google’s Manhattan offices from nearby Stamford, Conn., for example, would see their salaries slashed by 15 percent if they choose to continue working from home. By contrast, “Googlers” who live within NYC’s five boroughs and choose to work from home permanently would not see their pay slashed at all. This seems silly to me. That CT employee likely commuted to the NY office pre-Covid (a huge percentage of people who work in NYC have always lived in NJ or CT for COL issues). If they choose to work from home, how are they any different from an employee living in NYC who chooses to work from home? This is not at all the same thing as someone moving from SV or NYC to rural Wyoming to arbitrage COL differences as a remote worker. The CT worker is capable of actually being in the office within an hour if something came up requiring them to be, the guy who moves to WY is not.
- hiyer 5y agoWhat I'd like to know is whether they're docking the pay of that exec dude who's working from New Zealand. Although I'm pretty sure he's made enough to not care.
- Nexxius 5y agoGoogle & other tech companies that can shift their force to remote can be expected to offload real estate to an MLP and restructure remote workers to 1099 contract employees. This probably would also enable them to get around pesky H1B rules to further reduce costs. They can't do that for every project or function but, remote workers might want to reconsider their fight to stay home.