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> “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 definitio

• spicybright 5y ago
  With a "brand name" like Google, you can certainly get away with a good amount of this sort of behavior.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Maybe 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 ago
  No 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 ago
    You 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.
    • creato 5y ago
      A lot of people simply overestimate how irreplaceable they really are. If the 1/100 Google employees that are actually hard to replace (and Google knows it) threatens to leave unless they keep their Bay Area salary, they won't get their pay adjusted.
      • actually_a_dog 5y ago
        Oh. I see. So, tech companies aren't crying about a lack of qualified software engineers anymore? When did that change?
        • creato 5y ago
          The only thing they've ever really cried about is the salaries they have to pay to get the workers they want. With remote work becoming more of an option, the candidate pool is larger, and so the salaries they have to pay to get the workers they want are going to go down.
• YZF 5y ago
  This has always been true though. The employee in the London or Tel Aviv or Bengalore or Toronto offices of Google (or any other company for that matter) are not paid the same $ amount for the same role/contribution. Companies have always paid people "market value", never what they can afford to pay (which for some companies is less and other companies a lot more).
  • musingsole 5y ago
    But that has as much to do with the relative skill level in those particular markets and constrained to living in those markets in a pre-remote centric world as it does higher cost of living in those areas.
  • gundmc 5y ago
    When I worked in home-office based companies previously (job with lots of travel to customer sites), they paid a flat rate no matter where you lived. I quite like the philosophy of "this is our remote pay, if you want to move to Bentonville, AR and live like a king have at it, but if you want to live in Manhattan that's on you."
  • tuukkah 5y ago
    When an employee's "market value" goes down, it does not warrant a pay cut though: the existing employment contract continues, and the value that the employee provides to the employer does not depend on the employment market.
    • machinebun 5y ago
      Pay cuts are a pretty accepted alternative to layoffs during recessions... I think it certainly depends. It's more of an ethical question - as legally, I'm pretty sure the company can implement a salary cut whenever it wants.
      • tuukkah 5y ago
        If a recession caused Google to run out of money, the pay cuts could be justified much better, but that's not the situation at hand. I think the ethics (and legality?) of arbitrary pay cuts go hand in hand with arbitrary firings: cutting a salary to $1 is essentially the same as a firing. Legality then would logically depend on whether the employment contract is under a state jurisdiction with at-will employment or if there is a requirement of a just cause.
• EMM_386 5y ago
  > 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. I'm a senior developer who has chosen to live both in expensive cities like New York, as well as rural areas. I knew moving to the rural areas I'd make less in pay with the companies there, I accepted this because it also came with a lower cost of living. My skills grew but my pay was reduced. So was my rent. Under your logic the local companies should compete with San Francisco salaries, because I "could" be making that much there. When I moved out of NYC I wasn't expecting other companies to compete with my former NYC salary, that would be absurd. The pay is high there because the cost of living is high, not because that is specifically what my talents are "worth". Yes, the fact everyone is remote now is making everyone second-guess this assumption about pay and location. However, prior to remote work you got paid relative to the cost of living in your area. Programmers in Fargo, North Dakota made far less than programmers in Los Angeles, even with the same or greater skills.
  • seedless-sensat 5y ago
    The pre-pandemic status quo is clear, but the point is that it doesn't need to be this way. Google can afford not to cut pay.
    • quaintdev 5y ago
      Also, because the employee is at home now they can allocate that office space and resources to someone else. They are saving on individuals working from home! They should be compensating for office equipment at home.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Yes, actually, you've got it exactly right. They should compete with SF companies for the type of workers SF companies want to hire and who have the capability to work remotely. In fact, they do, implicitly, because, by and large, people who can make SF salaries don't generally apply to companies that exist in rural areas in the first place.
• TulliusCicero 5y ago
  > Did the value to Google of the work these people are doing suddenly go down? No, but pay has never been about just the value provided. It's (value * leverage). Janitors provide plenty of business value, because a clean workplace is important. They have low pay because they're relatively easy to replace, so they have no leverage. If you move to an area with a weaker economy and fewer high paying job opportunities, you've reduced your leverage, so your pay going down isn't surprising.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Except that a Google employee moving to someplace with a weaker economy has not reduced their leverage. These are people who have the power to simply move back.
    • TulliusCicero 5y ago
      They absolutely have. It's much easier to switch jobs without moving than to get a job that requires a move. Their leverage isn't totally gone -- especially since full remote jobs are becoming more common -- but it's definitely reduced. When you move, it's not just the hassle and expense, but also the life changes. Especially if you have kids, those are big. Experienced software engineers in general are capable of moving to practically any major metro if they really want to. By your reasoning, all of them should possess the same pay scale, the same cost of labor.
      • actually_a_dog 5y ago
        > Experienced software engineers in general are capable of moving to practically any major metro if they really want to. By your reasoning, all of them should possess the same pay scale, the same cost of labor. By Jove, I think you've got it!
        • TulliusCicero 5y ago
          But they don't, because they don't need to, and it's not how the market works.
• option 5y ago
  They are doing it because in lower COL area people with Google salaries can become financially independent much sooner compared to if they had to live in Bay Area. Financially independent people are much less likely to tolerate shitty bosses and dull projects.
• toiletaccount 5y ago
  your living expenses get factored into your pay, it's why you (at least used to) hear of secretaries in nyc making over 150k. most of it goes to rent and other living expenses.
  • actually_a_dog 5y ago
    It is? So, there's an adjustment for people with families, then? And that adjustment gets larger for people with bigger families? Although I truly don't know the details here, what you are saying is not logically consistent with how these types of things are typically implemented. It's just "you live $HERE, so you make $THIS_MUCH," with no actual regard for expenses.
    • creato 5y ago
      The relationship isn't direct, but it ends up roughly working out this way, because whenever a company has a choice between two or more candidate employees, they bid the salary down to the point where one of them walks away. The point at which walking away happens is going to be related somehow to the cost of living in that location. There are a lot of idealizations in that explanation, as I said it roughly works out this way.
    • toiletaccount 5y ago
      the market does the factoring for them. to acquire the talent they want in a place like nyc they have to at least pay them enough to live close by. its a lot more expensive there than most other places. this until recently was a factor that affected everyone in the office, because they all have a certain amount taken out of their checks from society just to be in the proximity of their employer. their families are their own business.
• kcplate 5y ago
  In the next few years, I’d love to see statistics on corporations that owned office property vs leased office property and their attitudes on remote work post pandemic. I’d say it’s a safe bet that corporations that had an easy out of their office footprints would likely have less of this type of return to office “encouragement”. Consequently companies like Google and especially Apple that have created these corporate owned campus monstrosities (err I mean “flagships”) would not want to have a billion dollar real estate asset on their books that sat around 75% empty.
  • hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
    This is understood. However, Google from the very beginning aimed at attracting the best people, not just with salary, but with time for side projects and so on, it was a part of their culture that made it attractive. It's a 180-degree turn now, they openly became employee-hostile. This kind of pettiness may seem insignificant but it leaves a bad taste and make the best talent think twice about their options.
    • lamontcg 5y ago
      "don't be evil" is quite dead and buried.
    • kcplate 5y ago
      Well I doubt you could call it really “employee hostile”, it’s more a shift to a more normalized benefit expectation for the industry and relying on the Google name prestige to separate it from the other companies in the tech sector. It may not be what it once was…but employee hostile? Hardly.
• candybar 5y ago
  Paying people simply what they are used to being paid is even less fair than what they are doing. Given that they already have location adjustments, if they simply let people keep their comp regardless of their move, employees that moved to Boston from SV and now work remotely from Boston would be paid more than employees who were always in Boston and still work in their Boston office. Remediating this would require increasing everyone's pay outside of their top market (Is it just SV and NY? Not sure) and that would cost significantly more.