Yes, or at least if you move to higher cost markets (Zurich, sf, etc.) You'll be paid more than you might have been otherwise. It just happens than Google already has established offices in like all of the most expensive cities.
So why was the employee not OK with taking a pay cut for all those benefits? And if he is gonna be remote anyway, then why not outsource his job to a country with lower cost of living and therefore lower cost of labor?
And doesn't mean that we have to pay everyone more who _has_ to come to work? I.e. because they need to go the factory floor? Or they need to go the power plant?
> And doesn't mean that we have to pay everyone more who _has_ to come to work? I.e. because they need to go the factory floor? Or they need to go the power plant?
You only have to pay someone more if you cannot find someone to do the job for lower pay.
I’m already reaping the rewards of WFH. I used to have the energy to go to gym maybe twice a week after work, then eat some rubbish food because I didn’t have the energy to spend another hour in the kitchen.
Now I can be at my gym when it opens at 06:30, have a good workout, shower, walk home, cook breakfast, and still have 30 mins before I need to start working.
I can even fit in short cardio sessions in the evening and have returned home and made a nutritious meal by the time I’d normally just be getting home from work.
I go to the gym seven times a week now with no net reduction in my free time.
I eat a better diet. I save money. I’m happier and more relaxed. My home office is a much more productive space than the noisy open plan office we have.
I never start the working day in a bad mood whereas a bad commute (delays, bad weather, unpleasant people, etc) used to put me in a lousy mood for the rest of the day.
Not all commutes are equal (both in environmental footprint and desirability). One of my favorite commutes was about an hour by train -- I lived 5 minutes from the station and my job was a short walk from the station. It was a reverse commute, so I always got a seat.
I got a lot of reading done and I didn't consider it to be "wasted time".
Another favorite long commute was 45 minutes by bike, almost all on a separated bike trail.
Of course, my current 30 second bedroom to livingroom commute is probably my favorite commute of all time, but my point is not all commutes are horrible. And even my current work-from-home commute has its drawbacks, like no clear separation between office and home life.
I really think mentoring and knowledge sharing is easier in person.
I am certain heads down work is easier from home. Especially if you have a good setup.
I don’t know how to reconcile this.
A hybrid approach isn’t it because the best (technical) mentoring happens when someone is heads down and gets stuck. Plus commuting some days and not others is hella disruptive to a routine. I need routine to be most productive.
If the person that lives in NYC (but works remotely) gets paid more than the person that lives in Stamford and works remotely, those Stamford employees should all get together and rent a shared studio apartment in NYC and use that as their primary home address. They can even use it for overnights when they come to the city and stay late.
Why is it fraud? It's an actual apartment that they can use when they are in the city for work. It's not like it's just a mail drop, it's a physical apartment and the employee is on the lease.
My employer doesn't ask me where I've established residency, they ask for my "Home address", and if I can't find anything in our employee manual describing what a home address is other than "where you can receive mail". I don't know what Google's policy is.
In the US, your W-2 employer has to withhold your taxes on behalf of the state so they have to have your legal residence. I suppose you could file a tax return where you later claim that you weren't really a NY resident but a CT resident, but then you're going to have to file taxes with CT and pay out of pocket with penalties (since you were supposed to have them withheld from your paycheck) and NY will probably dispute your return, as they have documented proof of you being a NY resident. Especially if your income is high, which will be the case for many Google employees, it's a bad idea to have your residency in that dispute state where multiple states can claim you as a resident.
You can prove to either CT or NY that it's not your primary residence for tax purposes, but even if you can't, you may still be better off paying double taxes to avoid a 15 - 20% pay cut.
The pay cut mentioned for Connecticut is 15% and that likely doesn't cover the RSU, so the realistic cut in the pay rate may be more like 5-10%, depending on your function and level. NYC marginal tax rate for a typical Google employee is going to be around 10%. And that's before you take into account the actual cost of this scheme.
I am a proponent of full price transparency in order to come as close to ideal function marketplaces as possible so that resources are best allocated.
But even without full knowledge (which is probably impossible to achieve and one of the functions of a market is to incorporate the various pieces of knowledge of all the participants), prices are still determined by two parties agreeing on a number, and just because Google has more power, the opposing entity is still agreeing to the new number if they continue selling their labor to Google.
I mean if you look at it from the other way… they agree to pay $X for the work but give you an increase of $Y to support a higher cost of living in certain areas to be near the office.
This is being spun as a decrease instead of seeing that people actually have had an increase because of CoL. which no longer applies if you move.
If you agreed to $X and then move to say the Bay Area would you expect them to keep your salary the same?
I feel like its a market rate, if the company can now hire people all over there are likely some people now willing to do the job for less money, particularly because they are living in a place with lower cost of living and their expenses are significantly lower. However, if they are trying to compete for local talent in high cost area they need to pay more.
Note, this doesn't always apply, for example, doctors in rural communities can sometimes make more money because they are needed and most don't want to go there.
A hairdresser in Norway has to be paid a lot because otherwise they can take one of the abundant high paying jobs in the oil industry with no additional training. How would you level pay for hairdressers in Norway and those in e.g. Sweden? There already are basically no restrictions on movement.
Labor is a market. Google has always had very different salaries and have been pretty explicit about it saying they were aiming to have among the top salaries in the labor market for each posting. I was shocked how low Paris Google salaries were vs SF, but it makes sense to some degree
Companies changing salaries based on location makes it a really interesting problem for someone working remote to find the combination of a high salary location, low expenses, and low or no tax state.
Once you're making Google money, I would think the overriding concern would be where you actually would like to live. What environment do you find stimulating? Where are you likely to meet people that share your values? Do you want to be close to family?
Actually, I think if anything, when you make "Google" money, the stakes become a lot higher. Taxes are easy enough to ignore when the base amount is low.
Honestly, I agree with the policy. The fundamental misunderstanding that people who say "Why aren't we paid for what you produce" is that the existing compensation _is_ paying for what you produce, it's also taking into account the price of the location you're working.
Why _should_ an engineer working from Seattle, where rent is ~2k for a 1bd, not get paid more than the engineer working from Bentonville, AR, where a 1bd is $800? Your compensation is made up of what the company expects for you to spend _because_ you're working in a particular location.
Then the money Google saves on HVAC, restrooms, facilities, support staff and office space should be going directly into the pockets of the employees that convert to fulltime remote, right?
> Your compensation is made up of what the company expects for you to spend _because_ you're working in a particular location.
That's Google's model?! I can live 10 minutes away from the office or 1 hour away by train, I still live in the same city.
If I move my apartment 50 minutes closer to the office, I'm still going to the same office, but my rent will go up. I should get more compensation right? My compensation is based on what I'm expected to spend by location.
Conversely, I can also live 10 minutes away but in a different city. Think LA.
Funny, but off-topic story relating to this: I once had my debit card shut off because I tripped a fraud alert by being in 5 different cities on the same day. This was in LA, and I really was in 5 different cities that day, but I probably didn't drive 50 miles.
Would you pay twice the regular rate for an identical pair of trainers that had been made in a different place? Unless the location of the employee has a material impact on their output, it seems bizarre to offer different payment for the same thing.
Maybe a particularly bad example? New Balance has a line of shoes made in the USA and made elsewhere, with about a 2x price difference ($185 for USA, $70 to $100 for non-US).
The idea of people who object to this is that they're choosing to live in a cheaper location and they should be able to save the extra money from that.
If I bought a Kia Rio, would they say "You have lower car expenses compared to other employees, we're going to pay you less because you don't need the money"? Or conversely, if I choose to buy a $150,000 car should I be able to tell Google "Hey you need to pay me more because I have very high car expenses?"
That's obviously silly. But if you want to live somewhere that a house costs $2MM, it's your employer's responsibility to foot the bill for it, and if I buy a house in Bentonville AR for 1/10th of the price, my pay gets cut?
Why _should_ an engineer working from home in Seattle but enjoying all that Seattle and surrounding area have to offer get paid more than some poor bastard who is staying hear his family to help care give in Where-the-hells-ville, AR?
If we move to Beverly Hills should that person get paid more than Seattle? (yes of course Google has to have an office there per these rules)
Should employees who choose to own a car be paid more than someone who uses public transit or their own bike?
You are paid $x in order to produce $y. Assuming our $y's are the same what we choose to spend our $x on should be personal and private.
I am willing to bet, knowing personally many people in Arkansas, that most of them have no desire to live in Seattle, and would not view it as "enjoyable" if they had to move their.
Similar to me, living in the MidWest, there is no amount of money in the world that force me to move to Silicon Valley, the West Coast, or New England Area... None.... I would rather live in a box under a bridge.
> Why _should_ an engineer working from Seattle, where rent is ~2k for a 1bd, not get paid more than the engineer working from Bentonville,
Why _should_ they do get payed more.
If home office is a standard it's their decision to live in a expensive area.
People are payed for the work they do, not because they live in a privileged area. You could go as far as say it's a form of discrimination to pay people depending on where they live.
I mean are you next reducing payments for people transmuting a lot because they live in a cheaper area.
And then shouldn't you also pay less to people owning property because they have long term less living cost?
The actual problem is Silicon Valley and similar places being completely out of balance.
You have the correct end result, but seemily misunderstand why wages are they way they are.
Google does not pay someone in Seattle more than AR simply because the rent is higher. The reason wages are higher is a result of people in Seattle demanding more money because their costs are higher, and if Google wants to attract talent there they have to offer a wage people will accept, that wage happens to be lower in Bentonville than Seattle
WFH changes the dynamic in that Google can now recruit from anywhere in the US, thus the competition for a given job is higher so in normal times that will mean a lower wage over all
There are many people that would not work for Google in the past in part because they could not or were unwilling to relocate to a city with a Google office, WFH eliminates this need thus more people will be willing to work for Google.
WFH changes the dynamic in that Google can now recruit from anywhere in the US, thus the competition for a given job is higher so in normal times that will mean a lower wage over all
People keep saying this, but it's only true in an employer's market. In an employee's market, it works the other way around, because now the good employees have a wider choice of potential employers. Which kind of market do you think software development is?
I would consider your argument seriously, if the price of the products and services I work on were also adjusted to the location of the buyer, but they rarely are. So, I find it hard to justify that I have to be paid less based on location.
- several employers other than Google have policies to adjust pay based on location
- the calculator they developed is to help make employees make data-based decisions (this is in contrast to other companies where no such calculator exists and one is left to guess and/or initiate talks with their boss that may or may not end awkwardly)
Another unspoken thing: there's such thing as salary negotiations and exceptions. "If I take a 10% cut, I'm leaving" is a perfectly reasonable thing to say in such a negotiation, and maintaining current salaries is something these types of employers are not culturally against (the way some middle management thinks of performance notwithstanding).
The general goal of the policy is to make things "fair" in the sense that they already have employees in lower-pay locations and it's unfair/potentially problematic to have two people in that same location doing similar work but being paid vastly different amounts. The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people who never ran businesses and are just disguisedly wishing they made more money: saving money on salaries is done for the same reason companies do tax-related shenanigans. In Google's case, even the employees are kinda in on the scheme, as bottom line affects quarterly reports, and thus their equity compensation...
Yeah, ultimatums kinda suck as a negotiation tool for employees. High risk, low reward most of the time.
I would replace it with explaining that the pay cut makes you unhappy and/or makes the position less appealing. Make it an assessment of the position and the pay, but don't talk about actions that will come from it (like leaving or job searching). Telling them what you'll do is like obviously telegraphing your next move in a fight.
Negotiation is a tricky thing. You don't want to limit your options too early because that might prevent good outcomes. But at some point, if the other guy is being silly and you know you have viable alternative roles as your BATNA, cutting to the chase just saves everyone time and makes sure they understand that something is a deal-breaker.
Of course you do. You could also not raise a fuss in the first place and just move somewhere that isn't 2 hours away from your place of work, like the majority of society does. Or argue that the policy shouldn't apply to you because you're still paying the same state tax and it makes no difference for the company in terms of taxation logistics. Or move teams to one with a more reasonable boss. Or say nothing and do the change-jobs-and-come-back-later-at-L(x+1) thing. Etc. It's not black and white.
The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people who never ran businesses and are just disguisedly wishing they made more money
While probably true, this kind of argument goes both ways.
Recent events have proved, if there was any doubt left, that a lot of people can work perfectly well from home and greatly value doing so, and that both desire and performance are highly dependent on the individual. Some businesses are going to have to get used to the idea that some of the good people they'd like to hire simply won't be willing to make long, inconvenient journeys to work every day any more or to live in expensive locations to avoid them. If they decide not to offer those people competitive compensation by national standards, they may increasingly find that others will, having themselves located any centralised facilities in more economic areas.
Pricing too much by location for highly remote-capable staff is a short-sighted policy anyway. It is surely a matter of time before environmental concerns put pressure on governments to discourage unnecessary travel. That probably means higher costs for travellers one way or another, which is only going to widen the gap in favour of remote working.
>> The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people who never ran businesses and are just disguisedly wishing they made more money: saving money on salaries is done for the same reason companies do tax-related shenanigans.
Salaries like anything are market based prices. Why are salaries different in SV over MidWest, is same reason a BigMac in SV costs more than in the MidWest..
WFH opens up the pool of employee's to a much larger scale, the more people that can do the same job the lower the wage for that job will be
People however do not want to look at labor as marketable good like a widget, they want to view labor as something else, its not.
> several employers other than Google have policies to adjust pay based on location
For example, the federal government. There's a set pay scale for the country, with "locality pay" added in a number of cities/regions.
A few years ago, I know civilians who were working for the Navy in Washington, DC and their jobs were moved to Norfolk, VA. Their jobs did not change; but, due to locality pay, it was a 10% pay cut. (Yes, a number of people left and did not move.)
When you require people to be on-site this makes sense especially in the military where the employer is dictating the location. I support the military policy of locality pay and different housing allowances for different locations, but when people are all working from home that no longer makes sense to me.
> The "why don't they just pay everyone SV salaries everywhere" argument is obviously from people
Or just maybe you are mischaracterizing an argument from people that take the notion of "equal pay for equal work" to heart and protested even against offshoring for similar reasons and against tax related shananigans that just transfer the social burdens of infrastructure onto income tax paying citizens.
The non-strawman argument is "equal pay for equal work", not "SV pay for everyone".
With pay from different locations, there is an argument to be made for varying salaries when the working conditions related to the office presence and the corresponding project involvements differ and one can argue it isn't equal work. With working from home, there can be variation in project involvement due to scheduling which again might be unequal work, but that would be more tied to which hours of the day are on the clock, if the hours worked are the same then an employer paying an employee less for living in a different city when all other working conditions are the same is merely the employer unfairly (ab)using their more powerful bargaining position to capture economic gains that should belong to the employee for making the choice to live in a cheaper area. So when you talk about fairness one can talk about two classes of employees (in office vs working from home) and then salaries tied to hours worked and the rest is discrimination.
There are arguments to be made for allowing employers to do this, since perhaps as a matter of public policy it is better for people to concentrate in cities or for forbidding it for alternate reasons. But the public policy question wouldn't change the fact that employers are choosing to pay people based on criteria not at all related to work they do. There is still room in "equal pay for equal work" to tie office presence to a higher salary, if it is genuinely more valuable, just put the dollar value on that.
> The non-strawman argument is "equal pay for equal work"
But that's also a logically problematic notion in the sense that it's a complete utopia given how our world currently operates (i.e. there's a reason why most of your clothes are made in China or thereabouts) and, on top of that, it's a self-defeating idea. The logical conclusion of that line of thinking - an ad absurdum, if you ask me - is that everyone gets paid the same for similar work, and therefore also have to accept 2M house prices, including the folks making your socks in Malaysia. In reality, though, you don't get to have a cake and eat it too, that's literally the basis of how inflation works (and why Austin folks resent Californians for example).
You do raise a good point about strictly WFH jobs vs locality-dependent jobs (e.g. a McDonalds worker has to be physically present at a location) and I think it ties a bit into why management is often reluctant to go forward w/ WFH policies: management is largely about multiplicative effects, and there can be very tangible differences in in-office vs WFH depending on timezones (in fact, I know a consulting company that very successfully convinced their clients that offshoring is more expensive than a north american workforce due to time lost on back and forth communication with India timezones)
If any of the FAANG companies decide not to collude with the others on this, here's their opportunity to poach talent. Outside of FAANG (and the few others who pay FAANG salaries), companies that do this are going to find retention is a big problem. It's unlikely anyone is going to leave Google for AFLAC and turn a 10% work from home decrease into a 60% change of employer decrease but certainly there could be movement between other companies as some will see WFH as an opportunity to staff up instead of trying to find a path back to where we're never going to be again.
Well I guess any time is a good time to leave Google, now with a little encouragement from the management. Would be great for actually innovative companies to scoop up some great engineers that would otherwise be working on advertisement money extraction algorithms.
1) I want to be paid _more_ if I'm working from home. My employer doesn't have a right to use my personal property (my home, my energy, my coffee, etc.) without additional compensation.
2) Driving up compensation regardless of location is a great way to incentivize monopolistic behavior (e.g. FAANG) over the talent market while making it more difficult for new / smaller orgs to compete for talent.
Exactly, I live in the Bay area and now that my wife and I work from home our previously totally adequate 1 bdrm is now too small to work comfortably. Particularly when we are both on calls. Getting another bedroom for an office is going to be $10000/yr after tax, don't see my work paying for that. If I was 100% remote I could move somewhere cheaper but I can't since I have to go in occasionally (scientist in the lab).
OTOH, your employer used to compensate you for using your car, your gas, your time to commute. Now they know you are not doing that. I would be surprised if the average FAANG car commuter spent more at home than commuting.
My feeling is that things should be left the same, but I think your POV is definitely valid. The _space_ at home becomes a problem especially for those in expensive cities and lower compensations. Affording an extra bedroom is not always possible.
Another spin to the same story: major employer agrees that forcing people to commute to office deserves substantial extra pay.
Google employees are in a more-than-fair position when it comes to negotiate compensation. If the deal sucks, then Google will revise it and/or lose part of its talents, but the issue will fix itself.
Then again, maybe the issue was they were compensating people so that they accept SV commutes and house prices, and everyone is realizing that most people don't need to live in SV. So the ludicrous compensations aren't needed either.
This is truly asinine bullshit. Your work doesn't add less value to your company, you don't work any less hard. Where your body is physically located is irrelevant.
Who checks where you work from? Can a 100 devs pitch in and rent a house next to Google’s office and claim that that’s where they all live, while working from somewhere else?
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