> A Google employee interviewed by Reuters commutes two hours each way to the company's Seattle office. That employee was considering switching to remote work permanently when the company reopens its offices in October. But then the employee looked at the location-based pay calculator and realized the switch to full-time remote work would mean a 10 percent pay cut--in effect, rescinding the raise that came with this person's most recent promotion. "I didn't do all that hard work to get promoted to then take a pay cut," the employee told Reuters.<p>This is absolutely insane. A 10% pay cut is absolutely worth 4 hours of your day back everyday and this person is completely irrational.
> But cutting pay for existing employees who opt to work from home is a terrible idea and it shows a complete lack of emotional intelligence.<p>What in the world does this mean?<p>Cutting pay for temporary telework is stupid, but cutting it for long term agreements that are willfully made by the employee makes total sense.<p>It seems ludicrous to me to pay Silicon Valley rates to someone living in Montana. The pay is based on cost of living and labor supply constraints. And both of those are eased by people working remotely in low cost of living areas.<p>If they don’t do this then they’ll end up paying the high water mark everywhere in the world for fairness purposes and that will make it harder to compete. Imagine living in Lagos or somewhere and because you’re locally employed and always lived in Lagos you get Lagos wages. But someone who was hired in San Francisco and moved to Lagos gets San Francisco wages. How emotionally intelligent is that?
If the COLA adjustments are granular enough (e.g. zip code), I could see this as a civil rights violation. They'd be punishing employees who live in black and latin communities.
Perhaps I'm in the minority here given the comments thus far, but I've always been of the opinion that equivalent work should be compensated equivalently and commensurate with the value of output generated for the company.
ITT: People using their subjective remote-work opinions in defending Google's desire to increase their profits by sacrificing their own employees' well-being.
10 percent doesn't seem too bad.<p>I'm currently working remotely for an NYC-based company and I think I'm making 20-30% less than than if I was living in NYC.<p>However, it's still about triple anything I could make in the local market, on top of the facts that the work is actually fun (unlike anything in said local market) and there is no commute.<p>Seems like a pretty good deal to me tbh.
Are the cuts proposed base salary or also equity grants? (I would imagine these might be pegged to your salary level so one impacts the others, the bonuses im sure work that way)