COVID-19 has been a huge quality of life boost for me.
After working at home for ~13 months now, it will be very hard for me to go back to the office. I have young kids at home and getting to spend extra time with them every day is a huge gift, on top of having no commute. There are some negatives, but I feel just as productive and more engaged.
Here in Sydney, Australia, both office and WFH are available at my work. I'll have anywhere between 0% and 90% of my team in the office depending on the day or week.
In my experience, even being the only one in the office is a thousand times better than WFH.
Whether teammates are WFH affects me less than whether I'm WFH.
I used to be out of the house from 7:30 am to ~6:30 pm depending on commute, so it wasn't like that my time anyway. Now I'm working a slightly longer day, because during it I'm taking an hour to make my kids lunch, an hour to interact with them in the afternoon, some random downtime here and there when they pop their heads in, etc.
As schools reopen my plan is to basically just to set my core working hours to the schoolday which is going to be at 8:15 am to 3:30 pm and then I'll log a bit more in the evening if needed. We normally have the kids do some reading before bed to start winding them down and I can easily sit there with my laptop while the kids read. so many of the other parents I've seen struggle are the ones that rigidly stick to 9 to 5 vs a concept of "I should do about ~8 hours of work today". Those are the ones that really seem the most vocal about wanting the office back. Which honestly if that is what they want, that's fine. They can be the office crew and have the commute, pay for childcare, etc. I'm not looking to get back on that grind though.
I do feel bad for parents were both parents are constantly on Zoom. We're lucky in that we were able to rig it so all my meetings at AM meetings and my spouse has PM meeting, so we can have an on call parent most of the time. For families were both parents work sales, this probably sucks. Although I've seen some people in sales do enterprising things like setup little pods of rotating babysitting so they can just not schedule calls during their day to watch all the kids in the pod (do their reports or whatever).
I think going forward two things I'll advocate for at work is flexibility during summer hours and for parents with kids too young to be handed a Redwall novel and told to read quietly for a bit. Both are forms of investing your employees as short term thing for long term benefit since after all eventually the children get older (or you at least end up with a more mature child that can do tier 0 support duties and escalate to mom or dad when needed).
Surely not a bigger productivity cost than a coworker doing the same thing, though.
Assuming you're driving yourself, this is universally a productivity killer. You risking a huge amount of frustrating and angering situations while your workers are commuting to a central location. I'd put good money on a lot of lost productivity to commute.
Then there's the people who have to commute, due to functionally in-person jobs (artisans, doctors, baristas, etc.). Optional commuters going to the office for their "social fix" are doing so at the expense of forced commuters. Work should be work and social should be social; if you want a social experience during work hours then have a social lunch in your neighborhood.
It is unclear why, having complained about being forced to work from the office, the set of employees happy to work from now think imposing their preferences on everybody else is supposed to be better for everyone.
In fact I simply miss the ritual of leaving my home and returning every day. I’ve been doing this for a few years, though.
Long dog walks have helped.
Productivity is not the end all be all. It's ok to look out for yourself.
Yes!
And I'm renting a small office near the house for pandemic purposes to have a quiet space to work. But being two minutes away instead of an hour away is night and day. I can be home and back multiple times a day, in same time than it took to walk to the snack dispenser at the office.
So live closer to work. Google pays enough for people to do that. The schools are usually better too.
B) Prices can become extreme near campus buildings because landlords know they can charge exorbitant prices and still find a tenant.
C) Moving to a more expensive place impacts you _and_ the rest of your family via shared rent, utilities, etc..
D) Your significant other, if you have one, may not work at the same company. So you may end up shortchanging your spouse and taking time away from them and their lives?
I'm not advocating for living literally right next to campus. But to say you can't compete is disingenuous. The whole reason Mountain View is so expensive is because there are so many engineers from Google who can afford it.
No they don't.
Go look up house prices right around campus on Trulia. I would say it's shocking, but disgusting is a more apt feeling.
You can buy a home nearby. Sunnyvale has homes for $2m or less and you can afford it at $600K household. Very reasonable commute.
If you want 3000+ sqft and 5-bath homes then yeah, you're out of luck. Hit executive level or startup riches for that one.
To act like Google doesn't pay enough to afford a home in Bay Area though is BS. The whole reason the area is so expensive is because FAANG pays so damn much to keep pulling in more talent. (It's a cycle)
Also - you could rent. Most eng I meet at FAANG have no interest in ownership out of principal. They just want investment potential. Renting is frequently very good. Only reason you'd buy is for leverage but you won't get good leverage here in SFBA because you have to do all cash offer. So, just invest in market instead.
For married couples above 30 with one high TC earner - it's extremely common. You're not marrying a barista in SF if you work at FAANG. I haven't met anyone who is married, above 30, who also works at FAANG, the spouse can legally work in the country, and the household income is below $500K. I know that seems like a lot of qualifiers but basically a married couple that both have working abilities - if one is at FAANG, the other is likely at FAANG or similar (or a doctor or a lawyer or an executive or whatever - very common).
I'd have to really stretch to find anyone who I've met with high TC that isn't also married to another with high TC (besides SAHM/SAHD - where the one earner is usually an exec, so homes are still not too expensive for them).
I'm not talking about non-FAANG employees btw. If you work somewhere that doesn't pay well - then ok. You have to suffer like every other American does. I'm saying that if you work at FAANG - it's a bullshit excuse to commute an hour each way. (I mean - FFS - a lot of them have shuttles where you can clock in on even if you do live further away) It's a choice at that point. They pay you a lot so you can be close to their campus. High earners typically marry high earners. It's financial suicide to do otherwise. (Bye-bye 1/3 of your income for 18 years when you inevitably get divorced)
You may have a very limited circle of folks you talk to and are willing to share such details with you. Myself and a number of close friends do not have a $500k TC household as married couples. Not even close.
> It's financial suicide to do otherwise. (Bye-bye 1/3 of your income for 18 years when you inevitably get divorced)
Maybe I misunderstood you but you're saying you should marry someone who earns similarly to you because of the inevitable divorce? I'm not sure I follow, you're advocating to marry for the financial prospects first because marriages end in divorce?
I’ve seen enough people have their marriages end and have insanely high and long term alimony payments even after the other partner has moved on and pseudo-married someone else. (But hasn’t legally married them because then they don’t get their alimony) Until marriage is treated like a business contract where consequences are agreed to before signing, it’s a terrible idea to marry someone in a lopsided financial situation unless you don’t care about any kind of risk. You’d never be able to get/afford insurance for such an incredibly risky venture.
The point is.. going into work is a waste of time most of the time. That’s why a lot of companies are doing flex schedules now.
This is not true. Maybe people are confusing principal with senior?
That or you're counting multi-year stock grants in the current year.
Principal engineers (L8) at Google/Facebook make around $1M a year, and $1.5-2M is not unheard of.
Source: spouse is management level at G of FAANG. Those numbers don't match up with reality in general. For a few edge cases, sure. Not for most people.
I also have multiple friends that work at Google, and can confirm that their numbers fall squarely into the bands described on levels.fyi. (In fact, they're often taking home considerably more, due to the aforementioned stock growth and stacked refreshers.)
Several possibilities:
1) your spouse is not in the engineering management track and isn't familiar with the payscale
2) your spouse works in an office with a lower payscale due to regional considerations (though this wouldn't make the numbers look realistic even in "LCOL" US offices, so it'd need to be international)
3) there's some misunderstanding about levels or something else. That Principal Engineers (L8 - three levels above Senior) make 900k-1M out of the gate isn't really disputed; they tend to make a bit more at Facebook, even.
Good thing Google only employs senior engineers... <image>eyerollsmiley-x1000.gif</image>
> The whole reason the area is so expensive is because FAANG pays so damn much to keep pulling in more talent.
No it isn't. That isn't the reason at all. The reason is a bunch of literal rent-seeking wealthy old people who fight new housing projects at every possible turn so they can sell their house for $2 million, or die and leave it to their kids, who will then sell it for $2 million.
> Most eng I meet at FAANG have no interest in ownership out of principal.
Press X to doubt.
You know what hurts productivity more? The soul-crushing experience of missing out on watching your kids grow up because you're spending all day in an office or commuting. If you work from 9-6, and commute an hour each way, that basically means you hardly see your kids at all five days out of the week. That level of depression and alienation is going to do far more to hurt output. By comparison, the productivity impact of taking five minutes to give my daughter a kiss before she takes a nap is a de minims by comparison.
The people I work with are all great and interesting people. But frankly, I'd infinitely prefer to spend my lunch hour and coffee breaks and happy hours with my wife and kids. This may just be my preference, but I don't see how anyone with kids could actually prefer being alienated in an office instead of at home with their loved ones.