Came here looking for this. Back in my G days, before they were the high paying behemoth they are now, there were regular complaints about compensation. The first corporate response was absolutely tone-deaf. They created a tool for you to see your total compensation that included all-in values like on-site amenities. The natural response was one of unhappiness and people requesting to opt out of eating at work and promising to never use the laundry facilities or the gym or many of the other bits of bait they use to lure new grads. The next response came much later and it was a broad leveling of pay. Obviously the second pass was better.

Alphabet will save a lot of money by not having so many warm bodies in the office. They eat less, they poop less, they generate less heat and make the AC work better, they require fewer support staff to be in the buildings, etc. Reducing pay because you're using fewer company paid resources is just as tone-deaf as that first try.

> before they were the high paying behemoth they are now, there were regular complaints about compensation.

You mean back when they were illegally colluding with Apple and other technology companies to suppress wages.

> The next response came much later and it was a broad leveling of pay.

I got a 20% pay bump after the wage fixing scheme collapsed and those pay resets happened, and my employer was in no way involved in it-- Apple and Google's conspiracy just suppressed wages far beyond the active participants.

It's not about tone-deafness it's about maximizing profit. Parties that will willfully and knowingly break the law to conspire to fix wages aren't going to be bothered by moves which seem a little cruel or illogical.

Good point. Tone-deaf was how we took it.

> they poop less

I worked at Google for about 10 years. Never having to hunt for an open bathroom stall while under a certain degree of physiological distress has perhaps been the greatest benefit to WFH for me.

The cost of the A/C and janitorial staff is peanuts compared to the money they spent on commercial real estate. If they don’t get ROI, someone is going to be held accountable. If the offices close and the value of commercial real estate plummets there are huge players that are going to be wiped out, with macro-economic ramifications. It’s a perfect example of sunk cost fallacy, but on the scale of billions of dollars.

It's been a while for me but I recall that a significant amount of the real estate already existed. I worked in a number of buildings in MTV, starting before the SGI retrofit. Most were old and had little done to them. There was new construction (mYbe the Zurich office, with Urs' apartment on top?) but way more remodeling. I know they built the housing near moffet but how much other real estate did they really do from the ground up? And how a big of a dent is that? (I'd eager there's some tax magic there too.)

My point is, G can afford the losses on selling some buildings and have unused capacity without hurting their stock price.

Google has something close to $50B in real estate holdings. They announced $7B in real estate spending in 2021. [1]

That press release reads more like a "head of state" spending in key constituent areas for some policy changes needed. Shovels in dirt wins politicians, and Google needs all the help it can get with the looming antitrust issues.

[1] - https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/inve...

Alphabet made the calculation a long time ago that paying for you to poop in the building is a rounding error compared to the extra productivity doing so allows them to squeeze out of you. That hasn't changed and it's unclear to me why the pandemic would change it.

> If anything, they should argue for a pay increase to offset the costs Google is externalizing in utilities, on-site benefits, need for security, food, space, etc.

This is absolutely correct.

If Google would tell me that I'll see my pay cut by about 10% for working remotely, I'd put in 25% less effort – 15% for space, power, etc., and 10% to make up for the cut.

You misunderstand how companies decide salaries. You aren't paid the value you provide your company. You don't get a raise if you save the company money.

You are paid the least the company thinks it can pay to get an acceptable applicant to fill your position. The truth is that there are many capable people who would prefer to work remote, and they're willing to take a pay cut to make that happen. Therefore companies don't need to pay remote workers as much.

Workers collectively dont get to value their own labor. There price is the market price, and remote work always paid a lot less than in-office work, for obvious economic reasons.

Please elaborate more on the "obvious economic reasons".

For some reason, I don't see anything economic (do you care where stuff is made? I don't, really, only that it gets made, the rest is irrelevant detail), nor obvious here.

There are more people in the remote pool than in the in-office pool. Also it is better for employees to be remote than to be in the office, meaning they are willing to get a paycut to get it. Lastly COL and tax adjustments.

There are perfectly capable engineers in this world making under 1000U$S a month, they are just not in the US.