[09bjb]

$GOOG stock has pretty much doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, meaning the company has been having absolutely no trouble whatsoever doing its job with a fully remote workforce for 2 years now. They don't "need" employees to come back to the office.

[Graffur]

I don't think the stock price reflects that too much. You can't attribute the doubling to workers being at home. If it dipped when workers went back to the office.. that also would not mean much.

[dnissley]

Using the stock price of a technology company to judge the productivity of it's workers? Surely that's a component of stock price, but man this seems like a huge leap to make such a claim

[vgeek]

Maybe argue the inverse-- that most of their employees aren't actually productive? They're at over 150k FTEs and probably well over 100k temps/contractors, how many of them are doing things that materially impact revenue versus steady state or just looking busy? Every refresh of the golden goose Adwords makes it easier to just plug in a credit card and blindly spend without ever hearing from an account rep who manages 100's of other SMB accounts. Once they have so much inertia on their yellow page 2.0 search & video ad monopoly, where else will advertisers turn?

[whiplash451]

Two years aren't much at the time scale of Google. The effects of switching from in-person to remote (and vice-versa) are much longer term.

[dymk]

I don't think I agree. But I'm curious, in your opinion, how long is long enough to be able to say if WFH has had an impact on the company's bottom line?

[whiplash451]

A decade, maybe more.

[refurb]

This is a good point. Theranos equity made huge gains for a while so clearly they must have been ultra productive too?