If my time's worth $50 an hour, it'd have to be a damn good free lunch or a damn short commute for the free-lunch-for-unpaid-commute trade to be a good deal.

Don't forget the huge benefit of lunch just being there.

I spend a lot more time dealing with food now (cooking, cleanup, groceries) than I spent on my commute. I could go to a restaurant, but if I don't want to eat the same thing every day, getting there and back and waiting for the food is going to take more time than my commute, especially if I do it for more than lunch.

Even purely from a time perspective, free-lunch-for-unpaid-commute is an EXCELLENT deal in my case. I can totally see that being different if your commute is longer than 30 minutes.

I kinda agree, except that I actually like cooking.

Even still, I've been working later (7pm approx) as I've started with a company based out of California (I'm in Ireland), which sucks for eating food.

Slow cookers/crockpots are kinda ace, you can dump all the ingredients into it in the morning, and have a meal when you finish work. As a bonus, the smell of the food is nice in the afternoons.

But unless you're actually paid per hour...

I mean - I'm not really arguing that you should commute just for a free lunch. If anything - I was making a bigger argument in regards to the office space part. I'm fine with the lunches at home right now. (I can only blame myself for the poor lunch options on any given day) The $2,000/month that I'm looking at spending just to have office space is a bit of a bigger deal, imo...

I doubt if I spend $5/day eating lunch at home.

And it's really not the norm for companies to pay for meals or commuting.

But, yes, if you want to continue living in an expensive urban area, the cost of an extra room is significant. I do consider myself fortunate that I live in a semi-rural area and have a dedicated office. I know a number of people who are fleeing city apartments to more rural areas.

I pay $2150 a month for a 5 bedroom 3100 square foot 4 year old house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area and work for $BigTech remotely. I wouldn’t trade the arbitrage opportunity for anything.

and do you also get the $BigTech 400K/year salary? that would be sweet.

Do I get the $400K salary? I’m not at the $400K salary level but neither are most people who work for $BigTech. The salary bands for the AWS consultants/solution architects/engagement managers are the same as the equivalent SDE roles. I would think the same holds true for GCP and Azure.

I can tell you according to levels.fyi that my salary is the same for my level as someone living in Seattle. I also know an SA living in MiddleOfNowhere Nebraska who is making the same for his level as someone in Seattle.

This is a good reply. At 400k a year, expenses really cease to matter. But at 180k a year, there is a difference between Seattle and Nebraska.

More like $210K -$250K for an L5.

Edit:

Would I move to the west coast for $225K compared to what I could makes locally? Heck no, $400K, maybe. At this point in life, even my local pre-Covid salary was “enough” for us to comfortably meet our short and long term goals.

The extra $70K-$80K basically just gave us enough to tell my wife don’t worry about going back to work surrounded by Covid when school starts back and the rest is going straight to long term goals - save more for retirement, pay off the house faster, etc.

Doubling our income wouldn’t make any lifestyle differences. What are we going to do travel in a post Covid world? Buy a larger house for three people and within a few years 2?

Thanks for the data :) For me, extra savings would just go towards automating more things in my life. All of the things that are broken or malperformant in my house could be resolved with a few phone calls. If I still have money left over after that, then it would probably be invested to generate more secure and reliable income. If I only have 500k in the bank, I feel weary about putting half in dividend stocks that might not pan out like I hoped. But if I have 2 milliom in the bank, then $200,000 in dividend stocks feels like child's play in terms of risk :)

That brings up another interesting and off topic aside.

I made plenty of $bad_life_decisions until 12 years ago. So early retirement is out of the question. But that’s okay, I’ve never hated my career, my previous jobs at times definitely.

But, with a paid off house, the amount of savings I should be able to amass in 20 years by the time I’m 65, and hopefully social security is still a thing. With today’s rules, your spouse can either collect their social security or half of yours while you are both still living. We could easily live off of an (inflation adjusted) $4500 SS + the hopeful retirement savings.

> I pay $2150 a month for a 5 bedroom 3100 square foot 4 year old house in the burbs of a major metropolitan area and work for $BigTech remotely. I wouldn’t trade the arbitrage opportunity for anything.

Congrats, you don't live in silicon valley. Woohoo. Your life is not everyone's nor is it representative of what everyone can get.

My employer will only keep people who will show up at the office. If I found employers regularly paying $400k+ for remote - I'd consider it... But I don't see them often.

Well, most people aren’t making $400K at $BigTech either according to levels.fyi

I had two choices when I could see myself topping out locally as a bog standard enterprise dev - either I could go the r/cscareerquestions route and “grind leetCode” so I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard, and move to high cost of living area or I could focus on gaining experience so I could be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant” somewhere where most of the jobs are remote with travel.

Right when I was about to pull the trigger and start applying for local companies, Covid hit, the local market dried up and I got an email from an Amazon recruiter.

I thought I might as well try. I can answer the “tell me about a time when...” questions with the best of them and I had the relevant experience.

I am shocked there are people who get 3 square meals a day all paid for by their job

I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves

And why would you pay $2000 for a "couple more" bedrooms? You're telling me you can't put an L-desk in your living room? This thread just has ridiculous scenarios upon ridiculous scenarios, like the guy who would need to take a "40k pay cut" to get a home gym and a 3D printer.

I live in a small (400-sqft) 1-bedroom that has no internal doors. It was never rented as a WFH space. If you and your partner are both on calls a lot of the day - it's kinda hard to do them if you have to talk over one another. It used to be you had 8-hours of separation a day. Now, you don't have any. More bedrooms would provide some of that.

Some people like having living rooms without office furniture jammed into them - go figure. Most people I know would have to get rid of some furniture in order to fit a desk nicely into their living room.

> I'm apalled that there are adults getting 3 free meals and are upset that they now have to get those meals themselves

The 3 meals a day thing just sounds like gatekeeping. "You must not be a real adult because you want food that's included in your benefits instead of having to labor over it like the rest of us who don't have such benefits!" (Or you have to pay for those meals to be delivered - which is very costly on an individual scale)

What if you can't go get your oil changed now? Should I say, "I'm appalled that there are adults getting oil changes at service centers and are upset that they now have to get those oil changes done themselves"

You work from home, there is no one forcing you to live in a 400 sq ft apartment, and there is no one forcing you to share it with someone else. The fact that you relinquish that responsibility to your job is what is ridiculous - you choose where to live, and now that you WFH you can work from wherever you want, the fact your home is only 400 sq ft, and that you want to actually stay in an area where you have to pay upwards of $2k just for adequate space is not your workplace's responsibility to fix.

And the argument is not that these people getting 3 free meals arent adults, it's that they are actually unprepared for a world in which they themselves have to pay for their own breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Availability for space for one. Moving your whole family in a different even state for the other -- which might not be an option, breaking lease etc during a pandemic. And not all employers have clarified when they expect employees to come back. Are you going to move across states for half a year, 3 months, less?

Also, those lunches are not free: employers offer them as part of the compensation and to keep you at the office working late. Compensation negotiations always bring up the benefits as an item of your compensation. If a company makes the argument that they are paying you in fact x,000 more in the form of benefits, they are now breaking this agreement (even if it is oral) and not paying you. (I have had a "if you end up working too late and there is no food in the office, we will pay for the food and keep working." style of clause).

Similarly, some people do negotiate working from home most of the time and doing a 3-4 hour commute once a week in exchange for reduced salary, to enjoy a larger and cheaper home. That is an obligation the employer placed on the employee and asks for money to lift it, and allow them to live somewhere further away.

Related to the workspace, I do personally like to change working environments (e.g. coffee shops at times, quiet room at others) etc. Most people though need to consistently separate work and rest of their lives.

And the workspace is the responsibility of the employee unless you have a remote work contract. (Certain countries have legislation on the matter in fact for both cases.) Imagine a car mechanic being asked now to service cars at their home instead. For engineers the work environment is not a power plug, some paper and a laptop, even for software engineers. That is romantic naivete perhaps, and dangerous thinking.

If employers send surveys around and ask point blank if people have screens, space, good desk and chair, keyboards, high speed stable connection -- home connections now have to take the slack from enterprise ones -- good access to all the servers, they disagree with the above thinking. They wouldn't be paying for all of the above in the first place, otherwise.

There has long been a debate if these free means actually count as a form of reimbursement (and are therefore taxable).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-cafeterias-whet-...

https://www.businessinsider.com/irs-and-free-food-at-tech-co...

Or you can move somewhere where the cost of living is 80% lower...and still work remote.

Until you have to go back to the office whenever that is... And say goodbye to all of your friends/family.

How many people who work for BigTech have family there and didn’t relocate?

Of the Americans I know - quite a few. Of the foreigners - obviously quite a bit less.

Beyond that - friends can also be more important than family. I know plenty of people who won't move because all their friends are where they currently live - and they're fine with not being close to their family.

If tech companies don’t adjust for cost of living and you move you can save money on housing and get more space.

Isn’t that the point though? If the worker has to move in order to get more space, the worker is bearing the costs (literal and opportunity).

This is a very localized issue. Most people (I included) do not get even free lunch at work and there is no free transit to office either.

Both are cheaper than average (I think the buss is 1/2 the normal ticket price and the lunch is 2/3 of normal "take out" price) but certainly not free.

Everyone is also thinking this the wrong way around. People are thinking "how would this fit my current lifestyle" instead of "if this is the new normal, how would I change my lifestyle and would it be better over all".

I don't live in a big city even now, my commute is about 20minutes each way with a car. As it currently stands if I can stay working completely remotely I probably will and I will be selling my apartment and looking for a house in a more rural area. Something larger than my current apartment so I could have an actual office (in an ideal world there would be a separate building that would act as office / workshop). Currently I'm struggling with no dedicated office space, but that is because being 100% remote wasn't an option.

I get that many people have grown to expect free lunches and whatever from their work, but in over all work force thous people are in tiny margin group and while it sure would be sad if they lose the privilege, but needs of the many and so on.

Fringe benefits should always be expected to be transient (meals, commute transportation), and it isn’t wise to include them in total comp calculations (as they’re easier to do away with than your comp).

>Fringe benefits should always be expected to be transient (meals, commute transportation), and it isn’t wise to include them in total comp calculations (as they’re easier to do away with than your comp).

Yet places like Google would argue for them as part of their TC. The companies that tend to offer these benefits don't usually get rid of them until they're going out of business...

Nobody in the management of a company like Google would ever breathe a word about meals and transportation being part of comp, because if they are part of comp then they need to pay taxes on them. The two companies where I worked that had expensive on-campus meals both had systematic approaches devised by corporate lawyers to make sure that meals did not appear to be compensation.

It’s your job as an employee to not drink the kool aid and to properly value benefits provided, regardless of how they’re marketed. Cash is king, everything else is window dressing.

No one is drinking any KoolAid. I care about the fact that I don't have to go through the cognitive load of figuring out every meal. This is a benefit I personally experience and so I factor it in my analysis. I don't care how my employer reports it in their taxes or balance sheet.

Also, cash is king but companies can offer benefits at scale that will be much harder to access for me as an individual.

Mostly healthcare in the US. And a few other things that are tax-advantaged by being benefits from an employer (like 401(k) matching). I'm not sure that I can think of much else, other than negotiated travel and other discounts--which I don't really consider "benefits"--that are harder for me to access as an individual.

Sure but it is not just the $ sum but also $/h and $/sweat and tear. Having eg. parking lots even if you arrive at 10 aclock is also a big deal.

I have a hard time relating to your comment.

Why do you need a couple more bedrooms?

Can split a bedroom as an office with the other person in your house.

If you have kids you can pair them up in the same bedroom with bunk beds.

You could spend the money on a Murphy bed that folds up and turns into a desk.

I have co-workers who even work from their dining room table for the time being.

Moving is always an option every excuse you have just follow up with, "and...?".

A dedicated personal office is very nice if you full-time work from home. It's much nicer than working out of a bedroom, especially if the bedroom isn't that big.