To me the mental cost matters. For me, I'm mentally better off when I hang out with people physically than when I sit at home isolated chatting on slack. For you that might be different.

So I'd happily pay the commute cost if I have to for my mental well being. If you don't need that that's fine. You can stay home.

I have a gut feeling (so no data) that for many projects a core group of physically together people will out perform a group of remote workers of the same size "All other things being equal" (which they never are).

I come from games, having designers/artists/programmers able to look over each others shoulders and "riff" off each other's ideas is invaluable. But I know there are other kinds of work that don't need as much interaction so YMMV

I find some degree of commute itself necessary for my mental health. The act of traveling itself flips a mental switch. Just being home all day, I basically have to go out and pick up a coffee or something in the morning just to simulate that feeling.

This must be learned, commuting is definitely not something I would say was good for my mental health.

Heh, all these comments are very much "to each their own" but ya, holy heck did I ever HATE my commute. It wasn't even that long, but it was depressing. I didn't even realize how filled with dread I was every night before going to bed and every day around 4pm or so realizing I'd be faced with getting myself home. This situation is heaven for me (not saying I'm happy about why we're in this situation, to be clear).

Of course, I live alone in a decent-sized apartment outside of downtown. I also work at an XP shop (I actually much prefer remote pairing) and I'd probably feel differently if I had to work alone all day every day.

> For me, I'm mentally better off when I hang out with people physically than when I sit at home isolated chatting on slack. For you that might be different.

But in a way, this is not a balanced relationship. Sure, you'd want to interact with people like you who are excited about being together, so that's the preferred state anyway, but if most of your colleagues are of the 2nd sort, then you put the effort of going in the office to no reward. You could connect with people outside your immediate sphere, but team cohesion isn't helped by that and you might start disliking working there. So in a way you get some bubbles forming - those who prefer virtual interaction and those who prefer face-to-face.

This will probably be a big factor for career progression - is your manager leaning towards WFH or office-work? If you're on the other side, you might get left behind. Not that there aren't plenty of such possible discrepancies already out there

My exp is the exact opposite. I find being able to avoid the people I don't ever want to talk to a much better mental health boost.

The people I want to talk to are usually busy doing actual work so we usually catch up at lunch or after work. I also have the personal numbers of those people. All the people that have time to talk during the work day I'd rather not talk to. I know this is basically an insult for that I'm sorry but I suspect you are one of those people. The awkward guy with no friends that comes to the office for his social interaction fix.

Riffing ideas is not helpful sorry but its just your awkward way of socializing. Has anyone really ever said oh ok I'll just trash this work and start over after "riffing"? No they just go "haha" and continue doing whatever they were doing.

The delta in utilities, in a place like Texas, during the summer months, is certainly not trivial. Relative to a tech workers salary, sure, a hundred bucks per month isn’t that much, but it’s costing me a lot more to keep my house cool through 100F days all summer long than it would if I let the thermostat go to 80F during the workday.

Not to mention the flipside. Living in Minnesota, I have to use my furnace all day when I work from home for many months out of the year. Natural gas isn't cheap, yet an electric heater would probably even be more expensive on my electric bill.

Does everyone in the living space leave for the day? At my place someone is always home most of everyday anyway.

I live alone, so if I were going to an office, yeah

How much was the commute costing you though?

But I do not have an extra office in a dedicated bedroom. I live in central Tokyo.

The delta in house price for ‘extra bedroom’ in the place I live is around $250,000.

There is just no way my company is going to even consider reimbursing me for that.

But if you're WFH, you don't need to live in central Tokyo, you can live anywhere. You'd probably save money by gaining an extra bedroom and moving out of central Tokyo, no?

Anywhere where you:

- Have reasonable fast internet.

- (Affordable) Hospitals/Police/Firewatch in reasonable distance

- Are not to far away from the companies office as you likely still have to go to the office from time to time.

EDIT: Most people don't live in Tokyo or cities with similar expensive housings. The cost of moving away from cities is often much bigger then "just" longer transit times from home to work.

If WFH was guarantee, I'd have enough money to take a helicopter down to NYC twice a month instead of paying taxes/rent/mortgage/higher cost of food/MTA/LIRR/etc.

While living in a house with too many bedrooms. And if you want to talk about environmental impact, the air is cleaner the water is blue again and maybe we start paying baristas 100k a year for the inconvenience of having to live in the city instead of software engineers that can fckoff and do this from the moon.

The obvious is slapping everyone in the face. And if you are in commercial real estate, best wishes in 2021.

>Are not to far away from the companies office as you likely still have to go to the office from time to time.

The length of a "tolerable commute" increases disproportionately as the frequency of said commute declines. If I have to commute every day, anything over 30 minutes is pretty tiring. If I have to commute twice a week, driving 2+ hours is fine. If I have to commute once a month, I'd be willing to live on the other side of the country and fly in.

Thinking long term, housing is expensive because of mandatory office going, so removing the pressure from that side should in theory affect prices

It already is. I live in a semi-rural area that's lovely, but the commute is a hassle (there's a ferry to downtown, if you can walk/bus from there it's ok, but long, if you have to drive from there, you have to fight for limited car spaces on the ferry, and traffic is awful around downtown, etc; and friday afternoons its hard to get a car on the ferry because of weekend trips). This summer a lot of people have moved from the other side of the ferry, because they can WFH (for now) and would prefer more space right now. Real estate prices are up and inventory is down. Of course, if they need to be in the office 4 or 5 days a week, they will likely move back.

In addition, you're being forced to adjust your personal lifestyle because of the office space your employer is choosing not to provide. Perhaps it would be cheaper to live in a farm house in the middle of nowhere, but what if you want to live in central Tokyo? Perhaps it's the American in me, but doesn't everyone deserve the right to pursue happiness, even if it's in the form of the city in which you live?

If other people flee the cities in favor of cheaper housing elsewhere, then real estate prices should decrease in places like Tokyo making it easer to live there for the people who want to.

Sure, you might want to live in central Tokyo, Manhattan, SF, etc. And it would be nice to be able to do so. But also Aspen, Nantucket, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Myrtle Beach, etc. Absent a business purpose, why should the former be subsidized over the latter.

What you say is true, of course.

But then this is the trade: he goes from a cheap, tiny place in Tokyo, spends most of his time at the office or out and about, gets to enjoy a world-class city

to: living somewhere that isn't Tokyo, where he can afford a space large enough to have an office, and is home all the time, and doesn't get to enjoy a world-class city.

Not a win, I'm guessing. And this is coming from someone in his third year of remote work who lives a mile out of a village of about 3,000 people. It's not everyone's cup of tea.

I didn't move to Tokyo to live outside of Tokyo.

That was my point. If you live in a central part of a major city because it's convenient for work and you want to live there, having to WFH indefinitely is probably going to be costly compared to being able to easily go into an office (unless your company will pay for a co-working space). You're right that they won't pay for a larger apartment.

There is also a social and mental cost.

For example for some one where anxiety acts in a way which hinders him to proper handle thinks like making food or cleaning having a clean office with a Mensa giving out reasonable good food for a reasonable price is a massive difference. It can make the difference between overcoming it and complexity succumbing to it to a degree where you at some point end up homeless on the streets....

Sure just one example. But you can make many such examples. Often less extreme.

But however I look at it it always boils down to people being good of (housing, mental health, social net and high sallery (==more affordable office equipment)) profiting from it but people which are not (small dark apartment, mental health problems, abusive partners, social isolation, not much money) paying the price for it. And sure in the praxis you will find anything in-between.

> allready have a dedicated office in an exurban house

In my experience (Germany/Berlin) this normally only applies for people which earn above average and even then it not so common for people only earning slightly above average. The best/most common thing you find with people earning slightly above average is a room which is intended for children but they either don't yet have any or they already moved out so it was turned into a office room.

Also most office at home room I have seen where just suitable for one person, so if both partner need to do home offices it gets space-wise tight.

I don't like the idea that telecommuting benefits only the ones who can afford it.

Living hours from your workplace because you can't afford to be closer is not privileged. Wanting to cook at home because it's cheaper than restaurants it's not privileged. Wanting to Save the costs of gas or public transportation isn't either.

There are good arguments for and against but it's kinda bad to assume.

Good points. It is also not that easy to just upgrade from a 2 bedroom apartment to a 4 bedroom one to accommodate a couple where both parties needs to work from home. Who is paying that extra rent? Certainly not the employer.

The keywords in what you said is “to me.”

For some reason, passionate work from home workers assume everyone likes what they like and everyone has the same situation as them.

I prefer going to the office. It’s not a moral failing, it’s just what I like. I think people should be free to do what they like.

Those minor costs can still add up. Depending on your setup and location you could easily be spending 30+c/h on electricity when working from home. Extra cooling, lighting, possibly multiple PC’s etc. At ~2,000 hours a year you’re talking an extra ~600$/per year after tax.

On the other hand it’s also much cheaper to cook at home.

PS: My preference is to live close enough to walk to the office, but that doesn’t really scale well.

I've been working for home for about four years now. One of the biggest unexpected benefits has been the ability to do asynchronous household tasks. Placing a load of clothes in the washing machine takes very little time, same goes for putting them in the dryer. The time for those machines to do their work is time I'm working for my employer. When I would go into an office, those tasks would consume a large part of evenings or a day on the weekend. Same goes for cooking if you make things that are mostly hands off. Half an hour before lunch I can throw previously prepped ingredients into the Instant Pot and air fryer which will make lunch ready right as I start my lunch hour. Of course sometimes I'm in a meeting and can't even get to the kitchen to start those tasks but being flexible is part of the deal. On those days, I eat lunch half an hour later, which still isn't much trouble.

A couple years ago, I had to move bare metal servers to my home to continue my job working at a VR technology startup, who had just decided to forgo their offices.

I took on an extra $150-$200 in power expenses per month, and it was absolutely treacherous trying to get reimbursed for this. The company never considered the costs they were funneling into the employees - apparently - until people started to complain.

I fear most people were put into similar situations - perhaps not fiscally, but in a procedural sense - during this most recent mass WFH migration.

> I took on an extra $150-$200 in power expenses per month, and it was absolutely treacherous trying to get reimbursed for this

Well, fuck that... if it's company hardware and there's no reimbursement, power gets cut to that rack at 5PM local time.

Just wire it into a light switch. If the switch gets flipped... shame.

"I don't know what to do. I guess if you wanted to send an electrician out to install a new circuit with its own meter, things might be more reliable."

> send an electrician

I think OP needed an electrician onsite anyway, as $200/month would be somewhat over 2500 watts continuous 24x7 which would require in the US at minimum two dedicated 15 amp circuits. That's a serious enough amount of heat to require the attentions of a HVAC guy also.

I ran some small clusters at home for learning purposes and maybe $400 per year was pretty minimal compared to the cost of tuition, cost of the hardware, etc.

If your electricity is 10 cents per kWh it would be that much.

Since they said NYC we can bump that to 21 cents and then $150-$200 becomes 980-1300 watts, or 8-11 amps. That's something most people could plug in to their bedroom or living room circuit without a sweat.

Is there a resource online one can use to figure out what the cost per kWh will be for their power usage in a particular area?

I am fascinated by how people know these figures seemingly off the top of their heads. :)

I was beginning to suspect this, as well. But I of course was nowhere near prepared to handle this responsibility on my own. I live in a 2BR 4th-floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, NY, constructed 1913.

The rack consisted of a dual-processor Xeon 1U with a Tesla GPU, two 4U hard drive racks, and a UPS unit.

In MA ($0.195/kWh), that’s only about 1400W, or 12A which is supportable on a single 15A circuit.

That would double my power expenses per month. Who knows if my circuits would even handle it. ADDED: My internet would also not be reliable enough for servers that other people were depending on.

That's a big difference from my laptop being plugged in at home for 8 hours a day rather than in an office.

In a warm climate/season it could cost you even more. Not only are you paying for the servers' electricity, but you're also going to want extra air conditioning to remove the waste heat.

Yeah I live in a country that literally worships efficiency and cost cutting. Fancy offices have been extinct for a long time. Thanks to technology people can work anywhere and they're expected to.

I don’t think utilities are expensive enough to compare to the explicit costs of commuting by car (fuel, wear and tear, insurance) and the implicit costs of commuting (increased morbidity/mortality risk from driving, opportunity cost of time needed to be allocated to commuting).

Especially if the house isn’t completely empty when you’re at work.

Again this heavily depends on your situation.

I live a 20 min walk from my office. I have £0 commuting costs.

On the other hand I live in an old city with little new built housing. My flat is over 100 years old with massive ceilings, electric heating and no way to way to improve the insulation. Heating it just in the evenings for 5 hours costs about £50 a month, heating it while I work will likely cost £70-100 extra in top.

It’s not a zero cost: it’s 40 minutes of time.

I run there, which is time I still spend at home. And I enjoy the walk home as I live in a beautiful city. I normally go walking throughout the day for longer than that anyway.

Yes, I love being able to walk/bike to work, but that’s not life for 95%+ of people in the US (nor England from what I know).

Walking/biking gives you agency that public transit/cars don’t. It feels much freer.

Biking in Tokyo is less freeing than public transportation because of the added time finding a place to lock up the bike. I bought a bike thinking I'd use it but it turns out it's actually much less free since if I take it I'm stuck with it the entire day where as without it I can easily visit the other side of the city on a whim via public transportation. The same would be true in Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin, many other places with good public transportation.

You should look at getting a folding bike. I got a Brompton recently, using a company cycle-to-work scheme and it's been brilliant. I can cycle 3-4 miles in 20 mins to my favourite coffee shop, fold up my bike in 20 seconds and stash it under my table.

It might be a net positive if they enjoy the walk more than 40 minutes of other activity.

WFH doesn't mean they can't walk for 40 minutes though.

But in the context of office vs home, if the OP is basically saying "I like my free commute" then you have to remove cost & time from the "pro" list for WFH.

I used to like reading on the train as time for myself but it didn't balance out the other stress & cost of commuting.

If Transport for London said that trains would be free at the point of use & actually put on enough service that most people got a seat I'd definitely consider the office more favourably again

Not to mention the infrastructure / tax costs! New interstate lanes to sate population growth don't build themselves.

The more regular commuters we can take off the road, the better.

Some of my transit activist friends are upset over the potential of work from home to harm demand for transit service, which for some populations are used for more than commuting to work. Also if more people end up moving out of city centers because they're no longer constrained by a commute, that further erodes the demand for public transportation.

Commuting for a lot of us in the suburbs: long distance train passes, gas, parking, wear on the car, and increased insurance premiums for the mileage dwarf anything you're talking about. I'm saving over $500 after tax dollars a month by WfH. And that's before the buying lunch near the office, occasional Uber when trains were down, parking tickets...

Based on not traveling, a $50/month delta between me not being in the house at all vs. being there full-time is actually about right. But then I don't live with someone. But simply not being in the house for 10 hours a day doesn't affect things much. Admittedly I use AC minimally.

That said, I'd be happy to concede that working at home costs me $1K/yr. in costs I wouldn't have were I to go into an office every day. But that has costs like commuting (for most people) too.

Yeah, my stay at home costs are not zero, but just being able to scale back to one car (dropping one insurance payment), cancel parking downtown and stop burning so much gas is already a $700/mo saving.

Add in some of the other costs of the “downtown lifestyle” (lunch and coffee; skipped and brewed at home for pennies now) and I’m saving like $15k/yr post tax.

Just on insurance, parking, gas, lunches and coffee I’m saving enough to buy a brand new Aeron chair every month, give or take.

And if this turns permanent, there are a lot of other changes I can make to save even more money and increase my quality of life.

I’d say $1k/yr sounds about right for the extra expenses I’ll incur. That’s not even on my radar with all the other money this saves me and the opportunity it creates.

Savings also add up, so everyone's balance will land somewhere different depending on their lifestyle. Commute has a cost, buying lunch has a cost, less sleep has a cost, wearing shoes more often has a cost, etc...

(I expect another one of the "surprising industry suffering from covid" articles at some point about lack of footwear sales)

Personally, usually most of the 3-4 commute hours per day I can spend in productive work so the time factor isn't a big issue. But cost wise I have literally saved thousands of dollars not commuting the last six months - probably to the equivalence of a 15% pre-tax pay rise.

Same here. Just on the really obvious and direct expenses, I got around a 15% raise out of this. There are a lot of other expenses that have gone way down as well and the other expenses that have increased have been... basically line noise. An extra $10 on coffee a month compared to $1200+ in savings isn’t even worth looking at.

And this is still when it’s unknown whether I’ll need to go back to an office full time at some point. If this turns into even 60-80% remote long term, I can start looking at things like selling the second car, moving a little further out instead of paying a premium for a “short” 1 hour commute, etc.

And that’s all without even discussing the time. The extra several hours a day I have to spend with my wife/child/dogs and doing things I love instead of sitting in gridlock are invaluable.