For those of us who have to commute, it's not exactly the norm to be saving money while commuting.

Commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1], and the median commute time results in spending 10 full days commuting a year.

The average commuter in one of the largest metro areas in the country will spend over 13 full days commuting a year:

> In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.

[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator

Reducing daily commute seems like a good way to improve our carbon footprint.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-climate-change-c...

Mind you, there are things like that going on (at least in my neck of the woods), with things like subsidies to consumers for going to battery powered cars and installing solar panels, and subsidies to e.g. energy producers for building wind farms out at sea.

Me too, but GP has an argument along these lines here.

Commute is a big, and often deciding factor, in private car ownership. Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car. Expand the delivery systems for day-to-day stuff like groceries, and another big reason - buying in bulk - goes away. While people living in sparsely populated areas will still need their cars, the dwellers of large cities with serviceable public transport infrastructure might be more inclined to get rid of their cars, and just rent one for an occasional out-of-town errand.

In this way, normalizing work from home creates top-down pressure for reducing the number of private cars in use.

I think this is backwards.

We saw during the pandemic a mass exodus from cities. Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore.

Once you remove the burden of commuting, suburban / rural life becomes _even more_ attractive, increasing the need for cars.

IMO it’s too early to claim that. People left the city during the pandemic because there was no point paying the premium to live in a city when all its amenities are closed. As cities open back up we might see a lot of people return. Anecdotally, I know a bunch of early career folks in their 20s that moved back in with their parents during the pandemic to save cash. That most certainly isn’t their long term plan.

I don’t doubt that a good number of folks won’t return to the city once this is over. But I wonder if that’s just an acceleration of moves they would have already made in the next 5 years or so, rather than something indicative of the death of cities.

People who are betting against urban life are basically making a bet against human nature based on short-term trends.

A city is an entirely different experience when its residents are allowed to use parks and can enjoy dining out, walking to a market, strolling to the cinema, etc...

I think the pandemic highlighted a key deficiency of cities which most people will not soon forget.

Now it's more congested, but traffic still moves pretty quick. I'm not looking forward to all the commuters going back to the office.

And the one car I do have could potentially last me the rest of my life because I've gone from commuting 12k miles per year (time 2), down to around 3000.

My last two bus trips had betwen1 and 5 people blatantly ignoring the mask requirements and this is in on of the UK covid hot spots.

Exactly. Germany banning plastic straws while simultaneously funding a new natural gas pipeline feels very much like they just want it to seem like things are improving.

Switching from brown coal to natural gas can reduce carbon footprint by about 50%. This is a good stepping stone to reduce the huge amount of brown coal that Germany uses for power. Also, the reduction in NOx and SOx is huge by switching from brown coal to natural gas. Another big win for public health.

Do I misunderstand your point?

Germany has limited places to harvest wind (North Sea) and limited solar resources. How else can they reduce their carbon footprint? I guess they can build massive solar arrays in Libya and then build the world's largest long-range DC power line to Munich? (No joke: Singapore might do this with Australia.)

But if you ask me, the long term answer is nuclear. I know it’s controversial but many of the issues are blown out of proportion.

Disposable plastics are a problem first and foremost because they cause proliferation of microplastics in the biosphere. This is an issue, but it's not an important issue right now. It's likely harmful to biosphere and to us in the long run - but as of today, there's no noticeable harm being done that can be tied to microplastics, which suggests any negative effects are weak.

Climate change, on the other hand, is a civilization-ending threat. We keep burning more fossil fuels, and it's quite likely our grandchildren will get to starve to death. Preventing this should be our absolute top priority. Microplastics can wait.

It's like trying to administer first aid to an accident victim who has a nasty skin cut on their arm, and a leg that got cut off below the knee. Yes, that skin cut is painful and it needs treating to prevent infection, but it can wait - the first priority is to deal with the leg, before the victim bleeds out.

Things that everybody is going to notice first-hand have an outsized impact on public consciousness. When combined with democracy, this has nasty consequences.

For politicians banning plastic straws is a no-brainer: easy to ban, no real impact on anything, and everyone is going to notice it and feel like something is happening. Same for plastic grocery bags and cutlery. Do it and maybe you'll grab some of those Green votes, same play as the Energiewende.

Meanwhile if you make industry even just .1% more efficient the impact is larger by orders of magnitude but nobody is going to notice, first-hand, right now. So it's pointless when you only care about votes. Which is sadly a main feature of democracy.

Bottom line is, voters may elect politicians, but companies fund their campaigns.

GP described what's a clear systemic failure inherent in the current implementation of the system. This doesn't mean we have to throw the system away - figuring out how to mitigate this problem would work too.

On this, I don't have any solid ideas. In a way, it's a marketing problem: maybe there's a way to make people more receptive to reality than to feel-good but ultimately meaningless actions?

I sometimes wonder if governments shouldn't have an official propaganda department, with an official website, explaining in layman's terms the reasoning behind various laws being introduced. You'd go to a page for plastic straws ban, and see the government's official word on why it was drafted, what problem it's meant to solve, how it attempts that, and how they track the results.

Of course, everyone would have a field day debunking every single article from a million different angles, but at least it would serve to anchor the discussion. And it would be a place for a smarter politicians/parties to explain why increasing efficiency of some industry by 0.01% is a huge win by the current administration - hopefully leading to more such actions in the future.

There's a thin line between giving clear explanations and patronizing the citizens, but I think governments need to start walking it - as it is, politics is way too complicated for regular people to follow in any meaningful sense, other than repeating soundbites.

The Netherlands have fairly lax laws on substances and are a EU member. If you take something from the Netherlands into a country that doesn't want that item within their borders you are subject to the local laws. Same thing that would happen if you brought contraband from South America to the US really.

That said, I like the balance in your comment about the known effects of microplastics. At the moment, it is just a hype story. Honestly: No one really knows, but we should continue to seriously monitor and research the issue. I have heard that stretchy clothing (aka "ath-leisure") causes a lot of micro-fibres to be shed during laundry. This is simiar to microplastics, as most ath-leisure is made with synthetic materials that are essentially refined oil (as plastics).

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/06/the-us-natural-gas-industry-...

new studies suggest the leak rate is around 2.3%, which is about twice as high as previously predicted - and at 3% you have offset all the benefits compared to coal generation. Again, obviously that's still better in terms of particulate emissions/acid rain, but you wouldn't be doing any less global warming. So it is still significantly bad in terms of greenhouse effect, not nearly the panacea the fossil-fuel industry would like to present it as.

(and conversely - the fact that it's such a distributed problem makes it difficult/expensive to clean up. you can capture CO2 and particulates from a point source - it's expensive and it sucks but you can do it. But you can't stop 2 million miles of pipes from leaking a little bit at every fitting.)

the only saving grace is that methane does oxidize relatively quickly, on the order of tens of years, whereas CO2 is pretty much there forever. but if we're still pumping out more natural gas into the atmosphere 10 years later, that's not really the fix people think it is. Again, it's 100x more potent over a 100 year lifespan than CO2, the "long term" picture isn't all that rosy either.

Unfortunately, in many places you can't produce oil without producing gas, and with so much gas right now, there's not a lot of financial incentive to capture it all. If we reduce the need for oil, we'll reduce gas leak emissions as well.

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spill...

Why would it be different for other things created by the same processes? And do the pipes let less leak out than if we just left it in the ground?

Oil and gas seeps notwithstanding, the vast majority of reservoirs are stable and likely to remain so over human timescales unless we stick wells into them and start piping fluids around on the surface.

I'm also not going to let my pets freeze or bake while no one is home.

Just nobody is brave enough to do it, because it would be political suicide. Even if you gave the money back to the people in the form of tax breaks and social programmes, it would still be political suicide.

If you weigh this against spending an extra hour or two commuting, then it looks like a lousy bargain. But if you are like many people, and ended up working more hours during the pandemic, [1] then that erases some/all of the gains of not commuting.

1: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/24/people-a...

Wow. I cut my hours down substantially due to WFH. Pre-COVID I was doing 70+ hrs per week due to commuting into the area during the week and having nothing to do.

Now I put in maybe 40hrs per week, broken up into 1hr chunks here and there and I'm not spending over $1500/month just for a room/expenses in the area where work is.

It's great! I'm not going back to the office, like, ever.

Or are you just clocking in less, also producing less?

Once the new house is built, my office will probably be in a separate guest house.

I eat well and spend maybe $400 a month on groceries and food.

I’ve heard that Google recruiters attempt to con potential employees into some ridiculous assessment of the “free” food as a compensation benefit with numbers like those that you posited above. I can’t imagine valuing daily meals that highly.

The campus was really too big to leave for lunch unless you arrived at some stupid early hour to park underground below your office. It's a 10-15 minute walk to the south parking garage and then at least a 10 minute drive to the closest places to eat and none of those are cheaper than the cafe.

So unless you're bringing food from home you can pretty easily hit $20 for lunch per day. I doubt Cafe Macs is running a huge profit but the cost for employees is non-trivial.

I am used to pay at least 10 euros, for food + drink, unless I go to one of those special lunch time deals or street food places.

And since I am Portuguese, evenings is also a proper meal, so make it twice for the days I happen to dine outside as well.

In fact to this day I never gotten into the whole Abendbrot stuff, even though I have lived half of my life in German speaking countries.

Just explaining where I am coming from, not attacking anyone.

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

You'll be able to make it healthier though, and tune it exactly to what you like.

When you get older, you start to understand food, and you are willing to pay more for it, but now you have to count calories.

Can I survive on $10 a day? I did it on $3 a DAY when my parents were on food stamps, but I am not that crazy about going back to the "franks, rice, and ketchup" menu.

Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars, when I was at Google my cafe had fresh seafood (a rotation of different types of fish, scallops, shrimps, mussel, crab, etc) and good quality regular meat dish (I particularly liked the skirt steak with guacamole), great vegan/vegetarian options, in-house made desserts including fresh made chocolate truffles every day prepared by the chef.

And that's just lunch, at one cafe, not including breakfast and dinner and options at the other 3 dozens cafes on campus.

If you can recreate all of that for two people with a $60/week budget, then kudos to you. I know I can't.

You then mention chocolate truffles. Personally if I had my employer providing ridiculous good food for free, I’ll likely live less healthy because I will eat those nice unhealthy things every day.

If I am prepping my own food I have complete control over what I buy and can choose _not_ to buy unhealthy things.

Also in my experience a reason why food prepared by a chef tastes so good: more fat used.

I assume that Google and Facebook canteens (well that’s what they are) are better than the ones offered by companies here in Germany, but I think I would still gain weight.

That probably depends on your cultural background.

Whenever I was in the US and worked for large tech companies I found the food too fat, too sweet, (interestingly same things like Kellogs are totally different in the US than in Europe), too much artifical flavor, too much cheese, too much toppings, large unhealthy portions.

The water and Cola tasted like Chlorine and were undrinkable - I guess you don't taste it when you grow up with that taste.

I had good food here an there, especially great - and expensive - steaks in NYC and once the best fish tacos in the world on a beach in San Diego, but overall the food wasn't to my liking. I was dissapointed by the food in SF, I had very high hopes from hearing all the good things but it was just average.

Food which I did like more than the food for "those two people" in general was the food in the South of France, in Sardinia, Corsica and Rome, desserts of the Middle East, in Japan and Vietnam - also Copenhagen is so underrated concerning food.

The food for "those two people" tastes natural, has no artifical flavorings and is healthy.

So it probably depends on your cultural background, as I've said.

For the last five years we're cooking most of our meals at home, maybe go out or order food once or twice a month. The food we cook isn't as exotic, nicely looking or sophisticated as the food served at Google, but it is tasty, fresh, healthy and the groceries are pretty cheap. And despite being older, my blood results are better now than when I was leaving Google.

I understand what you're saying, but still cringed at that statement. Eating well and, by extension, cooking is hardly something I would value at $0/hour and I find it mildly insulting that someone would devalue the time I dedicate to preparing meals.

If you don't like cooking and would rather dedicate some of your income to having someone else do it for you, please frame it in that way. It recognizes it is your own decision and comes off as less judgmental of others.

I can definitely relate to him because I hate spending time cooking, I don't like the prep, I don't like the drudge work, and I don't like to have to clean up afterwards. I have a finite lifespan and I don't wanna waste any of it on things that I fundamentally do not enjoy, particularly if it's entirely avoidable.

But the best part of the day is the very first fresh ground coffee with real sugar and real cream in the morning. You just can't beat it.

Also fasting is better for you than eating all the time.

At wet markets in China/HK/TW/SE Asia, you might be able to eat for a month on 60 USD.

Buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is cheaper in terms of explicit dollar costs, but if you don't enjoy cooking then you also need to assign some monetary value for having to do something that you don't like.

I think I would enjoy taking a break and cooking so free food is probably not worth $60 to me personally. It's not crazy to think that my employer gets a benefit of more than $60 through increased productivity by providing me with free food though.

Once I committed to WFH life, it became a logical next step to double down on the freedom aspects and start my own consulting firm.

That meant I needed long term thinking. I learned to cook more often and turned my entire front yard into a garden.

Overall I would say WFH has been net healthier on my mind and wallet.

It will last years though, do you NEED to cook only one thing with it?

If you cook frequently enough then it's just not an issue; there's always something with not much good life left, sure, but that's what you use next.

If course if you don't cook it's not a problem either, so it's probably unfortunately the cause of some reluctance. Maybe kits help that.

However, if 1) I cook all my food, and 2) try to have a healthy diet I spend easily the equivalent of 30USD/day. Going to a restaurant sets you back around the same amount per meal.

So, assuming I work 200 days/year going to the office and get free food would save me 6k USD/year (also assuming I cook 100% off my meals). That kind of money would pay for holidays or other stuff.

Finally, my back of the envelope math didn't include the time I spend cooking and all the "premium" stuff I get at the office like fancy drinks and snacks, which I usually don't buy when WFH.

I really think a lot of this debate is colored by Americans thinking of the American commute.

Whenever a pissing contest about grocery prices happens (and don't kid yourself, if a number has been mentioned it's not a question of when but rather an indication that the pissing has begun) you must quote a lower number than the previous person. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't need to include critical qualifying information like location and tradeoffs, it doesn't even need to be particularly likely -- but it must be lower. So it is written. Here, I'll demonstrate:

I only spend $250 per month on groceries and I cannot imagine the disgusting excess that could possibly lead anyone to waste a single cent more!

Is the cooked-for-you food free?

Anything but free. Meal plan requirements vary.

Where I lived undergrad, we had a kitchen for a suite of rooms although I ate out a fair bit. (Many dorms did not have cooking facilities though.) Both places I went for grad school (which were actually both Ivy League) had no cooking facilities of any type.

It's not free, you are required to pay for a meal plan when you are on campus dormitory housing.

In fact I'd guess it's probably a requirement here - I don't think student halls are treated any differently to any private rented accommodation, it's probably a requirement that there be access to a (possibly shared) kitchen.

It's also quite (and increasingly) common that you're only in halls (or at least only guaranteed a place) in first year, thereafter in private rented accommodation of course you'd expect a kitchen; whereas I gather in the US the vast majority are campus universities, and provide on-campus accomodation throughout all years.

Did the "The Young Ones" not get picked up in the US

Nobody buys prepared food every day, and the costs of food are negligible for a Google employee.

You could likely do that and end up spending less money than buying food and cooking for yourself. If you don't cook you can free up your time for other revenue generating activities, chores, etc. Total cost of 2x to 4x delivered meals in my area could be $20 to $80. That's ~$320 or 80 less then the $400 number quoted in other places in this thread.

It's pretty rational behavior from the employees side of things.

And, even before Google, when I started living alone I realized I couldn't buy milk anymore because I don't drink enough milk fast enough to not let it spoil. I've switched to soy purely because it lasts months I'm my fridge safely.

I don't think you're lying, although I don't think you're correct; I'm just amazed at how different people's baseline contexts are. In your context, that's a reasonable statement, or you wouldn't have said it.

> I can't even imagine how anyone could think this was true, even in multi-generational upper-middle class urban families.

In the context of the sweep of human history of about two million years, people exclusively cooking at home being relatively recent is true [1]. Restaurants are a relatively recent invention [2] [3]. What we conceive of as normal meals is relatively recent [4].

Communal was the predominant cooking setting for many modes of cooking like baking for most of human history. This was because fuel was brutally time and energy-intensive to gather and prepare until our species started to master tool-making to a sufficient level that individual households at the mainstream level could afford the necessary tools. It literally took organizing a community to sustainably run much of what we take for granted in an individual middle class developed world household kitchen today.

Cooking over an open fire is likely the oldest mode [5], and that fire takes a fair amount of effort to sustain solely at the household scale, and the archeological evidence for humans routinely and widely making fire instead of sustaining it continuously suggests routinely and widely making fire is relatively recent (100's thousands instead of millions of years ago) [6], and even then it was common to borrow fire from a neighbor than making it, so arduous it was to make fire or expensive it was to acquire the tools. Our species only really started to relatively routinely cook during the Paleolithic age about 200,000 years ago [7], starting with open fire roasting, then proceeding from there (boiling came after roasting, ironic since boiling water is considered by us as how we start teaching children to cook) [7].

There is a simple experiment you can conduct today to validate this on your own: with nothing but a flint suitable for knapping (which in itself is an accomplishment to de novo achieve), and plain cotton clothing (to give you a head start), work out what it takes to start a fire, sustainably gather fuel, sustainably gather calories and nutrition, and scale it up to a minimum genetic variability group. It is incredibly exhausting, and prone to all kinds of failure modes.

The sheer amount of agonizing, brutal, incremental effort over the millennia it took our ancestors to "just" get to the stage to develop agrarian systems (and there is even debate if even that was a prudent choice [8] [9] [10], though for the record I'm pro-agriculture) is mind-boggling. By comparison, our current state of civilization is just LARP'ing "grinding", and gamers talking about grinding take that to yet an entirely different level. I give our ancestors their due: they were a set of some tough hombres, and we collectively do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants.

[1] https://food52.com/blog/17568-the-centuries-old-form-of-publ...

[2] https://www.history.com/news/first-restaurants-china-france

[3] https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/03/home-cooking-food-h...

[4] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20243692

[5] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23230980-600-every-hu...

[6] https://www.livescience.com/when-did-humans-discover-fire.ht...

[7] https://lithub.com/why-and-how-exactly-did-early-humans-star...

[8] http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/538/was-adopting-ag...

[9] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agricult...

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43118

Of course they do? When I've been crunching, like just putting insane hours in, I've gone weeks without cooking and just ordering in. It costs a fortune, even at Google salary - or in my case, 'SF' salary. Not to mention the cost of living is already absurd due to rent - your salary gets eaten up faster than you might imagine.

I get what you are trying to say, but empirically false

I know many people who don't cook at all and live solely on prepared food.

(Never cooking is very, very rare here in The Netherlands so I'm curious about any anecdata here).

These are broad strokes, but my experience in rural America and in SF bears this out, rich people eat out very often and tend to be fit and the very poor also eat out more than average but tend to be obese. Everyone else is in the middle.

In The Netherlands, the cuisine tends to be really simple, and salad-kits and meal-kits are extremely popular. The fanciest food that people 'cook' is often a soup or pasta, and I'd say it's extremely rare for anyone to make pasta or sauces from scratch.

In my case, my family prepares almost all of our own food anyway. And more than a few days of eating prepared food begins to affect my health. But that doesn't mean a worker who lives on prepared food wouldn't value the benefit of free food at work.

From home, I whip something up from my kitchen every day

I'd say I spend <$10 a day on food with good quality organic local ingredients.

Most people definitely don't, at $1825 a month that's already more than the median cost of rent in the U.S.

When I get paid 200$ per hour, saving 20-30$ but losing 2h is totally not worth my time.

I would rather spend that time with family or my hobbies.

How about if your commute is <20 minutes one way?

Some of us don't really object to 90 minutes a day of quiet time where we can read tbh.

a) 3 meals prepared for me saves me time and money. I love to cook but I don't have tons of time anymore and I don't have a a good kitchen. If I want to save time via delivery I end up spending tons more, and I don't think I eat as healthy.

b) The food was ridiculous. I've eaten a lot of good food, I've eaten in numerous countries, and Dropbox's food was god tier.

c) Tons of snacks, little treats, etc. Wine as well. Given the incredible quality of the food I wouldn't be surprised to find that I was eating quite a lot in terms of money.

It was such a quality of life win, especially as someone who loves food, to just have insanely good meals every single day. Even if ultimately it probably saved me closer to 1000 a month than 5000.

ADDED: This subthread to me is such a bizarre look into a certain bubble of SV. [See also apparent disagreements with the statement that spending $60/day in restaurants is somehow abnormal.]

I remember the Japanese cafe at Google was very good at one point. This article has some pictures to give you an idea:

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

Can't stand work canteens... something about the smell of food really puts you off eating.

It feels very forced.

Prefer an impersonal sandwich shop where I just have a wall to stare at than being in something attached to my workplace.

I am surprised that the IRS hasn't gone after this like HMRC has in the UK

But the companies are presumably eating the cost.

I ate some of the best meals I've ever had while working there. After a certain point that matters more to me than an extra N dollars a year.

For me getting home before dinner would be a massive plus to getting a free meal.

(/s)

The dinner is also often relatively early, so you still have quite a lot of time after the commute (granted, if your commute is 1+ hour then it's far from a dream routine).

What I like is having the option, for example I had a late sports club that was close to work, so it was more interesting to grab a quick bite and stay there to go to the club and return home after.

I wonder, on some deeply dystopian level, if tech companies do this on purpose to keep their a large proportion of their employees single.

Maybe statistically, OK. But if you have a nice commute it may be likely the best part of your day. I have a mostly flat, 40 min bike ride in the woods every day, and it is my "me time" that I cherish and lets me unwind before and after work. Definitely not "lost time".

> it is my "me time" that I cherish

You have kids don't you? That seems to be a consistent feature of people I meet who espouse the virtues of going to work.

Yes. But my liking of bike commuting is maybe more related to the fact that it is a positive change from using public transportation, where I felt really miserable (had to take two crowded buses with an indeterminate waiting time in-between).

But you are right that having kids changes one's view to work... often, after an intense weekend, I go back to the lab and say "finally! I can relax and get some work done".

If that's the absolute best way you can imagine spending those 40 mins, you don't lose the option to do that.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/05/younger-worke...

Personally I like the free AC.

Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.

It seems like a no-brainer to do this in Arizona, but I don't know the economics.

Still need to work out the numbers on the solar panels so I can decide if I should buy them, or lease them.

I live quite frugally otherwise (balking at other numbers in this thread) and $150 per month in climate cost increase for the daytimes sounds perfectly normal to me. During the hot summers I spent twice that when living in an apartment in the big city.

Also consider most people rent and have little ability to impact insulation and efficiency in their homes.

Work from home doesn't mean you have to literally work from home. There are plenty of places you can work from, ranging from free like libraries or parks, to paid like coffee shops and co-working spaces. You can get your employer to pay for the latter.

> Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.

Those optimizations become liabilities if you get a new job elsewhere.

Alternative framing: your life has been constrained by your career expectation of working in an office; you've optimised around that and found a local maximum.

Work-from-home doesn't remove that local maximum from you, but it creates an opening to find a higher maximum.

While money is fungible, time is not. You can't buy more time with your kids while they're young if they're already grown. You can't buy more time with someone who has passed away. And you can't buy your way out of missed opportunities in your personal life, once they've gone they're gone.

He's not coming back to the office. No way, no how. He's seen a better life.

Same thing applies to cooking, groceries, errands, etc.

Driving a car yep you're absolutely right, but if you commute via car a long distance for a considerable amount of time I think you're crazy.

For the record, I’ve commuted via public transit (both bus and train), bike, and foot for long stretches of time. All beat driving, all are much worse than just not commuting at all.

I don't what commuter line you're coming in on but it must be one with seats on the roof.

We are software engineers! There is no reason for us to put up with a worst case or even an average case commute. If we want to go into the office, it's easy for us to move house or move job.

Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour, especially when going into the office has its own monetary benefits as OP mentioned. It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.

The median and average commutes are not the worst case scenarios.

> Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour

10% of a software engineer's yearly salary is nothing to balk at. A year or two of that is easily the down payment amount for a modest home, and is more than what many people make in a year.

> It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.

I just checked Uber, and a one way trip to my last employer is $40 without surge pricing, and to another employer, it would be over $60. Assuming there's about 260 work days per year, that's at least $20k - $31k a year on Uber rides alone.

And it's not just about cost. It's also about time. Based on my last commute, I'd spend about two weeks straight just driving to work and back each year.

You maybe did it for a larger house. Or maybe for cheaper rent/mortgage.

We're not talking here about folks on minimum wage who can only afford to live 2 hours outside of the city they are working in.

The highly paid software engineers on hackernews could absolutely afford to live 5 minutes from the office, 30 minutes from the office, or 2 hours from the office.

They could afford to move to a city with good transit where they can only afford an apartment, or to a city with no transit where they can afford a giant mansion.

Secondly, you can work towards a situation where you don't have that commute, or it's cheap / clean / easy / you don't lose all the time. Spoiler: live on a trainline or buy a bicycle.

Third, I don't believe this is the main reason for commuting. I think it's because people want to live in one place and work in another, which is usually a bad idea - especially for the environment. It irks me when I choose to live reasonably close to work so I don't need to burn fossil fuels to get there, and then people driving their cars to and from some village complain about their commute whilst I have to suffer the air pollution from their vehicles.

I totally get that for some transitional periods a long commute may be required, but I don't know a single person who couldn't make their commute a 20min walk or by public transport if they moved or switched jobs.

do you suggest moving every time you change jobs? I suppose that can be done as a single person or a couple, but moving homes every 4-6 years with children who have to change schools, etc is (I'm sorry) an insane proposition.

If you are single and can just up sticks from one apartment to another then yeah, it's pretty trivial.

No, just if you move to a new job that's a long journey away from your house.

Does "commuting" only mean "driving in a privately owned car" where you are based? I'd consider travelling by rail, bus or bicycle to also be commuting.

I.e public transport

There is always a choice. Ten more miles equals one extra bedroom and so on.

Are you suggesting people live at the office?

And furthermore, even if everyone was that free-roaming, only-working, highly-paid software developer you seem to consider average, still there wouldn't be enough living space really close to many offices for all employees.

This might be technically correct. But realistically I'd count only working hours. 200 working days and roughly 2 hr commute for me a day. So it is about 400 hr commute to work/home i.e ~50 work days spent in commute.

I took a small pay cut, moved the east coast and now spend 24 minutes a day commuting, which is infinitely better.

This is true. I choose to live within walking distance of my office, and it has vastly improved my life - prior to this job, I commuted 2.5 hours a day, and that was awful.

These choices of course have complex tradeoffs, but you don't have to commute, it is a choice.

I feel like the trade off isn't that complex. Walking to work is a luxury of having a well paying job in the city.

I have to live near disabled family members so I can help take care of them. It's either work at Walmart, commute or work remotely. I've done the latter for years, but before the pandemic, most non-remote-first employers' attitudes towards remote working was either simply "no", or there was the expectation that you were to spend a year or more working in the office before asking your employer to make a special case for you to work remotely.

I will not be happy to return to the office.

If everyone remote worked half the week, I’d expect the metros to be half as full during rush hours. So it’s be a lot more enjoyable for everyone: space to sit and space to read a book.

I think the best of both worlds would be working at the office on average 2 to 3 days a week (on average; so I’d like to be able to work remotely for a week or two at a time).

This would also allow couples to alternate being home which would be nice for kids. If both parents work late at the office, who takes care of the kids, a nanny ? Expensive and doesn’t help the proximity between parents and their kids. My girlfriends mom stopped working when her kids started calling their nanny « mom ». That means that her career stopped. And that scares my girlfriend.

Finally, remote working would reduce traffic jams and hence help with our whole global warming situation.

So the 5 day at the office work week for everyone is: - not hygienic (metros more packed == greater chance of spreading the common cold, flu, stomachs etc == more money spend on healthcare == more sick leaves) - not green (why travel everyday when we do not have to) - not family friendly (who takes care of the kids when no one’s at home 60 hours a week?) - wastes everyone’s time (stand still doing nothing in the metro for an hour to work and back).

I’m all for the partial work at the office for the reasons mentioned by the grandparent comment, but go to hell companies that will bring the five days at the office back !!

I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.

Being forced to spend 8 hours a day outside my home makes me actively uncomfortable. I'm autistic, partially faceblind (I used to think I can tell people's faces apart... but then a coworker will shave their head and it turns out I'm completely incapable of recognizing them... turns out I mostly just recognize hair), have difficulty looking people in the eye, and have a litany of sensory issues. Face-to-face interaction gives me zero benefit, and being able to work while wearing a rayon nightgown and rayon pajama pants means I'm actually able to focus on my work instead of focusing on how my clothes feel.

My company has a diversity and inclusion committee—I am on the diversity and inclusion committee—and there has not been a single discussion of how forcing people back to the office is actively harmful to autistic employees who can't benefit from face-to-face interaction and have sensory issues that make offices uncomfortable. It is absolutely hypocritical for companies to say they care about diversity and inclusion while shafting autistic employees like this.

The number one reason I had was, because everyone can just be them, it's a lot different than in the office.

The job can and should be a lot more inclusive and diverse when you're working in your own space -- home office, cafe, etc. You find what works for you, without having to worry about messing with someone else's flow in the next cubicle or being interrupted in your own flow by someone that always needs to escape their own work. Someone that wants to do something distracting can, without annoying others, everything is on your own terms, even if you have to take care of other family members.

With audio only you're just another human, not to be judged on appearance or malformation or what have you; which opens barriers that are presented in the office all the time, hell, it might even scare your interviewers from giving you the job in the first place! Either people can be cruel or incessantly think you're helpless.

I've noticed over the last year, those colleagues that are more introverted sometimes have a better go of presenting how they think online. When sharing their screens they're able to show more of their presentation skills, a lot more chances to present in a way they've developed overtime. And not more opportunities, it's probably the first opportunity they've had to shine than if it they were in an office; it doesn't happen.

In my opinion, I feel like those that are people-people will always get ahead in an office setting versus those that think a bit differently, look a bit differently, dress or act a bit differently, and this makes it a more level playing field for the latter.

Remote work promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.

An all-remote workforce is on its way to being an all-male workforce. Female employment is already decades behind where it was pre-pandemic.

The single male echo chamber on here is unnerving.

If you WFH and have a child >5yo you're likey to be able to spend a few hours working with them at home. You can take a regular break and pick them up from school. With more than one it is more difficult. But in either case, how do you manage to stay in the office without after school childcare?

I'm speaking as a parent who has exactly the same job as my partner. If neither of us were WFH, we would be unable to get by without after school support. With both of us WFH, we can trade pickup and childcare responsibilities. It's way more flexible and completely the opposite of what you're arguing.

Based on my experience, raising a kid on your own is difficult, and without home office would have been even worse.

What? Surely if anything it's the opposite - if you can't afford it wfh allows you to be at home to 'multi-task', what're you going to do if you're supposed to be in the office?

> I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.

I’ve made the mistake of saying that out loud during pre-pandemic lunch conversations and happy hours and every time people looked at me like I had two heads.

I mean, in the extension if nobody cares a single f about being competitive, then maybe your whole company doesn't care about being competitive either, and oopsies some other company cared a bit more and now you don't have any jobs anymore...

If a company wants its employees to care, it can re-organize itself as a co-op. Until then, our relationship is purely transactional.

I find it ironic that our industry trains up developers until the point they finally become competent at their jobs, and immediately force them to manage new breed of trainees instead of doing the work they're good at.

I was recently hiring a developer and my massive media company insisted I ensure my recruiter is giving me diverse candidates. I selected an individual who is apparently Spanish Jewish. Some very rare tribe of Jews from Spain. Was that considered diverse? Nope. Needs to be black.

We were audited. The American auditor was flabbergasted by my values on the form. He literally told me that as a (visible, brown) Jew, I couldn't possibly mark those things down. I had to resort to pulling out maps and asking if Morocco was in Africa and Israel was in Asia. He was flummoxed by my refusal to mark down "white" when a) I'm not white, and b) his form offered me the ability to mark down what I am. Pointing out that percentage-wise as Jew, I was less than 0.006% of Canada's population also didn't make me a minority apparently.

That was the last time I ever assumed that minority is supposed to mean anything other than the tokenized narrative of the time.

I guess the geographical line is somewhere around Mauritania

Honestly asking, not trying to nitpick.

>White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "White" or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/note/US/RHI625219#:~:....

Skin tone is olive-tan, get pretty dark in the summer (if I stay out, but usually indoors working on something), eyes are almond shaped. I've had/get people coming up to me on the street asking questions in Spanish often, Tagalog and a few other South East Asian languages not as frequently, Russian, have Hasidic kids coming up asking me if I'm Jewish so they can try and drag me off to their Winnebago of a mitzvah tank. Once had some guy approach me speaking German with a beer in his hand and after realizing I don't speak German said, "Oh sorry, you look German" (whatever that means) and then I warned him of open container and the precinct up the block. Most assume I'm just a white guy who is either Italian or Jewish (might have to do with being from/living in the Northeast US idk).

I don't like talking about my ethnicities because I just don't care, but when it's brought up in the context of someone saying, "black people do this" or "okay white boy", I get offended because to me it's primitive and, excuse my language, retarded. Those things are usually said by those who don't know my ethnic background (not that it should matter), and when I call out the ignorance behind the statements made and that doesn't come across, I explain my ethnic background, which usually results in "what's a cape verdean?" or "what!? You're black too?". And if that doesn't come across, I'll flash a photo of me with my grandmother or father and they stfu.

This is going on a tangent, but to your point, I believe that having marked off african/black and caucasian or "two or more races" on my job applications has positively impacted my response rates in the past, but has also lead to negative results post-interview once seeing me and not believing that I am in fact Cape Verdean. I dont have empirical evidence, but having the technical capabilities and drive required for the jobs, after taking and passing test after test with well known organizations, having interviewers emphasize "inclusion and diversity", and having many interviews that left me feeling "wow that went awesome. Totally got this" (I'm more of a realist. If it sucked, it sucked), only to get a rejection, I've come to the assumption that there's got to be at least some percentage of rejections where the potential employer thought "he's lying... he doesn't look black".

The whole corporate "inclusion/diversity" thing here in the states is a fucking joke. My older brother, who's darker and a little less ethnically ambiguous, has commented on his experiences, which are relatable to a degree, saying he "was always too light for the blacks, and too dark for the whites"

I was recently invited to a candidate selection process with senior managers and HR. There was one guy who was autistic, but talented and good. He was "weird" by normal standards, but scored very well in all interviews and calls.

Long story short, he was considered the "best", but "weird". We hired a less qualified woman wearing a headscarf and the position was then "adjusted" to be more innovation/marketing foused and less hard tech focused.

I tried to convince them to take the autistic dude and also argued with diversity, but was told that "he is just strange and will not fit in" and finally overruled.

I am very happy I got out of that place...

Civil rights violation? Probably.

A good example is exactly what is going on now: multinationals all temporarily slapping a rainbow on products to take advantage of a movement (like Raytheon. wtf... https://twitter.com/RaytheonTech)

It's why Asian's are beginning to wake up to this as they've, as a group, been "too successful" and are seeing ever meritocratic device they've used to lift themselves up dismantled and replaced with lotteries, etc that ensure equal outcomes (even they won't).

Do committee members not have the ability to raise issues? I'd have thought that would be why they would want people like you on the committee, so that you can raise and talk about issues like this.

I empathize with this but many organizations are, essentially "up or out". You are either seen as growing and rising through the ranks or as awaiting some sort of release.

I hope you are so good at what you do that you could easily find another job, but that is not a given for most people. So they feel compelled to play the games you are dismissing.

If you're on the diversity and inclusion committee and no one is challenging the return to the office, can't you? Or is this purely a reactionary, advisory committee?

Hopefully coming out of this there'll be a mix of companies. Some fully remote for people like yourself and some mostly in the office for folk like me.

When I look back on hallway conversations, I can't think of many that really mattered. Actual important decisions are typically not made by IC engineers. Relevant conversations are usually inside team structures and not spontaneous.

Not that I’m itching to get back in an office (I’ve been remote most of my career), but this really depends on the environment. I’ve seen some really pivotal changes happen simply because someone happened to yak about it, or overheard such a yak and jumped in.

Usually these changes have been mostly technical in nature and under the purview of the engineers. But sometimes they’ve significantly changed product direction.

What!?!? I don't necessarily agree with OP, but this is the exact opposite of my experience (mostly observing others). One of the main downsides of WFH is the "always on" nature of it.

I usually left my laptop at work, and ignored my phone before (after all I'm not at work). Now you're always set up to work, so there's no reason you can't respond at 8PM. I don't, but many of my colleagues do.

Most of my coworkers, especially the ones that would be leaving early for work life balance reasons, work all hours, and I get randomly pinged at 5:30-8 by people that would just be done for the day. They don't need to commute, so they have less pressure about working at odd times, and want to show managers the advantages of the WFH thing, so it won't go away.

The effect is that it leads to a "longer" work day, but less concentrated than it would have been in the office. And similar productivity, IMO. I wonder if some of your co-workers you describe may do the same. In some ways, I feel like it's better work-life balance for some people as it's "ok" (in some work cultures) for WFH employees to take the time as they need it. And others are equally fine ensuring their work time is as concentrated as possible because they have other things they would rather do in evenings, etc.

You won't be as tempted to just pop in for a few minutes of work here or there to respond to some chats or emails.

I sympathise with people finding it hard to switch off (I was one until I did all of the above) but it's a simple problem to solve and it's absolutely nothing to do with WFH.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has the exact opposite experience with this. I can’t think and get mentally blocked when I have someone peering over my shoulder or I’m staring at their screen. I find this kind of collaboration so much easier if I’m in the comfort of my own desktop setup, sharing the screen over Teams/Skype whatever and communicating verbally over a quality headset.

EDIT: To make myself clear, this is not a criticism of my boss, it's just that pair programming with someone who is a lot more experienced than you is just naturally intimidating.

I’m by no means junior but I’m new on a team, and I’ve had to remember over and over that the giant blob of the state of everything is unfamiliar to me, familiar to my team, and when I elide details I’m not saving anyone any time because I’m not sure whether those details are relevant or even if they might reveal where I’m off track.

From over your shoulder: "Then do this thing cos of this this and this" - yes thank you I know. Eventually I feel downcast and just stop thinking for myself, I'm just a typer at that point.

Caveat: I’m ADHD/ASD. I find it hard to focus on multiple sensory subjects at once. Pairing in an office means I’m focused on the screen; the human’s body language; the human’s verbal communication; interaction around concepts, design, mechanical stuff like what actually gets read/written/executed; a second screen because sometimes it’s more effective to computer for a second than engage all of that. Remote pairing condenses a lot of that.

Over the shoulder pairing has a lot of "do this", "search that". Shared has a lot more of "can you work out x whilst I check y" and "this is the result of y, I'm interpreting that as z. Should we do a?".

In my opinion it's a much better programming experience than having your laptop and sitting next to someone so that you can each look over at each other's screen.

Also by mid afternoon you might not want to sit physically that close to someone.

I'd use vscode live share even in the office, which begs the question what even is the role of the office in facilitating pair programming

There is a big different between WFH for a few months where EVERYONE else is also WFH ... and WFH for YEARS where some, or most, of the others are in office.

The latter is years upon years of feeling disconnected, left out, and sidelined. The vast majority of companies even if they allow remote are not remote first. Remote first involves actual structural and procedural changes.

Lastly, WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN. You'll recognize just how bad it can be to see (as a function of your time alive) MOSTLY just your home. It does a number on you.

This is just down to nothing more then poor discipline and lazily wanting an office to fill the gap for you. I have been working from home for 9 years now, 5 days a week. You know how I solve the issue, I go outside. I go and run. I take my dogs out for a walk. I also meet with friends to eat / drink coffee. I look after myself. The time I save commuting means I can do things like cook myself a proper lunch, go and have a nap if I did not sleep great the night before. I have much more freedom to balance my life. I agree though, if I sit at my desk all day inside and then stop work to go and sit on the couch and watch Netflix, sure it's going to be detrimental to my mental health.

Also the only social part I referenced was coffee with close friends. I think drinking a coffee with an understanding friend(s) is much easier then being around 20+ colleagues for 8 hours straight.

Point being, everyone is different in this regard.

Just because someone has extreme social anxiety doesn't mean they permanently refuse to take action. Sometimes they succeed in actively overcoming it and are capable of forming connections. Being in an environment where you can passively observe the character of others does tend to make it easier to approach them on the days when you're feeling up to it. A person might choose to work in an office because they understand this benefit of consistent forced exposure.

Maybe you like the office more and can’t make wfh work, not everyone can! But don’t assume everyone else is like you

Why? You have to put in the effort to be social, but you need to do that in person, too.

I have been working remotely for my entire work life (11 years employed, about 5 years freelance) and I am a very happy person.

To be fair, I'm also developed some very strong friendships over the internet (through videogames), so i guess i have a lot of experience in the field

I've worked from home 100%, worked from an office 100%, and worked a combination. Overall, I think the combination is best. However, having put in somewhere on the order of 15 years fully remote, it has not caused any problems for me. I chat with people via IM, including both purely social and problem solving discussions. I've been on teams where everyone was remote and ones where I was the only remote, and in areas in between.

Overall, working remotely is good for some people and not for others; much like every other arrange. It takes skill and effort to get good at, just as in person social interactions do. Some companies make it easier than others.

It's a complicated topic, and I really don't think it's possible to say "it's good" or "it's bad", only "it depends".

I wouldn't be surprised if people who don't have local family or established friends in the area and live in cities where talking to strangers is considered threatening behavior tend to socialize primarily, if not exclusively, with co-workers.

hi. Been completely remote for 5+ years. My mental is better than ever.

> You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN

I would much rather use all the saved time NOT going to an office and instead spend it with people I care about more having more interesting conversations in a more comfortable environment.

> The latter is years upon years of feeling disconnected, left out, and sidelined.

I empathize with some of the isolation that WFH can bring, but I also strongly disagree that it is an inevitability. WFH gives you more freedom with your time and doesn't force you into social interaction by default which, depending on the person, can be a good or a bad thing.

I think it just highlights the importance of CONCIOUSLY choosing our social interactions which might take more effort but I think results in higher satisfaction. You could look at it like junk food vs. nutritious food. One is convenient, leaves you wanting more, and is probably not as healthy if that's all you take in. The other fills you up more, sometimes takes a bit more work, and ends up being more sustainable long term.

This year WFH have been a significant mental health improvement. I am more social outside of work and I am more productive during work.

I am dealing with an insane amount of issues that would have never happened if everyone was in the same office.

It really depends on the culture of the company and the team, and it appears that mine has not managed to change enough (whatever they claim).

Any source or data for this assertion.

On the other hand there is people out there, like me, that have been improving and refining remote working skills from decades.

When I traveled to former Soviet Republics it shocked me how helpless old people felt doing the most basic things. As young people they were trained to delegate everything on the State. The State did a very bad job almost at everything but there was no alternative, so they never developed the skills .

When they were old,it is difficult to learn anything new and they had not the necessary skills to survive on their own and were nostalgic about communism.

That made me realize that most schools and Universities and jobs just train you to obey orders and do not leave space for resourcefulness and independence.

This is imho the worst part of WFH. Some people come to work at 6:00 and go home at 14:00, some come at 10:00 and leave at 18:00, and some even later. If you're in an office, the latecomer can just check the early birds office, "oh, you're here, can we ..." / "he's not here anymore, this will wait 'till tomorrow". With WFH it's constant emails and work calls, and for a lot of people it's hard to separate work/home, turn the work phone off (especially in small companies, where before the plague, if someone called you in the afternoon, it usually meant something horrible has happened).

The second thing i'd miss is all the non-work activities that happen at work, from random chatter, to lunch, practical jokes, etc. Also when dealing with clients, the after-meeting-beer usually solved a lot of problems with a lot of one-on-one chats, and informal talks about rwhat the issues are,... this is hard to do on zoom/teams/..., especially if there is a higher-up present, and the engineers are afraid to honestly say what's bothering them during day-to-day work.

If you get up early and stop replying to emails after 15:00-16:00 (when there isn't something scheduled going on) no one gets surprised.

The team there was shocked and maybe offended even, and I was informed it was verboten to work any of the next 3 days.

Differences in work cultures globally are staggering.

Everywhere I've lived and worked (only two countries, tbf), the idea of working on a holiday weekend is just ... not considered, outside of being on call and getting paid extra for it or similar.

In my experience it really depends on the individual, team, and company just how strict people are with not working unscheduled overtime on national holidays to crunch a release or not.

But assuming that it will happen, that's a first for me.

I've faced this first hand as I switch from one company to another. In my previous place, we enforced a hard limit on when we could be expected to respond, and nobody ever messaged me on slack/ sent me an e-mail after that. At my new place, people are constantly e-mailing and messaging into the small hours of the night. It's tiring to watch.

I'm not sure i can agree with that. Most of the communication in my office is a quick message in Slack, or a comment in Jira.

I feel like this is perhaps more of a matter between synchronous and asynchronous communication, GitLab has wrote a bit about this in their guide to remote work: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/

- I hate being distracted by hallway conversations. They're just a way to avoid work for most people.

* I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person

- They are easier to do online imo. There's no need to sit next to each other.

* Having a workforce socially close improves productivity because everyone wants to step up for each other.

- My team has gotten closer to each other during the pandemic than ever before. I think your point is highly subjective.

* Being seen by my fellow employees helps keep me from becoming distracted.

- Sounds like you need to work on that. If you need other people to monitor you to make sure you're doing work...

* Working at the office helps prevent home life from being distracting during work hours.

- Again, probably something you need to work on.

* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

- I think most people spend the same on food and drinks, since companies do not provide it for them. Maybe they even spend less, since they have more time to cook at home. Electricity is negligible for me at least. It's way less than I spend on commuting.

* I enjoy the routine.

- I find it insane.

* I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

- I'll give you that. But for me personally this has not been a problem at all.

Re: work/life separation, I think a shed at the bottom of the garden is all the separation I need. The fact that I can do some coding, take a short walk to the park, do some gardening, interact with my wife far outweigh wasting my life in an office

The wife: Does chores / cooking and baking while she is just a participant in a meeting. Go for a run before picking up the kid from daycare

Myself: I can drop the kid off at daycare, do chores around the house, do HIIT workout multiple times during the week. Try body hacking like intermittent fasting / prolonged fasting

We take naps to recharge if we are tired. We also go enjoy nature & hike practically every week which is naturally therapeutic.

It’s a dream for a lot of people to just wake up, get a cup of coffee and sit down at their computer, to not have to get out of bed in the middle of the night, plan bowel movements like a military campaign and run around like a maniac all day every day.

Compared to commuting (car+gas) and time-to-commute opportunity costs (to use for personal house tasks, side projects, self health)? I seriously doubt it.

I think the lesson here is, some companies can be remote-first, some companies can be in-person, and different employees will prefer different environments based on what's going on in their lives and the choices they make.

It should not be the case that one "tribe" should try to impose their preference on the other, which was the case pre-COVID (e.g. almost everyone was forced to be in-person), and I suspect fear of a return to that status quo is what is driving a lot of these discussions.

Or are these people working for companies that provide food or something. I just don't get it.

It's simple. I work at Google, but this answer works for many other companies as well. Prior to COVID I would eat an average of 13 meals per week (and snacks) at the office. Now that I'm eating all of those at home, my grocery bills have shot up.

Also, I’m busy working, so I don’t actually have time to cook my lunch, so it’s either eating something frozen, which is unhealthy and gets old, or get delivery, so that $30 for a meal.

Also, my commute is a fifteen minute walk, because I absolutely optimized for not having to drive anywhere. The only benefit to wfh was seeing my kid more often, but that had its own caveats because it is hugely distracting. So, it’s cheaper and more productive for me to be in the office.

The only reason I’d want to work from home was if I wasn’t actually working, and my bet is many people see it as exactly that.

It's this. Companies started offering food to keep their employees in the office longer. That people here are saying they prefer eating at work due to the cost shows it worked.

Preparing food means getting ingredients, tracking expiration and making and storing leftover food.

In some ways this is wonderful, in others it is a huge time and energy sink compared to eating at work.

Spoiled food wastes more than money and it happens easily.

You can buy prepared food for home via takeout or frozen but those have their own problems.

Totaling up gas and mileage and food and tolls, commuting to the office is going to cost me on the order of $500-1000 a month that I'm not spending now. Just the extra time that I'd need to spend getting ready to go to work and then commuting works out to an entire extra work week of time over the course of a month.

It’s be cheaper out in the suburbs, but even then it might be another few hundred a month.

I’m surprised that people are talking about things like electricity costs when real estate costs are so much higher.

At the office, maybe, but definitely not working.

For dinner, the set times provide natural day boundaries with a strong incentive to wrap up by a certain time. During lunch, it may be saving some time that people wouldn't work by doing away with the need to get to and wait for a restaurant (if the company wouldn't provide any cafeteria at all; every place where I worked had one, usually paid and lunch-only though).

I believe that companies provide food because it's a relatively cheap perk providing a lot of value that simply cannot be replicated.

If I have to make my own food, I have to grocery shop, cook, and do dishes, all of this done inefficiently at small scale and out of my own time. At a buffet-style cafeteria, you just walk in, grab food, eat, drop off your dishes, done. The real value isn't the free food. It's the convenience that comes with it.

At the same time, it doesn't cost the company that much. Raw ingredients aren't that expensive, and neither is running a cafeteria if everything is prepared at scale.

Even if you ignore the cost, restaurants (including buffet style ones) can't replicate that convenience: They aren't at a place where you are anyways, and payment adds extra friction. A la carte restaurants are right out because of the wait. And even if the food actually did make people stay longer - I bet that time is made up by not having to do chores to feed yourself.

Well that's where you live now. Average worker changes jobs 12 times in a career. Is your plan to just move 12 times (and pay the costs associated with that)? Or work at the same job for much longer (and pay the costs associated with that)?

One of the benefits of living in a large metro area is the amount of job opportunities, but it you put an 8 minute circle around your residence and only look for jobs within that, that negates those benefits.

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration/guidance/...

It’s great that we have more remote work opportunity post COVID, but it was never realistic to expect every company or even most company to abandon in-office work and all of the benefits that come with it. Maintaining a remote team is significantly more management and communication overhead than simply having people in one place.

You mean it actually requires management. Office work is easy to manage with butts in seats. I had someone ask me once, if we were remote, how would we know people are working. I asked, how do we know they are working now?

Communication overhead with in person only appears lower. I've been a part of many meetings where people talk in circles, think they make a decision and then a week or 2 later wonder what was talked about. Of course, you might be unique and have a dedicated person who takes copious notes every meeting and sends them around afterwards. Remote pushes written communication as the first step, which I have found to be much better to build ideas from.

One thing that does not work is a company trying to do both. If anyone is remote, then the company needs to be remote first.

No, I mean it requires more management. It’s not about butts in seats, it’s about communicating and keeping people on the same page.

Anecdotally, when shifting to remote work we often saw managers struggle with a tendency to micromanage and check in too frequently with remote employees. I know “butts in seats” is a common trope but in practice it was easier for people to get away with doing nothing at the office because managers assumed that in office meant they were working.

Communication overhead is absolutely higher in remote companies. It sounds more like you were describing a broken company culture that you managed to distance yourself from by going remote, but the culture is still broken.

A team that communicates properly in person will have more overhead to communicate remotely.

Not sure what inspired you to make a claim from a position of ignorance. Definitely an outlier. The vast majority of people have commutes that are not within 8 minutes by any means. 1 Google search and see the US - https://blog.batchgeo.com/commute-times-and-transportation/ or Europe - http://ftp.iza.org/dp12916.pdf

I’ve managed both types of teams and haven’t found this to be the case at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Asynchronous communication as the norm is a lot less demanding on ICs and managers. In person meetings are rarely an effective use of time or energy.

Besides this factor, in person meetings can often be less effective than email or a group chat.

If coworker A prefer digital communication, and coworker B prefers in person communication, then there is no way A and B can both be happy. A can stay at home, and B can go to office, but B is now far from home (commuting) but still over zoom. The only way to not waste people’s time is for All remote, or for A to completely not get their way and get dragged in person.

“Imagine the hallway conversations that could start the next…” it will make up for your 2 hour commute and 3000 one bedroom apartment!

Because statistically it would be representative.

Also because even if the office is next door, you need to get dressed properly, prepare, etc., which eats at least half hour every morning.

And another key benefit is that, even for those who don't shower, nobody else is hurt...

"only 45 minutes each direction!? you're lucky!"

or

"that's a reverse commute! you're lucky!" spoiler alert, there is no reverse commute, everyone is driving every direction

Once I realized the collective delusion I quit

Most of my career has been 10 minute walking commutes at trendy companies in trendy neighborhoods in the middle of a city, max of 20.

Statistically this is not possible as others are priced out or the units to live in just don't exist.

Very few of those people have kids. Unless you're making L8 comp, raising a few kids within bicycle commute the major tech campuses is financially unobtainable. The cost of a backyard, good schools, and safe streets is astronomical in tier one urban cores.

And that’s all just in the US. It’s even more obtainable in other countries with better urban planning.

* 2000 square foot house * 7500 square foot lot for backyard * 7/10 or higher GreatSchools * Built after 1980 (older houses have much higher lead content which is terrible for young children) * 3 bedrooms/2 bathrooms * 30 minute commute to Amazon or Microsoft HQ

I couldn't find a single home under a million. Central Austin is pretty similar, and Boulder is even worse. Portland's slightly more affordable, but homicides in Portland have also quintupled from last year, so families aren't exactly running there.[1]

By comparison I can find a house meeting those criteria in Gainesville, FL for under $400k. That's why remote is such a better deal than commuting for people with families.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/anarchists-and-an-in...

I lived in Seattle for a long time and know plenty of large families living in comfortable homes close to work on regular non-FANG salaries. They don't live in estates, but they don't need to. The people who do want that either need to be rich or drive an hour; there are a lot of those people too. And I'm sure the ones who drove an hour are thrilled with work-from-home.

It'd be nice if an outcome of this pandemic is a political change toward ending absurd commutes by building cities better, but doesn't really seem like people are putting two and two together

WhyTF are so many people commuting for so long in the first place? solve for this the rest follows

I think some see work as a vacation from home and others see home as a vacation from work. If employees are spoiled with many benefits in the office like gourmet lunches, famous speakers, entertainment, and free massages, It makes sense to prefer working at work when your office is a luxury spa - but most offices are not like that at all.

This isn't just some unimportant whining. It's the source of a large chunk of your carbon footprint. And electric or autonomous cars won't make that go away.

Why?

Rent was triple what I was paying to be close, or double to cut the commute in half. And I had no job security.

Still ride a bike for transportation though! Love it.

* I spend a lot more on gas than on the electricity delta

* I spend a lot more on food and drinks when I am in the office than at home; in the office I buy, at home is all home cooked. The food at home is also a lot healthier.

* the team I manage is spread in 2 other offices in different countries, nobody is in my country, so going to the office achieves nothing

* the extended team I work in, also spread even more, only one person in the same office as me. We already talk too much, more is not better

* spending 1-3 hours a day commuting (varies a lot if I ride the bike or drive the car, time of day and if it rains) never helped anyone

* I am not distracted by home life, I am too busy for that

* I am one of those very few people things are escalated to when the fan gets bent, so there is no much separation anyway

But I recognize there are some benefits of being in the office, even if overall for me it is not a net positive.

1) Home is not without distractions, but I think the office had more; it mostly came down to ambient noise and people always moving around in my field of view. Being alone I can focus more. Everybody is different. If you find the office better for focus (for you) I don't debate that.

2) I hate over-the-shoulder code reviews. I don't want me and my coworker's faces to be kissing distance while we both squint at a 14" laptop. I'll take a Zoom call screen sharing on my 34" ultrawide any day.

I absolutely think being there in person is a competitive advantage, especially in the ladder-climbing aspect. We don't work in a purely egalitarian system. There is a game, and you can play it or not play it, but all other things equal you'll get more monetary rewards if you play it.

And my non-Machiavellian viewpoint on it is that I like my coworkers and I think seeing them and conversing with them in person few times a week is good for my mental health. I get more face to face social interaction when I work at least part of the week in the office.

Sure, work-from-home is nice for senior folks like me who have lots of influence and have nurtured their career over several decades. We can allocate resources and people listen to us by virtue of position.

For junior folks, work from home is terrible for their career. Nothing substitutes for standing in front of a whiteboard and talking things out. You need social contacts to spread out in order to be safe when your company goes to shit. And, you probably share a house with multiple other folks and don't have much budget to buy things.

https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

Also I find modern tools easily make up for not being in close proximity.

Best of all as an engineering lead, I am not restricted to hiring in the small pool of engineers who can travel to the physical location of an office. I can hire talent world wide

> I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

To be fair, that's a matter of personal discipline. There is nothing to stop you closing your laptop at 5pm and leaving it until the next day to open it again.

> To be fair, that's a personal disciple issue.

That's true, and in my case I have absolutely no issue with not working at random hours, even though I use the same exact computer for both work and personal projects. I work from 8 AM to 6 PM, with a break from 12 to 2. Absent an emergency, at 6:01 I'm done for the day and unreachable.

But in other domains, I've found that having to enforce this discipline can take an emotional / energy toll. In my case, I have this issue with food. I've found that if I have snacks and / or other easy to eat, calorie-laden food around the house I will absolutely have a terrible time trying to control myself and not eat them all. Even though I'm not actually hungry, I keep thinking about them and keep feeling like I need to eat them. This absolutely has an effect on my ability to focus, and the only way to have that go away is to eat. I'm not a smoker, but I suppose it's a similar kind of itch.

But by not buying them at all and not having them in the house, it's much, much easier for me. I don't actually miss them when I don't have them and never think about them. Every once in a while I may think about having an ice-cream or something, but I don't crave it to the point of going to the store and buying it (even though the round trip is like 10 minutes, and I'm a fairly active person). Just eating an apple or whatever makes the craving go away. But if the ice cream was there, 9/10 times I would have eaten that instead of the apple. And "just a scoop" is never just a scoop.

So I completely sympathize with people who've found that having this clear separation between work and home makes a difference for them. Having to catch a train / avoid sitting in a car during a commute / picking up the kids from school / whatever can really put an end to the possible tendency of "just five more minutes, and I'm done".

But there's also the fact, as others have said, that there are other ways to not work from home than going to an office. While I love working from my own house, what I hate the most with the office is the commute, and it's not even that bad by local standards. But advocating for a remote culture would allow people to combine these advantages (having both a separation and no / short commute). Of course, the social aspect of the office some people talk about wouldn't be completely solved.

Don't Wake Up the Programmer!

https://alexthunder.livejournal.com/309815.html

Having gone back and forth between in-office and WFH and between IC and manager in both circumstances, I have no doubts that in-office work is more productive than WFH.

The only exceptions are when the office environment is truly terrible. WFH is more productive than being in an office full of constant distractions, or an office with broken HVAC in 90-degree heat, or an office with a bully executive who enjoyed yelling at people. In those circumstances, WFH was simply a partial band-aid over a company that didn’t care enough about employees to treat them right. Eventually the interrupters learn how to ping you on Slack 20 times a day or the office bully realizes that they can terrorize people remotely at 9PM. WFH didn’t solve any problems, it just buffered them with distance. The real solution was to switch to a company that cared.

That’s not to say that WFH can’t work. It can be made to work, but we need to be honest that it adds overhead and inefficiencies that must be compensated for. Given a choice between in-office and full remote, the same team will be more efficient in-person.

Candidly, I suspect many employees feel the same way. However, it’s becoming taboo to question the superiority or WFH in online discussions because the WFH fans are very defensive about their preference.

Given that the trend is to open floor plans with limited personal space, I suspect that "truly terrible" is a fair--if not flat out generous--description of a lot of office space.

Maybe there's some teams out there that are doing WFH well but every person I know on game dev has commented on how productivity is way down since WFH.

[1]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...

1) WFH

2) dedicated office

3) cubicle

4) quitting

5) open plan office

Not every employer gives you free meals, and when they do, you may not always like them and may still want to eat something else.

Commuting can many hours of your time. I have more valuable things to do with my time rather than commuting.

Some company cultures are better adapted to remote working, while others stand to benefit more from in-person, and the same thing can be said for individuals. People who thrive more in one than the other will gravitate toward companies whose remote/office emphasis matches their preference, and recruiters will start considering it, too.

Is it really that uncommon in the US outside of FAANG companies?

Here in the UK my employer can and occasionally, but not frequently enough in my opinion, does pay for my lunch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

Though I suspect both yourself and the previous poster was referring to the European Union.

We have a policy where you are free to work from home if you like given that there are no COVID cases in the city I live in however we have seen large influxes of staff returning to the office.

For me, its exactly the reasons you've called out.

At the end of the day there is no one size fits all for everyone, the same way that working in an office doesn't work for anyone. However I do believe that people should be given the option.

If people want something, they can send an email. Those aren't ephemeral.

Competitive advantage for whom? The company?

It's gonna be hard to overcome to employee advantage of having a potentially absurd effective-hourly-rate when you combine a high salary with extremely low actual hours that only remote work can provide.

You can go from 40-60 hours (factoring in overhead like commute) to 15-20 and 2-3x your hourly rate. That's a huge efficiency gain.

Of course this is subject to the type of work you do your own personality etc etc.

This is single biggest reason I want to go back to office.

In fact it already has started to feel weird that my home is my work place as well.

Even if my work place remains fully remote I’ll find some other place to work from but never some place as shitty as WeWork. Maybe I will rent a cheaper smaller place nearby if I don’t find a sane coworking space.

I've had to tell people - I won't reply after 5, and no meetings then. People still tried to setup 530, even 730pm meetings all the time (not even during crunch time). Instant decline lol

We don't make enough time for our own lives. Hell, it's hard enough to find time to actually make an enjoy a dinner.

I still don’t want my home also as a work place.

Weirdly for me the food and drink is the opposite. Maybe if you're lucky enough to have an office that provides full lunch meals for you but I haven't experienced that yet.

I really enjoyed work lunches but it usually meant 4/5 days a week was going out with colleagues to local restaurants and paying restaurant food prices.

At home I can make a sandwich with stuff from my fridge without the allure of "well everyone else is going out for sushi don't you want to join?"

I've been enjoying not having to spend £4k/year on a rail season ticket. It looks like in the UK the new part-time season tickets are aimed at people commuting 2 days a week, whereas tech companies seem to be converging on 3.

Yes, we had similar results in my coven.

I think this is the only point in your list that is actually fundamental, the rest can be remediated by relatively simple lifestyle changes. If you like pair programming, then there is an almost certain probability that you'll prefer the office over remote. There is literally nothing one can do remote to replace the kind of in person interaction that pairing or over the shoulder reviews give you.

I personally paired full time for a few years and I hate it with the heat of a thousand sons. Between pair programming and getting a low paid service job, I'd take the latter. The fact that WFH lets me cut out at-work social interactions that cause me severe distress is a benefit I will never give up.

Working in the office is not a competitive advantage when your leaders are working remotely. Which is what’s often happening — I find it’s actually easier to catch up with my peers virtually since I don’t have to waste time walking to another building and standing in line for coffee. Since they’re at home too and not stuck in meetings all day, they’re answering IMs and turning what used to be a 30 minute ordeal you had to go through in order to get their attention into 5 IMs back and forth.

Just try to imagine being on the other side of this: if you wanted to work in the office and people arbitrarily said “nah”. Because that’s what I think is going to happen at a lot of companies, and it’s what many of us who prefer remote work have dealt with our whole careers. There are too many positives for companies around office leases to not have a significant portion of your workforce remote: I think the improvement in financial performance of remote companies will force the hand of even the reluctant ones.

And if people are allowed to work from home, they have an alternative that fills the loss of the private office, and they can also take upon themselves to shorten their working hours to something more "reasonable".

I saw it happen 25+ years ago when working from home wasn't a thing. I worked for a consulting company. We had about half of our workforce working at customer premises. Not low fee body rental but projects that had to be run there. Well, the people getting advances in pay and career were mostly the people working in the headquarter. Managers of successful remote teams got career advances, some key remote developer got them too (customers wanted them) but most of them were forgotten wheels of the company machine.

But I'm in no competition with colleagues so working from home is great. I won't go back unless I'll ever start starving.

I work 100% remote and recently have been mentoring a recent CS graduate and doing pair programming with him. Let me describe how we do it and then I'd like to hear how you think things are better in person.

We start a Slack voice call, these work reliably. Some coworkers told me the longest Slack call they have maintained was over 12 hours long, with people coming and going throughout the conversation.

After starting the voice call, I share my screen. I show him what I'm working on in IntelliJ and we talk about it. Then I use a new IntelliJ feature called code-with-me and send him a link, he clicks on it and and he is then able to edit any file in my IDE on his IDE on his computer. I'm still sharing my screen, but he might not look at it, after all, he can see and edit any part of the code on his own computer now. He can share his screen at any time if needed with 2 clicks.

I direct the conversation, but look for tasks I can pair off. There's a service I need an interface too, so I ask him to work on it. He starts reading documentation about it on his own computer with multiple large monitors. He then begins writing an interface to the service. I flip tabs over to the source file he's working on and can see where his cursor is and what he's typing in real time. I give advice, I just type out what I mean instead of trying to describe what I want him to do in the code with verbal words. This is all like Google Docs, we can bring in even more people and have 5 or 6 cursors all over the project just working independently. Everyone at their own desk where they're fully productive.

This is a real story. He finished the interface to the service, and it worked well. I still don't know all the details of what he wrote, I never had to be distracted by it, but his code has worked so far, so my trust was well placed. The whole experience was so smooth. We could sync up and talk about a single bit of code and then return to our own work, the context switching took literally seconds. I'd just say, "hey, look at this", he'd click a tab in his editor and then see what I was doing, we chat about it for 30 seconds, then he makes a 2nd click and is back to his own work. We pair programmed like this for about 3 hours. Sometimes we'd go 15 minutes without saying anything, but we were working towards the same goal, and interruptions to talk about the goal weren't distracting. I could never endure watching over someones shoulder for 3 hours.

We were maintaining a call / audio channel the entire time, I even muttered some things under my breath (just thinking out loud) and he was able to hear. I think it's the only time I've been happy and productive with pair programming.

VR might take this kind of thing to a whole new level. Check out Imersed: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2849273531812512/

I agree with a lot of your points, but not this one. Even if I were to take my lunch to work, I would still end up spending some money on coffee or snacks (because I can't always predict exactly what I will want to eat or drink during the day), and if I'm in a rush in the morning at home (e.g. slept in), I can just make lunch when I end up having the time, versus having to buy lunch in the office if I left without time to prepare some food to take.

The electricity point stands I suppose, but it's hard to quantify the difference, for me, as I moved only a few weeks before the pandemic, so don't have any pre-pandemic, work from the office data to compare with.

The £150 odd I save each month on travel costs likely more than makes up for any extra spending on leccy

That is more on you being a good steward of your money than anything else. Our development team eats out at restaurants nearly every day when we were at the office. Code together, dine together. Bad boys for life.

I can agree with all your other points, but this one simply stuck out to me. Haven't nearly all companies realized more productivity with WFH?

My social interaction has pretty much always been online since a kid and most of my long term friendships and social interaction came from in-person work. I miss the people who genuinely made my day better on a consistent basis at work, and I get almost none of that remote. Being single through COVID has been hell.

I also have zero work/life separation. I enjoy the routine, the excercise, less distractions than being at home. I feel like I could absorb more and know a lot more of what was going on.

2. I would contest that with sufficient quality screen share this simply so marginal it's dismissable

3. This makes several assumptions about personality and socialising and isn't always the case. Forcing people to see each other does not create social closeness. Sustaining good friendships over instant message is very much the norm. I think occasional in person meetings or, more deliberate collaborative effort if fully remote can create this just fine.

4. Distractions in the office, drive bys, noise of neighbours and even digital distraction vs a small degree of self discipline (using one monitor, phone on dnd can help too) ... I dont buy this at all.

5. See above - if you have children then that is understandable, however I would wager that correct work/play time separation is whats needed here.

6. I can claim some of my electricity cost as work expenses and the food on my commute and at work is incredibly overpriced. I typically prepare food at home. Being at home more i'm now not restricted to whatever carries well in a tupperware.

7. Arguing that a routine needs to be made for you instead of creating your own isnt a valid reason. Self discipline.

8. Discipline and routine also addresses the last point, but I will concede its easier to manage.

To outline the competitive advantage FOR working at home. In addition to the above I gain:

Custom desk, my high quality office chair vastly superior to corporate stock, custom office space, custom lighting temperature and air flow.

Control of noise levels

Total control of distractions

I save 4 hours a day lost to transport being forced to listen to podcasts and have more meaningful work and play time as a result.

I save substantial money on transport

No social guidelines, I can have what I want on the radio/TV if I wish.

I can wear more comfortable clothes and save money on laundering work clothes

I can exercise more freely and easily

I can work in line with the ebb and flow of my conciousness and not when someone else demands it - and am subatantially more productive.

My deliveries no longer go missing

My home is tidier

I dont have to use a disgusting corporate bathroom

I dont get sick anymore

My carbon footprint is close to zero

My mental health has improved substantially

I think that mostly covers it

Due to this all corporations will and are going to try to “control” ppl simply because most of them cannot control themselves.

Tho I would say overall in any field its pretty much one of the most important skills/or in life generally.

My commute without delays and everything is on time is about 1hour and 25 mins.. with delays.. you can see how this easily can get close to 2 hours.. delays no transport in the UK.. are almost daily.. it's the only thing they do consistently.

"Let's be 100% honest: you did not spend 4 hours a day commuting pre-WFH. You just didn't." - This comment tells me you're either lucky enough not to have to commute in a big city.. or are rich enough to live in the city you work in.

Home <-> Walk <-> train(euston) <-> walk <-> tube <-> walk <-> work

Time required if everything work correctly

~ 1h 10m to work

~ 1h 30m from work, (more since you dont want to miss the train)

Now, a single cancelled/missed train for me is +30m, happened at least once a week due to faulty train etc.

In addition, these things happen all the time:

Is the tube delayed today causing me to miss my train? +30m

Is it hot summer week? expect almost everyday to be cancellations of 1h+++

Someone trespassing/ hit by train, cancellations of 1h+++

Signalling problem, cancellation of 1h+++

Fire next to track cancellation of 3h+++

plus more Many days I have spent more than 4hrs just to get home.

Now this 2h 40m commute easily averages out to 4h

Just take a look at this:

10min walk to the station

5min wait for the train

1h 5min travel time

10min walk to the office

+

10min walk to the station

around 15min wait for the train

1h 5min travel time

10min walk to the home

the only thing you can argue is

>around 15min wait for the train

For me, working from home for the past 3 years has been completely life altering.

Work is nothing more than a distraction away from what I really want to be doing with my life. Working from home lets me optimize for all the right things like being here with my kids all the time, going to the playground at lunches, making them breakfasts and lunches, and seeing them at 5:01pm. I love that I can take breaks with them rather than talk about nonsense at the water cooler.

I'd much rather not focus on optimizing for work...

Random noises and sounds takes away focus and brings me out of "the zone".

I have a separate area where I work, I don't work any place other than that.

1. The daily routine and commute helps reset your brain and get you in/out of "work mode"

2. You don't have to cannibalize your home desk to make way for your work PC, or set up a second desk for work PC

3. No deciding what to get for lunch, it's whatever is closest or catered, no wanting a coffee and finding that you need to run to the store

4. If your team isn't meeting your sprint goals, someone can look at you and verify that you are working, so they won't automatically assume that the problem is with you

This paints a rosy picture of the daily commute which is simply not true [1]. Furthermore, the argument that going into the office gets you in and out of "work mode" doesn't stand up either. With instant communication channels like email, Slack, et al and a lack of labor regulations regarding after-hour work communications (at least in the US), we were never able to be out of "work mode" pre-pandemic either.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/how-your-stressful-...

I'm also annoyed by the amount of housework/cooking/preparation/cleaning I have to do when I'm at home all day, when half of that happens in the office/resturant otherwise.

I am not sure how cleaning changes at all, and doing laundry, which used to be very difficult to fit in, is so much easier. I can understand why food prep would be more onerous to most, but I enjoy cooking and if I don't really want to I live in a city, I have plenty of options all around me.

Some people actually do work better in a distraction free environment, but it seems you don't believe that. I should mention, my company has an open-office floorplan, so the amount of daily interruptions was quite incredible...

I've worked with people who have made it a fine art to appear busy, to hold earnest conversations in hallways, to comment in IM frequently, yet do 10% of the work of the good performers. And we all knew who the good performers were.

Managing employees in an office doesn't depend on having butts in the seat, or "eyes on them." It depends on understanding what needs to be done, communicating/delegating, and then getting out of the way.

* the rest of the company tends to forget you exist

* you tend to get the blame

* out of sight, out of mind

* fewer promotions

Working on a fully remote team is not the same as working on fully co-located team. Some will say it's worse but for me its better. One thing is for certain - it is different. Some things are easier and some things are harder. It's just a different point in the design space of possible ways to work.

I was getting a slew of emails related to a project and after a bit of coaching I got most of these updates to go into a teams channel, where we can call out the interested part @user, and keep things in an easier to view format when we need to catch up.

At my previous job, I would bond with my teammates over lunch talking about random things, bouncing ideas, and I feel like we really were a team. We trusted each other. At my new, 100% remote job, sometimes my colleagues are just tuned out, and I have no idea why. I can ask them over our weekly videochat, but it's just not the same. We don't have the same level of trust. I can't read their body language. We can't just have a random 5 minute chat over coffee. Brainstorming online has also proven to be really ineffective. It works really well over lunch, with no stress and no expectations, but planning a brainstorming meeting really can't offer that.

IMO remote work is very weird and dehumanizing. You might feel differently. I know it works for some people, but I really feel like the cohesion in my team is nowhere near as good. Yet I feel like if we were in the same office in person we'd be doing much better.

My ideal balance is 4 days of in-person work and one remote day per week, with flexible working hours.

I also find that communicating through multiple remote channels is freeing. People aren't reading my body language to misinterpret what I'm saying. Requests and plans are more concrete and documented. People have to be more thoughtful about what they are asking for.

For most of us, it's also something we're being forced to do for 40-50 hours a week. We spend the best, more productive hours of the prime years of our lives working. So it might as well be something engaging.

People we would rather not be around, I agree. I unfortunately have to deal with some of these online as well though. Ideally this is something that can be discussed with one's manager so that we are no longer forced to work with said people.

~90 minutes of commute saved each day (2 hours a day for me actually), valuing my time at $100/hr.

That comes out to roughly 5k-6k a month in savings.

For the company, probably; not for me. All the bullet point you mentioned: none of them applies to me. It’s interesting to see different points of view, though.

Too real

No self-respecting person would never publicly (and proudly no less) say they:

- Need supervision - Require frequent interactions / reassurance from colleges - struggle to maintain their personal lives - Cant form their own routines

There is mounting pressure to stop WFH and its coming entirely from those at risk of WFH, namely those who need the office as a place to be seen.

This really happens? I am too shy to join a random conversation in the hallway.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wfhjobs_wfh-workfromhome-remo...

[2] Also: "no skin in the game" / the misguided local optimization where personal responsibility is minimized at the expense of the group / intentionally stagnating instead of growing in one's career position.

The thing thou lovest, though the body starve.

Who works for glory misses oft the goal;

Who works for money coins his very soul;

Work for the work's sake, then, and it may be

That these things shall be added unto thee.

> Cox also began to write art criticisms (unsigned) for the New York Evening Post. This and other writing jobs took Kenyon's time away from painting but also helped him make a living.

I made friends and together we did an amazing job, made happy customers, and helped build a business, which gave me great personal pride and satisfaction.

The pay cheque showed me the work i was doing was valuable To the customer, yes and bought me a house etc, but I can’t imagine being at a job that I also didn’t enjoy and see some purpose in, some utility that I was bringing to the world.

Some people feel a competitive nature and want to work and get ahead.

Some people work with friends and therefore enjoy being there and socializing.

People have varied motivations for things besides pay.