Sounds a bit extreme, but OTOH this is what tradesfolk typically do - charge $100 to ring your doorbell and take it from there, since it does cost them money just to get to you.

Still, even if there is some sort of justification (moreso if the company chooses to locate themselves away from residential/affordable areas), I'm not sure how you would avoid abuse. Maybe just pay employees a fixed amount for each day they are required to drive to the office ?

With tradesfolk you can choose who to call, and somebody from farther away will charge more for getting to your door. With workers that is not a consideration today (in most roles), but if companies had to pay for travel time it absolutely would be. But that leads to uncomfortable questions about moving. If you get children and move to an area with a better school, can and will your work now fire you because your commute got more expensive for them?

A fixed payment for office days would remove that, but then how do you determine the price of that payment?

I think my contractors have generally had a general service area. And, if you're out of it, they're probably not interested. Now, mind you, I often don't have a super-itemized bill. But I'm not sure I've seen a commute time/cost line item.

Yeah, I can't recall anyone ever putting it down explicitly as a line item, but a number of them will tell on the phone you there's a minimum charge for coming out. For some reason locksmiths seem to always do this.

I expect a lot of jobs that locksmiths do are pretty quick and easy for them. I went down a file cabinet lockpicking hole a couple of months back and ended up just drilling out the lock. I expect a locksmith could have handled it in a few minutes (if that) but if they had to drive 30 minutes to my house they have to collect for that somehow.

And workers should be paid to have space to work from home and internet service and food and office supplies and electricity.

I'm a remote worker and I get an annual stipend to equip my home office and reinbursement for my internet and cell phone.

The stipend is flexible. Some of my coworkers stocked their home office with snacks, for example.

Agreed. I'm glad that I at least get reimbursed for a portion of my home internet connection and for office equipment.

Most of which you would have anyway. I never cared about incremental costs for internet, electricity, etc. if any. I could have probably collected double-digit dollars per month during COVID but I wasn't even officially remote anyway.

I definitely pay for more bandwith than if I wasn't working from home. Also I saw a difference in my electricity bills.

> Most of which you would have anyway.

Data caps exist and also higher service reliability tiers cost more.

The standard residential plan I had was fine for any work purposes. As far as I'm concerned, incremental needs for normal work are in the noise. I did have outages now and then but they were pretty much for reasons that would have applied to any business service as lines were down.

I do get paid 50 euro per month for working remotely. It's on my contract. I didn't ask for it, but it's ok.

Some do. My last full time role had some $100/month stipend for personal supplies. Pretty much paid for my internet bill in that time.

Another before that had some 3000 dollar a year stipend for approved office supplies over the pandemic; basically anything that wasn't groceries could be put on there. I even fancied putting a PS5 on there at once point, but then realize high quality office chairs and desks would drain that stipend quickly.

And also workers should be paid for not working 26 days per annum, it's more than a full month!

Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office, and incentivizing people to move further away is the last thing we should do

Yes, rent 5 minutes from the office is likely very high, and it's much cheaper two hours away, and that's why most people live far away. But that is already a factor in salaries. If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.

> Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office

Price per square meter is.

>Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office

the stiff housing market indeed is. You can't buy land that isn't for sale.

Nevermind that most people cannot just up and move whenever their work fancies it. And you don't want to. Too many horror stories of people who moved for their job only to get laid off a few months later. Corporate isn't taking my community with them.

>If the office is in a high-cost-of-living area they have to offer higher salaries to get an equal caliber of workers.

Or they just offshore it.

This definitely is not how it works. There are a ton of companies in Irvine for example that vastly underpay their developers compared to the cost of living in the area. And if you were to assume that's how it works, then companies should be offering salary increases for RTO which is very obviously not happening.

Companies that underpay compared to cost of living exist everywhere, even in the cheap places. They usually end up with the people who can't get or don't want a better paying job.

And yes, companies should be paying salary increases for RTO if they hired on the promise of remote work. Not doing that will just means you now offer worse compensation compared to job conditions and are going to lose some people to greener pastures. Which might be a factor in Microsoft's timing: less job mobility right now

> Nobody's stopping you from moving closer to the office

Tell me you’re single in early 20s without telling you’re single in 20s.

As a salaried employee there is no "salaried time." You're paid for your output not the time spent on it. This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek. Literally no one bats an eye at arriving at the office late so if you want to start your commute at 9 and include that in your "working hours" no one would care.

Unless you do sales you're just lying.

Absolutely zero chance some HR person goes through your commit history at the end of the month, assigns a value to it and then pays you some amount of money based on that.

You're paid for hours of work, it's there in your contract. If they don't enforce it that's a different thing. If you can't even grasp that ..., I don't think your "output" is that good, lmao.

At most tech companies, you can work 5 hours per week or 100 and your salary remains the same.

If they see you working 5 hours per week and don't think you're productive enough, they can fire you, but you aren't paid any more for working more hours. That's what "salaried" means. It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.

> It's why you've never heard someone getting paid "time and a half" for working weekends in tech.

It depends on the state. In California there are minimum salary requirements, that are adjusted every year, that must be met to be an exempt position. Otherwise you are required to pay hourly.

It's honestly one of the nice features of the state.

I have yet to experience a role where workers are allowed to deliver while clocking less than 40 hours. 5 hours per week on salary is only if you do not tell management.

Or are management.

The employer want to pay for the output. But the employee want to be compensated for their time and the quality of it.

> This goes especially true for Microsoft where lots of people put in far less than a 40hr workweek.

No offence, but this shows in the products.

It's a standard expectation for managers to see you physically located in the office for 40hrs per week in semi-flexible arrangements (if you're lucky).

You may forget that as tech workers we are incredibly privileged with the way our office life is compared to others typically, that we can sometimes come in late and leave early: may be another "perk" (like remote work) which goes away in time or during the next squeeze.

So it's a poor defense, as it's not reflected in other similar industries, nor is it relevant when we're discussing flexibility being reduced by the same company doing the flexibility reduction.

You are definitely paid for the "hours" in your contract and not the output, if you were paid for output some workers would be able to work harder to make more money by creating more things; as it stands you get the same money if you do 80hrs or 40hrs or 20hrs at any level of effort. You're not paid for time or output, you're paid to be "of service".

Maybe you get more money at promotion time (maybe), but pay is certainly *not* linked to compensation.

I disagree completely with that, at least for software engineers.

The work queue is infinite, measuring output with any sort of precision is almost impossible for a lot of the work (maintenance, actually necessary refactors, security, mentoring juniors, managing stakeholders, etc etc etc). There's no "I've finished my work for today".

I'm not saying that I like it, or that it's a good thing, but in my understanding engineers are paid to be available doing work roughly 40h/week.

All of what you mentioned is quantifiable.

> Commute time should be salaried time.

Salary means you're paid a fixed amount per pay period, regardless of hours worked.

So including commute in your hours worked wouldn't change your salary, which is by definition a fixed amount.

Did you mean that commute time should be paid hourly at an additional rate?

This depends on the juridictions.

The jurisdiction is Redmond, WA

That depends on which timeline we're working in. In alternative universes, Microsoft is called Megahard and is started in a town called Rougeworld, WA.

I'm salaried but my contract specifies 'expected hours' from 9-5 or 8-5 with an unpaid lunch.