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Comment by avitzurel | Hacker News Reader

And so... Prices in the streets in that radius will go up another notch. As if Fremont and parts of Menlo Parks hasn't gone up because of them already.

Acknowledge it or not, instead of paying 15,000$, Facebook could have been more remote friendly and people can live wherever they want.

For a company the size of Facebook/Apple/Google they can also have micro-offices in cities further away from the valley.

Employees won't have to relocate, housing prices will settle and the damn traffic on the bridge and the 280 will be less horrible perhaps.

Every time I commute I think to myself, what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity, how many cars in front of me would just vanish?

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> Every time I commute I think to myself, what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity, how many cars in front of me would just vanish?

Increase road tolls, use it to incentivize companies to allow remote work.

Everyone is working on solution for cleaner energy, electric cars and others, no one really makes an effort trying to solve how many of us just waste 2 hours of our lives on the road every day.

Because its a political/human problem unfortunately, not a tech problem.

Remote work clearly works, you just need to incentivize companies to put it in place. Otherwise, they will continue to extract those hours a day of commuting from workers, the money workers put into public transit or their cars, etc. Externalities people!

I was actually about to make this comment when you did.

This is a matter of responsibility and perception. When you are help up in traffic you don't think of Facebook's and Google's responsibility for it, you think of the government.

The solution for this is not hard, it's just something that no one seems to have the guts for making the decision.

Sometimes I wonder, this 15,000$ incentive to employees make me think that no one is even thinking about it over there at Facebook.

Remote work does not clearly work for everyone and everybody. It does not work for me, I need other people's presence and interaction for those 8 hours per day on order to feel like I'm doing meaningful work. Granted, I don't have kids nor pets to keep me company at my one-bedroom apartment.

Except that'll impact everyone, not just office workers who might be able to do that kind of thing.

Right, that's how it should work.

Roads have a finite capacity (you could increase vehicle speeds in order to increase capacity, but you'll run into hard limits); you properly price that capacity based on time of day. If you can't reduce demand with dynamic pricing, you will exhaust supply (in this case, congestion occurs) in short order.

Increase road tolls and facebook will just start paying a fraction of a percent more to their employees.

So the only ones who suffer are the ones hit by a regressive toll system.

In other words, punish people financially for not being rich enough to live close to work. That'll work.

Remote has other benefits like getting more women involved in tech: http://www.wired.com/2015/04/powertofly/

However, companies praise "high-bandwidth" face-to-face communication, and which we most all agree can be useful. The issue though at many companies is they lean on it to try and paint over communication and process issues they have. It's not a problem with remote per se, but it's an easy scapegoat.

>what if suddenly most companies realize that they can have 15-25% of the workforce work remotely without damaging the productivity

Because this isn't true at all. Working remotely (on average) is much less productive than an office. Distributed, smaller offices would be a better solution, but then people would be much more locked into whatever team/project they are currently on.

I really disagree on this.

Though I am biased, I've been working remotely for 5+ years.

Since relocating to the US I've been working part time from the office (I am about 30m away).

We are a small company and we still have 10-20% of the people working remotely, some in different time zones completely.

It takes time and process, but given the opportunity I believe it will work really well for a lot of organizations.

The thing is, lots of enterprises do allow for remote work, but apparently it is only allowed for the off-shore consultants, not for their own employees.

I never understood this duality.

It is ok for an off-shore consultant to work remotely from somewhere on earth, but not for the employees.

I think the idea is to optimize, not accomodate.

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