Latest EU data shows that in the Netherlands 14% of employees work from home | Hacker News Reader

Latest EU data shows that in the Netherlands 14% of employees work from home

alugy.com

145 pointsRayMan165 comments

Being Dutch and actually working remotely from home full time, I find this hard to believe. What I can believe much easier is that indeed many people are allowed to occasionally work from home or have a day a week or something when they typically work from home. E.g. to pick up the kids from school etc.

I do get raised eyebrows when I mention working from home full time. This is anecdata, but I don't know anyone who works from home full time. Maybe we Dutch from-home workers should get out more and meet each other :-)

As the title in the graph shows (in the article), it's the % of people that "usually work from home"

That wasn't the question on the questionnaire though, as BetaCygni points out somewhere above in this thread.

The Dutch questionnaire only answered the question if you are allowed (and sometimes do) work from home.

If they are allowed to occasionally work from home then it means that they are also capable of working from home full time and that is the main take away.

We can argue whether this is theoretically true but I haven’t met an employer here in the Netherlands that thinks this.

Working from home some of or most of the time is fine but there needs to be face to face contact at least weekly.

Not really true. I turned down a very good job in Amsterdam just last month, because they wanted me in the office 4 days a week. It was a great employer, tons of perks, I’m sure they were flexible about times and you could move that remote day to suit you etc etc, but still: 4 days in, not negotiable.

I’ve seen the same here in UK. The remote day effectively ends up being an unofficial reduction of working hours rather than an acceptance of WFH as legitimate.

Same. I bet this includes people like my wife, who works from home an entire afternoon per week (i.e. hardly not at all).

I've worked from home in the past, not full time however; it was like 1-2 days per week max, so those days I welcomed not having to commute since the company wasn't exactly nearby. However I worked by myself, therefore 100% at home, for a while when I was getting my feet wet in the IT world in the 90s, and vividly recall that feeling I could only explain years afterwards, like realizing that I couldn't tell the difference between working at home or sleeping at the office. If I had to choose today, I would always try to work not entirely at home.

It's called Dutch accounting. Every piece of information send by the Netherlands to the EU is somehow warped.

lol

https://tradingeconomics.com/netherlands/wages

https://translate.google.com/translate?client=firefox-b-d&cl...

People fighting in this thread; I pulled out the actual questionnaires [1]. The Netherlands does not have it in English, but Denmark does Or Czech Republic. Both have question/answers that are roughly:

Q. Did s/he work in last 4 weeks in his/her main job at home? [I believe over a 4-week period]

1. No

2. Less than half of worked days

3. At least half of worked days

I am assuming the sum of Answers 2 and 3 was 14%. Norway has only two options: "regularly", and "from time to time". Don't know if that changes your viewpoint?

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Scroll down to end of page.

Working from home regularly, yes, I totally believe that.

From the Dutch questionnaire (thanks for the link):

Q.: Kunt u, al u dat wilt, een deel van uw werk thuis verrichten? (Zowel incidentele als structurele mogelijkheden om thuis te werken tellen mee.)

1. Ja

2. Nee

3. N.v.t.

Translation:

Q: Can you, if you wish, do part of your work at home? (Both incidental and structural options for working from home count.)

1. Yes

2. No

3. N.A.

So basically the article is skewed, and 14% of people CAN work from home. Does not mean they DO work from home.

The way it is phrased, if phone calls, emails or text messages are work depends on the type of job. Unpaid work is still work.

I don't know. I work from home as well, in Slovenia, and I don't know anyone else around me who does. But I was recently pleasantly surprised when my new employer sent a work safety inspector (basically ensuring that employer provides you with good working conditions) to my home. They told me it's quite a common practice nowadays, especially but not only for programmers, and they do a lot of these inspections.

> Maybe we Dutch from-home workers should get out more and meet each other :-) I'm up for that

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...:

”In the EU, the self-employed usually worked from home (18.5%) more often than employees (3.0%). This pattern was repeated in each Member State.”

If would guess that, if you manage to find the relevant numbers on https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lfs, you’ll find that the Netherlands has relatively more self-employed persons, and that those working from home more skews the numbers.

It most likely comes from how the questionnaire was built. Most of the people I know get at least one day a work from home. That's 25% of home workers depending on how you count it :).

A lot of Dutch also work part time. I for example have 4 days, including 1 from home. That's somehow 2/5 of my time at home then.

Those figures are believable, and imho, great! Coming from France, it's a pleasure to have that freedom.

Yes, I am also surprised.

This is meant to measure people who "usually" work from home.

I wonder how they distinguish counting people who work from home "regularly" in the sense that they do so at least a day every week, people who do so three days a week (arguably meets the definition of "usually"), people who are mostly home based but who regularly go into the offices, and full remote workers.

The latter in particular are still quite rare.

In the commercial world it's less common but it's really big in the public space. Seems to be part of their whole green thing and a play to cut office costs.

Overall 14% feels about right for people who work from home in some way structurally. It's very high in some areas but totally missing in others (anything requiring physical presence).

Also dutch and working from home fulltime, haven't met that many people that are in the same position tbh.

This actually became very obvious 3 weeks ago, when a majority of employers shut down their work from home services because of the Citrix Netscaler vulnerability. There were major traffic jams the following Monday morning which were aptly named "Citrix Jams" on the news.

Apparently many companies were late implementing the security measures and had to take their entire service down 3 weeks after the initial publication of the issue & fix.

This, and also the fact that Citrix's mitigation was not perfect. NCSC's recommendation was to shut the service waiting for a real patch: https://www.ncsc.nl/actueel/nieuws/2020/januari/16/door-citr...

Not only the traffic jams where a problem. Some companies are so forward with working remote they've abolished the concept of a personal workspace/desk for every employee and only have 'flex' workspaces which are shared among all workers (higher ups excluded of course, do as I say, don't do as I do...). So in the morning you never know which desk you'll end up with and if you even sit close to your teammates. The flex spaces (along with the parking spaces) are calculated to the average amount of employees to be expected to work in the office, not the maximum capacity. So you can imagine how productive that monday was.

I was surprised to find out that this 'flex' workspaces thing is not just a 'hip company' thing, but pretty common for government workers too.

Not a fan, personally, but still.

It's weird, my girlfriend works for a water board (keeping our feet dry, the fish wet and crops & nature just wet enough), the have this too. To make things worse, between christmas and new years, the office is closed as lots of people take up vacation days but if you don't you're still expected to work.

Flex workspaces predate WFH as a trend. It originated among salespeople and other departments where employees are not actually “in” most of the time - someone figured out they could cut on office costs by reducing “wasted” space. Similarly to open-space modes, hotdesks were then extended to a lot of other places where they didn’t belong, and here we are. I know of entire buildings where people are effectively forced to get to the office horribly early just to ensure they have a decent desk close to their colleagues.

It makes sense for those. Doesn't make sense for me, who does 40 hours / week preferably in the office.

Most/many professions (lawyers, doctors, dentists, etc) have an office on the ground floor on their house and live in the floors above.

Indeed, but this is going to vary by country. If you try a developing country, you'll find that most people do work from home. (where I live even the mechanic/grocery/shops are operating from home). If you are moving further (rural), you might find that pretty much everyone is operating from home.

This is not allowed in the USA but I'm not sure about the Netherlands or other EU countries.

The correct measure should be: Jobs that are performed remotely. (i.e. If you are a doctor, you are not accepting patients at home but performing work through the Internet)

We do a lot of this, but it's not for everybody. Some people work well with that much freedom, others not so much and they really need the structure and close contact with colleagues to shine. We try to find a middle ground by having an office but no mandatory presence there, on some days the office is quite full, on others deserted. I personally don't care as long as the work gets done. We're all over Europe so a good percentage of our colleagues is too far away anyway so for us and our kind of work this is a very good fit.

I'm Dutch I work from home about 20-30 percent of my time. But that is not in this metric. I think my group is substantially larger than this 14% then.

Dutch person here, these stats are definitely wrong.

In what way?

The other 86% spend about four hours in traffic.

Source: lived there.

Smallest country in Europe has the highest percentage of employees working form home

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... lists a number of European countries which are smaller than the Netherlands, including Belgium and Albania.

Finland is 8-th biggest country in Europe (Russia included) and it follows the Netherlands with 13.3 percent

Well, in all logic one should expect larger, less densely populated countries, to have a higher percentage of employees working from home.

The population density and the size of the Netherlands (ignoring the fact that it is not the smallest country of Europe in any kind of sense) is not an obvious factor for making more people work from home, since it should make it easier for people to commute to work.

The awful traffic and saturated road network though might play a role in this.

By what measure do you call the Netherlands the smallest country in Europe?!

By percentage of cyclists wearing helmets.

But joking aside, by none, really. The Netherlands is very dense, and indeed quite small, but it's not the smallest by any common metric - size, population, economy.

Beats being in a traffic jam for 45 minutes mornings and evenings and is better for the environment.

The Netherlands is ranked #7 in the EU in terms of labour force, around 5% of the total EU workforce (with the UK gone, Germany, France and Italy form the top three, together they account for about 50% of the workforce).

Usually, the highest percentage of anything happens on the smallest groups.

Count your blessings, it's an honour to work for silicon valley and spend half your wage on taxes and boomer real estate. Keeps the economy growing, I believe.

What's that? No you must work there in person, it doesn't matter programming is a portable profession by design.

I work remotely for valley and LA startups. As a freelancer (sometimes with shares) in my case, but still, it is doable. I guess big corps is different, but those do not interest me (meant as; I cannot say anything about those).

From the links on your profile it seems you live in NL. You can still freelance for SV/LA startups? Interesting, as when I searched for remote positions in those companies, almost all of them didn't seem to allow non-US remote work. How do you cope with the time difference? Is the pay closer to SV/LA levels or closer to NL levels?

The time difference works out as we talk 1 hour west coast morning and that’s it. Usually that is the end of my day, so they can test and report issues for me to fix when their day is done.

Pay: I do not know: payment in NL is quite high for freelancers in my experience so not sure about that question. It is more the taxes that get you I guess vs the west coast.

Thanks!

As a manager, I really like having a few people in the US and a few in Asia. (Our core team is in London).

That lets us get certain tasks done much more quickly (in terms of elapsed time between start and finish).

Silicon Valley also pays something like 2-3x Europe and Europe has about the same taxes so you still come out ahead in SV. If you were actually willing to take a lower salary (for cheaper housing, less taxes, etc.) then there's plenty of places in the US willing to take you up on the offer.

I'd say we get more for "the same" taxes in EU.

Sure but it also doesn't matter as I see it.

Medical care in the US is pretty good when you're got decent insurance and aren't bothered by copays (I see top specialists in under a week, average ones in 24 hours, etc.). Vacation is negotiable and when you make so much more you can literally take a year off between jobs. Larger tech companies provide good parental benefits and, again, you can always take unpaid time off.

There's a separate social argument but from a personal point of view it doesn't matter. You just need to shift your mindset from money being a scarce resource to money being (directly or indirectly) the thing you use to get anything else you value.

What changes is purchasing power. Without going into detail, eastern europeans can get lucky with a nice outsource SV job. Our common expenses are symbolic.

You can do almost the same thing inside the US. The US is massive and the cost of living differs massively across the country. A house in SV costs something like 10x one in rural-ish Pennsylvania.

You can reduce your edge a bit. That's even more common in EU. Usually bosses are really paranoid and they're not good at judging whether you do good job or not.

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