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Comment by ragebol | Hacker News Reader

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 :-)

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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.

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.

Working from home regularly, yes, I totally believe 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.

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).

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.

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

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...

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

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.

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

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.

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