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Comment by bamboozled | Hacker News Reader

Why I think offices will just catch back on is because they will come down in price and because those who work closer to the people at the top of the company will be those promoted, this will make the pressure of working in an office greater again.

Maybe this move is also the end of middle management and traditional CEOs?

I hope I’m wrong about office life catching back on because of all the emissions being saved by remote work...

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Counterpoint: Most workers get no promotions, they'd be lucky to have a 1% inflation adjustment. They couldn't care less about any pressure to go back to the office.

But every worker wants to be the one getting the promotion.

I'm spending an extra $300-$500 / mo in home office expenses (food, coffee, power, internet, AC, sq footage, etc.) now that I work from home.

I'd love to be back in the office to be near the gym and enjoy the amenities.

Really? What expenses have gone up?

Food? Unless your company provided a LOT of food?

Are you paying more for internet? Paying more for sq footage?

Curious

One obvious expense for me is cleaning.

I used to just be able to go get lunch, and relax / do activities on the weekend and come into a clean office and desk, fresh and ready to work.

Now my house, with my partner and I being in it almost permanently, we make a lot of mess that constantly needs cleaning. I find that gets annoying combined with longer hours.

Because we weren't home much beforehand, the apartment didn't get so dirty and just needed a light clean once a fortnight.

Absolutely this! Takeout containers or food scraps From cooking alone is a huge factor. And before COVID I could just pay someone to take care of this while we were at work, but where do I go now for even half a day? I honestly considered doing day-by-day coworking space rentals which would be an additional expense. Unfortunately my work involves a lot of talking on the phone and getting a dedicated office, even for a day is getting expensive.

Also I think just because we're home more I have more chance to notice what slobs we are. I never noticed our baseboards in the house before wfh but now I look at them every time I'm in the bathroom. They're WHITE!! And they're getting dusty!

Seemingly my sink is never free of dirty dishes no matter how many times I stop in my tracks in the middle of the day and take 10 minutes to do the dishes, breaking all concentration. Everywhere I look there is something to be done. I take a break to piss then see the bathroom is a mess. I go to grab a granola bar and realize I need to take an hour later to go shop at the grocery store, and return to my workspace hungry and defeated. I spend my days alternating between working on the couch and working on the bed, seemingly constantly doing chores around the clock. The list of things to do never ends, I just decide to put most of it off for the day once I'm too exhausted to do any more thinking or spend any more time on my feet. I can't do any deep work anymore with all the shoehorned zoom meetings I have to show face for. I feel more beat at the end of the day than when I was working 50 hour weeks busting ass as a groundskeeper in the hot humid sun.

It's suffocating spending 100% of your time in one place. My apartment feels like a submarine at the bottom of the ocean. My productivity is somewhere down there, too. Despite all this, I drag on, just biding my time for that glorious day when I can get inoculated for COVID.

Re the dirty dishes, one killer way I get around this it to put away everything that I don’t use and only have one of each item I need.

For example I only have one cup, one bowl and plate. If you have multiple items, you generate more mess and are less incentivised to clean things you don’t need.

Is that a time or monetary expense? Are you paying for cleaning service?

(More than you would be for the corresponding takeout that cooking from home is replacing?)

Not OP. There are companies where food is (was) either free or heavily subsidized. For me, fitness expenses went up: I have to pay someone to use their small gym instead of paying flat fee for the chain gym. Car expenses went up, I did not drive to work, and now road trips is one of the very few remaining ways of entertainment. Not me, but some other people had to upgrade their internet connection, buy wifi extenders, and additional monitors (sometimes partially reimbursed by a company). Some had to move to the larger house because they’re DINK and need two offices.

To be fair, car expenses for road trips for entertainment are pandemic costs but aren’t reasonably work-related expenses.

True! I can see a gym membership adding a non-significant monthly expense. Or having to re-locate to accomodate additional working space (rent asides, the cost of moving can be significant). Good insight.

Definitely. Companies are simply externalizing this onto us. My company now occupies about 25 sq ft of my home rent free that I must manage for them.

Wait, so you normally don't have food, coffee, power, or internet at home? you moved into a bigger home to create a home office?

If I had a job (i freelance), I'd still have my office setup, my pc on 24/7, and fiber internet. Still the same $$.. but I never had a place w/ free drinks either, so coffee was on my own dime.... same for lunch/food.

- $2/day snacks

- $4/day coffee (really this should be higher b/c the cafe at the office made expressos that would cost $4/ea at Starbucks and I drink 3 per day)

- $4/day bfast

monthly food total: $200.

I needed to buy a desk ($100), office chair ($80), networking / power equipment, etc (total ~$200).

Studies have shown that sleep quality is very important and you should reserve your bedroom for sleep and sex [0]. If I work 3ft from where I sleep, I never "turn off" work.

So this means I needed either find space in the rest of my house (the kitchen table or rent a larger place).

Assuming I don't want to reduce my quality of life by working WFH, I'm now spending an extra $300/mo on food, equipment, and sq footage. If I was freelancing, I could write off these expenses on my taxes and my prices would reflect these costs. As a W2 worker, I am not able to write off these expenses from my taxes nor have I been able to negotiate better pay from my employer.

[0] - https://buffer.com/resources/work-bed/

I've noticed this as well in the post-covid office life, the leadership team keeps going into work so being in the office is a good way to get noticed and work closer to them.

Maybe it works?

I've noticed this as a senior engineer working for a fully remote organization that I'm delivering more, working harder and longer hours but there is zero talk of me getting a bonus or being promoted. Just more work. I had to start asking questions about it the other day.

This is my second remote job and the same experience. In between my fully remote positions I worked in an office, I was promoted and offered bonuses.

Maybe physically seeing a person working hard used to provoke some sympathy from management to offer promotions and pay rises?

The other thing I've noticed is that it seems now everyone is going remote, people are just working 12 hour days without hesitation. Whereas before, there were hard works and more relaxed types. What excuse does one have not to attend a 6am meeting when "all you have to do is open zoom"?

Do companies you've worked for in the past normally approach you about promotions?

Maybe it's because I'm shy or bad at self-promotion, but I've never had an employer offer a promotion. Even after getting great performance reviews, I've had to fight tooth and nail or go through a promotion committee song and dance that can drag on for months or years.

Most companies I've worked for have just handed out promotions at seemingly random intervals.

You could ask too but it never really went over well.

What I'm usually offered promotion for is having leadership skills. I don't know why or how, but it's something I naturally seem to be complimented and respected for, even though it's only that in the last year I started looking more into what it takes to be a good leader and truly try be better at it.

With fully remote work it seems the concept of leadership is changing and maybe being replaced with...scrum boards? I don't now how it works fully remote yet :) All I know is there are some successful full remote companies, but they don't really have good reviews on their leadership skills either when reading Glass Door.

Yeah I agree it works, I have experienced the same and been on the good side of it in orgs where I got promotions faster than the remote folks.

I'm currently working mostly remote and even though I am in the senior management team in the firm I work for I've noticed people are treating me slightly differently; even though I am sticking to my guns because I am relatively high risk for COVID.

I also let my team decide whether they want to work from home or from the office (as long as they can get to the office without commuting) and I've noticed the more junior people are keen to keep coming into the office.

Where do you live that you can characterize life as “post-covid”. New Zealand? (It is rhetorical - you do not have to answer).

For our company most people are not allowed to go to the office unless they are maintaining servers, facilities, or have to work with the paper trail that cannot be taken outside the office.

I meant it more like "the period after covid started" :)

We are allowed to go to the office in the UK as long as it's been made "covid safe", even though the government recommendation is to WFH wherever possible, it's a suggestion not a rule.

The office is an important persuasion technique. There's a reason why the CEO has a fancy office with a beautiful view that you have to go past 3 tiers of security/admins to get to. It sends a signal to everyone that they should respect this person. It's the same reason you have a shitty low walled cube that you share with 3 other people. It's harder to have that same visual persuasion if the CEO is wearing jeans and a tshirt in his living room on a Zoom meeting.

I think social status signaling still carries over in the age of remote:

CEO (high status) - well lit, high quality camera view of a spacious home with tasteful artwork.

Peon (low status) - dark, lit from above view from a webcam aimed up their nose and background replacement to keep people from seeing the closet they are working from.

Should someone who has to be in the office to have their work noticed be promoted in an organization that depends on remote workers? Do they have what it takes to be responsible for remote works and work smoothly with them? They've self-selected themselves out of that pool, so it's a question worth asking.

I won't be surprised that most companies won't ask it, and thus in-person people will have an advantage, but I still maintain it's worth consideration.

> they will come down in price

I hoped they might come down in price already, as I'm looking for an office.

But no. I've been keeping an eye on prices and availability in my area for years. When I looked recently I was surprised to find prices up and availability significantly down.

That is, except for shared office spaces (co-working). There's a lot of those, and I'm not interested.

Between promotion and more free time to do side projects, hobbies, families etc which one do majority of people choose?

the one that results in more money I would imagine

I chose to live across the street from the office. Saw it as a way to force work out of my home. If I needed to work, I'd walk over to the office. Obviously not something a lot of people get to do, but it was nice while it lasted!

Wasn't so much of a hard choice as apartment costs are pretty much a constant around where I live. Thanks Irvine area...

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