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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

This is great if you have a house with lots of space.

Personally as a single young adult I like living in the city with lots of amenities nearby. I would hate being forced to WFH, the same way some hated being forced to go into the office.

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This is an often recurring argument on this subject.

For example, I don't care about having a big garden but I don't necessarily enjoy living in a dense city. If I could WFH at least three days a week for the foreseeable future, I would gladly move to a town in the suburbs where I could have a bigger apartment for the price of my studio apartment. I bet a lot of people would do the same. This would lessen the pressure on housing in the city center, so people like you who actually prefer living in the big city for reasons other than work could afford larger apartments.

My main reason for living where I do is so that my commute is less than 30 minutes each way.

I guess the point is that as the constraint of everyone working in the same place is reduced, there will be less people wanting to live in the city allowing better conditions for those who do.

I mean, permanent remote is also not great (particularly in a context where there are no offices), because for people in my living situation that puts the onus on us to find our "work" zone. I'd rather not spend extra money on more real estate or a WeWork-type membership.

I just don't find it very surprising that ~60-70% of people don't particularly like permanent remote, since it's 1. a departure from the norm and 2. people usually build their home-work separation with the commute, and I would say people expressing missing the commute separation at least some of the time represent a majority, if not a plurality, of my direct coworkers. But we are also at a company that let people do partial WFH pre-COVID.

The solution to the home-work separation, which also has potential to improve mental and physical health, is to go for a 20 minute brisk walk at start and end of the work-day.

Personally I don't know why we need to keep prescribing one-size-fits-all solutions for people who may respond differently. Prescribing fully office was terrible, why is prescribing fully remote not?

Forcing people into a specific building vs saying they can work anywhere. It's a massive difference. People throw around the term WFH, but you could really work anywhere. It's freedom.

There are limits. You’ll be restricted by timezones and your ability to function in them. WFH doesn’t mean async.

Because prescribing simply, easy to agree with yet wildly inaccurate (by their very nature) rules of thumb for every situation is a quick easy way to rack up cheap virtue points.

You get what you incentivize. See that number in the corner? That's why the solution for everything gets turned into lowest common denominator five world sentences.

That's about as helpful as telling someone with depression to "just be happy."

They literally recommended something simple and physical that almost any person could do.

Without any regard for whether it works for all people all of the time.

Yeah, anyone who has already solved the actual problem by other means. Which is why it's like asking a depressed person to be happy.

My kid is in day care, so I get that separation by dropping her off and picking her up. (Fortunately day care is close to my home, not to my office!)

The work office is not the only way to have an office.

In these times, I'm renting a small one person private office a few minutes away (by bike) from home. It's the best of all worlds. Quiet space to work, it is outside of the house for separation, but very close so the commute is minimal on a bike and don't need to drive.

I don't love having to pay for the space but objectively it is less than the cost of fuel I was spending every month on the commute so I'm still saving money. And my commute is ~7 minutes on a bike instead of 60 minutes driving. And I'm so close to home I can come back mid-day to see my son. Win-win-win.

So yes, I'm planning for permanent remote, life is so much better.

I see this solution becoming more common as remote work increases in prevalence.

I can see this becoming the norm.

What is surprising is the WFH is sort of the default, people have always worked where they live. Whether you are farmer in 1500 Congo or a chinese blacksmith in the Qin dynasty. Life is work.

Being forced to work from home is better than being forced to work from an office. In the former case, you can (and I did) rent an office, join a coworking space, work from coffee shops, etc. In the latter case, you have one choice and one choice only, and that choice sucks for a whole lot of folks.

I thought the same for years and chased that dream. Eventually I found I ended up as a miserable isolationist to some degree. So roll on a number of years and I’ve got 5 people living in a tiny house in London. I sleep, eat, work and play in one room and have done for about 10 years now. It’s great and I wouldn’t swap it for anything.

The important thing is that you find activities to do outside the house because it doesn’t matter how big your space is; you need to get away from it sometimes.

Same, we live in a fairly small (90sqm) house which we rebuilt a few years ago. Bedrooms and bathroom are downstairs and upstairs is open plan with high ceilings. My workspace is upstairs and it works out great. Kids going to school and my wife to work neatly bookends the day and I just switch on my own machine and off the companies to keep separation. I'm right in the heart of downtown Reykjavik so heading out to do stuff or take a break is straightforward.

That's a great argument for pushing employers to be prepared to provide an allowance for office space (whether to cover costs of adjusting your home, or for membership at a co-working space convenient for you). We don't need to go back to centralised offices to solve that issue.

Working remotely doesn't have to mean working from home. You could be working from a rented office or shared office space, friends, a hotel and so on.

What's great is the flexibility and customization for each individual employee.

And who pays for that?

For many remote work involves less take home pay.

Companies usually have budget for setting up remote workers and IME are happy to pay for work spaces.

IME they are not happy to pay for work spaces.

A nice chair, a desk, a monitor. (Not that I have space for a nice chair at home!)

But an office? No way.

Perhaps it's because renting an office costs similar to renting a flat where I live (even though you get less space when renting an office).

I have had positive signals towards paying for a desk in a shared workspace... But wait, aren't we working at home to avoid sharing workspaces at the moment?

Developer for a major hospital that's not in a tech hub. An executive suite got trashed, so we got a used chair ($25 donation to one of our company charities "suggested"), and that was it. If we need more WFH gear than that, then we are told we can go work in our limited remaining office space.

I personally want more free WFH gear, but I think our execs are clever. "Oh, you don't have a desk? Nobody is in the office, so we can give you a socially-distanced 15x15' space for free if you drive in."

I'd hope that stance would shift if they didn't see it as a temporary thing. My experience has only been with remote positions where there is no office to attend.

No employer is going to hand me another $400 a month because I need an apartment with another bedroom to serve as the office.

Employees who adjust to the change and moved out of the high cost of living area.

An example from my own circumstances, I was paying $1800/month for a 1 bedroom in Toronto but now for a little bit less I have a 3 bedroom house with a small yard.

And we are seeing some employers adjust pay to location now too. In the end you are also subsidizing the office out of square footage in your home, and reaping none of the benefits such as socializing with people.

Some employers are adjusting for pay location, not all, and mine didn't because the cost of losing me was more than adjusting the salary for the different location.

I am reaping the $200/month transit pass that I no longer need. As a Canadian I'm able to ask my employer for a T2200 to write some of my expenses off even as an employee.

I'm also saving ~5 hours a week in less commute time.

I'm still socializing with those coworkers in our daily water coolers, weekly syncs, Monday & Friday fireside chat.

I lived downtown for years while working remote for companies in different cities. Not going to the office made it even easier to enjoy the city imo.

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