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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

I really wish WFH sticks. Mainly because it reduces a lot of pollution and energy use.

It will stick if people refuse to go back to offices. I started working 100% from home nearly seven years ago and wouldn't take a job that involved commuting unless an astronomical amount of money was delivered up front. Simply no comparison in terms of quality of life.

I’ve worked remote for 12 years. There are drawbacks, but the quality of life improvement is huge.

I appreciate your comment and the GP for tactfully expressing feelings similar to my own. Pollution from automobiles, the health impacts of long commutes, the economic and social costs of high paying jobs concentrating in relatively few places; it’s just sad to see how desperate everyone is to get back to the unhealthy normal.

People are by and large not going to refuse. They say they are going to refuse, but when push comes to shove and their cushy FAANG job says “return to office or you are fired” they are not going to call the bluff. It’s easy to talk but not easy when you are faced with being handed your hat.

I was the same, and ended up accepting the 3h per day commute for lots of money. Never again. I'd rather be poor.

Before the pandemic hit my wife had been looking for a remote accounting job for about a year or so with no luck. We live in a rural area and don’t want to move, and there aren’t any real options in the area other than where she currently works.

People can only say no if there are options for them.

Not just WFH but now that everyone is ramped up for large remote meetings, this could/should dramatically reduce the need for business travel.

Pre-pandemic I traveled cross country somewhat regularly for meetings that could easily be done remotely. Sure there's some value sometimes in hallway conversations, but not enough to justify flying around whimsically blowing vast CO₂ in the middle of a climate crisis.

Someone should just make a more random hallway-conversation feature in Zoom or whatever. Or maybe we could normalize doing lunch together and casually chatting on zoom for certain important remote meetings (but not even close to all, please lord).

On this note, can we also have some regular phone meetings again?

I mean, I've worked remote for 13 years now. Although it has been available for most of that time, we almost never used video during calls in the past. When covid hit, suddenly calls I've been having for 10 years require everyone to be on camera.

Video has its benefits of course, but it's not always necessary and it's more exhausting than a voice call. If I'm talking to people I've worked with for 10 years, I actually think it's worse to always do a video meeting. We're not looking at each other anyway, we're looking at what we're working on, and being on camera is so much more draining.

Does anyone else feel like a step back to more voice calls would actually be a step forward in happiness?

We do our daily meetings audio-only and it's definitely less stressful. Less is more.

Car parks are the worst, we'll see a lot of land go to much better use than a dry and void cement lot.

there is more than this over simplification. My home power bill went up, i all of a sudden had to heat/cool my house in time when i normally didn't. I know for a fact that the office continued to heat/cool the office because there was a skeleton crew there.

I think there are going to need to be a lot more research into this.

The only reason there's an office kept acclimatized somewhere is because the WFH was a temporary measure. If it's definitive, the office will shrink quite quickly.

I’d like to check the math though because I imagine heating and cooling a building with hundreds of people in it is much more efficient than heating and cooling all their homes all day.

>I imagine heating and cooling a building with hundreds of people in it is much more efficient than heating and cooling all their homes all day.

What about the 20 mile commutes most of them have? That infrastructure and fuel use has to be added into the equation.

Sure but I thought we were just talking about office heating and cooling.

Let’s add the medical costs of everyone being morbidly obese from work from home and the Covid 15 becoming the Covid 50 lbs. :)

What about everyone who is suddenly running at lunch because they have a shower at home?

Hard to work out on the commute unless it's by bike of course. All the extra free time makes it much easier to stick to the workout plan.

Also, apart from building thermal management, energy is consumed in commutes. Associated energy costs of infrastructure maintenance, vehicle maintenance, energy costs for transport of fuels, etc.

If you have someone living in your home, then your house is heated/cooled anyway. In those specific cases, energy use for office is a waste.

I imagine atleast 50% of people working have someone at home while they are working.

Don’t tell me they are paying you enough where your spouse doesn’t have to work!

There's actually an interesting point hidden in here, which is that in some areas the electricity billing is priced progressively.

Your first X units are cheap, the next Y units are pricier, and anything after that are expensive. This is what we have with PG&E. It means that families like mine, where my wife and I work from home (including before the pandemic) pay a higher bill because we're treated as if we are consuming irresponsibly.

But we don't actually use that much energy considering the fact that we are home all day long. Energy companies will hopefully adjust their tiers or find some other way to treat people who WFH equitably, not punitively. My understanding is that PG&E has done this to some extent already, but I don't know what they plan to do after near-global WFH ends.

Sounds like a good solar panel system will be economical for you.

I've been working from home for a better part 15 years and I second this. I bought Nest thermostats when we built our home a few years ago...In hindsight - I'm not entirely sure why: someone is almost always home (working or otherwise)!

Have you considered looking into better insulating your home or alternative ways of staying warm than blasting the heat? I wear a sweater, socks, and sweats while I’m working from home. I guess this is heavily dependent where you live, though.

That's great when it's cold. Not so much when you live in an area that will soon have temperatures >100° every day for the next few months. I will deal with being a bit warm but I do not enjoy sweating all day while I'm just sitting at my desk. Even now with Temps getting into the 90s it would be very uncomfortable to not run the A/C even with fans spinning at full speed.

Some jurisdictions will let you deduct that from your taxes.

I've heard that in the US, federal deductions related to a home office are a very common trigger of audits.

If your home power bill went up by more than you saved on transportation costs you have a severe insulation problem. Like, ten foot hole in an outer wall severe.

That explains how the grizzly bears keep getting in...

wow getting downvoted because of ?

Yes it costs less to heat my home than to drive in, but thats not the point.

I have two cars because we have to drive into work and drop/pickup kids. if we're WFH we dont need two cars, but i cant just dump one of then on a whim when WFH might end.

Also the energy costs measurements are just mine. they're universal. We wasted so much energy in this scenario. Its just that the energy/resources were now both mine and the companies resources.

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