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Comment by Nbox9 | Hacker News Reader

I work for another company that is going to do a partial return to office. I will be looking at options for companies that offer full in person office (or 90% in person office) after things settle down. I have worked full remote for a total of 5 years of my career, and I believe working in the office is a competitive advantage.

* Overhearing hallway conversations (and joining them) helps spawn invocation.

* I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person

* Having a workforce socially close improves productivity because everyone wants to step up for each other.

* Being seen by my fellow employees helps keep me from becoming distracted.

* Working at the office helps prevent home life from being distracting during work hours.

There are some personal benefits I enjoy from being in the office.

* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

* I enjoy the routine.

* I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

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> I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

For those of us who have to commute, it's not exactly the norm to be saving money while commuting.

Commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1], and the median commute time results in spending 10 full days commuting a year.

The average commuter in one of the largest metro areas in the country will spend over 13 full days commuting a year:

> In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.

[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator

I think their calculations are based on 24 hour days (1 hour roundtrip * 260 days). Vacations and work are based on 8 hour days, however, so in reality it's more like 30 days (6 weeks) of vacation time. And 30 minutes each way is much closer than most of the places I've worked.

The food/drink part could be the most of it. A Google employee enjoying free food and drink could save $60/day versus buying prepared food ($10 for breakfast, $20 for lunch, and $30 for dinner). If you drink much coffee or other beverages, that could be another $15/day.

If you weigh this against spending an extra hour or two commuting, then it looks like a lousy bargain. But if you are like many people, and ended up working more hours during the pandemic, [1] then that erases some/all of the gains of not commuting.

1: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/11/24/people-a...

> But if you are like many people, and ended up working more hours during the pandemic, [1] then that erases some/all of the gains of not commuting.

Wow. I cut my hours down substantially due to WFH. Pre-COVID I was doing 70+ hrs per week due to commuting into the area during the week and having nothing to do.

Now I put in maybe 40hrs per week, broken up into 1hr chunks here and there and I'm not spending over $1500/month just for a room/expenses in the area where work is.

It's great! I'm not going back to the office, like, ever.

Are you working less because you save commute time, and work more efficiently at your home workstation?

Or are you just clocking in less, also producing less?

Sometimes working less doesn’t mean producing less, or if it’s less it’s not necessarily linear. They said they used to work more “because they had nothing to do”. The extra hours may not be worth as much as a well rested mind.

Oh, my overall productivity is down quite a bit due to family distractions.

Once the new house is built, my office will probably be in a separate guest house.

A Google Employee working from home could save $200/day versus getting a fancy limousine to go to work.

Nobody buys prepared food every day, and the costs of food are negligible for a Google employee.

> Nobody buys prepared food every day

I get what you are trying to say, but empirically false

Yeah if I made Google wages I would not want to waste an hour or more a day on commuting. Plus, you can easily make food for 10-20 dollars a day so saving by eating the company food will cost you more just by colmuting and losing your time (or potential wages).

I certainly don't worry about what I spend on food and I spend a few dollars a day on breakfast and lunch. Maybe $10-15 typically on dinner (if that). Most people don't have the free breakfast/lunch/dinner some tech employers do. And my utilities might differ a few dollars per day if I'm home or not.

Do you think googlers are paid by the hour?

> Nobody buys prepared food every day,

I know many people who don't cook at all and live solely on prepared food.

Do you see more-than-usual overweight people in this group?

(Never cooking is very, very rare here in The Netherlands so I'm curious about any anecdata here).

In my experience it is a horseshoe, people that eat out for every meal tend to be either on the high end of the income spectrum and thin or the very low end and obese.

These are broad strokes, but my experience in rural America and in SF bears this out, rich people eat out very often and tend to be fit and the very poor also eat out more than average but tend to be obese. Everyone else is in the middle.

Also depends on the cuisine. Quite a few cuisines take extraordinarily long to cook, and at that point, you're better off just eating out to save time (if you have the money) than deal with those meal-kits that are either not sustainable, or healthy, or often-times, both.

In The Netherlands, the cuisine tends to be really simple, and salad-kits and meal-kits are extremely popular. The fanciest food that people 'cook' is often a soup or pasta, and I'd say it's extremely rare for anyone to make pasta or sauces from scratch.

> Nobody buys prepared food every day, and the costs of food are negligible for a Google employee.

Of course they do? When I've been crunching, like just putting insane hours in, I've gone weeks without cooking and just ordering in. It costs a fortune, even at Google salary - or in my case, 'SF' salary. Not to mention the cost of living is already absurd due to rent - your salary gets eaten up faster than you might imagine.

I know Googlers who literally never buy groceries because they eat all of their big meals at the office, grab a bottled smoothie on their way out the door, and get restaurant food on the weekends. It is cheaper to get groceries than to buy prepared food, but there’s a lot of spoilage that happens when you’re only cooking 2 days/week.

There’s a big jump that happens when you have no food in the house. No spoilage, no dishes, no pantry to stock. I didn’t even work for a company and this is how I lived immediately pre-covid in Mexico City. I kept the ingredients to make a protein shake, and had one at 11am after the gym every day. Then went out for dinner. That was the distinct downtime. If I wanted a snack, I walked to the corner store and bought one. It was a sweet setup.

I'm not at Google, but while my office was open I didn't stock much breakfast food. The breakfast food at my job was better than I usually bought, so I didn't need to buy it.

I did not own a fridge or any cooking appliances for my first year at Google. 3 meals a day at work + takeout on weekends.

In my apartment, the number one electricty cost comes from my fridge+freezer. (To be fair, I live in the sub-tropics.)

Just because you overeat and overindulge when it's free and shoved in front of you doesn't mean you need, want, or will buy the same food if it's not.

That's true! But I wouldn't equate eating expensive food on-campus as overeating/overindulging. The googler I knew best who did this was vegetarian/vegan and very fit. She had access to lots of high quality food that matched her diet, and part of the reason she was vegetarian/vegan was because google's cafeterias made it easy for her.

Being vegan because the food is easily available? I’ve never heard that before.

I should clarify that my wife is vegan, and I‘m flexitarian/vegetarian. Eating at restaurants is often a pain because most dishes contain some kind of animal product. But I don’t see how ease of finding vegan food while eating out is a motivation to go vegan.

Really? Turn it around, perhaps it's more obvious that it being difficult would act against any desire to be vegan?

Against the desire, no. I was speaking to that. Compliance - sure!

For me personally a buffet style place causes me to paradoxically eat less, as I was brought up with a lot of food anxiety so not having to ever worry about “enough” food I end up eating a lot more sparingly.

I buy prepared food multiple times a day.

My wife and I together spend about 3k per month on food. We're outliers but it surely happens.

To a first approximation, no one is spending $60/day on restaurant meals unless they're traveling.

When Dropbox served food I valued it at 50k, ie: in order fro a company to poach me, given they don't have food, that's 50k they'd have to make up for. While I don't spend anywhere near 4k a month on food, there were a few things to consider:

a) 3 meals prepared for me saves me time and money. I love to cook but I don't have tons of time anymore and I don't have a a good kitchen. If I want to save time via delivery I end up spending tons more, and I don't think I eat as healthy.

b) The food was ridiculous. I've eaten a lot of good food, I've eaten in numerous countries, and Dropbox's food was god tier.

c) Tons of snacks, little treats, etc. Wine as well. Given the incredible quality of the food I wouldn't be surprised to find that I was eating quite a lot in terms of money.

It was such a quality of life win, especially as someone who loves food, to just have insanely good meals every single day. Even if ultimately it probably saved me closer to 1000 a month than 5000.

I guess I just can't comprehend a mindset where 3 meals a day at a company is this huge win. On the occasions when I went into an office with a non-free cafeteria, I didn't even always eat lunch.

ADDED: This subthread to me is such a bizarre look into a certain bubble of SV. [See also apparent disagreements with the statement that spending $60/day in restaurants is somehow abnormal.]

Indeed, as a Midwesterner, I'm fascinated by the sheer logistics of having to bring a sandwich to every computer programmer in San Francisco, every day. It's one of those features of "how cities work" that you never even think about.

Many of the comments here would get you literally laughed at interviewing at 99+% of the companies (including tech ones) in the US. "Give me $50K more if you don't offer three high quality free meals a day."

Then they also have to give you a free gym, to work those meals back off.

That's never been my experience.

Definitely not. Meals and snacks are becoming common perks in tech even outside of SF/the US, and people (especially young grads fresh out of college) are beginning to ask for them. I personally keep a look out for it, too, since I eat a lot healthier when compared to ordering food, and save a lot of time compared to cooking it.

I just can't imagine wanting to eat 3 meals a day at work, no matter how good they are.

You will be shocked that we even bring friends and family there occasionally! That's how good the food is :)

I remember the Japanese cafe at Google was very good at one point. This article has some pictures to give you an idea:

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

You will be shocked, apparently, that there are people here saying they don't want that!

Sounds like when I was a conscript.

Exactly: I have to get out, and away.

Can't stand work canteens... something about the smell of food really puts you off eating.

It feels very forced.

Prefer an impersonal sandwich shop where I just have a wall to stare at than being in something attached to my workplace.

Its also not taxed which for a higher earner does multiply the benefit.

I am surprised that the IRS hasn't gone after this like HMRC has in the UK

They sort of have: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/benefits/pa...

But the companies are presumably eating the cost.

Most of the bigger companies have their own cafeterias and kitchens to produce everything in house. They usually contract it out to companies like Bon Appetit who completely manage the logistics and operations.

I feel like I justified my point well. Eating extremely well made food is a major win for me. There's the obvious financial and time savings, but there's also a lot to be said for having a fresh made meal three times a day - and Dropbox always had variety, they pretty much never repeated dishes (other than the standards - burgers, pizza, etc).

I ate some of the best meals I've ever had while working there. After a certain point that matters more to me than an extra N dollars a year.

It's just weird to be so ostentatiously luxurious with consumption, to allocate more to food than the median personal income.

Sorry, but it is what it is. I make a lot of money and there's a point where benefits like food matter more to me than 10s of thousands of dollars.

depends on if you're giving them 4 hours of work extra a day for them (12 hour workdays)

Imagine rarely eating with your kids or wife.

There are a lot of unmarried people too.

Sure, but imagine eating all your meals at work. Your existence would be work, eat 3 meals, commute, sleep at home.

For me getting home before dinner would be a massive plus to getting a free meal.

I did that for a while, but then I was also in midst of a crumbling relationship so it was a way to give each other space.

The dinner is also often relatively early, so you still have quite a lot of time after the commute (granted, if your commute is 1+ hour then it's far from a dream routine).

What I like is having the option, for example I had a late sports club that was close to work, so it was more interesting to grab a quick bite and stay there to go to the club and return home after.

Cut out the commute and sleeping at home with our latest perk, the sleep pod!

(/s)

I lived close enough to work that I could go home and then walk back.

Funny, I actually saw lots of people bring their family to work for dinner when I was at Google, it's pretty common actually.

That's both cool and a bit sad.

Imagine not having kids or a wife every year of your career.

Some people simply don't get much value or enjoyment from a good meal at all, in that case it's probably too hard to make them understand. But assuming that you do enjoy dining at a good restaurant once in a while, can you imagine that getting essentially unlimited meal vouchers at good quality restaurants (not cafetarias or fast food joints!) can be quite valuable for a good number of people?

Are all these people spending 10-11 hours a day at work or something? I usually eat breakfast (if I have it) around 8am and dinner some time between 6-7pm. I would never want to be at work that long no matter how good the food was.

What you are saying is that it became 50k cheaper to poach you when they let the leases go and gave away all the plants?

Yes, though I'd already left to start my own company, but we don't have a cafeteria either.

Does Dropbox no longer serve food?

I haven't worked there since before the pandemic, but that's my understanding.

They went full remote.

I can see the appeal of this if you're living alone or with some housemates who also live that lifestyle, but I can't see it working if you have a girlfriend or boyfriend unless they also work for a company that caters all their meals too. Otherwise you'd never get a chance to have breakfast or dinner together. That would suck.

I wonder, on some deeply dystopian level, if tech companies do this on purpose to keep their a large proportion of their employees single.

Dropbox allowed guests. I brought a number of people over my time there.

Would you bring in a spouse and kids every single day though?

I don't have those, so no.

I don’t think they are trying to keep the employees single, but they are definitely trying to get them to spend more time in the office.

8hr 9:30-6:30 (including lunch hr, between breakfast and dinner) day in the office isn't so unusual or dystopian.

I think a possible generalization is that each of us optimizes for what's important / possible in our lives and jobs. We never really knew how to impute the economic value of those things in the first place, but simply followed heuristics and cultural habits. And then the pandemic took all of our assumptions, and threw them out the window.

In my case, my family prepares almost all of our own food anyway. And more than a few days of eating prepared food begins to affect my health. But that doesn't mean a worker who lives on prepared food wouldn't value the benefit of free food at work.

Jesus Christ.

I eat well and spend maybe $400 a month on groceries and food.

I’ve heard that Google recruiters attempt to con potential employees into some ridiculous assessment of the “free” food as a compensation benefit with numbers like those that you posited above. I can’t imagine valuing daily meals that highly.

Likewise here, I'm floating around $300-350/month at the store, and that includes non-food consumables like tissues and cleaning supplies.

Thats pretty extreme. I am usually around $800 a month, but that includes about 2 meals a week at casual restaurants with friends.

(Context: replying to gray post)

Whenever a pissing contest about grocery prices happens (and don't kid yourself, if a number has been mentioned it's not a question of when but rather an indication that the pissing has begun) you must quote a lower number than the previous person. It doesn't need to be true, it doesn't need to include critical qualifying information like location and tradeoffs, it doesn't even need to be particularly likely -- but it must be lower. So it is written. Here, I'll demonstrate:

I only spend $250 per month on groceries and I cannot imagine the disgusting excess that could possibly lead anyone to waste a single cent more!

For how many people?

Just me. Granted I don't feel the need to save as much as I can in this department. I like quality meat that is not from a factory farm and vegetables. Probably $500 on groceries and $300 on going out to eat.

I'm glad others are shocked by that $60/day on food. I would say food takes up the largest percentage of my expenses and $60 is easily 5 days worth of food for two.

Lol I spend about 5-10$ a day on food. Where do these people eat at lol

Going to guess SF, where those are not overly expensive prices for eating out with a drink at each meal.

I like cooking and tend to prep on a Sunday, and then midweek on Wednesday if I'm bored. I live in Austin, TX. I don't usually eat out at all except the occasional outing with friends. Of course I'll splurge on the weekend depending on what's going on. That said I tend to eat the "zone diet" that stuck with me even after I lost a bunch of weight on it. It isn't particularly "hard" to find food to fit that scheme. Of course you have to not mind reheating food :) . I'm a fairly rugged individual and don't really need froufrou food every day https://www.tasteofhome.com/collection/meal-prep-recipes-wee...

Can $5-10 a day get you food with this kind of quality and variety?

https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-free-food-google-cafe...

If you are eating that every day then you are destroying the beauty of food for yourself. That level of food should be a treat, not your "daily driver"

Pretty common for me, but I've mostly lived in places with a huge variety of fresh ingredients. That "level of food" is actually not that high in places like Barcelona, Lisbon, Sao Paulo, Sydney, SF, LA, Guangzhou, Bangkok, etc. 60USD/day (~1300USD per month) is not that much compared to how much FAANG employees are making. At the end of the day it's a matter of priority. Tons of people spend more than that on alcohol/cigarette/drugs/cars.

Per person, yes. You'll have to cook it yourself though.

You'll be able to make it healthier though, and tune it exactly to what you like.

I think so. I buy bulk (15-50lb bags) organic grains, legumes, flour, seeds. Makes it more work to calculate per meal but it's pretty cheap. I get a lot of verity but you do have to be creative and it helps if you are fast at cooking.

The biggest injustice in life is that when you are young, food is just fuel to get through the day. You can eat all of it and you don't care if it's good.

When you get older, you start to understand food, and you are willing to pay more for it, but now you have to count calories.

Can I survive on $10 a day? I did it on $3 a DAY when my parents were on food stamps, but I am not that crazy about going back to the "franks, rice, and ketchup" menu.

Same here. $60 is basically our two-people weekly shopping.

And those two people likely don't eat remotely as well as Facebook or Google employees.

Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars, when I was at Google my cafe had fresh seafood (a rotation of different types of fish, scallops, shrimps, mussel, crab, etc) and good quality regular meat dish (I particularly liked the skirt steak with guacamole), great vegan/vegetarian options, in-house made desserts including fresh made chocolate truffles every day prepared by the chef.

And that's just lunch, at one cafe, not including breakfast and dinner and options at the other 3 dozens cafes on campus.

If you can recreate all of that for two people with a $60/week budget, then kudos to you. I know I can't.

> those two people likely don't eat remotely as well

You then mention chocolate truffles. Personally if I had my employer providing ridiculous good food for free, I’ll likely live less healthy because I will eat those nice unhealthy things every day.

If I am prepping my own food I have complete control over what I buy and can choose _not_ to buy unhealthy things.

Also in my experience a reason why food prepared by a chef tastes so good: more fat used.

I assume that Google and Facebook canteens (well that’s what they are) are better than the ones offered by companies here in Germany, but I think I would still gain weight.

I used to work for Google for few years and I did gain some weight - just like many of my coworkers did. The food was delicious and looked great so I was eating too much overall and did not pay attention to the healthy meat vs vegetables balance.

For the last five years we're cooking most of our meals at home, maybe go out or order food once or twice a month. The food we cook isn't as exotic, nicely looking or sophisticated as the food served at Google, but it is tasty, fresh, healthy and the groceries are pretty cheap. And despite being older, my blood results are better now than when I was leaving Google.

You would be amazed at the quality of fresh food you can buy in the local stores. there's a good chance the potato you're eating for 5 dollar in the restaurant is the same one that's in your cellar which costed 5 cent

"And those two people likely don't eat remotely as well as Facebook or Google employees."

That probably depends on your cultural background.

Whenever I was in the US and worked for large tech companies I found the food too fat, too sweet, (interestingly same things like Kellogs are totally different in the US than in Europe), too much artifical flavor, too much cheese, too much toppings, large unhealthy portions.

The water and Cola tasted like Chlorine and were undrinkable - I guess you don't taste it when you grow up with that taste.

I had good food here an there, especially great - and expensive - steaks in NYC and once the best fish tacos in the world on a beach in San Diego, but overall the food wasn't to my liking. I was dissapointed by the food in SF, I had very high hopes from hearing all the good things but it was just average.

Food which I did like more than the food for "those two people" in general was the food in the South of France, in Sardinia, Corsica and Rome, desserts of the Middle East, in Japan and Vietnam - also Copenhagen is so underrated concerning food.

The food for "those two people" tastes natural, has no artifical flavorings and is healthy.

So it probably depends on your cultural background, as I've said.

Zurich has one of Google's largest offices in Europe. I doubt the food is as oily or over-sweetened as Silicon Valley. (And yes, broadly, I agree that US prepared food is mostly over the top on oil/salt/sugar.) It would be nice to hear from Googlers who have visited more than one office and its canteen.

My mistake, I assumed the thread was about the US in general, I hear what you say.

> Even if you value your labor/time to cook to be worth of zero dollars

I understand what you're saying, but still cringed at that statement. Eating well and, by extension, cooking is hardly something I would value at $0/hour and I find it mildly insulting that someone would devalue the time I dedicate to preparing meals.

If you don't like cooking and would rather dedicate some of your income to having someone else do it for you, please frame it in that way. It recognizes it is your own decision and comes off as less judgmental of others.

He did come off as a little harsh but he's not entirely wrong depending on how you value your time and priorities. for the record it is perfectly possible to eat healthy without having to spend(waste) time cooking. I steam vegetables, eat fruit, and eat a lot of lean chicken and sardines.

I can definitely relate to him because I hate spending time cooking, I don't like the prep, I don't like the drudge work, and I don't like to have to clean up afterwards. I have a finite lifespan and I don't wanna waste any of it on things that I fundamentally do not enjoy, particularly if it's entirely avoidable.

"As well" is subjective and your presuming those two people want to eat like that. I don't. I enjoy talapia, chicken breast, white rice, and Fiber One on a daily basis. I rotate in broccoli and peas, and enjoy the occasional Honey Bun, chocolate, and bowl of Cocoa Pebbles.

But the best part of the day is the very first fresh ground coffee with real sugar and real cream in the morning. You just can't beat it.

Curious where you live where you can get real cream legally? Are you milking your own goats or cows?

Most employees in Paris get lunch coupons at work.. I guess they may eat better than FAANG employees

Also fasting is better for you than eating all the time.

The $60 is laughably high, but the value of the perk of $400 a month might also be too low considering part of the appeal is presumably that it all gets looked after for you and you don’t have to prep food or even think about your meals (the value of having all your meals cooked for you isn’t the same as the value of the ingredients).

I read a bunch of comments in this branch, and I think yours nails it. Initially, I saw 60 USD per day and laughed. Thought to myself: "Ok, they will all be overweight in 1 yr -- like junior bankers!" Then, I realised the labour costs are pretty high, so 60 USD per day might be too low. It might be closer to 100 USD in "value" per day for Google to provide all your meals.

My total expenses for groceries and vegetables is less than $60 for a full month in India.

Why was this downvoted? It's useful anecdata. Thank you to share.

At wet markets in China/HK/TW/SE Asia, you might be able to eat for a month on 60 USD.

You don't factor the electricity/water for cooking & cleaning and the time spent doing it(calculate it by the hourly rate of a mid-range cook assuming you are there).

The key part there is "buying prepared food". 60 per day is much more reasonable if you eat out or get takeout/delivery every meal.

It sounds about right to me if you don't like cooking. Note that the cost is for prepared food.

Buying raw ingredients and cooking them yourself is cheaper in terms of explicit dollar costs, but if you don't enjoy cooking then you also need to assign some monetary value for having to do something that you don't like.

I think I would enjoy taking a break and cooking so free food is probably not worth $60 to me personally. It's not crazy to think that my employer gets a benefit of more than $60 through increased productivity by providing me with free food though.

Reading FAANG employees talk about food prices makes me realize the old "It's one banana. What could it cost, $10?" is something that was written based on reality.

When I worked at Google I so rarely paid for food that I began to completely ignore the cost of food when I did pay for it. It just didn’t seem to matter much.

At Apple Park lunch at Cafe Macs could easily run $10-15 (without a drink) depending on what station you ordered from. The food there was good but not exactly cheap.

The campus was really too big to leave for lunch unless you arrived at some stupid early hour to park underground below your office. It's a 10-15 minute walk to the south parking garage and then at least a 10 minute drive to the closest places to eat and none of those are cheaper than the cafe.

So unless you're bringing food from home you can pretty easily hit $20 for lunch per day. I doubt Cafe Macs is running a huge profit but the cost for employees is non-trivial.

And I thought spending up to eight euros for a warm meal (I'd have a sandwich in the evening) was stretching the budget.

Actually that is cheap.

I am used to pay at least 10 euros, for food + drink, unless I go to one of those special lunch time deals or street food places.

And since I am Portuguese, evenings is also a proper meal, so make it twice for the days I happen to dine outside as well.

Where do people not have a "proper meal" in the evening?

For us a sandwich isn't a proper evening meal, just something to eat on the go when no time for anything better.

In fact to this day I never gotten into the whole Abendbrot stuff, even though I have lived half of my life in German speaking countries.

Just explaining where I am coming from, not attacking anyone.

oh man I miss those 2 o'clock lunch deals (Menu del Dias) which would fill you up for like... 12 euros haha. I remember in Barcelona or Valencia you could go to a really fancy, highly rated restaurant and "splurge" for 20 euros. Miss that place!

Heck, I remember a salad at Harvard being $12.

But aren't there any lunch trucks, roach coaches, etc around for normal people to get food?

Nope. Parking requires badge access and there's no street parking near the campus. Even if some lunch truck set up shop in a nearby parking lot it would still be a 15-20 minute hike to reach it.

What’s your hourly wage and how much time do you spend preparing food?

And do you get overtime pay if you don't cook your own food?

I work for Google and live in Switzerland where food is really expensive so my situation doesn't generalize well.

However, if 1) I cook all my food, and 2) try to have a healthy diet I spend easily the equivalent of 30USD/day. Going to a restaurant sets you back around the same amount per meal.

So, assuming I work 200 days/year going to the office and get free food would save me 6k USD/year (also assuming I cook 100% off my meals). That kind of money would pay for holidays or other stuff.

Finally, my back of the envelope math didn't include the time I spend cooking and all the "premium" stuff I get at the office like fancy drinks and snacks, which I usually don't buy when WFH.

And you live in a country with a really nicely developed public transport infrastructure, so you don't go through the nightmarish car commutes that most USians probably have in mind. When I lived in CH, I did not mind the days I had to commute – it was mostly a relaxed trainride where I could get work done 75% of the time.

I really think a lot of this debate is colored by Americans thinking of the American commute.

Indeed. My commute was/is between 15 and 20 minutes door to door so I really don't mind the buffers between home/office!

Most of Europe has relatively nice public transport. I used to read books while on my way to work. That was 1.5-2 hours per day for my library. My previous office was 30 minutes walking distance from my home. Great way to wake up as opposed to coffee. While I was in the US, they had scarcely any sidewalks. Only in big cities it seemed appropriate to walk to somewhere.

On the other side, Europeans tend to think that there is only the US and Europe in the world. American-style long commutes are the reality in most of Asia, Latin America and the larger African cities. If anything, Europe is the exception.

My wife and I were spending maybe $1000/mo on takeout -and- we had free lunches at offices until the pandemic.

Once I committed to WFH life, it became a logical next step to double down on the freedom aspects and start my own consulting firm.

That meant I needed long term thinking. I learned to cook more often and turned my entire front yard into a garden.

Overall I would say WFH has been net healthier on my mind and wallet.

I am a huge proponent of Blue Apron (or a similar service). Have been a customer for 7 years now. It cuts down on grocery waste (do I NEED 1 liter of sherry vinegar to cook one thing?), and you pick up a ton of techniques that may not be chef-advanced but very useful in every-day cooking.

> do I NEED 1 liter of sherry vinegar to cook one thing?

It will last years though, do you NEED to cook only one thing with it?

That's just an example. Most of the ingredients that I buy without meal kits usually just go bad, there is no saving money justification there, especially in NYC where groceries are more expensive.

I think this is an 'occasionally cooking' problem.

If you cook frequently enough then it's just not an issue; there's always something with not much good life left, sure, but that's what you use next.

If course if you don't cook it's not a problem either, so it's probably unfortunately the cause of some reluctance. Maybe kits help that.

Wow. Thank you to share. How much garbage does this produce just from packaging? I cringe at packaging waste from takeaway. That is my number one reason to avoid it. (To be clear: I don't live in a place that uses remotely "eco-friendly" packaging like pressed recycled light cardboard and balsam[sp?] wood utensils!)

Consider a significant number of Googlers are upper middle class kids, possibly on the spectrum, who go straight from the ivy league to google’s cafeteria. These made up numbers seem reasonable and accurate to them because they never had to take care of themselves in the real word.

Don't ivy league students have to cook for themselves?

Many people at college generally do not have access to a kitchen.

If that's true at all it definitely needs an 'in the US' qualifier - it's surprising to me in the UK, and even more surprising we would be so different in that regard.

Is the cooked-for-you food free?

>Is the cooked-for-you food free? It's broadly true in the US as far as I know for on-campus university housing. (Off-campus housing and fraternities/sororities are often different.)

Anything but free. Meal plan requirements vary.

Where I lived undergrad, we had a kitchen for a suite of rooms although I ate out a fair bit. (Many dorms did not have cooking facilities though.) Both places I went for grad school (which were actually both Ivy League) had no cooking facilities of any type.

> Is the cooked-for-you food free?

It's not free, you are required to pay for a meal plan when you are on campus dormitory housing.

Wow. That's surprisingly different to the UK - I've never heard of anywhere having no kitchen available. (Other options are of course available, but certainly not required.)

In fact I'd guess it's probably a requirement here - I don't think student halls are treated any differently to any private rented accommodation, it's probably a requirement that there be access to a (possibly shared) kitchen.

It's also quite (and increasingly) common that you're only in halls (or at least only guaranteed a place) in first year, thereafter in private rented accommodation of course you'd expect a kitchen; whereas I gather in the US the vast majority are campus universities, and provide on-campus accomodation throughout all years.

At least in my experience, there is a kitchen area per floor with stove and oven, though nothing more than microwave and hot plate (and mini fridge) in the actual dorm rooms themselves.

They live all four years in halls most UK uni's have a lot of students in rented accommodation for al least some of the time.

Did the "The Young Ones" not get picked up in the US

lol I'm doing a bootstrapped startup. I ate: a can of tuna, peanut butter, greek yogurt, protein powder-based shake, and watermelon yesterday... maybe at a total cost of $3-5??

You only missed ramen in that list! (Are you "ramen profitable" yet?)

I save a huge amount on food wfh. Working somewhere without free food, I would buy prepared food every day.

From home, I whip something up from my kitchen every day

Right but a Google employee living in SF and commuting to Mountain View will spend 3 hrs/day commuting give or take. Are Google employees worth $20/hr?

This is the real question ppl commuting to work should ask themselves. Is 1-2h per day of commute worth the pay/benefits I get ?

When I get paid 200$ per hour, saving 20-30$ but losing 2h is totally not worth my time.

I would rather spend that time with family or my hobbies.

>If you weigh this against spending an extra hour or two commuting, then it looks like a lousy bargain.

How about if your commute is <20 minutes one way?

$60? Wow, happy to not be in the US.

I'd say I spend <$10 a day on food with good quality organic local ingredients.

That $60 is assuming that you're in an expensive area and are eating out three meals a day. You don't need to spend that much, even in NYC.

Not everyone spends that much. If have to guess that most people don't. I'm in the US, and spend less than half that much to feed a family and we don't eat cheap, boxed junk.

Thanks for the insight!

> If have to guess that most people don't

Most people definitely don't, at $1825 a month that's already more than the median cost of rent in the U.S.

Food and rent are separate markets.

And spending more in the food market than the rent market is definitely unusual.

Since you're home, you're free to make whatever food you want, anytime, for the 2 hours daily commute.

What!? Who spends $60 a DAY on food? I live in Zürich, a very expensive place to eat, and my weekly total food budget for my wife and me is like $170.

If someone eats all their meals out, that's not unreasonable. That's about what I'll spend daily when traveling in cities. Of course, that doesn't describe what I do day-to-day at home at all. I'll occasionally grab a pizza but that's about the only takeout/eat out I routinely do when I'm at home.

I live pretty luxuriously and spend about $100 per day on food altogether.

I've spent years, working in offices in London and not being thrifty with £, in fact spending too much on overpriced sandwiches, coffees cakes etc... but how on earth do you get to those numbers ??

It also depends on if you commute by car or public transport.

Some of us don't really object to 90 minutes a day of quiet time where we can read tbh.

It's not just the money, you also save time and effort which in my opinion really accumulates to something significant and distracting in the long run. It's just nice to be able to focus on your work and have someone else worry about food, and not having to take breaks for preparation/cleaning/doing dishes etc.

$15/day for coffee at home is way too high. You can buy a pound of high-end coffee beans for that price. A good grinder, aeropress and kettle will cost you less than $200. That’ll easy beat the quality of corporate cafe coffee. Even at five cups a day, you’re looking at $4/day.

I spend 150$+ per month on AC and heat because of the pandemic. I spent ~30$ in gas a month commuting. I could even walk if my bike didn't work.

Personally I like the free AC.

Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.

If you're paying rents/mortgages close to your work, those savings from AC probably disappear pretty quickly.

For people who like where they live that isn't necessarily a factor. Even if I was fully remote I don't think I'd move

I live in a medium/low col city. Not everywhere is NYC or Cali

> I spend 150$+ per month on AC and heat because of the pandemic. I spent ~30$ in gas a month commuting. I could even walk if my bike didn't work.

Work from home doesn't mean you have to literally work from home. There are plenty of places you can work from, ranging from free like libraries or parks, to paid like coffee shops and co-working spaces. You can get your employer to pay for the latter.

> Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.

Those optimizations become liabilities if you get a new job elsewhere.

I'm not a mobile person, I've traveled the world but lived in one city my whole life. I've done the 90 minute commute, I've driven all over. This role I picked especially because of the location. Work fits my life not the other way around.

$150 extra from 40 hours of AC is insanely high. That's about what I pay total in the middle of summer in Florida for a decent-size SFH. Check the insulation on your house for a leak. Also maybe consider upgrading to a ductless heat pump mini split. That would almost certainly cut your marginal cost to near $30/month.

It’s not uncommon to pay $3-400 for your electrify per month because of AC in the Midwest (for three months a year, that is)

My electric hits $400+ a month in the summer and it’s just going to get worse when our pool is completed. I live in a new 2500 square foot house in Arizona, our insulation is fine. And we have two pretty nice heat pump/ac units.

Fair enough. But in Arizona, it's not like you're just turn off the AC completely and let the house bake in the 115 noonday heat. Maybe you bump your thermostat from 76 to 90 from 9-3 (gotta give it time to cool back down before you get home). That cuts your power usage in half for six hours of the day, 22 days a month. At most that might save you $120 during the hot summer months.

A friend's pool in England is almost entirely sustained with solar panels: radiant ones to heat the water (as required), and PV to run the pumps.

It seems like a no-brainer to do this in Arizona, but I don't know the economics.

I’m likely going to get solar panels, but building a pool is an expensive frustrating process, and I didn’t want to take on an additional project at the same time. The pool also has an electric heat pump so as long as the solar panel install is large enough solar panels will cover both needs.

Still need to work out the numbers on the solar panels so I can decide if I should buy them, or lease them.

Have you considered adding solar panels to your house?

Yes, I’ve been in talks with a Tesla rep. Need to run the numbers on buying vs leasing, and get a few other quotes.

Where do you get 40h from? Assuming living in a place that has long hot humid summers and cold winters, thereby needing AC for most of the year, that number should be closer to 100~200.

I live quite frugally otherwise (balking at other numbers in this thread) and $150 per month in climate cost increase for the daytimes sounds perfectly normal to me. During the hot summers I spent twice that when living in an apartment in the big city.

Also consider most people rent and have little ability to impact insulation and efficiency in their homes.

Only if you're an extrovert. As an introvert I love people throwing stuff over the wall to me and I never have to deal with office gossip, politics, or other shenanigans.

My landlord noticed electric bill going up (combined with rent) and a lightbulb moment happened when we realized we've all been at home over the winter and its 220+ hours more of heat and other appliances every month.

> Once you optimize your job to be close to your home, many of the benefits of wfh disappear.

Alternative framing: your life has been constrained by your career expectation of working in an office; you've optimised around that and found a local maximum.

Work-from-home doesn't remove that local maximum from you, but it creates an opening to find a higher maximum.

I have a similar situation with heating. Two months of sub zero C this winter didn't help either.

Commutes also cost the one thing we can't get back; time.

Sometimes people say they're making a time trade off for more money, and plan to use that money to buy more time.

While money is fungible, time is not. You can't buy more time with your kids while they're young if they're already grown. You can't buy more time with someone who has passed away. And you can't buy your way out of missed opportunities in your personal life, once they've gone they're gone.

I would rather pay the maid to spend 5 hours to clean the whole house once a week, while I take the kids to the park or to the beach.

Same thing applies to cooking, groceries, errands, etc.

We talk about the time-value of money; perhaps there’s also a time-value of time.

Chap at work (at his home,rather!) has spent the last 15 months making and eating breakfast with his children every day.

He's not coming back to the office. No way, no how. He's seen a better life.

If you use public transport, you can regain that time. In the UK you can get a seat on most rush hour trains, and even standing up on the Tube you can read a book, listen to a podcast, do your email etc. It's also good thinking time.

Driving a car yep you're absolutely right, but if you commute via car a long distance for a considerable amount of time I think you're crazy.

No commute made me unsubscribe from almost all podcasts and read fewer books indeed.

Not to mention sleeping on the train.

Depends, public transport outside of London is often a complete joke in the UK. I switched to cycling after getting pissed off at a bus that came once every hour and a half, was often 30-40 minutes late and occasionally didn't bother to turn up at all.

Yep. My commute in London is basically the only time I get to read books.

Disagree strongly. I commuted solely via public transit for years, and it isn’t time you’ve regained in a meaningful way. Reading a book on a crowded train is superior to driving, and vastly inferior to reading a book in my hammock before working hours start. I also can’t work out, hang out with my family, or do all kinds of activities when I’m on public transit.

For the record, I’ve commuted via public transit (both bus and train), bike, and foot for long stretches of time. All beat driving, all are much worse than just not commuting at all.

> In the UK you can get a seat on most rush hour trains

I don't what commuter line you're coming in on but it must be one with seats on the roof.

Many UK Cities. I guess you're in London? Certainly wasn't easy to get a seat there, but then London is only a small part of the UK's pop.

> The average commuter in one of the largest metro areas in the country will spend over 13 full days commuting a year:

This might be technically correct. But realistically I'd count only working hours. 200 working days and roughly 2 hr commute for me a day. So it is about 400 hr commute to work/home i.e ~50 work days spent in commute.

You don't have to commute. You chose to commute.

You maybe did it for a larger house. Or maybe for cheaper rent/mortgage.

We're not talking here about folks on minimum wage who can only afford to live 2 hours outside of the city they are working in.

The highly paid software engineers on hackernews could absolutely afford to live 5 minutes from the office, 30 minutes from the office, or 2 hours from the office.

They could afford to move to a city with good transit where they can only afford an apartment, or to a city with no transit where they can afford a giant mansion.

Please remember that not everybody here works for FAANG or similar companies.

None the less people do seem to make poor decisions when it comes to commuting.

This comment suggests you are from a generation where there was a choice

Mostly it comes from having made poor decisions in the past.

There is always a choice. Ten more miles equals one extra bedroom and so on.

Which generation doesn't have a choice? I'm a millenial and don't understand if this generalization is at me, genx, boomers or those damn new kids the zoomers. When I bought a house I was able to buy anything that was on sale and fit my budget except for retirement communities with a 55+ age restriction

You work at offie A, your spouse works at office B. There’s 20 miles between them. How do you avoid the commute?

Well, for one thing only _one_ of you needs to commute.

Secondly, you can work towards a situation where you don't have that commute, or it's cheap / clean / easy / you don't lose all the time. Spoiler: live on a trainline or buy a bicycle.

Third, I don't believe this is the main reason for commuting. I think it's because people want to live in one place and work in another, which is usually a bad idea - especially for the environment. It irks me when I choose to live reasonably close to work so I don't need to burn fossil fuels to get there, and then people driving their cars to and from some village complain about their commute whilst I have to suffer the air pollution from their vehicles.

I totally get that for some transitional periods a long commute may be required, but I don't know a single person who couldn't make their commute a 20min walk or by public transport if they moved or switched jobs.

> people want to live in one place and work in another, which is usually a bad idea

do you suggest moving every time you change jobs? I suppose that can be done as a single person or a couple, but moving homes every 4-6 years with children who have to change schools, etc is (I'm sorry) an insane proposition.

I suspect they don't have children, as finding a suitable and affordable family home in the city is also incredibly hard.

If you are single and can just up sticks from one apartment to another then yeah, it's pretty trivial.

> do you suggest moving every time you change jobs?

No, just if you move to a new job that's a long journey away from your house.

> Secondly, you can work towards a situation where you don't have that commute, or it's cheap / clean / easy / you don't lose all the time. Spoiler: live on a trainline or buy a bicycle.

Does "commuting" only mean "driving in a privately owned car" where you are based? I'd consider travelling by rail, bus or bicycle to also be commuting.

Depends, often commuting is seen as this long, arduous thing to get to work. When I was going to the office, it was a 15 minute bike ride along canals. Technically a commute, but it doesn't feel like it, and it doesn't take a significant amount of my day. Really, it's a nice small amount of being outside and getting a little exercise and was kinda relaxing, so a net positive.

I guess it's an American idea about commuting being a 4 hour journey sat alone in your 5-seat car on a 6-lane freeway.

The word commute literally comes from ticket prices being commuted for regular travellers (holder of a commutation ticket)

I.e public transport

Sorry I was unclear, yes I meant if you want to recover the time, take public transport.

> You don't have to commute. You chose to commute.

Are you suggesting people live at the office?

No: close by. As in : within 30 minutes of (electric) biking distance.

So... within commuting distance?

That's just bulls... People have a live besides work. Kids, family, spouses, hobbies, ... a lot of things have an influence where people can realistically live.

And furthermore, even if everyone was that free-roaming, only-working, highly-paid software developer you seem to consider average, still there wouldn't be enough living space really close to many offices for all employees.

Private transport is also one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

Reducing daily commute seems like a good way to improve our carbon footprint.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200317-climate-change-c...

One of many, though; I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions. Yes they're a part of the equation, but there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down.

Mind you, there are things like that going on (at least in my neck of the woods), with things like subsidies to consumers for going to battery powered cars and installing solar panels, and subsidies to e.g. energy producers for building wind farms out at sea.

> there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down

Exactly. Germany banning plastic straws while simultaneously funding a new natural gas pipeline feels very much like they just want it to seem like things are improving.

Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues.

Disposable plastics are a problem first and foremost because they cause proliferation of microplastics in the biosphere. This is an issue, but it's not an important issue right now. It's likely harmful to biosphere and to us in the long run - but as of today, there's no noticeable harm being done that can be tied to microplastics, which suggests any negative effects are weak.

Climate change, on the other hand, is a civilization-ending threat. We keep burning more fossil fuels, and it's quite likely our grandchildren will get to starve to death. Preventing this should be our absolute top priority. Microplastics can wait.

It's like trying to administer first aid to an accident victim who has a nasty skin cut on their arm, and a leg that got cut off below the knee. Yes, that skin cut is painful and it needs treating to prevent infection, but it can wait - the first priority is to deal with the leg, before the victim bleeds out.

> Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues.

Things that everybody is going to notice first-hand have an outsized impact on public consciousness. When combined with democracy, this has nasty consequences.

For politicians banning plastic straws is a no-brainer: easy to ban, no real impact on anything, and everyone is going to notice it and feel like something is happening. Same for plastic grocery bags and cutlery. Do it and maybe you'll grab some of those Green votes, same play as the Energiewende.

Meanwhile if you make industry even just .1% more efficient the impact is larger by orders of magnitude but nobody is going to notice, first-hand, right now. So it's pointless when you only care about votes. Which is sadly a main feature of democracy.

Do you have any better alternatives to a democracy?

There doesn't seem to be any good one.

GP described what's a clear systemic failure inherent in the current implementation of the system. This doesn't mean we have to throw the system away - figuring out how to mitigate this problem would work too.

On this, I don't have any solid ideas. In a way, it's a marketing problem: maybe there's a way to make people more receptive to reality than to feel-good but ultimately meaningless actions?

I sometimes wonder if governments shouldn't have an official propaganda department, with an official website, explaining in layman's terms the reasoning behind various laws being introduced. You'd go to a page for plastic straws ban, and see the government's official word on why it was drafted, what problem it's meant to solve, how it attempts that, and how they track the results.

Of course, everyone would have a field day debunking every single article from a million different angles, but at least it would serve to anchor the discussion. And it would be a place for a smarter politicians/parties to explain why increasing efficiency of some industry by 0.01% is a huge win by the current administration - hopefully leading to more such actions in the future.

There's a thin line between giving clear explanations and patronizing the citizens, but I think governments need to start walking it - as it is, politics is way too complicated for regular people to follow in any meaningful sense, other than repeating soundbites.

Nope, I'm just noting a failure mode.

Republicanism, lots of little democracies competing against one another for citizens, yet united when it comes to things like national defense. The US was originally designed to be a constitutional republic but a growing federal government has degraded it to more of a simple representative democracy.

I never heard the term "Republicanism". Are there any (real) countries that practice this? Australia's states have lots of divested powers. How do you feel about that balance?

Im not familiar enough with government in Oz to say but the closest example in modern times would be the EU, although they have a heavier hand than I'd recommend. If people in say France were unhappy with their government they can more easily move to Germany then if they were separate nations not in the EU. The key is giving the states enough control that they are distinct from one another while allowing people to move between them. If the federal government takes too much power the states become homogeneous and you lose the ability to vote with your feet like that.

How does the EU handle cases where one member wants to treat something as contraband and other do not? With open borsers for people and trade can one meber state have different laws for banned items or substances?

> With open borsers for people and trade can one meber state have different laws for banned items or substances?

The Netherlands have fairly lax laws on substances and are a EU member. If you take something from the Netherlands into a country that doesn't want that item within their borders you are subject to the local laws. Same thing that would happen if you brought contraband from South America to the US really.

IMO, if you try to make industry .1% more efficient, they will lobby the hell out of everyone to make sure that doesn't happen, because it affects their profit, and they threaten to withhold their campaign contributions. So instead, politicians do unimportant things like limit plastic straws.

Bottom line is, voters may elect politicians, but companies fund their campaigns.

Crowded, rich countries that responsibly burn garbage & waste still have a serious issue with dioxins generated by burning plastics. You can filter some of it, but usually areas around these plants have much higher than normal dioxin levels.

That said, I like the balance in your comment about the known effects of microplastics. At the moment, it is just a hype story. Honestly: No one really knows, but we should continue to seriously monitor and research the issue. I have heard that stretchy clothing (aka "ath-leisure") causes a lot of micro-fibres to be shed during laundry. This is simiar to microplastics, as most ath-leisure is made with synthetic materials that are essentially refined oil (as plastics).

Natural gas is great. It doesn't generate as much pollution as one might think. Other than fully clean energy like hydro and solar, it is one of the best.

it doesn't generate much in terms of particulate emissions (eg it's not dirty like diesel) but it's quite bad in terms of greenhouse effects. the natural gas pipeline network leaks a relatively large amount of the gas that transits it (it's on the order of several percent per year) and because it's such a distributed problem it's not economical for companies to fix it purely on a cost-savings basis. And natural gas (methane) is an extremely potent greenhouse gas - it is #2, behind only carbon dioxide in overall impact on the atmosphere, and something around 100x as potent as CO2 over a 100 year lifespan.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/06/the-us-natural-gas-industry-...

new studies suggest the leak rate is around 2.3%, which is about twice as high as previously predicted - and at 3% you have offset all the benefits compared to coal generation. Again, obviously that's still better in terms of particulate emissions/acid rain, but you wouldn't be doing any less global warming. So it is still significantly bad in terms of greenhouse effect, not nearly the panacea the fossil-fuel industry would like to present it as.

(and conversely - the fact that it's such a distributed problem makes it difficult/expensive to clean up. you can capture CO2 and particulates from a point source - it's expensive and it sucks but you can do it. But you can't stop 2 million miles of pipes from leaking a little bit at every fitting.)

the only saving grace is that methane does oxidize relatively quickly, on the order of tens of years, whereas CO2 is pretty much there forever. but if we're still pumping out more natural gas into the atmosphere 10 years later, that's not really the fix people think it is. Again, it's 100x more potent over a 100 year lifespan than CO2, the "long term" picture isn't all that rosy either.

How much of that gas was going to leak anyway? The fields they pipe it from probably don't hold it all in. Any stats on this in Google are buried under reports on the extraction industry, so I can't find anything concrete.

"Anyway" from what reference point? The gas stayed in the ground for millions of years before we poked a bunch of wells into the reservoir. If the wells are shut in correctly, they shouldn't leak appreciably. As the comment above notes, the more pipes you have, the more gas is going to leak.

Unfortunately, in many places you can't produce oil without producing gas, and with so much gas right now, there's not a lot of financial incentive to capture it all. If we reduce the need for oil, we'll reduce gas leak emissions as well.

That's the question. How much makes it to the surface? Oil used to pop up everywhere before humans sucked up all the easy to reach surface sources. There's still a little that comes up from the ocean floor without any human help.

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spill...

Why would it be different for other things created by the same processes? And do the pipes let less leak out than if we just left it in the ground?

This source suggests that geological methane emissions are about 40% of total emissions: https://phys.org/news/2021-03-natural-geological-methane-emi...

Oil and gas seeps notwithstanding, the vast majority of reservoirs are stable and likely to remain so over human timescales unless we stick wells into them and start piping fluids around on the surface.

slight addendum to the above - I should have said "not dirty like fossil-diesel". I'd like to make the point that synthetic diesels like biodiesel are extremely clean in terms of particulates and is in fact one of the more interesting "bio-fuels" (although of course there are always problems with any approach that puts food in direct competition with fuel for feedstocks).

I'm confused by the second part <<funding a new natural gas pipeline>>. I assume you are talking about Nord Stream 2.

Switching from brown coal to natural gas can reduce carbon footprint by about 50%. This is a good stepping stone to reduce the huge amount of brown coal that Germany uses for power. Also, the reduction in NOx and SOx is huge by switching from brown coal to natural gas. Another big win for public health.

Do I misunderstand your point?

Germany has limited places to harvest wind (North Sea) and limited solar resources. How else can they reduce their carbon footprint? I guess they can build massive solar arrays in Libya and then build the world's largest long-range DC power line to Munich? (No joke: Singapore might do this with Australia.)

It seems you argue it’s a stepping stone, then you argue there’s no other way. Both of these can’t be true.

But if you ask me, the long term answer is nuclear. I know it’s controversial but many of the issues are blown out of proportion.

I would argue, that when you take a holistic view of the complete environment, including the soils and subsoils where our food largely comes from, the only long term answer you're left with is to de-civilize and go back to hand tools, local living, and animal transport for the rare times it's needed.

> I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions.

Me too, but GP has an argument along these lines here.

Commute is a big, and often deciding factor, in private car ownership. Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car. Expand the delivery systems for day-to-day stuff like groceries, and another big reason - buying in bulk - goes away. While people living in sparsely populated areas will still need their cars, the dwellers of large cities with serviceable public transport infrastructure might be more inclined to get rid of their cars, and just rent one for an occasional out-of-town errand.

In this way, normalizing work from home creates top-down pressure for reducing the number of private cars in use.

> Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car.

I think this is backwards.

We saw during the pandemic a mass exodus from cities. Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore.

Once you remove the burden of commuting, suburban / rural life becomes _even more_ attractive, increasing the need for cars.

> Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore.

IMO it’s too early to claim that. People left the city during the pandemic because there was no point paying the premium to live in a city when all its amenities are closed. As cities open back up we might see a lot of people return. Anecdotally, I know a bunch of early career folks in their 20s that moved back in with their parents during the pandemic to save cash. That most certainly isn’t their long term plan.

I don’t doubt that a good number of folks won’t return to the city once this is over. But I wonder if that’s just an acceleration of moves they would have already made in the next 5 years or so, rather than something indicative of the death of cities.

I agree. As for most things, the internet narrative exaggerates reality. New York is already quickly coming back to normal -- certainly slower than before, but offices aren't open yet. Once they open, the intangible benefits of being in the office will re-appear, and result in the same cultural forces that have led to cities for ~all of human civilization.

People who are betting against urban life are basically making a bet against human nature based on short-term trends.

Cities are certainly not the norm when looking at "~all of human civilization.". The norm by far is small anarchic-communal villages (150 people or less). Yes, eventually some outliers form, and villages become a large metropolis, with all of the problems and certain pitfalls that entails.

The past year also saw a 50%+ spike in urban violent crime rates, and repeated riots in nearly every major city. Anecdotally most of the professional families I know who fled to the suburbs cited safety as the primary reason.

citation please.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/953254623/massive-1-year-rise...

You're forgetting the key bit: It was during a pandemic, and so especially during the first 6-12 months, people didn't feel safe being around others. They also often legally didn't have any space outside they could enjoy. Suburbs bring personal space and the legal right to be in your back yard.

A city is an entirely different experience when its residents are allowed to use parks and can enjoy dining out, walking to a market, strolling to the cinema, etc...

Yup. In between the waves of lockdowns, cities were actually more pleasant to be in than they normally are - with so many offices closed, there was a lot less people and cars on the streets, meaning less pollution and less noise.

Without the commuter rush, many places were much more pleasant. I'm in a suburban area and it used to be a solid hour of "line 'o cars" on the main street by my house. God forbid you want to go somewhere at 5pm or 8am.

Now it's more congested, but traffic still moves pretty quick. I'm not looking forward to all the commuters going back to the office.

"for a brief period during unprecedented times, a city apartment was as pleasent to live in as a proper house. This has quickly passed."

Almost. A proper house still has more space, and less noise constraints :).

This is such a bizarre comment. Do you think people will just forget how easily it was for their entire lifestyle to become illegal? Do you think those that moved to the suburb will forget the incredible freedom they purchased?

I think the pandemic highlighted a key deficiency of cities which most people will not soon forget.

I downsized to one car during the pandemic. The only reason I had two cars was because we were a family of commuters. Now that no one in the house is commuting, there's little point to owning and maintaining multiple cars.

And the one car I do have could potentially last me the rest of my life because I've gone from commuting 12k miles per year (time 2), down to around 3000.

Second had car prices have soared and people might not be keep to go back to jammed public transport due to covid.

My last two bus trips had betwen1 and 5 people blatantly ignoring the mask requirements and this is in on of the UK covid hot spots.

Depends where you live and if you have to heat or cool your house to work from home. Homes are much more inefficient to moderate temperature than offices. That may or may not offset the benefit from commuting, and even less so if done on public transport with lower emissions.

That only applies if the home is empty when people are at the office. If my family stays at home while I commute, then there are emissions from commuting, heating the home and heating the office.

Not even then - nobody likes to return to a very cold home after a day at the office. It'll take advances in insulation to become much more widespread before a meaningful amount of people starts shutting off heating when away. That means first tearing down and rebuilding a lot of buildings, because you can't just bolt this kind of insulation tech onto an old construction.

> Not even then - nobody likes to return to a very cold home after a day at the office.

I'm also not going to let my pets freeze or bake while no one is home.

After spending all day inside my box I need a ride to clear my head anyway

The way to reduce carbon footprint is to put a zero on the price of gasoline, diesel, natural gas and all other forms of carbon-based fuel. A 900% tax should do just fine.

Just nobody is brave enough to do it, because it would be political suicide. Even if you gave the money back to the people in the form of tax breaks and social programmes, it would still be political suicide.

900% of 0 = 0.

By put a 0, OP means add a zero (3.95 -> 39.5). Not make gas free.

I don’t know - a carbon tax and telling everyone they’re required to come to the office just seems like it’s punishing workers even more. For many people transit it’s not available or odd fossil fueled powered. WFH should be preferred over a carbon tax on commuting - eliminating the consumption altogether is far better than sending tax money to the government and hoping that people change behaviors based on pricing.

A 900% tax would make workers tell their employers that they demand to work from home, get a big pay rise, or go on strike...

It's not just political suicide, it's a game theoretical non-optimal play because any one country doing this only hurts themselves while not actually solving climate change. It only works if you have some large number of the top emitters agree to cap all together.

> Commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages

Maybe statistically, OK. But if you have a nice commute it may be likely the best part of your day. I have a mostly flat, 40 min bike ride in the woods every day, and it is my "me time" that I cherish and lets me unwind before and after work. Definitely not "lost time".

If you were given back those 40 mins, you could spend them on a 40 min bike ride in the woods.

If that's the absolute best way you can imagine spending those 40 mins, you don't lose the option to do that.

I also spend about 30 min per day cooking for the kids. Would you say that I could "get back" these 30 minutes by hiring a personal cook? Well, maybe, but I really don't live like that. It's a mildly pleasurable activity, even if I'm able to imagine "better ways to spend my time".

Reread that comment. He’s saying you would have the option of doing that 40m bike ride, which you don’t have today. For the majority of people that commute will not be a nice ride through the woods, and they can’t opt out.

I don't think a 40 minute bike ride is the kind of commute we're talking about. Most commuters are not doing so by biking through a nice woodland trail. I would love to ride to work, but it would take over twice as long as your commute in a climate that is inhospitably cold for biking for about 6 months of the year and often rains for the rest.

> it is my "me time" that I cherish

You have kids don't you? That seems to be a consistent feature of people I meet who espouse the virtues of going to work.

> You have kids don't you? That seems to be a consistent feature of people I meet who espouse the virtues of going to work.

Yes. But my liking of bike commuting is maybe more related to the fact that it is a positive change from using public transportation, where I felt really miserable (had to take two crowded buses with an indeterminate waiting time in-between).

But you are right that having kids changes one's view to work... often, after an intense weekend, I go back to the lab and say "finally! I can relax and get some work done".

That sounds wonderful. Why would you need a commute to do it? Couldn’t you just take a bike ride for the pleasure and let me skip the hour long sardine can frequently delayed train ride often in the snow, sleet, or rain in the process at the end of the day?

Could but probably won't. At least I found that even though I like the bike portion of my commute and had kept it up for the first few months it eventually dwindled away in favor of sleeping in and working longer. Something to be said for the motivation of being required to get somewhere.

Fewer than 1% of Americans commute by bike.[1] For the vast majority of people the end of WFH will not be a relaxing meander of me time through the forest.

[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/05/younger-worke...

You should post a video of it on YouTube (or somewhere else you prefer). A lot of people might enjoy it... a bit like Norweigan "slow TV".

You are assuming that salaries don't take that into account.

I thought I would like commuting as I’d find time to read more, but commuting during rush out to and from work is the absolute worse. I don’t even have space to open a book. And the metros in Paris are every 2 minutes so you couldn’t safely increase this rate. And obviously you couldn’t really make the metros longer (you could first fill a half and then a second half, but come on, let’s be realistic here).

If everyone remote worked half the week, I’d expect the metros to be half as full during rush hours. So it’s be a lot more enjoyable for everyone: space to sit and space to read a book.

I think the best of both worlds would be working at the office on average 2 to 3 days a week (on average; so I’d like to be able to work remotely for a week or two at a time).

This would also allow couples to alternate being home which would be nice for kids. If both parents work late at the office, who takes care of the kids, a nanny ? Expensive and doesn’t help the proximity between parents and their kids. My girlfriends mom stopped working when her kids started calling their nanny « mom ». That means that her career stopped. And that scares my girlfriend.

Finally, remote working would reduce traffic jams and hence help with our whole global warming situation.

So the 5 day at the office work week for everyone is: - not hygienic (metros more packed == greater chance of spreading the common cold, flu, stomachs etc == more money spend on healthcare == more sick leaves) - not green (why travel everyday when we do not have to) - not family friendly (who takes care of the kids when no one’s at home 60 hours a week?) - wastes everyone’s time (stand still doing nothing in the metro for an hour to work and back).

I’m all for the partial work at the office for the reasons mentioned by the grandparent comment, but go to hell companies that will bring the five days at the office back !!

Whenever the discussion of commuting comes up, the discussion revolves around worst case scenarios.

We are software engineers! There is no reason for us to put up with a worst case or even an average case commute. If we want to go into the office, it's easy for us to move house or move job.

Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour, especially when going into the office has its own monetary benefits as OP mentioned. It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.

Except of course if where we live is a compromise between minimizing distance to other places like our spouses place of work or our kids school.

Live close to work? No! Move further away so you can create more emissions travelling there and have a bigger house to heat/cool. Then complain when politicians don't put your needs over the quality of life of the people who actually live and pay tax on your route. Finally, sleep soundly at night knowing the brake dust you make them breathe comes from a Tesla.

> Whenever the discussion of commuting comes up, the discussion revolves around worst case scenarios.

The median and average commutes are not the worst case scenarios.

> Its not worth agonizing over a few bucks an hour

10% of a software engineer's yearly salary is nothing to balk at. A year or two of that is easily the down payment amount for a modest home, and is more than what many people make in a year.

> It would be a non-issue for most people here to just pay for an Uber back and forth to work, and not have to worry about driving at all.

I just checked Uber, and a one way trip to my last employer is $40 without surge pricing, and to another employer, it would be over $60. Assuming there's about 260 work days per year, that's at least $20k - $31k a year on Uber rides alone.

And it's not just about cost. It's also about time. Based on my last commute, I'd spend about two weeks straight just driving to work and back each year.

> For those of us who have to commute, it's not exactly the norm to be saving money while commuting

This is true. I choose to live within walking distance of my office, and it has vastly improved my life - prior to this job, I commuted 2.5 hours a day, and that was awful.

These choices of course have complex tradeoffs, but you don't have to commute, it is a choice.

I feel like this borders on the kind of insensitive comment that people get when they live paycheck to paycheck. Why don't you just save your money for a month? Why don't you just buy nicer shoes so you don't have to replace them every other month?

I feel like the trade off isn't that complex. Walking to work is a luxury of having a well paying job in the city.

You're not wrong, but you are discussing this in community full of largely well paid professionals. The majority of is have the financial ability to live within walking/cycling distance of the office, even if we choose not to.

Are you not paying more to live near the office?

> These choices of course have complex tradeoffs, but you don't have to commute, it is a choice.

I have to live near disabled family members so I can help take care of them. It's either work at Walmart, commute or work remotely. I've done the latter for years, but before the pandemic, most non-remote-first employers' attitudes towards remote working was either simply "no", or there was the expectation that you were to spend a year or more working in the office before asking your employer to make a special case for you to work remotely.

I commute at least 2 hours each day I go to the office. If the MTA is running smoothly. I would estimate I spend closer to 20 days commuting each year. Plus $1,800, which pales in comparison to the TVM of hundreds of hours commuting.

I will not be happy to return to the office.

That's one reason why I left Seattle. I was commuting 4 days/week, with a 1hr 15min commute in both directions, so I was spending 21.66 days a year in the car. Why so long? Affordable housing, of course.

I took a small pay cut, moved the east coast and now spend 24 minutes a day commuting, which is infinitely better.

I do not care about being competitve.

I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.

Being forced to spend 8 hours a day outside my home makes me actively uncomfortable. I'm autistic, partially faceblind (I used to think I can tell people's faces apart... but then a coworker will shave their head and it turns out I'm completely incapable of recognizing them... turns out I mostly just recognize hair), have difficulty looking people in the eye, and have a litany of sensory issues. Face-to-face interaction gives me zero benefit, and being able to work while wearing a rayon nightgown and rayon pajama pants means I'm actually able to focus on my work instead of focusing on how my clothes feel.

My company has a diversity and inclusion committee—I am on the diversity and inclusion committee—and there has not been a single discussion of how forcing people back to the office is actively harmful to autistic employees who can't benefit from face-to-face interaction and have sensory issues that make offices uncomfortable. It is absolutely hypocritical for companies to say they care about diversity and inclusion while shafting autistic employees like this.

If you are on the committee you should probably speak up and say something.

I agree - not sure there will ever be this kinda leverage again in our lifetimes

Yo, start that discussion! I’m autistic, and while I can benefit from face to face, I often don’t. I don’t work for your company but I know I’m depending on you to work with and for your colleagues and to help set an example.

> I do not care about being competitve.

> I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.

I’ve made the mistake of saying that out loud during pre-pandemic lunch conversations and happy hours and every time people looked at me like I had two heads.

As long as you are enjoying yourself it’s fine right? I enjoyed that for a while too, but just developing became boring, so now I’m also trying to play office politics. Not in the sense of some machiavellan scheme, but previously I’d just utterly ignore it.

Office politics can be amusing if you’re able to step away from it a bit and don’t care too much about the rat race. It’s immediately obvious who are the folks genuinely interested in building value and who are drones interpreting what their managers order them to do.

Eventually someone has to do the lowly business of actually implementing the value that those 10x ninja fullstack super senior software architects just created. God bless the drones.

It's a self-inflicted problem. They shouldn't have promoted those 10x ninja superstars out of development and into management roles (and apparently, "principal engineer" and even "senior engineer" is frequently just faux-management - all the responsibilities, none of the authority of a real manager).

I find it ironic that our industry trains up developers until the point they finally become competent at their jobs, and immediately force them to manage new breed of trainees instead of doing the work they're good at.

It's a real pity how much resources get outright wasted due to petty office politics squabbles... too bad many managers don't care :/

I think it's a perfectly healthy and normal attitude to have, but the thing is that it's only your perspective as the employee, and to avoid being short sighted and irresponsible, you have to also to some extent consider the perspective of the company as well.

I mean, in the extension if nobody cares a single f about being competitive, then maybe your whole company doesn't care about being competitive either, and oopsies some other company cared a bit more and now you don't have any jobs anymore...

There are people who’s job it is to care about the perspective of the company, and they make a lot more than any of us.

If a company wants its employees to care, it can re-organize itself as a co-op. Until then, our relationship is purely transactional.

Just had this conversation with my parents today. They asked why is working from home so wonderful?

The number one reason I had was, because everyone can just be them, it's a lot different than in the office.

The job can and should be a lot more inclusive and diverse when you're working in your own space -- home office, cafe, etc. You find what works for you, without having to worry about messing with someone else's flow in the next cubicle or being interrupted in your own flow by someone that always needs to escape their own work. Someone that wants to do something distracting can, without annoying others, everything is on your own terms, even if you have to take care of other family members.

With audio only you're just another human, not to be judged on appearance or malformation or what have you; which opens barriers that are presented in the office all the time, hell, it might even scare your interviewers from giving you the job in the first place! Either people can be cruel or incessantly think you're helpless.

I've noticed over the last year, those colleagues that are more introverted sometimes have a better go of presenting how they think online. When sharing their screens they're able to show more of their presentation skills, a lot more chances to present in a way they've developed overtime. And not more opportunities, it's probably the first opportunity they've had to shine than if it they were in an office; it doesn't happen.

In my opinion, I feel like those that are people-people will always get ahead in an office setting versus those that think a bit differently, look a bit differently, dress or act a bit differently, and this makes it a more level playing field for the latter.

Exactly.

Remote work promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I think this is yet to be determined, but even if you're right, it still promotes a different kind of inequality. Remote work is strongly biased in favor of those with the resources to have a nice, distraction-free office setup at home, and towards those who are already established in their careers.

Not to mention how it advantages people who can afford after school child care.

An all-remote workforce is on its way to being an all-male workforce. Female employment is already decades behind where it was pre-pandemic.

The single male echo chamber on here is unnerving.

How can you stay in the office if you don't have after school child care?

If you WFH and have a child >5yo you're likey to be able to spend a few hours working with them at home. You can take a regular break and pick them up from school. With more than one it is more difficult. But in either case, how do you manage to stay in the office without after school childcare?

I'm speaking as a parent who has exactly the same job as my partner. If neither of us were WFH, we would be unable to get by without after school support. With both of us WFH, we can trade pickup and childcare responsibilities. It's way more flexible and completely the opposite of what you're arguing.

> Not to mention how [wfh] advantages people who can afford after school child care.

What? Surely if anything it's the opposite - if you can't afford it wfh allows you to be at home to 'multi-task', what're you going to do if you're supposed to be in the office?

This is a weird take. I spend a year almost exclusively raising my son because my wife was studying to be a sub-specialist on another city and she only had a full weekend once a month. The first thing I did once we had a plan, was to negotiate partial home-office, because even if I could have after school child care, I certainly was not for it. Two months in, the partial home office became full home office because even the commute could throw a wrench on my tight schedule.

Based on my experience, raising a kid on your own is difficult, and without home office would have been even worse.

Childcare can still be used with wfh post pandemic. And having a parent at home benefits both children and parents. It’s not a great thing that we’ve ended up in a situation where children are raised by strangers in day-care. I think WFH is great for parenting in general - it may not be the best for worker efficiency and lack of distractions (although that can be argued) but it is good for children and I think most parents would pick their kids over the office.

If your kids are relatively older and self-sufficient, working from home is an advantage because you DON'T need to afford after school child-care. If you are in an office, and you need to commute, of course you're going to need it. On the contrary, if you are a single mom, you'd see that remote work is a blessing.

That is a bit ironic that you call inclusion the absence of social interactions.

Oh my god you are so right. It’s somewhat unfathomable that companies were able to see that remote work actually works and yet insist on going back even for people for whom wfh is essential to their well being.

That’s because diversity and inclusion pretty much means “blacks” and “women” fullstop.

I was recently hiring a developer and my massive media company insisted I ensure my recruiter is giving me diverse candidates. I selected an individual who is apparently Spanish Jewish. Some very rare tribe of Jews from Spain. Was that considered diverse? Nope. Needs to be black.

I actually had a manager at a company openly say they were having trouble finding an intern as they only wanted a minority. I ended up waiting for months.

I am very happy I got out of that place...

How is it that some people are so careful about being diverse that they end up being incredibly racist, and yet not notice it ?!

Because to be anti-racist you need to implement present discrimination to make up for past discrimination. It’s in their literature and literally a tenant in Kendi’s popular book “How to be an Anti-Racist” that countless diversity councils in corporations suggested their employees read during last years moral panic.

Civil rights violation? Probably.

Anti-Racism is a hard concept for me to grasp. When I was growing up we were taught to judge everyone by the content of their character. To me it made sense, why care about what people look like if they are good people. But now that view is considered racist and judging people by what they look like is "back in style" so to speak.

I fully relate to this. Years ago I worked for a Canadian subsidiary of a US company doing work with the US government. On a (illegal in Canada) US government form I accurately marked down that my "Protected Origin Class". I am 50% African and 50% Asian, as a Moroccan-Jewish, Israeli.

We were audited. The American auditor was flabbergasted by my values on the form. He literally told me that as a (visible, brown) Jew, I couldn't possibly mark those things down. I had to resort to pulling out maps and asking if Morocco was in Africa and Israel was in Asia. He was flummoxed by my refusal to mark down "white" when a) I'm not white, and b) his form offered me the ability to mark down what I am. Pointing out that percentage-wise as Jew, I was less than 0.006% of Canada's population also didn't make me a minority apparently.

That was the last time I ever assumed that minority is supposed to mean anything other than the tokenized narrative of the time.

Huh, so its not only me. My grandparents came from Libya in the late 1950's, but for some reason the very north of Africa doesn't quite qualify for most people as African "enough" for me to be of African descent. Feels like for many people the benchmark is either skin color or not coming from a traditionally Arab country. A similar thing happens to acquaintances of mine of Tunisian or Algerian descent.

I guess the geographical line is somewhere around Mauritania

Because it's asking about ethnicity not geographic place of birth.

English isn't my native tongue so perhaps i'm missing some subtlety, i thought ethnic groups are people who share a common descent?

Honestly asking, not trying to nitpick.

Ethnic groups are a distinct concept from racial groups. Ethnicity has more to do with culture and society versus race, which is largely about appearance and, to an extent, geographical provenance.

You're correct. The point is that for NA that common descent is Arab not African. I know that's not completely true but in the context of the crude racial classification system the US uses it is. According to the US government you're white:

>White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as "White" or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/note/US/RHI625219#:~:....

I feel you. Been in similar situations. Cape Verdean father (black skin tone), and a Jewish (she didn't have a bat mitzvah I didn't have a bar mitzvah, we're not religious) and Irish mother produced me, an ethnically ambiguous person with multiple passing complexions.

Skin tone is olive-tan, get pretty dark in the summer (if I stay out, but usually indoors working on something), eyes are almond shaped. I've had/get people coming up to me on the street asking questions in Spanish often, Tagalog and a few other South East Asian languages not as frequently, Russian, have Hasidic kids coming up asking me if I'm Jewish so they can try and drag me off to their Winnebago of a mitzvah tank. Once had some guy approach me speaking German with a beer in his hand and after realizing I don't speak German said, "Oh sorry, you look German" (whatever that means) and then I warned him of open container and the precinct up the block. Most assume I'm just a white guy who is either Italian or Jewish (might have to do with being from/living in the Northeast US idk).

I don't like talking about my ethnicities because I just don't care, but when it's brought up in the context of someone saying, "black people do this" or "okay white boy", I get offended because to me it's primitive and, excuse my language, retarded. Those things are usually said by those who don't know my ethnic background (not that it should matter), and when I call out the ignorance behind the statements made and that doesn't come across, I explain my ethnic background, which usually results in "what's a cape verdean?" or "what!? You're black too?". And if that doesn't come across, I'll flash a photo of me with my grandmother or father and they stfu.

This is going on a tangent, but to your point, I believe that having marked off african/black and caucasian or "two or more races" on my job applications has positively impacted my response rates in the past, but has also lead to negative results post-interview once seeing me and not believing that I am in fact Cape Verdean. I dont have empirical evidence, but having the technical capabilities and drive required for the jobs, after taking and passing test after test with well known organizations, having interviewers emphasize "inclusion and diversity", and having many interviews that left me feeling "wow that went awesome. Totally got this" (I'm more of a realist. If it sucked, it sucked), only to get a rejection, I've come to the assumption that there's got to be at least some percentage of rejections where the potential employer thought "he's lying... he doesn't look black".

The whole corporate "inclusion/diversity" thing here in the states is a fucking joke. My older brother, who's darker and a little less ethnically ambiguous, has commented on his experiences, which are relatable to a degree, saying he "was always too light for the blacks, and too dark for the whites"

Exactly this! In Germany it is women + openly gay + women wearing headscarfs.

I was recently invited to a candidate selection process with senior managers and HR. There was one guy who was autistic, but talented and good. He was "weird" by normal standards, but scored very well in all interviews and calls.

Long story short, he was considered the "best", but "weird". We hired a less qualified woman wearing a headscarf and the position was then "adjusted" to be more innovation/marketing foused and less hard tech focused.

I tried to convince them to take the autistic dude and also argued with diversity, but was told that "he is just strange and will not fit in" and finally overruled.

most actions the majority of corps take when it comes to "diversity" are purely performative. Diversity is important and more people should care about it, but what constitutes as "diverse" in the corporate environment is only what looks good on the outside and has a minimal (perceived) impact on the bottom line.

A good example is exactly what is going on now: multinationals all temporarily slapping a rainbow on products to take advantage of a movement (like Raytheon. wtf... https://twitter.com/RaytheonTech)

Not that I agree with those mandates too much, but I can see the logic: A group needs to have a story of oppression in your local community to be considered for that. Diversity is a somewhat misleading word here, the aim is equality for historically disfavored groups.

The aim for it is "equality of outcomes" without merit or actual achievement and that's all. Of course only in certain, sought after, select things. And of course these policies won't stop after we have achieved "equality" if current college admissions and graduation trends are any indication (women represent 60% now, yet nobody says we need to discontinue programs designed to ensure success for them or that we should address the problem of men falling behind - in fact we blame men for it).

It's why Asian's are beginning to wake up to this as they've, as a group, been "too successful" and are seeing ever meritocratic device they've used to lift themselves up dismantled and replaced with lotteries, etc that ensure equal outcomes (even they won't).

We've had equality (equal opportunity). Now the aim is, unfortunately, equity (equal outcomes, regardless of merit).

I can empathise with your experience, as someone who is either just inside or outside of Asperger's.

If you're on the diversity and inclusion committee and no one is challenging the return to the office, can't you? Or is this purely a reactionary, advisory committee?

>I am on the diversity and inclusion committee—and there has not been a single discussion of how forcing people back to the office is actively harmful to autistic employees...

Do committee members not have the ability to raise issues? I'd have thought that would be why they would want people like you on the committee, so that you can raise and talk about issues like this.

This. I work because I need the money. Period. I love my craft and I practice it every day on my own terms and as little or as much as I want... but offering my skills to others just happens because I get paid.

aside from the autism reasons (although I definitely empathize as my wife is on the spectrum) you took the words right out of my mouth. I don't care about anything other than funding my lifestyle. Been remote for 5+ years and will never go back. I enjoy my job and I like to socialize with people I work with in person occasionally and play some ping pong, but nothing about working in an office is worth the trade-off.

> I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder.

I empathize with this but many organizations are, essentially "up or out". You are either seen as growing and rising through the ranks or as awaiting some sort of release.

I hope you are so good at what you do that you could easily find another job, but that is not a given for most people. So they feel compelled to play the games you are dismissing.

I have the same view of work but have the opposite view of being in the office. The small friendships and camaraderie make the work a lot more enjoyable for me.

Hopefully coming out of this there'll be a mix of companies. Some fully remote for people like yourself and some mostly in the office for folk like me.

Since starting to work remote I've discovered the power of shutting down the work laptop (not sleeping) at a set time and not looking back. No Slack or work email on the phone.

When I look back on hallway conversations, I can't think of many that really mattered. Actual important decisions are typically not made by IC engineers. Relevant conversations are usually inside team structures and not spontaneous.

> When I look back on hallway conversations, I can't think of many that really mattered. Actual important decisions are typically not made by IC engineers

Not that I’m itching to get back in an office (I’ve been remote most of my career), but this really depends on the environment. I’ve seen some really pivotal changes happen simply because someone happened to yak about it, or overheard such a yak and jumped in.

Usually these changes have been mostly technical in nature and under the purview of the engineers. But sometimes they’ve significantly changed product direction.

Depends on the company. In my case, all transforming ideas I had and were able to later push successfully were a result of hallway/lunch conversations with coworkers from other teams. It gave me ability to see a lot of problems through their eyes, that informed my decisions.

> Since starting to work remote I've discovered the power of shutting down the work laptop (not sleeping) at a set time and not looking back. No Slack or work email on the phone.

What!?!? I don't necessarily agree with OP, but this is the exact opposite of my experience (mostly observing others). One of the main downsides of WFH is the "always on" nature of it.

I usually left my laptop at work, and ignored my phone before (after all I'm not at work). Now you're always set up to work, so there's no reason you can't respond at 8PM. I don't, but many of my colleagues do.

Most of my coworkers, especially the ones that would be leaving early for work life balance reasons, work all hours, and I get randomly pinged at 5:30-8 by people that would just be done for the day. They don't need to commute, so they have less pressure about working at odd times, and want to show managers the advantages of the WFH thing, so it won't go away.

The parent you responded to is suggesting that hard-shutdowns at a certain time are a way to help prevent that. Shut it down at a set time and don't turn it back on until later.

You won't be as tempted to just pop in for a few minutes of work here or there to respond to some chats or emails.

How do you get randomly pinged outside working hours? Is Slack on your personal phone? If so, delete it. Keep your work emails closed (and not on your personal phone). Use a separate browser profile for work/personal if you are working on your personal laptop.

I sympathise with people finding it hard to switch off (I was one until I did all of the above) but it's a simple problem to solve and it's absolutely nothing to do with WFH.

No, I ignore that shit. It's usually group messages and/or people idealistically "hoping" for some help.

For me, it may look like I work longer hours than before, but I find my work hours less concentrated. I usually try to log on by 9am and will find myself finishing up between 6pm and 8pm depending on the day. But I often step away a number of times throughout the day for various reasons (no kids, but I assume those with kids have even more reasons for taking a few minutes here and there away from work). It also allows me to do something else during low-energy periods rather than trying to force myself to work (I've even rarely tried naps, although it never works well for me).

The effect is that it leads to a "longer" work day, but less concentrated than it would have been in the office. And similar productivity, IMO. I wonder if some of your co-workers you describe may do the same. In some ways, I feel like it's better work-life balance for some people as it's "ok" (in some work cultures) for WFH employees to take the time as they need it. And others are equally fine ensuring their work time is as concentrated as possible because they have other things they would rather do in evenings, etc.

I totally understand and agree, but that's different from being "easy" to do a hard cutoff. Leaving your laptop at work is a hard cutoff. Asking around, people are feeling less barriers between them and their work, and that leads to more of an "always on behavior". I've seen that in my colleagues and people from other companies have reported the same.

> I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has the exact opposite experience with this. I can’t think and get mentally blocked when I have someone peering over my shoulder or I’m staring at their screen. I find this kind of collaboration so much easier if I’m in the comfort of my own desktop setup, sharing the screen over Teams/Skype whatever and communicating verbally over a quality headset.

I think this has to do with seniority. When I was a lot more experienced than my coworker, doing pair programming was insanely fun. Because it felt like solving a puzzle with a friend, or exploring a video game with my sister. Now I'm occasionally pair programming with my manager -- who's like a 1000x me -- pair programming is mentally blocking. It's because my peer thinks so much faster than I do that it feels like I'm watching an action movie on 10x speed except every 3 minutes someone pauses the movie and asks questions.

EDIT: To make myself clear, this is not a criticism of my boss, it's just that pair programming with someone who is a lot more experienced than you is just naturally intimidating.

I’ve been in both positions and know the feeling! Whenever I pair with someone now, I usually try and slow things down in the beginning and ask questions along the way to see if they follow me, even if I think what I’m doing is ‘simple’. No point in pairing if the other persons eyes are glazing over :)

This is great, and also good to encourage with people who are more junior. They might think they’ve explained the thing from their understanding but it’s trivial to omit details in that position too.

I’m by no means junior but I’m new on a team, and I’ve had to remember over and over that the giant blob of the state of everything is unfamiliar to me, familiar to my team, and when I elide details I’m not saving anyone any time because I’m not sure whether those details are relevant or even if they might reveal where I’m off track.

No. At least in my case it has nothing to do with disparity in experience or speed of thought and everything to do with being in my own physical space.

I find this very interesting, because I'm in a similar boat, pretty senior, but not the top of the ladder. But for me some of my favorite pair programming sessions are with people who are operating on another level. It really gets the brain juices going.

I get this a lot as well. Just as soon as you are about to say something, or start typing. Just as the idea is coalescing in your mind, as you are walking down the path of understanding.

From over your shoulder: "Then do this thing cos of this this and this" - yes thank you I know. Eventually I feel downcast and just stop thinking for myself, I'm just a typer at that point.

You’re not the only one, and contrary to sibling commenter’s experience it hasn’t had anything to do with seniority for me.

Caveat: I’m ADHD/ASD. I find it hard to focus on multiple sensory subjects at once. Pairing in an office means I’m focused on the screen; the human’s body language; the human’s verbal communication; interaction around concepts, design, mechanical stuff like what actually gets read/written/executed; a second screen because sometimes it’s more effective to computer for a second than engage all of that. Remote pairing condenses a lot of that.

if you use an ide that supports it, then having an independent cursor, pointer and screen marker is infinitely better than sitting awkwardly aside and pointing finger. That and having your own IDE and browser to perform code search or testing in parallel.

I'd use vscode live share even in the office, which begs the question what even is the role of the office in facilitating pair programming

Try VS Code &/or Visual Studio Live Share or a similar feature on another editor.

In my opinion it's a much better programming experience than having your laptop and sitting next to someone so that you can each look over at each other's screen.

Also by mid afternoon you might not want to sit physically that close to someone.

Pair programming is way faster with screen share & multiplr monitors. One of you has the dominant screen with "the task" and you can both discuss it whilst doing indirect things on your own monitors, and throwing them to the share when they are relevant.

Over the shoulder pairing has a lot of "do this", "search that". Shared has a lot more of "can you work out x whilst I check y" and "this is the result of y, I'm interpreting that as z. Should we do a?".

This is what most of the newcomers to WFH don't understand:

There is a big different between WFH for a few months where EVERYONE else is also WFH ... and WFH for YEARS where some, or most, of the others are in office.

The latter is years upon years of feeling disconnected, left out, and sidelined. The vast majority of companies even if they allow remote are not remote first. Remote first involves actual structural and procedural changes.

Lastly, WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN. You'll recognize just how bad it can be to see (as a function of your time alive) MOSTLY just your home. It does a number on you.

Surely there are other reasons to leave your home than work and other people to socialize with in person than co-workers.

Depends on your character, stage of your life and priorities. It looks way different when you’re young, outgoing single person. Vs when you’re older, with a family (and tons of obligations) and introverted. Work is then often a place where you socialize and take a break from all the other stuff happening in your life.

> Surely there are other reasons to leave your home than work and other people to socialize with in person than co-workers.

I wouldn't be surprised if people who don't have local family or established friends in the area and live in cities where talking to strangers is considered threatening behavior tend to socialize primarily, if not exclusively, with co-workers.

Meet

But that's a really limited view. If you live in a city, there are likely loads of activities, clubs, meetups you can go to at least weekly.

Yep. WFH gives me more time to have the social interactions I chose to have.

Sure, but work is still a significant portion of ones waking hours. Personally, I wouldn't want to work in a place where I can't or don't enjoy socializing with co-workers. I hope, what comes out of this pandemic is, that there is going to be higher diversity in work modalities one can make part of a job seeking decision.

I always thought I would be a sure-fit for permanent WFH, but your comment absolutely nails it. My biggest problem is that a large proportion of interactions with remote work is formal, in a sense. No casual chat, no social “grease”. If you started a remote-only job in a pandemic, it is so easy to become disconnected, and disincentivized with colleagues that only exist in 2D asking for PR reviews. Really did a number on me.

Wfh pre pandemic is not the same as wfh during the pandemic. Usually my team gets together 2-3 times a year and can’t wait till we can again

> a large proportion of interactions with remote work is formal, in a sense. No casual chat, no social “grease”.

Why? You have to put in the effort to be social, but you need to do that in person, too.

Maybe that’s a touch too specific. But Igor me, it’s a lot easier to strike up a rapport on a walk to get coffee than scheduling a 30 min quarantini, a word I have grown to detest

Ah. While my company does have a semi-daily "30 minute meetup" on "random topic of the day", that's not how I chat socially with coworkers. We have a few channels that are just "shoot the shit" channels. I us those to discuss random topics. And there's several private channels for the occasional need to rant. Overall, not all that different from the water cooler.

We have watercooler chats in zoom. After standup, if organic conversions pop up, they are considered sacred.

I have been working remotely for my entire work life (11 years employed, about 5 years freelance) and I am a very happy person.

To be fair, I'm also developed some very strong friendships over the internet (through videogames), so i guess i have a lot of experience in the field

I’m on year five and I LOVE it - I never want to go back to an office, sure, maybe it’s better for the company but you know what’s better for me? WFH. I have more time for myself and to see family and friends, I co work with friends, and instead of commuting j make meals and I work with my cats all day long.

Maybe you like the office more and can’t make wfh work, not everyone can! But don’t assume everyone else is like you

Well it appears to have done a number on you but myself and many others really enjoy it and would never go back to an office. Not sure I’d assume my own experience should speak for everyone else’s. But I run a remote first team and have worked remote for decades, with great success and no mental issues.

it's about having the option isn't it, you should not be forced into either way. Going to the office 1 per month for that buzz is fine by me. Some people needs more. No one size fits all.

> WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN

I've worked from home 100%, worked from an office 100%, and worked a combination. Overall, I think the combination is best. However, having put in somewhere on the order of 15 years fully remote, it has not caused any problems for me. I chat with people via IM, including both purely social and problem solving discussions. I've been on teams where everyone was remote and ones where I was the only remote, and in areas in between.

Overall, working remotely is good for some people and not for others; much like every other arrange. It takes skill and effort to get good at, just as in person social interactions do. Some companies make it easier than others.

It's a complicated topic, and I really don't think it's possible to say "it's good" or "it's bad", only "it depends".

This is really subjective. I dislike water cooler talk. I dislike overhearing conversations. I dislike people interrupting me with something that could have been a message.

This year WFH have been a significant mental health improvement. I am more social outside of work and I am more productive during work.

4 years in, no issues. Probably better than ever. Not everyone is an extrovert, talking daily over audio to several people is fine for me. Sometimes we'll meet up for particularly hard problems to brain storm but otherwise, I'm good behind a screen. I think extroverts think everyone needs that face time, but no, we really don't. I'm fine with seeing my friends and family, my co-workers just aren't that special to me.

This is exactly my experience. I am the only one in my team working in another city and this is just ridiculous how many times I am feeling exactly these feelings (disconnected, left out, and sidelined).

I am dealing with an insane amount of issues that would have never happened if everyone was in the same office.

It really depends on the culture of the company and the team, and it appears that mine has not managed to change enough (whatever they claim).

> Lastly, WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN. You'll recognize just how bad it can be to see (as a function of your time alive) MOSTLY just your home. It does a number on you.

This is just down to nothing more then poor discipline and lazily wanting an office to fill the gap for you. I have been working from home for 9 years now, 5 days a week. You know how I solve the issue, I go outside. I go and run. I take my dogs out for a walk. I also meet with friends to eat / drink coffee. I look after myself. The time I save commuting means I can do things like cook myself a proper lunch, go and have a nap if I did not sleep great the night before. I have much more freedom to balance my life. I agree though, if I sit at my desk all day inside and then stop work to go and sit on the couch and watch Netflix, sure it's going to be detrimental to my mental health.

I think some folks with crippling social anxiety might have a bone to pick with this assertion.

Surely if they have crippling social anxiety, being stuck in an office all day with others where they are expected to socialise no matter how bad their anxiety might be playing up on any given day, is far worse?

Also the only social part I referenced was coffee with close friends. I think drinking a coffee with an understanding friend(s) is much easier then being around 20+ colleagues for 8 hours straight.

I cannot speak to what is easier or not. I was simply pointing out that you were laying down a blanket assertion that it was lazy and undisciplined, and that might not be universally appreciated.

Just because someone has extreme social anxiety doesn't mean they permanently refuse to take action. Sometimes they succeed in actively overcoming it and are capable of forming connections. Being in an environment where you can passively observe the character of others does tend to make it easier to approach them on the days when you're feeling up to it. A person might choose to work in an office because they understand this benefit of consistent forced exposure.

Depends on the person. I am generally fine in a "being stuck in the office all day" situation, but get anxiety trying to setup plans for social interactions, even with really close friends. Even just coffee. Also, 1 on 1 situations tend to cause me more anxiety that groups/crowds.

Point being, everyone is different in this regard.

> You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN

Any source or data for this assertion.

You are speaking about your personal experience. You never wanted to work remotely, you never prepared for it and as a result it has been a traumatic experience for you.

On the other hand there is people out there, like me, that have been improving and refining remote working skills from decades.

When I traveled to former Soviet Republics it shocked me how helpless old people felt doing the most basic things. As young people they were trained to delegate everything on the State. The State did a very bad job almost at everything but there was no alternative, so they never developed the skills .

When they were old,it is difficult to learn anything new and they had not the necessary skills to survive on their own and were nostalgic about communism.

That made me realize that most schools and Universities and jobs just train you to obey orders and do not leave space for resourcefulness and independence.

I have colleagues who have done WFH always - at least 5 years. I do not see any mental issues in them.

The mental health part really depends on whether you're living alone or with others.

> come see me after 5

hi. Been completely remote for 5+ years. My mental is better than ever.

> You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN

I would much rather use all the saved time NOT going to an office and instead spend it with people I care about more having more interesting conversations in a more comfortable environment.

> The latter is years upon years of feeling disconnected, left out, and sidelined.

I empathize with some of the isolation that WFH can bring, but I also strongly disagree that it is an inevitability. WFH gives you more freedom with your time and doesn't force you into social interaction by default which, depending on the person, can be a good or a bad thing.

I think it just highlights the importance of CONCIOUSLY choosing our social interactions which might take more effort but I think results in higher satisfaction. You could look at it like junk food vs. nutritious food. One is convenient, leaves you wanting more, and is probably not as healthy if that's all you take in. The other fills you up more, sometimes takes a bit more work, and ends up being more sustainable long term.

Yeah, fully agree. I worked at a fully remote company and it self-selects for the kind of person who enjoys being alone. It completely sucks as we are social creatures who enjoy the extra physical connection/camaraderie that is impossible to achieve with remote work.

> * I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

This is imho the worst part of WFH. Some people come to work at 6:00 and go home at 14:00, some come at 10:00 and leave at 18:00, and some even later. If you're in an office, the latecomer can just check the early birds office, "oh, you're here, can we ..." / "he's not here anymore, this will wait 'till tomorrow". With WFH it's constant emails and work calls, and for a lot of people it's hard to separate work/home, turn the work phone off (especially in small companies, where before the plague, if someone called you in the afternoon, it usually meant something horrible has happened).

The second thing i'd miss is all the non-work activities that happen at work, from random chatter, to lunch, practical jokes, etc. Also when dealing with clients, the after-meeting-beer usually solved a lot of problems with a lot of one-on-one chats, and informal talks about rwhat the issues are,... this is hard to do on zoom/teams/..., especially if there is a higher-up present, and the engineers are afraid to honestly say what's bothering them during day-to-day work.

I guess I should be happy that I work at a company with people in the EU.

If you get up early and stop replying to emails after 15:00-16:00 (when there isn't something scheduled going on) no one gets surprised.

I work in EU too, but a lot of coders around here start at 10:00+.. especially in smaller companies.

I guess I wasn't clear, I work on the east coast of the US but having EU employees means people are used to some of their coworkers not being available all the time.

I worked on a project for a big Korean company that required me to work onsite with a team in Dusseldorf. I happened to be there over Easter weekend and the project was behind. I inquired as to when we would meet up to keep working, and they told me the office would be closed, so naturally I asked what coffee shop/cafe/space or whatever we'd work at instead.

The team there was shocked and maybe offended even, and I was informed it was verboten to work any of the next 3 days.

Differences in work cultures globally are staggering.

It's not even really a culture thing it's a "the earth isn't flat so we're awake at different times" thing.

Kinda interesting how “going the extra mile” in the US is viewed as ineptitude in either planning or execution in Germany. Also how the phrase “this is unacceptable” is used very differently in the same places.

I’d say that’s a company culture thing, not a German thing. I lived and worked in Austria and my teams in Austria and Germany were both willing to work extra and on holidays when needed.

That's definitely uncommon in Europe to work on weekends/holidays/vacation. It's quite frowned upon, and for good reason IMO. Work life balance is important, and there's other stuff to do in life than work.

Would you be equally shocked if this was Thanksgiving in the US or Chinese New Year in China?

In my experience it really depends on the individual, team, and company just how strict people are with not working unscheduled overtime on national holidays to crunch a release or not.

But assuming that it will happen, that's a first for me.

I can't speak to Germany, but in some places it's not legal to have you work over public holidays as the company would have to pay you extra plus giving you leave to make up for it. If they don't want to do that, you aren't allowed to work.

Everywhere I've lived and worked (only two countries, tbf), the idea of working on a holiday weekend is just ... not considered, outside of being on call and getting paid extra for it or similar.

The unfortunate part of this is that once people start responding to e-mails at 12AM, suddenly everybody is expected to respond at 12AM. It's a race to the bottom when separation from work and home life isn't really mandated.

I've faced this first hand as I switch from one company to another. In my previous place, we enforced a hard limit on when we could be expected to respond, and nobody ever messaged me on slack/ sent me an e-mail after that. At my new place, people are constantly e-mailing and messaging into the small hours of the night. It's tiring to watch.

There are German companies where the email server doesn’t deliver Emails until the next morning. This obviously works best if all are in one time zone, but it’d be amazing if one could set: working from X to Y and emails just stop arriving after Y.

The expected part is very much a culture thing that doesn't have to happen. My coworkers work all kinds of weird schedules, so there really is no basis to assume that someone will respond at a specific time if you haven't scheduled that with them, and it works just fine. I guess in a place where only a few people deviate that might be trickier to establish.

> With WFH it's constant emails and work calls...

I'm not sure i can agree with that. Most of the communication in my office is a quick message in Slack, or a comment in Jira.

I feel like this is perhaps more of a matter between synchronous and asynchronous communication, GitLab has wrote a bit about this in their guide to remote work: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/

* Overhearing hallway conversations (and joining them) helps spawn invocation.

- I hate being distracted by hallway conversations. They're just a way to avoid work for most people.

* I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person

- They are easier to do online imo. There's no need to sit next to each other.

* Having a workforce socially close improves productivity because everyone wants to step up for each other.

- My team has gotten closer to each other during the pandemic than ever before. I think your point is highly subjective.

* Being seen by my fellow employees helps keep me from becoming distracted.

- Sounds like you need to work on that. If you need other people to monitor you to make sure you're doing work...

* Working at the office helps prevent home life from being distracting during work hours.

- Again, probably something you need to work on.

* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

- I think most people spend the same on food and drinks, since companies do not provide it for them. Maybe they even spend less, since they have more time to cook at home. Electricity is negligible for me at least. It's way less than I spend on commuting.

* I enjoy the routine.

- I find it insane.

* I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

- I'll give you that. But for me personally this has not been a problem at all.

Agree on every point.

Re: work/life separation, I think a shed at the bottom of the garden is all the separation I need. The fact that I can do some coding, take a short walk to the park, do some gardening, interact with my wife far outweigh wasting my life in an office

The only point that I agree from OP is about stronger work/life separation which I need to work on. My work days drag a bit more while working from home. In the beginning, I was even working during night which I never did when I was working in the office since I left my laptop at work. This was also because I am single and everything was under lockdown. So I didn't know what to do with my time.

WFH has been much better for our lives and I am not looking forward to going back. These are how WFH has benefited us:

The wife: Does chores / cooking and baking while she is just a participant in a meeting. Go for a run before picking up the kid from daycare

Myself: I can drop the kid off at daycare, do chores around the house, do HIIT workout multiple times during the week. Try body hacking like intermittent fasting / prolonged fasting

We take naps to recharge if we are tired. We also go enjoy nature & hike practically every week which is naturally therapeutic.

This is maybe the first relatable comment I’ve come across in here — work kills, the stress of having to be there on time, eating fast food because you don’t have time to cook, no time to exercise because you’re driving an hour a day, all the other things in your life piling up because all you seem to do is drive back and forth to work… I mean people aren’t even getting vaccinated because they’re worried about being able to show up to work the next day.

It’s a dream for a lot of people to just wake up, get a cup of coffee and sit down at their computer, to not have to get out of bed in the middle of the night, plan bowel movements like a military campaign and run around like a maniac all day every day.

>I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

Compared to commuting (car+gas) and time-to-commute opportunity costs (to use for personal house tasks, side projects, self health)? I seriously doubt it.

Agreed. The above reads like dated marketing from dinasour companies trying to convince people that office life is amazing.

“Imagine the hallway conversations that could start the next…” it will make up for your 2 hour commute and 3000 one bedroom apartment!

I agree with most of the parent comments. Commuting costs can be reduced, I biked to work when possible, and it was not possible when my kids were at school, which will be the same once things settle down. So it was the same cost with or without remote work.

I'm obviously an outlier, but I live an 8 minute (peaceful) bike ride from work. I hate commuting, so I optimized for that for this job, and working from home last year was absolutely a net negative for me. Distracting kids, poor work-life balance, more expensive (AC, food, water, etc).

I think the lesson here is, some companies can be remote-first, some companies can be in-person, and different employees will prefer different environments based on what's going on in their lives and the choices they make.

It should not be the case that one "tribe" should try to impose their preference on the other, which was the case pre-COVID (e.g. almost everyone was forced to be in-person), and I suspect fear of a return to that status quo is what is driving a lot of these discussions.

I don't understand how so many people in this thread are saying they spend more on food while working from home. How is this possible? Does it vary by country? In Australia at least it is orders of magnitude less expensive to prepare food at home purchased from a supermarket than it is to buy food whilst out an about.

Or are these people working for companies that provide food or something. I just don't get it.

> Or are these people working for companies that provide food or something.

It's this. Companies started offering food to keep their employees in the office longer. That people here are saying they prefer eating at work due to the cost shows it worked.

It isn't just that they prefer eating at work due to cost. Work provides prepared food.

Preparing food means getting ingredients, tracking expiration and making and storing leftover food.

In some ways this is wonderful, in others it is a huge time and energy sink compared to eating at work.

Spoiled food wastes more than money and it happens easily.

You can buy prepared food for home via takeout or frozen but those have their own problems.

For me, going back to the office means going back to eating microwaved leftovers, or spending $15-20 a day on lunch out.

Totaling up gas and mileage and food and tolls, commuting to the office is going to cost me on the order of $500-1000 a month that I'm not spending now. Just the extra time that I'd need to spend getting ready to go to work and then commuting works out to an entire extra work week of time over the course of a month.

On the other hand, where I live the marginal cost of an extra bedroom (to put a home office in) for a city apartment is about $1000 a month. In some higher cost of living cities it will be more.

It’s be cheaper out in the suburbs, but even then it might be another few hundred a month.

I’m surprised that people are talking about things like electricity costs when real estate costs are so much higher.

Absolutely for employees, the biggest (I'd probably argue only real economic downside) is more space if the company is urban and they really want to stay urban. Arguments around electricity are ludicrous and food only applies to a very limited set of companies.

> to keep their employees in the office longer.

At the office, maybe, but definitely not working.

For dinner, the set times provide natural day boundaries with a strong incentive to wrap up by a certain time. During lunch, it may be saving some time that people wouldn't work by doing away with the need to get to and wait for a restaurant (if the company wouldn't provide any cafeteria at all; every place where I worked had one, usually paid and lunch-only though).

I believe that companies provide food because it's a relatively cheap perk providing a lot of value that simply cannot be replicated.

If I have to make my own food, I have to grocery shop, cook, and do dishes, all of this done inefficiently at small scale and out of my own time. At a buffet-style cafeteria, you just walk in, grab food, eat, drop off your dishes, done. The real value isn't the free food. It's the convenience that comes with it.

At the same time, it doesn't cost the company that much. Raw ingredients aren't that expensive, and neither is running a cafeteria if everything is prepared at scale.

Even if you ignore the cost, restaurants (including buffet style ones) can't replicate that convenience: They aren't at a place where you are anyways, and payment adds extra friction. A la carte restaurants are right out because of the wait. And even if the food actually did make people stay longer - I bet that time is made up by not having to do chores to feed yourself.

Hunger is a strong incentive to wrap up. Serving dinner an hour after most people would leave otherwise is an incentive to stay an hour longer. And some people eat dinner and go back to their desks.

Those people probably get food at work. If you add up all of my snack eating + multiple coffees + lunch and dinner it becomes fairly costly per day.

My work pays for my food.

Also, I’m busy working, so I don’t actually have time to cook my lunch, so it’s either eating something frozen, which is unhealthy and gets old, or get delivery, so that $30 for a meal.

Also, my commute is a fifteen minute walk, because I absolutely optimized for not having to drive anywhere. The only benefit to wfh was seeing my kid more often, but that had its own caveats because it is hugely distracting. So, it’s cheaper and more productive for me to be in the office.

The only reason I’d want to work from home was if I wasn’t actually working, and my bet is many people see it as exactly that.

My work doesn’t even pay for coffee.

> I don't understand how so many people in this thread are saying they spend more on food while working from home. How is this possible?

It's simple. I work at Google, but this answer works for many other companies as well. Prior to COVID I would eat an average of 13 meals per week (and snacks) at the office. Now that I'm eating all of those at home, my grocery bills have shot up.

Not just grocery but also water, electric, gas, and home wear and tear. A lot of aspects of office work I’d previously considered table stakes or perks I now understand are compensation with detectable dollar value.

In my case, and this is admittedly unusual, I drank Huel consistently at work. I then eat a traditional meal (or two ) in the evening. Since WFH I only really have Huel in the morning since the oven is just there and I have cravings. I've also generally eat more due to eating my feelings but that is pandemic specific. I've also spent a lot on coffee shops just to get out the flat.

I don’t think you’re an outlier. I think online comment sections in general attract people whose preferred communication and socialization style is digital. That’s why at times HN comment sections feel like everyone unanimously agrees that in-person work universally bad.

It’s great that we have more remote work opportunity post COVID, but it was never realistic to expect every company or even most company to abandon in-office work and all of the benefits that come with it. Maintaining a remote team is significantly more management and communication overhead than simply having people in one place.

> Maintaining a remote team is significantly more management and communication overhead than simply having people in one place.

I’ve managed both types of teams and haven’t found this to be the case at all. In fact, quite the opposite. Asynchronous communication as the norm is a lot less demanding on ICs and managers. In person meetings are rarely an effective use of time or energy.

In person meetings make some participants in said meeting feel good.

Besides this factor, in person meetings can often be less effective than email or a group chat.

> I don’t think you’re an outlier.

Not sure what inspired you to make a claim from a position of ignorance. Definitely an outlier. The vast majority of people have commutes that are not within 8 minutes by any means. 1 Google search and see the US - https://blog.batchgeo.com/commute-times-and-transportation/ or Europe - http://ftp.iza.org/dp12916.pdf

> Maintaining a remote team is significantly more management and communication overhead than simply having people in one place.

You mean it actually requires management. Office work is easy to manage with butts in seats. I had someone ask me once, if we were remote, how would we know people are working. I asked, how do we know they are working now?

Communication overhead with in person only appears lower. I've been a part of many meetings where people talk in circles, think they make a decision and then a week or 2 later wonder what was talked about. Of course, you might be unique and have a dedicated person who takes copious notes every meeting and sends them around afterwards. Remote pushes written communication as the first step, which I have found to be much better to build ideas from.

One thing that does not work is a company trying to do both. If anyone is remote, then the company needs to be remote first.

> You mean it actually requires management.

No, I mean it requires more management. It’s not about butts in seats, it’s about communicating and keeping people on the same page.

Anecdotally, when shifting to remote work we often saw managers struggle with a tendency to micromanage and check in too frequently with remote employees. I know “butts in seats” is a common trope but in practice it was easier for people to get away with doing nothing at the office because managers assumed that in office meant they were working.

Communication overhead is absolutely higher in remote companies. It sounds more like you were describing a broken company culture that you managed to distance yourself from by going remote, but the culture is still broken.

A team that communicates properly in person will have more overhead to communicate remotely.

>> I live an 8 minute (peaceful) bike ride from work

Well that's where you live now. Average worker changes jobs 12 times in a career. Is your plan to just move 12 times (and pay the costs associated with that)? Or work at the same job for much longer (and pay the costs associated with that)?

One of the benefits of living in a large metro area is the amount of job opportunities, but it you put an 8 minute circle around your residence and only look for jobs within that, that negates those benefits.

If you're going to bring averages into it, the average 18 year old has ~9 moves remaining in their life, meaning that they'd only move an extra 3 times.

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/migration/guidance/...

If you live in a dense area, it’s not hard to switch jobs, keep a similar commute, and not move. I’ve had 4 jobs over the past 14 years, moved once, and never had a bicycle commute longer than 25 minutes.

The issue is that most people who want to be in office want to be in-person. The location is secondary to the fact that you’re with your coworkers in person.

If coworker A prefer digital communication, and coworker B prefers in person communication, then there is no way A and B can both be happy. A can stay at home, and B can go to office, but B is now far from home (commuting) but still over zoom. The only way to not waste people’s time is for All remote, or for A to completely not get their way and get dragged in person.

Why does everyone here just assume that everyone’s commute is as bad as theirs? There are many people in the current working generation that avoided the soul-sucking suburban commute from the start.

>Why does everyone here just assume that everyone’s commute is as bad as theirs?

Because statistically it would be representative.

Also because even if the office is next door, you need to get dressed properly, prepare, etc., which eats at least half hour every morning.

I just hope you shover despite working from home.

WFH I can shower whenever I want, not necessarily in the morning -- as would be the case when I have a morning commute.

And another key benefit is that, even for those who don't shower, nobody else is hurt...

You should get dressed properly and prepare even if you're working from home.

Our CISO made a deal with us that we'd wear collared shirts when we need to be on a video call but are free to wear whatever we want otherwise. I keep a polo shirt with the company logo in the closet of my home office for those occasions. Works well. Sometimes I wait until lunch to shower but if I have a video call in the morning, I'll be sure to shower so my hair looks presentable.

Where do you work that they care if your shirt has a collar?

To such a bureaucracy that they have a CISO

Come and force me

For about 3 months I had a soul sucking commute in the bay area, everyone's reaction:

"only 45 minutes each direction!? you're lucky!"

"that's a reverse commute! you're lucky!" spoiler alert, there is no reverse commute, everyone is driving every direction

Once I realized the collective delusion I quit

Most of my career has been 10 minute walking commutes at trendy companies in trendy neighborhoods in the middle of a city, max of 20.

Statistically this is not possible as others are priced out or the units to live in just don't exist.

> There are many people in the current working generation that avoided the soul-sucking suburban commute from the start.

Very few of those people have kids. Unless you're making L8 comp, raising a few kids within bicycle commute the major tech campuses is financially unobtainable. The cost of a backyard, good schools, and safe streets is astronomical in tier one urban cores.

Is tier one only Silicon Valley? There are plenty of people raising kids with short commutes in the Seattle area; you don’t even need a FANG salary. And Seattle’s still on the high end; people can also live in places like Austin, Portland, Boulder, etc.

And that’s all just in the US. It’s even more obtainable in other countries with better urban planning.

Out of curiosity, have you looked at the housing market in Seattle since the post-pandemic real estate boom? I did a quick smoke test with the following family/commute friendly criteria:

* 2000 square foot house * 7500 square foot lot for backyard * 7/10 or higher GreatSchools * Built after 1980 (older houses have much higher lead content which is terrible for young children) * 3 bedrooms/2 bathrooms * 30 minute commute to Amazon or Microsoft HQ

I couldn't find a single home under a million. Central Austin is pretty similar, and Boulder is even worse. Portland's slightly more affordable, but homicides in Portland have also quintupled from last year, so families aren't exactly running there.[1]

By comparison I can find a house meeting those criteria in Gainesville, FL for under $400k. That's why remote is such a better deal than commuting for people with families.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/anarchists-and-an-in...

Someone looking for a 2,000 square foot house with a 7,500 lot is not someone who's prioritizing an accessible location or short commute. The median house in Seattle is 1,460 ft², the median lot is 3,893 ft², and the median home age is 53 years. What you're describing is an actual mansion in any populous city; of course you're going to pay mansion prices.

I lived in Seattle for a long time and know plenty of large families living in comfortable homes close to work on regular non-FANG salaries. They don't live in estates, but they don't need to. The people who do want that either need to be rich or drive an hour; there are a lot of those people too. And I'm sure the ones who drove an hour are thrilled with work-from-home.

I live close enough to bike to work. I'm sure I don't spend a meal's worth of gas but I guess I spend 20 mins a day. Its not that strange at all.

Not everyone spends a significant amount of time commuting by personal car to the office. I see a lot of angst about hypothetically long 1-2hr commutes when the average commute in major tech cities is ~30 mins, and of course you can always control it by living closer to the office. Sure, not everyone is willing to make sacrifices for commute, which is one reason why it can be a competitive advantage.

I commuted 1.5 hours each way, bike in summer and public transit in winter both took the same time. I loved biking but public transportation sucks.

Why?

Rent was triple what I was paying to be close, or double to cut the commute in half. And I had no job security.

I'm sure you did but again, that is not an average case. You've evidently chosen a different trade-off.

My point is that the economics of my salary and rent made the choice for me.

Ebike next time. Mod the motor. You can still pedal and sweat if you want.

The exercise is a large part of what is enjoyable about bike commuting.

You can pedal to your heart's content, but with the motor you will be going faster than you would otherwise.

Yes. It's a multiplier, you get exercise and more range than a traditional bike and it opens up a larger portion of a city to bike commuting.

Today, I’d do that or at least get a road bike instead of the mtb I had, but this wasn’t an easy option years ago.

Still ride a bike for transportation though! Love it.

How much do homes cost within a 30 minute commute radius of FAANG HQ?

This seems to be why senior executives are so out of touch on the issue. "I don't see what the big deal about commuting to the office is. Just buy a $12 million house in the middle of Palo Alto"

There's the rub. The salaries look huge but they don't take into account the mental cost of commuting or the negative externality placed on people whose environments are rearranged to accommodate people from outside that region. Of course, the salaries are the reason it's so expensive (fueled by the few who choose to live that close) but that indicates that the housing surrounding the HQs won't accommodate a workforce with a reasonable commute.

This isn't just some unimportant whining. It's the source of a large chunk of your carbon footprint. And electric or autonomous cars won't make that go away.

That’s still an hour a day which i could spend cooking a nice dinner instead or working out

Ones support of WFH seems to depend almost entirely on their distance from the office. The other stuff is superfluous.

I bought a house 5 minutes from my office but I still prefer work from home. I get to spend all day with my wife where I’m most comfortable.

I think some see work as a vacation from home and others see home as a vacation from work. If employees are spoiled with many benefits in the office like gourmet lunches, famous speakers, entertainment, and free massages, It makes sense to prefer working at work when your office is a luxury spa - but most offices are not like that at all.

Train ticket is $5 each way, that’s less than one meal.

The amount that people go on about how WFH is saving them from their commute... Really goes to show how badly so many cities are designed that these sort of massive commutes are an ordeal required by so many

It'd be nice if an outcome of this pandemic is a political change toward ending absurd commutes by building cities better, but doesn't really seem like people are putting two and two together

+1 to this concept.

WhyTF are so many people commuting for so long in the first place? solve for this the rest follows

I will always prefer WFH for a critically important reason no one else seems willing to mention. I get to use my own bathroom. Sitting in a stall next to someone noisy is my daily hell. The worst is if the seat is still warm. I think may have actually avoided using a public restroom for 15 straight months.

I see you.

You need to stop looking over the top of the stalls ;)

My last place had these obnoxious stalls where the bottom is cut off, as someone with bathroom anxiety those things were a nightmare. Funnily enough the HQ building 5 minutes away had proper room-like stalls, I actually used to go there just to use the toilet sometimes.

I started using a bidet during the pandemic and I am dreading having to use normal American toilets

What? The seat being warm is the best case.

To me that's one of the grossest things ever.

Wow. I guess there's just two kinds of people in the world.

When I'm at home, I wash my behind after using the toilet. At work that's impossible. Not looking forward to getting back to the office.

It's a shame. In the West, even the flashiest, most employee-attractive offices won't have a bidet.

It depends on specific situation:

* I spend a lot more on gas than on the electricity delta

* I spend a lot more on food and drinks when I am in the office than at home; in the office I buy, at home is all home cooked. The food at home is also a lot healthier.

* the team I manage is spread in 2 other offices in different countries, nobody is in my country, so going to the office achieves nothing

* the extended team I work in, also spread even more, only one person in the same office as me. We already talk too much, more is not better

* spending 1-3 hours a day commuting (varies a lot if I ride the bike or drive the car, time of day and if it rains) never helped anyone

* I am not distracted by home life, I am too busy for that

* I am one of those very few people things are escalated to when the fan gets bent, so there is no much separation anyway

But I recognize there are some benefits of being in the office, even if overall for me it is not a net positive.

I agree on everything except two points:

1) Home is not without distractions, but I think the office had more; it mostly came down to ambient noise and people always moving around in my field of view. Being alone I can focus more. Everybody is different. If you find the office better for focus (for you) I don't debate that.

2) I hate over-the-shoulder code reviews. I don't want me and my coworker's faces to be kissing distance while we both squint at a 14" laptop. I'll take a Zoom call screen sharing on my 34" ultrawide any day.

I absolutely think being there in person is a competitive advantage, especially in the ladder-climbing aspect. We don't work in a purely egalitarian system. There is a game, and you can play it or not play it, but all other things equal you'll get more monetary rewards if you play it.

And my non-Machiavellian viewpoint on it is that I like my coworkers and I think seeing them and conversing with them in person few times a week is good for my mental health. I get more face to face social interaction when I work at least part of the week in the office.

Mentoring junior folks is a really big one that really needs in-person attention. It disappoints me that everybody is ignoring this.

Sure, work-from-home is nice for senior folks like me who have lots of influence and have nurtured their career over several decades. We can allocate resources and people listen to us by virtue of position.

For junior folks, work from home is terrible for their career. Nothing substitutes for standing in front of a whiteboard and talking things out. You need social contacts to spread out in order to be safe when your company goes to shit. And, you probably share a house with multiple other folks and don't have much budget to buy things.

So few people focus on junior employees! The junior employees on my team who onboard did in 2019 vs 2020 are much more than 1 year apart in terms of output and performance.

I think it's more dependent on your WFH practices. My current employer is fully remote (but always has been) and I think the junior engineers generally get up to speed with the senior engineers quickly.

I feel directly opposite to this, I am way more productive working from home as a programmer, for this reason alone:

https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

Also I find modern tools easily make up for not being in close proximity.

Best of all as an engineering lead, I am not restricted to hiring in the small pool of engineers who can travel to the physical location of an office. I can hire talent world wide

> I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

To be fair, that's a matter of personal discipline. There is nothing to stop you closing your laptop at 5pm and leaving it until the next day to open it again.

> > I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

> To be fair, that's a personal disciple issue.

That's true, and in my case I have absolutely no issue with not working at random hours, even though I use the same exact computer for both work and personal projects. I work from 8 AM to 6 PM, with a break from 12 to 2. Absent an emergency, at 6:01 I'm done for the day and unreachable.

But in other domains, I've found that having to enforce this discipline can take an emotional / energy toll. In my case, I have this issue with food. I've found that if I have snacks and / or other easy to eat, calorie-laden food around the house I will absolutely have a terrible time trying to control myself and not eat them all. Even though I'm not actually hungry, I keep thinking about them and keep feeling like I need to eat them. This absolutely has an effect on my ability to focus, and the only way to have that go away is to eat. I'm not a smoker, but I suppose it's a similar kind of itch.

But by not buying them at all and not having them in the house, it's much, much easier for me. I don't actually miss them when I don't have them and never think about them. Every once in a while I may think about having an ice-cream or something, but I don't crave it to the point of going to the store and buying it (even though the round trip is like 10 minutes, and I'm a fairly active person). Just eating an apple or whatever makes the craving go away. But if the ice cream was there, 9/10 times I would have eaten that instead of the apple. And "just a scoop" is never just a scoop.

So I completely sympathize with people who've found that having this clear separation between work and home makes a difference for them. Having to catch a train / avoid sitting in a car during a commute / picking up the kids from school / whatever can really put an end to the possible tendency of "just five more minutes, and I'm done".

But there's also the fact, as others have said, that there are other ways to not work from home than going to an office. While I love working from my own house, what I hate the most with the office is the commute, and it's not even that bad by local standards. But advocating for a remote culture would allow people to combine these advantages (having both a separation and no / short commute). Of course, the social aspect of the office some people talk about wouldn't be completely solved.

Whenever this comes up, I usually link to this:

Don't Wake Up the Programmer!

https://alexthunder.livejournal.com/309815.html

Any "competitive advantage" gained by these points will be more than wiped out by the extreme difficulty companies will have attracting talent if they don't offer remote flexibility. All of the data I've seen so far is pretty clear that yours is a minority opinion among tech workers.

My enjoyment of remote work has varied heavily based on the company culture, the type of work, and even my own evolving life circumstances.

Having gone back and forth between in-office and WFH and between IC and manager in both circumstances, I have no doubts that in-office work is more productive than WFH.

The only exceptions are when the office environment is truly terrible. WFH is more productive than being in an office full of constant distractions, or an office with broken HVAC in 90-degree heat, or an office with a bully executive who enjoyed yelling at people. In those circumstances, WFH was simply a partial band-aid over a company that didn’t care enough about employees to treat them right. Eventually the interrupters learn how to ping you on Slack 20 times a day or the office bully realizes that they can terrorize people remotely at 9PM. WFH didn’t solve any problems, it just buffered them with distance. The real solution was to switch to a company that cared.

That’s not to say that WFH can’t work. It can be made to work, but we need to be honest that it adds overhead and inefficiencies that must be compensated for. Given a choice between in-office and full remote, the same team will be more efficient in-person.

Candidly, I suspect many employees feel the same way. However, it’s becoming taboo to question the superiority or WFH in online discussions because the WFH fans are very defensive about their preference.

Very valid points. I went full remote 3 years ago and I really like it so far. Before had 25 min commute no traffic. I actually sometimes miss the time to just think by yourself. I took the wfh job because of the money and experience not for WFH. I think the key thing has been the entire company is remote all over the world. I think the hybrid model is just not going to work well. Either go all out WFH or not.

I take walks if I want that time to think :)

> The only exceptions are when the office environment is truly terrible.

Given that the trend is to open floor plans with limited personal space, I suspect that "truly terrible" is a fair--if not flat out generous--description of a lot of office space.

The academic research does not validate your gut assessment.[1] Remote work in 2020 was associated with a significant increase in worker productivity.

[1]https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/...

For game dev my gut is that WFH doesn't work unless maybe you're on the library team and so need no collaboration. Game devs have artists, game designers, and programmers working together, passing the controllers back and forth, asking for comments on what's on the screen, etc....

Maybe there's some teams out there that are doing WFH well but every person I know on game dev has commented on how productivity is way down since WFH.

If it's good for you, that's fine. But most of your ideas here are dead wrong. Things like "oh yeah real innovation happens because of hallways conversations" come from pervasive myth, not actual reality. Oh BTW pair programming is much easier over a shared screen, remotely, than it is trying to squish people in front of a single monitor.

The innovation argument is particularly frustrating. By far the most innovation in computing this century has occurred in open source software, which by its nature is completely distributed. People who work on the Linux kernel or Postgres or Rust would be pretty shocked to learn that whatever they’re doing must not be innovative since they’re not hanging out in the hallway.

As a postgres dev, I do feel that the lack of in-person conferences over the last 1 1/2 years caused a perceptible slowdown in some areas. But I also can't stand working full in an office most of the time.

Conferences are a nice in-between. I can see a lot more companies coming together for talks, socials and meetings a few times a year

The quality and insight of the discussions at conference is usually way higher than at the office. Conferences allow specialists to come together around topics covered only by a few people in the company. Also, they allow you to look outside the box, how other approach similar problems or technologies. At work, I usually already know it most from the regular communication.

My ranking is:

1) WFH

2) dedicated office

3) cubicle

4) quitting

5) open plan office

Not every employer gives you free meals, and when they do, you may not always like them and may still want to eat something else.

Commuting can many hours of your time. I have more valuable things to do with my time rather than commuting.

I think this will ultimately lead to a bifurcation of workplaces into remote-first and office-first (a divide which already existed, but was probably 5% vs 95% pre-pandemic), and this diversity will be a good thing.

Some company cultures are better adapted to remote working, while others stand to benefit more from in-person, and the same thing can be said for individuals. People who thrive more in one than the other will gravitate toward companies whose remote/office emphasis matches their preference, and recruiters will start considering it, too.

I don't think free food at work is particularly common outside of big silicone valley companies. Free espresso coffee (of middling quality) is pretty ubiquitous where I am though.

Here in Australia, every company I have worked at (non-FAANG) as a Software Engineer has had a kitchen, stocked with food under a "Grab what you want, when you want it" policy.

Is it really that uncommon in the US outside of FAANG companies?

In Europe your employer can't provide you with free food, it's value is counted as taxable income.

Europe is made up of 27 countries all with their own tax laws. You can't make generalisations like that without significantly more detail.

Here in the UK my employer can and occasionally, but not frequently enough in my opinion, does pay for my lunch.

There are 51 countries in Europe, if you count some technicalities around the Vatican, Monaco etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

Though I suspect both yourself and the previous poster was referring to the European Union.

You mean like catering at all hours or a bag of bagels and some fruit and maybe some snack sized chip bags

As someone who works for a global firm that has been back to the office since October I 100% agree.

We have a policy where you are free to work from home if you like given that there are no COVID cases in the city I live in however we have seen large influxes of staff returning to the office.

For me, its exactly the reasons you've called out.

At the end of the day there is no one size fits all for everyone, the same way that working in an office doesn't work for anyone. However I do believe that people should be given the option.

It's funny, all of the things you mention are things I would cite as perks of working remotely at my current org. I guess it depends on how you implement remote work. For example we typically have multiple departments running one or more "open calls" all day that anyone can wander into and hear what's going on. Engineering in particular makes heavy use of this, especially those who like pair programming.

Do people join the open calls just for specific reasons? Or do they join all day? An open call is a half decent alternative during forced WFH but it’s not the same. Random hallway conversations are just that: random. An open call wouldn’t be the same unless everyone was in the call all day.

There's a Teams channel that people chat in all day long. I've had to mute it, because otherwise it's just binging and bonging and flashing popups in my face constantly.

If people want something, they can send an email. Those aren't ephemeral.

People who like to do that sit in it all day. If there are multiple conversations going on they will split into the 2nd and 3rd channels. Some people like to hear the breathing and typing of their colleagues all day, some do not.

To answer your question more specifically, they can be truly random conversations. The other day I talked for two hours with someone about neural networks (not related to our work) while coding.

> I believe working in the office is a competitive advantage

Competitive advantage for whom? The company?

It's gonna be hard to overcome to employee advantage of having a potentially absurd effective-hourly-rate when you combine a high salary with extremely low actual hours that only remote work can provide.

You can go from 40-60 hours (factoring in overhead like commute) to 15-20 and 2-3x your hourly rate. That's a huge efficiency gain.

It might be an efficiency gain, but I think OP's reasoning is how much value you're extracting throughout the day.

Of course this is subject to the type of work you do your own personality etc etc.

> I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

This is single biggest reason I want to go back to office.

In fact it already has started to feel weird that my home is my work place as well.

Even if my work place remains fully remote I’ll find some other place to work from but never some place as shitty as WeWork. Maybe I will rent a cheaper smaller place nearby if I don’t find a sane coworking space.

Have you tried setting boundaries and being disciplined about it?

I've had to tell people - I won't reply after 5, and no meetings then. People still tried to setup 530, even 730pm meetings all the time (not even during crunch time). Instant decline lol

We don't make enough time for our own lives. Hell, it's hard enough to find time to actually make an enjoy a dinner.

I already do that.

I still don’t want my home also as a work place.

Totally understandable!

> * I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

Weirdly for me the food and drink is the opposite. Maybe if you're lucky enough to have an office that provides full lunch meals for you but I haven't experienced that yet.

I really enjoyed work lunches but it usually meant 4/5 days a week was going out with colleagues to local restaurants and paying restaurant food prices.

At home I can make a sandwich with stuff from my fridge without the allure of "well everyone else is going out for sushi don't you want to join?"

* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

I've been enjoying not having to spend £4k/year on a rail season ticket. It looks like in the UK the new part-time season tickets are aimed at people commuting 2 days a week, whereas tech companies seem to be converging on 3.

I would probably agree with you but one thing that offset all the benefits of going into an office, for me, was having a really long commute. I tried to get things done during the commute but it really didn't work well. Being stuck on a schedule so I could use public transportation also wasn't beneficial for me.

> * Overhearing hallway conversations (and joining them) helps spawn invocation

Yes, we had similar results in my coven.

> I often do/did paired programming

I think this is the only point in your list that is actually fundamental, the rest can be remediated by relatively simple lifestyle changes. If you like pair programming, then there is an almost certain probability that you'll prefer the office over remote. There is literally nothing one can do remote to replace the kind of in person interaction that pairing or over the shoulder reviews give you.

I personally paired full time for a few years and I hate it with the heat of a thousand sons. Between pair programming and getting a low paid service job, I'd take the latter. The fact that WFH lets me cut out at-work social interactions that cause me severe distress is a benefit I will never give up.

It’s all fine that these things work for you, but they probably don’t work for at least half your coworkers. I would not expect software development to ever return to 100% in-office. Those days were already starting to end pre-pandemic, and staying home for a year just accelerated the trend. A hot topic in the HR space right now is how you make working remote not a competitive disadvantage because it actually is a better working arrangement for a lot of people who have been historically marginalized.

Working in the office is not a competitive advantage when your leaders are working remotely. Which is what’s often happening — I find it’s actually easier to catch up with my peers virtually since I don’t have to waste time walking to another building and standing in line for coffee. Since they’re at home too and not stuck in meetings all day, they’re answering IMs and turning what used to be a 30 minute ordeal you had to go through in order to get their attention into 5 IMs back and forth.

Just try to imagine being on the other side of this: if you wanted to work in the office and people arbitrarily said “nah”. Because that’s what I think is going to happen at a lot of companies, and it’s what many of us who prefer remote work have dealt with our whole careers. There are too many positives for companies around office leases to not have a significant portion of your workforce remote: I think the improvement in financial performance of remote companies will force the hand of even the reluctant ones.

The push for working from home is just two other things that have become taboo to debate and is manifesting through the work from home "movement", which is the loss of private offices, and the debate about reducing hours of work.

And if people are allowed to work from home, they have an alternative that fills the loss of the private office, and they can also take upon themselves to shorten their working hours to something more "reasonable".

There are other factors (why waste fuel/accident risk on commutes, easier to cook healthy lunches, et cetera), but those are the biggest ones for sure. It would be nice if we could have the hours debate out loud and for real.

Yeah I hope this debate is started soon. I think if a company offered 6 hour working days and private offices, it would be a whole different story.

Those are all great advantages of working at an office. Unfortunately they are inconsequential compared to advantages of working from home.

I've been self employed and mostly working from home since 2006 and yet I'm with you that "working in the office is a competitive advantage." Not for me because I'm self employed, but I believe it is for people working in companies with other people in the office close to the eyes and ears of their managers.

I saw it happen 25+ years ago when working from home wasn't a thing. I worked for a consulting company. We had about half of our workforce working at customer premises. Not low fee body rental but projects that had to be run there. Well, the people getting advances in pay and career were mostly the people working in the headquarter. Managers of successful remote teams got career advances, some key remote developer got them too (customers wanted them) but most of them were forgotten wheels of the company machine.

But I'm in no competition with colleagues so working from home is great. I won't go back unless I'll ever start starving.

> I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person

I work 100% remote and recently have been mentoring a recent CS graduate and doing pair programming with him. Let me describe how we do it and then I'd like to hear how you think things are better in person.

We start a Slack voice call, these work reliably. Some coworkers told me the longest Slack call they have maintained was over 12 hours long, with people coming and going throughout the conversation.

After starting the voice call, I share my screen. I show him what I'm working on in IntelliJ and we talk about it. Then I use a new IntelliJ feature called code-with-me and send him a link, he clicks on it and and he is then able to edit any file in my IDE on his IDE on his computer. I'm still sharing my screen, but he might not look at it, after all, he can see and edit any part of the code on his own computer now. He can share his screen at any time if needed with 2 clicks.

I direct the conversation, but look for tasks I can pair off. There's a service I need an interface too, so I ask him to work on it. He starts reading documentation about it on his own computer with multiple large monitors. He then begins writing an interface to the service. I flip tabs over to the source file he's working on and can see where his cursor is and what he's typing in real time. I give advice, I just type out what I mean instead of trying to describe what I want him to do in the code with verbal words. This is all like Google Docs, we can bring in even more people and have 5 or 6 cursors all over the project just working independently. Everyone at their own desk where they're fully productive.

This is a real story. He finished the interface to the service, and it worked well. I still don't know all the details of what he wrote, I never had to be distracted by it, but his code has worked so far, so my trust was well placed. The whole experience was so smooth. We could sync up and talk about a single bit of code and then return to our own work, the context switching took literally seconds. I'd just say, "hey, look at this", he'd click a tab in his editor and then see what I was doing, we chat about it for 30 seconds, then he makes a 2nd click and is back to his own work. We pair programmed like this for about 3 hours. Sometimes we'd go 15 minutes without saying anything, but we were working towards the same goal, and interruptions to talk about the goal weren't distracting. I could never endure watching over someones shoulder for 3 hours.

We were maintaining a call / audio channel the entire time, I even muttered some things under my breath (just thinking out loud) and he was able to hear. I think it's the only time I've been happy and productive with pair programming.

That's a nice picture of what it can be like.

VR might take this kind of thing to a whole new level. Check out Imersed: https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2849273531812512/

I haven’t updated it in a bit, but I did a breakdown of how much money I saved working remotely for the last 2 years in December. Taking into consideration gas, insurance, food, time, clothes, etc saved almost $5k and 500 hours of personal time a year. I do miss the office a bit, but I’ll never go back.

> I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

I agree with a lot of your points, but not this one. Even if I were to take my lunch to work, I would still end up spending some money on coffee or snacks (because I can't always predict exactly what I will want to eat or drink during the day), and if I'm in a rush in the morning at home (e.g. slept in), I can just make lunch when I end up having the time, versus having to buy lunch in the office if I left without time to prepare some food to take.

The electricity point stands I suppose, but it's hard to quantify the difference, for me, as I moved only a few weeks before the pandemic, so don't have any pre-pandemic, work from the office data to compare with.

The £150 odd I save each month on travel costs likely more than makes up for any extra spending on leccy

> I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

That is more on you being a good steward of your money than anything else. Our development team eats out at restaurants nearly every day when we were at the office. Code together, dine together. Bad boys for life.

It’s mostly me having a programmable thermostat, taking full advantage of free food, and having negligible transportation costs.

You're engaging in the fallacy of "what is good for me is good for everyone else."

I didn't read that from the post you're referring to.

I did. The whole post is worded in a confrontational way, intending to piss people off and start arguments.

They're mostly just talking about their own experience, but it starts off with sweeping generalizations and doesn't address that other individuals might be different. Its the argumentation equivalent of a lie by omission.

> * Having a workforce socially close improves productivity because everyone wants to step up for each other.

I can agree with all your other points, but this one simply stuck out to me. Haven't nearly all companies realized more productivity with WFH?

I really like my current company and will be of the first in the office at least 3-4 times per week. I agree with your points, but also understand that it doesn't fit everyone's life.

My social interaction has pretty much always been online since a kid and most of my long term friendships and social interaction came from in-person work. I miss the people who genuinely made my day better on a consistent basis at work, and I get almost none of that remote. Being single through COVID has been hell.

I also have zero work/life separation. I enjoy the routine, the excercise, less distractions than being at home. I feel like I could absorb more and know a lot more of what was going on.

1.Interesting, the vast majority of these are not work related for me. Maybe one a year is in some way useful

2. I would contest that with sufficient quality screen share this simply so marginal it's dismissable

3. This makes several assumptions about personality and socialising and isn't always the case. Forcing people to see each other does not create social closeness. Sustaining good friendships over instant message is very much the norm. I think occasional in person meetings or, more deliberate collaborative effort if fully remote can create this just fine.

4. Distractions in the office, drive bys, noise of neighbours and even digital distraction vs a small degree of self discipline (using one monitor, phone on dnd can help too) ... I dont buy this at all.

5. See above - if you have children then that is understandable, however I would wager that correct work/play time separation is whats needed here.

6. I can claim some of my electricity cost as work expenses and the food on my commute and at work is incredibly overpriced. I typically prepare food at home. Being at home more i'm now not restricted to whatever carries well in a tupperware.

7. Arguing that a routine needs to be made for you instead of creating your own isnt a valid reason. Self discipline.

8. Discipline and routine also addresses the last point, but I will concede its easier to manage.

To outline the competitive advantage FOR working at home. In addition to the above I gain:

Custom desk, my high quality office chair vastly superior to corporate stock, custom office space, custom lighting temperature and air flow.

Control of noise levels

Total control of distractions

I save 4 hours a day lost to transport being forced to listen to podcasts and have more meaningful work and play time as a result.

I save substantial money on transport

No social guidelines, I can have what I want on the radio/TV if I wish.

I can wear more comfortable clothes and save money on laundering work clothes

I can exercise more freely and easily

I can work in line with the ebb and flow of my conciousness and not when someone else demands it - and am subatantially more productive.

My deliveries no longer go missing

My home is tidier

I dont have to use a disgusting corporate bathroom

I dont get sick anymore

My carbon footprint is close to zero

My mental health has improved substantially

I think that mostly covers it

People should realize that wfh is highly dependant on self-discipline. Some ppl have it, some dont. (Actually only very small % of ppl have high self-discipline).

Due to this all corporations will and are going to try to “control” ppl simply because most of them cannot control themselves.

You talk like its not a learned skill. Outsourcing your self discipline to a company if you do anything remotely related to tech should mean developing it is a top priority. Impulsivity is to a large degree a dimension of Extraversion, also.

I know its a learned skill, but still only a very small percent of people develop or learn it.

Tho I would say overall in any field its pretty much one of the most important skills/or in life generally.

Interestingly a lot of what you list is the reason while Agile advocates having the team all sit together in office. It makes communication much quicker and easier, and just simply overhearing others helps spread information very efficiently.

I'm glad you found what works for you. I think it's interesting how much preferences can differ from person to person.

For me, working from home for the past 3 years has been completely life altering.

Work is nothing more than a distraction away from what I really want to be doing with my life. Working from home lets me optimize for all the right things like being here with my kids all the time, going to the playground at lunches, making them breakfasts and lunches, and seeing them at 5:01pm. I love that I can take breaks with them rather than talk about nonsense at the water cooler.

I'd much rather not focus on optimizing for work...

Working from home has been a boom pretty much for the same reasons mentioned as in the pro.

Random noises and sounds takes away focus and brings me out of "the zone".

I have a separate area where I work, I don't work any place other than that.

I feel the same. Aside from the interpersonal benefits, the perks of the office are real monetary value. A lot of us don’t have terrible commutes and these benefits outweigh the cost of commute time.

I'd just like to add to that:

1. The daily routine and commute helps reset your brain and get you in/out of "work mode"

2. You don't have to cannibalize your home desk to make way for your work PC, or set up a second desk for work PC

3. No deciding what to get for lunch, it's whatever is closest or catered, no wanting a coffee and finding that you need to run to the store

4. If your team isn't meeting your sprint goals, someone can look at you and verify that you are working, so they won't automatically assume that the problem is with you

> The daily routine and commute helps reset your brain and get you in/out of "work mode"

This paints a rosy picture of the daily commute which is simply not true [1]. Furthermore, the argument that going into the office gets you in and out of "work mode" doesn't stand up either. With instant communication channels like email, Slack, et al and a lack of labor regulations regarding after-hour work communications (at least in the US), we were never able to be out of "work mode" pre-pandemic either.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/better/lifestyle/how-your-stressful-...

Perhaps I've been lucky to work at places where work did truly end at 5pm, about 90% of workdays (of course if the servers are on fire, or a customer can't log in, that necessitates after-hours work, but once it's done, it's done). It's a work culture thing, and instant communication channels don't necessarily lead to everyone being on-call 24/7. I'm sure that existed pre-internet also ("Boss called, I need to go back into the office and finish some paperwork...")

Yeah and also to mention the elephant in the room: people work much more when they are stuck in a room with others, and have eyes on them. And they work way less if they are at home and nobody is watching. This is just the truth, regardless of how little it applies to myself, of course!

I'm also annoyed by the amount of housework/cooking/preparation/cleaning I have to do when I'm at home all day, when half of that happens in the office/resturant otherwise.

But you are basing this on your personal experience. I work remote out of state from my company (and did so pre-pandemic.) I would often travel and stay at the office for decent periods of time. During those periods way less work was accomplished for me, because I was socializing more with co-workers, took more snack/water breaks, spent more time at lunch. While WFH I will still go out to local coffee shops to work out of if I am lacking focus for the day.

Some people actually do work better in a distraction free environment, but it seems you don't believe that. I should mention, my company has an open-office floorplan, so the amount of daily interruptions was quite incredible...

Sounds like an anecdote.

I've worked with people who have made it a fine art to appear busy, to hold earnest conversations in hallways, to comment in IM frequently, yet do 10% of the work of the good performers. And we all knew who the good performers were.

Managing employees in an office doesn't depend on having butts in the seat, or "eyes on them." It depends on understanding what needs to be done, communicating/delegating, and then getting out of the way.

I disagree there- I mean I work way more hours when I wfh than when I am in the office because I can tolerate it because I don't have a family at home who I am far from. I come down and see the wife when I get coffee and that is my "hallway" conversation and my dog is always next to me, and I never worry about her getting lonely. If anything, having to walk the dog helps pull me away from the computer when I otherwise would not.

I am not sure how cleaning changes at all, and doing laundry, which used to be very difficult to fit in, is so much easier. I can understand why food prep would be more onerous to most, but I enjoy cooking and if I don't really want to I live in a city, I have plenty of options all around me.

Pair programming and code reviews are actually easier remote.

Working remote means:

* the rest of the company tends to forget you exist

* you tend to get the blame

* out of sight, out of mind

* fewer promotions

I love my job, and I love working from home. I have been doing it for years.

Working on a fully remote team is not the same as working on fully co-located team. Some will say it's worse but for me its better. One thing is for certain - it is different. Some things are easier and some things are harder. It's just a different point in the design space of possible ways to work.

Sounds like you need an environment with better collaboration tools and people who know how to communicate.

I was getting a slew of emails related to a project and after a bit of coaching I got most of these updates to go into a teams channel, where we can call out the interested part @user, and keep things in an easier to view format when we need to catch up.

Working remotely will never be as good for communication IMO. You can set up weekly one-on-ones over your favorite videoconference platform, but there's just so much you can't see being physically separated from your coworkers.

At my previous job, I would bond with my teammates over lunch talking about random things, bouncing ideas, and I feel like we really were a team. We trusted each other. At my new, 100% remote job, sometimes my colleagues are just tuned out, and I have no idea why. I can ask them over our weekly videochat, but it's just not the same. We don't have the same level of trust. I can't read their body language. We can't just have a random 5 minute chat over coffee. Brainstorming online has also proven to be really ineffective. It works really well over lunch, with no stress and no expectations, but planning a brainstorming meeting really can't offer that.

IMO remote work is very weird and dehumanizing. You might feel differently. I know it works for some people, but I really feel like the cohesion in my team is nowhere near as good. Yet I feel like if we were in the same office in person we'd be doing much better.

My ideal balance is 4 days of in-person work and one remote day per week, with flexible working hours.

I've always viewed work as means to an end, and that end is getting paid to take care of my family. I've made some good friends, but I've also been forced to tolerate some people I would rather not be around.

I also find that communicating through multiple remote channels is freeing. People aren't reading my body language to misinterpret what I'm saying. Requests and plans are more concrete and documented. People have to be more thoughtful about what they are asking for.

> I've always viewed work as means to an end, and that end is getting paid to take care of my family

For most of us, it's also something we're being forced to do for 40-50 hours a week. We spend the best, more productive hours of the prime years of our lives working. So it might as well be something engaging.

People we would rather not be around, I agree. I unfortunately have to deal with some of these online as well though. Ideally this is something that can be discussed with one's manager so that we are no longer forced to work with said people.

Is Apple forbidding people from coming into the office more than 3 days? AFAIK at Google, you can go everyday if you want.

No - TFA mentions teams can come in all five days if they want to.

I agree, I've worked remote for a little over a year now, and I definitely prefer working in on office. The main benefit for me is the hallway conversations, real-life meetings, sketching things out on whiteboard, and work/life separation. I do not see myself ever working in a fully remote environment.

<plugarino> https://sharetheboard.com -- It doesn't solve all of the problems you've listed but it does help with remote white boarding! Try it and share feedback, please!

Your points are personal preferences. They don't support "competitive advantage" claim.

You have some strong anecdotes there but I'd like to see some stats from this previous year and see if there was actually a drop, an increase, or relatively neutral change in productivity/sanity amongst those who worked from home.

$200-$300k less to buy a house that is "outside commute range" of tech companies in the Seattle area.

~90 minutes of commute saved each day (2 hours a day for me actually), valuing my time at $100/hr.

That comes out to roughly 5k-6k a month in savings.

In my opinion living in Seattle is $200k-$300k better than living in Tacoma.

> I believe working in the office is a competitive advantage.

For the company, probably; not for me. All the bullet point you mentioned: none of them applies to me. It’s interesting to see different points of view, though.

> Being seen by my fellow employees helps keep me from becoming distracted.

Too real

Yeah but you get the most bang for your buck out of rent. What's the point of renting in NYC or SF if your only there for like 2 hours.

People put up with small NYC (and I'm assuming SF) apartments because there is so much going on in the city you'll hardly be there. If you wanted to get the most bang for your buck out of rent you'd move to Dayton Ohio or some other place where the cost of living is ultra low (for the USA).

People enjoy the cities?

"The reason other people should do a 2hr+ commute each day is because I function best in an adult kindergarten"

No self-respecting person would never publicly (and proudly no less) say they:

- Need supervision - Require frequent interactions / reassurance from colleges - struggle to maintain their personal lives - Cant form their own routines

There is mounting pressure to stop WFH and its coming entirely from those at risk of WFH, namely those who need the office as a place to be seen.

> Overhearing hallway conversations (and joining them)

This really happens? I am too shy to join a random conversation in the hallway.

So, you like office politics. Enjoy the commute.

I would expect more of that competitive advantage, too! Most people don't want to give up Working from home[1] and/or are only interested in "working" to collect a paycheck[2]. If the future because of in-office work mostly consists of ambitious people like yourself, opposed to the latter, then I'm actually more interested in joining. Thanks for the perspective.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wfhjobs_wfh-workfromhome-remo...

[2] Also: "no skin in the game" / the misguided local optimization where personal responsibility is minimized at the expense of the group / intentionally stagnating instead of growing in one's career position.

What are you doing your job for if not to collect a paycheck?

Some people feel excitement from getting to work on their project, regardless of pay. Some people think they’re “changing the world”.

Some people feel a competitive nature and want to work and get ahead.

Some people work with friends and therefore enjoy being there and socializing.

People have varied motivations for things besides pay.

Work thou for pleasure; paint or sing or carve

The thing thou lovest, though the body starve.

Who works for glory misses oft the goal;

Who works for money coins his very soul;

Work for the work's sake, then, and it may be

That these things shall be added unto thee.

> In 1882 Cox left Paris and moved to New York where he continued to paint. He also began to do many illustrations, mostly to pay the bills. Kenyon became well established as a magazine illustrator. His illustrations reached a much wider audience than did his paintings.

> Cox also began to write art criticisms (unsigned) for the New York Evening Post. This and other writing jobs took Kenyon's time away from painting but also helped him make a living.

I learned new skills and experienced personal and professional growth through the different projects I worked on and situations i found myself in.

I made friends and together we did an amazing job, made happy customers, and helped build a business, which gave me great personal pride and satisfaction.

The pay cheque showed me the work i was doing was valuable To the customer, yes and bought me a house etc, but I can’t imagine being at a job that I also didn’t enjoy and see some purpose in, some utility that I was bringing to the world.

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