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Comment by hwbehrens | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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.

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.

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