Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thwarted | Hacker News Reader

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I think the angle that's not fully communicated here is that the default expectation is 40 hours of work a week at 8 hours per day. At a company that expects you to be in the office for those 8 hours, many people actually spend more than 8 hours in service of the need to be in the office for 8 hours. That is, if it takes you 30 minutes of travel each way to satisfy a mandate to be in an office for 8 hours, you're really spending 9 hours "on company time", but you're only being compensated for 8. People who don't have, because of whatever reason, travel time can roll out of bed and immediately be ready to work (I have the past 18 months). Why should the employee take a hit out of their non-work time to do travel that the company insists on? If you want me to travel, pay me for it and recognize that you're paying for my time to not be productive because its being eaten up with travel (or recognize that some of the 8 hours of company-time is going to be eaten up with travel so you're only getting 7 hours of work time out of it). Someone could choose to move closer to the office, there by reducing the amount of time used for travel, and the unproductive-travel-time compensation should be reduced.

Historically, both employers and employees have incongruent and hazy understanding and a polite agreement as to how this kind of time gets accounted for (how much it is and who is accountable/responsible for it), especially in salaried positions/knowledge workers. That's probably going to change. If anything, the work-from-wherever trend will help people get a better understanding of and draw the line between work-time and personal-time, productive time and non-productive time, total compensation, and what, exactly, they are being compensated for, and how this time is grokked and tracked.

In that model, why wouldn’t the company insist that you move closer to work to minimize the commuting payment? You picked where you live and what company you applied to work at; they didn’t pick where you live.

If that means that you want to only apply for remote positions, that’s certainly your choice; I don’t blame you in the least for it, but expecting a company to pay you as a result of where you chose to live seems unlikely to happen, to put it mildly.

Many people have purchased a house that they intend to remain in, the friction to move houses is often larger than friction to change jobs. Also, there may be a spouse who just doesn't want to move house.

I agree with you on those points. I purchased a house I intend to remain in and my spouse doesn’t want to move either.

None of that is remotely* a concern of my company, though…

* pun was accidental, but pleasing enough to leave it in there.

> why wouldn’t the company insist that you move closer to work to minimize the commuting payment

The closest homes to work are $1.15MM and $1.5MM. I’m not sure if the CEO is paid enough in cash to qualify for one of these homes on salary alone.

>The closest homes to work are $1.15MM and $1.5MM. I’m not sure if the CEO is paid enough in cash to qualify for one of these homes on salary alone.

Obviously yes? You realize that most people mortgage their homes? A 1.5M, 30 year mortgage at today's rates (3.1%) translates to $76,863/year which seems pretty doable for a CEO (unless you're the garage startup type).

There are a lot of discrimination landmines when you ask employees to live in particular locations. In general, the safest thing to do is to require them to show up in person, and they will decide how far they are willing to live. In fact, if I recall correctly, you can't even ask people if they own a car. Being prescriptive about location can become a lawsuit for class discrimination.

Or for that matter, why wouldn't folks decide to live farther away from work to maximize their compensation? I think a lot of people wouldn't mind spending a few hours each day on the train for a 40% raise.

Expecting a company to pay you as a result of where you choose to live used to happen: if you moved to San Francisco from the midwest in order to work at a company in San Francisco, you would expect a cost-of-living-in-SF to be factored into what was being offered and what you'll accept as compensation; and if you didn't then you were underwater.

I don't have a clear cut way to interpret this interaction either in the past or going forward (everyone's motivations are different). But now physical location factors into the calculation on both sides differently than it did in the past. In the past "travel time to sit at a desk in a specific location" was always completely assumed to be a burden incurred solely by the employee (it had been the government who made allowances for pre-tax commuter costs in some cases). That is no longer the case.

When it comes down to it, getting paid for 8 hours of company time but 2 of them being travel time and 6 being productive is getting paid 33% more. The negotiation may be less directly about money: rather than "I want more money for that 40 hours" it could be "I'll work 32 hours for that money"

It appears that most people are considering the following two scenarios:

1. most employers will pay the same regardless of where I live, and my job security will be the same as before.

2. most employers will pay a bit less if I work remotely, but that's worth it to me since I can pay less for rent and have a higher quality of life. And yes, my job security will be the same as before.

It shocks me that people are not considering the following scenario:

3. most employers will realize that a person living 100 miles away represents the same value to my company as one that lives 5,000 miles away. The latter, of course, is far cheaper, more motivated, and far less likely to cause any problems since they also have far fewer protections. And no, they are not any less talented.

So far, the pandemic has been all about the workforce side of the story. We're about to find out what the employer side of the story looks like. I personally don't mind a future where everyone in this world get equal access to job opportunities, but I don't think that most people advocating for remote work are quite as aware of the long-term ramifications on the US workforce.

The point 3 is similar to the relocation scare of a few years ago to India or similar.

It hasn't happened.

Why? Probably because knowledge work is not at all zero sum. It grows with knowledge workers. So India's knowledge workers got jobs on top of existing ones.

Assuming the same happens now for rural America then it might be a net positive and might even revive some of the dying regions.

> The point 3 is similar to the relocation scare of a few years ago to India or similar.

> It hasn't happened.

We think it hasn't happened. And yet, the likelihood of talking to a CX rep from a Fortune 500 company who is based in the US is very low. Did that somehow help the US-based CX reps?

Perhaps you're thinking that it will be different with knowledge workers. Consider the well-publicized fact that a lot of Boeing software is written in India. How many other corporations are following suit behind the scenes?

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