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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

100% of the jobs I want to do can be performed entirely at home, but I prefer to do 100% of them in an office.

Not trying to be sarcastic. I genuinely asking. Why?

I'm not a fan of the office because:

1. I don't like the commute 2. I have an office in my house, but at the "office"; I would be sharing some kind of space. 3. now that covid is less of an issue I plan on going to lunch more with freinds.

1. Commute is a nice way to get some alone time and unwind after work (admittedly, I wouldn't mind a shorter one though, say 15 min)

2. At home there are many more distractions (kids)

3. At work there are nice people to talk to/interact with

4. Getting lunch with coworkers is a nice way to bond and discuss ideas

5. All my friends moved away during the pandemic, and an office is a good way to make new friends

6. IME, meeting in person leads to friendlier interactions, whereas virtual interactions tend to be more hostile

7. The separation of home/office life makes it easier to focus

Most of these points are unrelated to work itself, and may be easily rebuked.

Commuting is not a way to "unwind". If you have 15 minutes in the car, why couldn't you meditate for 15 minutes at home?

Interaction is not taken away if you WFH. But even if it was, if there are "nice" people at work, then there's the assumption that there are "not nice" people as well. Do you want to spend your days surrounded by "not nice" people as well?

If attending to the office is seen as a way to expand your friendship circle, then there is the assumption that any other in person activity should help to this end as well. Wouldn't it be worth trying to go to meet-ups, gym, etc., instead of relying on a workplace hostage situation?

Not trying to be too harsh here. But I have found that most people who want to go back to the office, expect others to go back as well. I don't oppose people going back, of course, but I do oppose being an accessory to their way of life.

1. I bike/run commute and have planned my life to let me live with 15 minutes of where I work.

2. I purposefully choose to live in a small apartment with no dedicated “work” space.

3. Yeah, me too.

Not the OP but for me:

1. I get very little face-to-face social interaction if I'm working from home. I need the interaction at the office or I fear I'll lose the already terrible social skills I have

2. Some conversations are just easier to have in-person, especially from a management standpoint. I don't micromanage and I am pretty hands-off but when a team leader is having issues with their team, it's generally easier for them to pull me into a conference room and chat face-to-face with me and we can figure out a resolution together. This can happen over video, but I find it's better if it's not.

3. I find you get exposure to new techniques and technologies and different perspectives on how to approach solving technical issues when you're in an office and can see a team huddling trying to figure something out.

That said, I know it's not everyone's preference and I'm in favor of a hybrid model personally. Office is available if you want to use it. If you're living in the area of the office, come in once or twice a month and have a face-to-face meeting with your project teammates and/or manager. Otherwise, you're free to be at home if you want.

I love working from home and remote suits me. But the past few months I’ve noticed more and more coworkers asking for zoom pairing sessions, increasing numbers of mob programming sessions, and a general craving for face time.

Personally I dislike those because they’re the worst of both worlds. Not quite remote, not quite in person. I get more done on my own.

In my observation many people are just very done with remote. Especially the younger folk whose lives aren’t as full of adult crap yet.

I can't speak for the OP and everyone has their own reasons but - Do you have a roommate? Children? Now your house/apartment is looking like a mini-office with shared space. - Your house has one office. Where will your spouse/partner work? Most houses don't have two offices. - Maybe living in a small apartment is OK for people because they can get out to larger spaces. Want to live in a studio apartment and work there too? - Offices can have cafeterias and tend to have restaurants nearby. - habit

In addition to all of the social reasons others have listed, I'll list 2 technical reasons why an office is a more comfortable place for me to work:

I have 2 large monitors at my office desk (so when you include my laptop's screen, I have a total of 3 monitors; lots of screen space). Compared to no external monitors at home.

At the office, I have a gigabit connection to the LAN and file servers. At home, I have a VPN that is, while pretty good, not able to compete with 1GBe.

These seem like easily solvable problems though. I have three monitors at home and 1Gb AT&T Fiber Internet.

Some people don’t want to solve this problem. My apartment is small and I have 0 interest in 3 ugly work monitors visible where I can see them all the time.

Hmm. Yes, they are solvable. But are they "easily solvable"?

I could buy extra monitors for my work laptop, but then I'd also have to buy or build an entirely new desk for them, and find a place in my home for this desk to live.

My ISP also offers 1GB I think, but even if I upgrade, that doesn't mean that my work VPN can keep up. It also doesn't help improve latency

Not the person you asked, but for me it’s the social aspect.

I can’t stand being on a camera, voice and text chat don’t really replace the in-person conversations for me.

Everything else is either the same or much worse working in person.

1. I like my commute. If my commute changed I would feel differently. Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

2. I don't have an office in my house. Even if I had the space I don't think I would want to use it for work. However, since coronavirus happened I have had way more space in my office than I did before, and I refuse to be sandwiched between two other engineers in an open office floor plan. So if my company tries to do that they will have a problem, at least from me.

3. I pack my lunch as often as possible and don't really know anyone who works near me.

I do think there are many developers for whom it makes sense to work from home. Especially if they are seniors, and their company workflow is well organized for it. Also, I do think that there are people who are very efficient working from home, but if they are WFH it will still be harder for junior engineers to collaborate with them or learn from them.

I've seen it suggested that in the future, companies who want people to come back to the office will lose all their best employees and will only be able to retain the people who can't get a WFH job. I think a lot of what makes someone a good engineer comes down to experience, so if that were to come true it would ultimately mean that senior engineers (best employees) will work remotely and junior engineers (can't get a WFH job) will be working on site. That kind of leaves junior engineers in the dust as far as mentorship is concerned so I would not consider that a good thing, even though it seems to be fine with certain people who think that they are "good engineers", when in reality they are probably just seniors.

> I feel employees should get paid for their commutes. This would lead to more pollution, sprawl, and deaths by automobile as people would be incentivized to live further from work.

People are already incentivized to live far from their jobs because of HCOL near their workplaces. Also, it would be nice if people's choices were as binary as this line of thinking seems to suggest. It seems to me that many people would rather have a shorter commute either way.

> People are already incentivized to live far from their jobs because of HCOL near their workplaces.

Yes, and now they would be even more incentivized.

> Also, it would be nice if people's choices were as binary as this line of thinking seems to suggest.

What's your point?

> It seems to me that many people would rather have a shorter commute either way.

Yes. But if further incentivized to have a longer commute, they would (in aggregate).

That's great, thanks.

> Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

This opens up way too many cans of worms - some of which (I feel) are very unfair.

(Morning shift)

I worked at SGI doing tech support on the "East" team. The teams were split up by timezone (we were all in Mountain View - where the Google campus is now). My shift started at 5am (no traffic at all) and I lived about 10 minutes away at that time of day.

One of my coworkers lived in Gilroy, and was on the west team (a 9-5 working hours) and would sometimes have a commute of an hour and a half each way if traffic was bad.

So, the guy in Gilroy should be getting paid an extra $100 to $150/day for living further away from me and not working the morning shift?

Or how about the sf2g types ( https://sf2g.com )?

---

I can find other examples of this through my professional career. I had a co-worker who lived in Minneapolis driving to Eau Claire, WI each day. One bad snow storm, it took him 3 hours to get in that morning.

I currently have a coworker who lives in northern Wisconsin and the office is in southern Wisconsin. He's been very happy with WFH. But he had quite a commute (he likes driving).

This furthermore complicates the question of overtime. If you've got a 90m commute each way, does that mean you should only be working for 5h/day to avoid overtime? If I take the scenic route, do I get paid more?

The "ok, here's the consequences of paying for the commute" that I would see is that for companies that need people in the office (e.g. nurses), they would then have the constraint "you must live within 15 minutes from the office and public transportation is not acceptable as that may cause additional delays."

While I recognize the "this is time lost", the "lets compensate for this time spent" is a mess and would cause more problems and discontent than the lost time discontent currently has.

So do you think it's fine that people spend hours each day in service of their company and not getting paid for it?

This gets to the question "what is the employer paying for?"

Let me flip your question around - do you think that it is fine that one person is paid extra to live 2h away or that they should be paid twice what I get paid for effectively the same time spent in service of the company because I only have a 10 minute commute?

Alternatively, consider the person who commutes into the office 1h each way while I'm WFH and have effectively 0 commute. Let's say the wages are $50/h. Should they get paid an extra $100 a day because they are commuting rather than taking advantage of the WFH option?

On Wednesday nights I'd head to dinner with my family from the office. This involved going about 20-30 minutes out of my way from my normal commute. Should I get paid for that adjustment to my commute?

Alternatively, instead of taking route 1 home, I took route 2 home and did some shopping on the way (the route is actually faster sometimes, but less enjoyable and a harder drive), how does that factor into what I should get paid for my commute?

If I took a 15 minute deviation from my normal commute to drive through McD's for breakfast, should I get paid for 15 more minutes?

I'm older now than I was, and so prefer taking city surface streets that are properly illuminated and plowed in the winter rather than country roads. This was a change that I made to my commute back in '18. Should I get paid more because I changed my commute to surface streets? It's a 30 minute drive... I could switch to taking a bus, but that's 80-100 minutes each way (yea, the particular route options are awkward - two transfers for the fastest route).

When I was in Northern Wisconsin, there was a Hmong community that lived 45 minutes away from the office. Would it be fair for the employer to say "you must live within 30 minutes of the office because we're not going to be paying more than 1h/day for a commute"?

The "not paying for commute at all" is the simplest and (I believe) most fair way to approach the commute and issues of non-productive time, personal choices for transportation, personal choices for "where you want to live", and significant complications for overtime and verification of overtime. It avoids issues of outright discrimination of people who take public transportation or live certain distances from the office.

Your examples have a level of granularity that borders on absurdity. We all know that what it comes down to is this: Company makes an offer, i.e. "One of the perks of this job is you receive a 2 hour daily commute stipend". Employee accepts or rejects that offer.

Why not raise everyone's salary by $100/day ($2,500/y) and call it even?

Less accounting to be done when someone's commute changes based on inclement weather, no needing to punch time clock when you leave and get home (or record milage on your vehicle), no difficulty with alternate commute choices (if I bike to work and it takes 1h rather than 30 min driving)...

What benefit to the employer is there to pay someone more if they live further away? What problem would there be if every employee was given the same pay increase regardless of where they lived?

It means that payroll has a lot less work to do too (rather than trying to keep track of everyone's commute).

If Meta HQ did this, would they be giving less to someone who lives in East Palo Alto rather than Gilroy (because of the "difference in commute")?

> Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

Why? How would it even be practical? What if there is congestion? What if someone moved after starting a job, or their commute time changes drastically? Does the employer pay for tolls?

That sounds like a problem for the company to figure out, not the commuter.

That sounds like it would result in the company allocating more of the budget towards people who commute more than to people who commute less.

As someone that commutes less, it means I get less pay, for no benefit to me.

The benefit to you is that you don't have to commute as far!

Not everyone has a bad commute.

Distinct place where I don't have the distractions of home. (ie feel the need to clean, fix, things)

Much nicer environment - way more open space / natural light, great air quality, views, amenities.

Man, I love my commute. Losing that was one of the hardest parts of the year I spent WFH. I take the bus to work, it's about 40 minutes each way. I get time outside, I get to watch the sun rise, I spend that time reading library books and magazines, sometimes I talk with strangers for a few minutes, I stop off on my way home to get new library books or at a shop for whatever, or sometimes hit a bar on the way home. My commute rules, don't take it away from me.

This could have never happened if Jeff and Sanjay were 'working from home'

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship...

Who knows Google would have been an also-ran Search Engine company if it weren't for those two solving the right scale problems at the right time.

And no amount of 'Productivity Metrics' can capture these leaps in value creation because it truly is of the 'Unknown-Unknown' category.

Most people are not going to be in the position, either in their role or the stage of they organization, to enact anything even remotely resembling that sort of innovation. Even when scaled down to their role and organization.

Exactly — yet so many people can’t accept that ANYONE might want to work from an office.

My assumption is that people who love WFH are generally suburbanites who can’t fathom getting to work involves anything other than sitting in traffic for two hours.

When getting to work involves a short walk to the office, getting a coffee on the way, of course that's the best commute by a country mile. When the weather's nice like this morning I'll take a longer walk, but I don't have to do that commute.

I hate cube and half cubes or like at my current job before covid I had an office that I shared with 2 other people.

This. A big problem with office work is office cube design. I'm old enough to have had a closed door office in the 90s and it was the best. I also worked in large cubes which had moveable partitions as walls where you couldn't see your neighbours. They were also good, not great, but better than today's cubes. They even had large book shelves where you could keep your reference books!

At home, I can close my door and it is much superior for my personal productivity than an open office cube plan.

At least you get a cube or half cube. My office is basically a really long desk with 4 people on one side and 4 people on the other (directly across from each other), with maybe 5 feet between you and the next person.

Urbanite here. I hated having to travel daily, even when my commute was around 35 minutes.

Currently working remotely and living in a city, because that's where all the services are.

Who are these people who can't accept that anyone wants to work from an office? If there are so many of them, can we see some examples?

Office work is not just about the commute, it is also about terrible work conditions where you may be seated in an open space shared by support, engineers, sales, etc.

"So many people can't accept that ANYONE is more productive in a remote setting".

This "us vs them" discourse is so childish. Just find the company that works the way you want, either all in office, or hybrid, or all distributed and move on.

Just look at the comments in this thread. Plenty of people seem to assume that no one actually wants to go to the office.

I see some comments where people mention that they prefer to work remote/FH, not that everyone who wants to work in an office is an idiot.

Holy crap. But that's how what _you_ write comes across o.O

At least at my office, the majority wants to stay remote. Only about a third want to come back in the office. It's not everyone, but it can be a very large segment.

That said, it seems remote would be the planet friendly option. No commute, reduce the need for additional building by retrofitting offices as residences (yeah, zoning), etc.

The vast vast majority of people don't have 2 hour commutes. This is pretty much an LA or NYC thing. There are other cities in the US and none of them require insane commutes like this.

My drive to work is 7 minutes, I live in a suburban neighborhood. I don't work in the office because there's no need for it.

People are not great at empathy.

If you have small kids working from an office gives you a good place to work with, hopefully, less distractions.

Some people like commuting because its their me time. Some people like the socialization being in an office gives them. Some careers/roles are easier when you can walk over to someones desk and talk to them.

There are plenty of reasons why working in an office might be interesting to someone. Just like there are plenty of reasons why working fully remotely is interesting to someone.

You're asking someone to respect your choice to work from an office, while it feels like you're disparaging their choice to live where they want to (or possibly can afford as, for example, most of the suburbs have become cheaper than cities for much of America.)

Can we all just agree that people want different things?

I live in the dead center of a major city, but it happens to be a city that isn't much of a tech hub. Thanks to widespread work from home, I can now consider job offers from anywhere and work for a hot startup that just IPO'd and get the same benefits of a bull market for engineering labor as someone younger and/or unattached who can easily move halfway across the country for a better job.

I miss the casual chatting about all kinds of things and the ritualistic coffee breaks (Sweden) a lot.

A lot a lot.

I can't afford an apartment with another room for a proper separate office, and wouldn't want to waste that space on a room to separate work and home even if I did.

And you can't afford this apartment because up until 2 years ago everybody was forced to get a place next to the office. You should support remote/distributed work, since it will make it possible to move to the country/small towns and relieve the pressure on difficult housing markets.

And who says I'm against it?

I could buy a house here per year, cash, with a decent US dev salary. It's not the most expensive place. I enjoy living in a city with things around to do without having to travel. But getting 2+ extra rooms solely for us to work remotely? Then we'd have to go for the biggest apartments ever made here. They are not built to house an office on top of living space currently, and personally I enjoy talking to real life people daily.

Id be open to going into a office, but when I compare wages between jobs done from home and jobs that demand in office I'm not seeing a significant delta. Even if the drive was 15 minutes I'd want something to cover my costs and time.

I was interviewing a month ago and I got a in office offer that was a little lower than the remote offer I had. I brought up that I'd be willing to come in for more money or some sort of flex time around that hour commute and that was met with a audible gasp from the HR person. They acted as if the request was rude and that the occasional free lunch made up for the 10 hours a week time loss. That made the choice for me.

If I am truly more valuable to the business in a office I see no reason why I can't share in those rewards.

"That made the choice for me."

Often the way they react is more important than the actual content. Seems like if they don't understand your concerns on this topic, they likely won't be amenable to your future concerns on other topics.

I’m actually the opposite. I’d take a 10-20% pay cut today to get an in-person job vs. my current remote job. I just haven’t been motivated to job hunt lately.

If I lived in some parts of Europe, then yes, I would totally love to go back to the office. But in the United States? I can't afford to live close enough to the office for a short commute (4-5x as expensive) and transportation is garbage.

Worst of all, there is nobody else there. Our teams are spread across 8 different countries in so many different time zones. I would have maybe 1-2 office mates from my department. That show up irregularly.

I remember the happy times I had in the office and I really wish I could recapture that spirit. But the wheel of time has kind of turned.

I’m in the US, choose to live in the least expensive and smallest apartment near a large-ish city so that I can have a short and manageable commute to both work and the things I enjoy doing.

My transportation costs are essentially 0 — bicycle maintenance I can mostly do myself. My electric bill is $20-$50 a month. Sometimes $3 for a bus ticket. Plus no homeowner’s insurance, property taxes, maintenance, water/garbage bills (all included in rent).

My costs would be 4x-5x higher if I didn’t make the choices I do, simply because the style of living I prefer isn’t available outside of cities.

I used to do that as well. But then my rent tripled in 5 years pricing me out of the area. I still miss my tiny apartment, but working from home is pretty nice too.

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