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Comment by cudgy | Hacker News Reader

“It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. “

It should be, but most companies offer uncomfortable furniture in an open, noisy room with drab carpet and the stench of burnt coffee and burnt popcorn.

“Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. “

Maybe this is true in Silicon Valley, but the rest of the world could easily outfit a corner of a room to a better standard than most corporate offices.

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>"It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home"

There are a number of reasons why this argument doesn't make any sense

-commutes are expensive, and time consuming.

-surveillance produces a worse working experience, but is a major goal of office design.

-A desk with a computer on it is 90% of the way towards a fully equipped office.

-Many modern offices are also built with recreation in mind, equipped with ping pong tables and other such nonsense.

-I have come to believe that the primary business rationale for having people "in the office", is that it makes it harder for you to look for other jobs, and that process means that employees get more expensive.

I'm sure there are lots of reasons. Another big reason is real estate. There is a lot of money tied up in these properties.

Whilst I was moving out and inbetween places, my "home office" was close to perched on a coffee table, and even that I'd take over a big open plan office (or possibly even my own private office).

Not necessarily, I live in downtown Toronto, ON, and I rent an apartment for my needs. These needs did not include working from home! I could move and find a better place to allow me to work from home properly, but unless my employer pays for it, or give me a raise to compensate for it, I'll find a better paying job.

I was working out of a studio apartment until this year and I honestly didn't feel like my WFH set up took up any real extra space:

In the beginning I would use the breakfast bar and just put the laptop up after work. Later on I bought an Ikea arm chair and an end table that just stayed in a corner I didn't use. This is all in addition to the partitioned off area for my side projects that had it's own desk and chair.

>but the rest of the world could easily outfit a corner of a room to a better standard than most corporate offices.

I disagree. Most people don't make enough money to have on room they can dedicate to work. In germany where I live rent is so expensive that for a single person a 2 room apartment is the standard. You basically need 3 rooms which means you're paying significantly more rent unless you live in very rural areas.

Beating a corporate office, as far as the actual work space itself and if we're talking tech work, doesn't require much, is the thing. A small table with a monitor and keyboard and a pretty-good chair, tucked in a corner, is already better just by being private. Having an entire dedicated room—even a very small one—is wildly better than most tech offices, and is far beyond what you need to have a better working environment.

Hell, the private bathroom alone makes even the working-from-a-coffee-table version competitive with typical tech offices.

Inbetween solutions also work. A small office with e.g. two or three people that work together can work quite well IMO if the space is big enough and the people get the means to decide how to use it.

Having three devs that work on the same thing in one room can be beneficial if they like each other.

My wfh environment is a desk in a corner of the bedroom, an enclosed area about 150cm x 150cm, with walls on two sides and shelves on the other two, with two little gaps for the light.

It's awesome. It feels so comfy. It's got the lighting I like. My chair could be better, but it's okay. I can hide in there.

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