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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

Could we not retitle this: "Employees Are Accepting Lower Net Income for Going into The Office"?

That is, time is a cost. Commuting takes time. An hour in and an hour out is a 25% increase in time devoted to work.

Commuting also has direct cost: fuel and/or transportation, risk of accident, stress, etc. Commuting also limits where you can live, and the taxes you pay. WFH does not.

For some people, less is in fact more. To fame it as an absolute "lower pay" is naive, if not irresponsible.

Why not do a piece that walks people through the hard and soft considerations? That's more beneficial than parroting a shallow - and perhaps false - narrative?

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I was just thinking this same thing! These employees are actually making more money by accepting a lower paying remote job.

I think “pay” is commonly understood to mean monetary, not adjusted for location, risk, time, or transportation cost, and understood to be stated in terms of total rather than hourly. Saying people are accepting lower pay to work remotely seems like a pretty objective way of describing the decision being made. What you’re describing are the motives, the fact that pay is not the whole picture. I don’t think we need to recast what “pay” means to understand that there’s more to be considered than just that.

> I don’t think we need to recast what “pay” means to understand that there’s more to be considered than just that.

Yes, we do. Because a fair number of people are math / numbers "shy" and don't do the calculations. That favors the employers. Painting "pay" more accurately levels the playing field.

I think you want "utility", not "pay". Utility includes all of a person's subjective desires.

The downside is that utility might not be computable, or a person might not have a well-defined utility function(if they give inconsistent preference rankings between 3 or more choices).

Pay is easily computable, and also has lots of data in pay stubs and government tax records. So pay is better than utility if you want to poll people or gather data.

Right. "Pay" is good for data collection and employers, etc. But it's a broken concept for the employees.

In this case, they're not even talking about utility, which may be intangible and can only be estimated. They're talking about net income after housing and commuting expenses, which can still be easily computed just using median rents and commuting expenses of the in-office versus remote working populations.

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