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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

And don't forget WFH vs working in the office are not two sides of a coin where you can pick and choose your adventure and it costs about the same -- working from an office has notably lower productivity (look at the non-FANG studies), costs way, way more for the employee and the employer, and has an unconsciounable carbon footprint (commuting, running AC in the offic 24/7, real estate, vehicles, etc etc).

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While I love to hate on forced-in-office work as much as the next guy - the AC point is actually the opposite of the truth. During the hottest hours of the day it's more efficient to cool down a single large space for many people than have everyone running their AC at home - now if your office likes to keep the temperature at 14C and forces most employees to bring in a space heater to keep from getting chills then that's a perfectly valid point... but most offices keep a "reasonable" temperature.

That assumes that homes have AC. Here in the UK it’s common for offices to have AC, but almost no homes do.

SF too.

how about the offset on all the vehicles on the road? People still need to cool their homes reasonably while at work (people, pets) when they're not there so the difference might be less important. also this makes the assumption you're living in a place that needs AC. Commute is all year, AC usage maybe not.

I can believe as a one-to-one comparison, cooling an office is more efficient. But people aren't turning off their home AC when they go into the office. If you figure that a majority of people won't even schedule their thermostat due to laziness, having other people at home, etc, and if even if they do, having their house cool down for their arrival home (5:30-6PM?) is still during a pretty hot time of day.

I would be pretty surprised if offset you could anywhere near the cooling of an entire office building considering all that.

I'm coming from the perspective of Texas where it's 100F effectively all day during the summer and I wouldn't move the thermostat from it's usual daytime setting of ~76F past maybe ~80F. Any more and it would take hours to cool back down.

This is just isn't true. Way way more AC gets used when offices are involved than when they are not (especially if the office building didn't exist in the first place in the flipside scenario). They leave office AC on 24/7, and people leave their home AC on anyway, so it has a multiplicative effect on carbon footprint.

I think it’s important to remember that this cannot be true of all jobs and job roles.

Sure but as a stock boy who absolutely can not do my job remotely: anyone that can do their job at home should.

If you were remote controlling a robot you probably could

Yes, but it could definitely be true of literally every single desk job. There are also many manufacturing, retail, and warehouse jobs that could be done by someone controlling a robot over the internet. If that becomes practical one could envision a 100% WFH economy. IMO it's an inevitability and is way way more practical than autonomous robots replacing jobs.

Why non-FANG studies? Are FANG companies more effective at using people in office?

Can you link to some of these studies? I feel like a lot of articles / comments are pointing to said studies, but rarely link to them. Looking at the people and companies around me I would personally take such a broad conclusion with a grain of salt.

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