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Comment by davidgay | Hacker News Reader

What these discussions always seem to forget is that WFH is you paying for your office space, i.e., a subsidy (versus the previous status quo) to your employer.

That's easy to forget for people in the US where land and housing is cheap, but I'm not convinced that it's so exciting in, e.g., Switzerland where residential land is scarce and expensive.

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Long commutes are also a subsidy to your employer. If employers paid enough for a similar standard of living down the block from the office, that's what everyone would do.

Truth. Would employers be ok with long commutes if they had to subsidize the cost of the commute from the time and fuel/wear and tear cost? Suddenly under that hypothetical scenario WFH becomes a lot more attractive

That mostly never happens. Even in the past when you had to travel, a lot of time is spent packing, going to the airport etc that's never accounted for as a part of your "work hours".

True, but that’s more of a slight against what is culturally billable as work time vs the reality of the intangibles of how much it costs to commute in the employee-employer relationship

It’s uncommon worldwide, but the majority of Japanese companies pay for employees’ regular daily commuting expenses in full [1]. Typically this is in the form of a commuter ticket that is good for journeys anywhere on the route between your home and work. Pretty handy if you want to break up your journey midway to run some errands or stop off at a cafe or restaurant.

Granted, this is something of a holdover from Japanese society in the late 20th century where lifetime employment was the norm, and nowadays this practice is becoming slightly less common. For instance, a specialist working for a Japanese company (like myself, a few years back), should expect to pay for their own transportation costs. Frankly, it was worth bearing the cost myself, though, as I did not need to reciprocate loyalty to the company in the same way my coworkers did by spending long hours at the office and participating in mandatory-ish social gatherings that lasted late into the night.

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/10/14/business/how-em...

I worked before in some companies that they pay you 10% of your salary as a commute compensation, and 25% for housing, outside the US.

Long commutes are mostly employees choosing to live further away from the office. I saw it often with my coworkers. They could have lived closer to the office. I got a place across the street from my office. Later we choose to move away because we wanted a bigger house.

If everyone moved within 3 miles of their office it would massively cleanup the traffic commute situation. But we build huge highways which subsidizes people who live far away from their offices.

I’m reminded of a previous house move. A two-bedroom flat 20 miles from work was £125k, and one within a mile, but otherwise similar, was about £350k. I could barely afford the first one.

Most of the time, if your employer is in town, housing there costs a lot more for a lot less (or the same) space. Many people cannot afford to double or triple (or more) their housing cost in order to live in town close to their work. Employers aren't willing to pay you more if you live closer to work in order to compensate you for this increase in costs. And then, there's no guarantee that this job you've arranged your life around will be permanent or career-long, so why do it? Why increase your rent or mortgage immensely to use more of the identical paycheck for a decreased standard of living with no guarantees of employment stability? And that's before we consider any other factors like where the better schools/less violent areas/etc. might be for raising children.

We knew a family in a close-in suburb of Washington, DC, about a mile outside the Beltway. Both parents worked for the EPA at White Oak, perhaps three miles from their house. Then the government reshuffled, and that part of the EPA ended up in Crystal City, Virginia, may twelve miles away, but a much longer commute.

This kind of thing happens to people a lot. My wife's then employer moved from downtown Washington to Rosslyn, Virginia--not a great difference in distance, but a worse commute. [Edit] I should add that this employer then moved back to Washington, DC. The Rosslyn location had the merit of being close to a Metro station, the new location was a mile or more from one.

Yes, but that's a much cheaper cost to me than commuting, and I don't live in the USA.

If you factor in time savings from not commuting, it becomes very expensive to commute to an office every day.

> What these discussions always seem to forget is that WFH is you paying for your office space, i.e., a subsidy (versus the previous status quo) to your employer.

Another way to look at the same situation is an employer is bonusing 1+ hours of non-work life each day previously spent preparing for and then commuting by an employee when they work from home.

Whether or not this is a cost-effective transaction is a per-individual decision IMHO.

I save enough money in gas alone (let alone eating lunches out) to more than make up for this subsidy of me paying for my home office/electricity/Internet. And I also get to not freeze to death in a noisy open plan office all day. It's so much better it's not even a joke.

Office space is a computer desk, a decent chair, power, network, coffee. I expect I’ll always have that stuff at home, working or not. I even have a B&W laser (though only my gaming PC has a driver).

Office space is space - a dedicated room or at least a quiet, out-of-the-way section of one's home, where your concentration won't be interrupted by other family members, where you won't have anyone moving around in your video background during your meetings, and where your typing noise and bright monitor won't be keeping anyone from going to sleep.

In cities with small apartments, such space is a luxury. Often unaffordable luxury when you have children who also need space to sleep and play and do homework.

Meanwhile, you cannot achieve it in the modern open corporate office space … “where your concentration won't be interrupted by other workers, where you won't have anyone moving around in your video background during your meetings, and where your typing noise and bright monitor won't be keeping anyone from concentrating.”

When the pandemic hit I was in a 500sqft studio across the street for the (soon to be) closed office. I actually did not own a desk or monitor or anything. I had to move when the lease was up to a bigger apartment. Now that I live with my partner, they need space for an office at home. Now we have ~1000sqft and live in a less dense neighborhood to compensate on cost.

I would prefer a smaller apartment (less to clean, less stuff, etc) in a high rise. But now I can’t afford that since I need 2 desks at home. Our employers didn’t pay us more and now there’s no office to go to if we didn’t want to work at home.

It is clear that the tax system does not work properly for work from home. All those office expenses are pre-tax for the employer but post-tax for the employee. Makes no sense, they are the same expenses for the same purpose.

This is also why I’ve been advocating for more companies to take the google approach to perks - instead of more salary, provide a good lunch. A $10 lunch to me costs $18 pre tax to the company via salary (in CA). But that also includes profit margin on the lunch provider, so might only cost the company $8 to provide.

This is also why I have advocated for a “net worth” tax (kinda like property tax but for all net worth) instead of income tax. If you spend money on an experience or disposable item (good for the economy) you aren’t taxed on that money.

There should be a tax form you can get from your employer that states you work primarily from home, and then home office items/broadband costs should be deductible on it.

Except nothing is deductible if you don't surpass the standard deduction, so unless you can find $12k of other various deductions, nothing is ever deductible for the individual player.

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