Work-from-home is the new normal in Canada
nationalpost.com
nationalpost.com
It’s a very notable shift for office workers. It just so happens that every newspaper opinion writer is in the exact socio-economic group most affected and way too often it’s talked about as if it’s universal.
It also leads to under coverage of important side effects: for example, here in NYC the economics of the subway system have been messed up since the start of the pandemic. If every office worker works from home the system suddenly loses a ton of revenue. But if they cut back on service it’ll disproportionately affect the (typically lower income) workers that still depend on it. Not unsolvable but rarely talked about.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141002...
Option for SOME employees.
I'd say that nobody can reliably predict even short term problems. WFH is just too different. We can only react to them, and not know if the reaction solved them or if it just got fixed by another change.
But, especially as leases expire, for both major employers and various support businesses like restaurants and bars we'll start to have a better idea of what the new normal looks like. (There's of course also no reason to think that the same preferences for work and living will automatically be picked up by new generations.)
I don’t think absolute terms like “rich” really help much in these discussions anyway. What is “rich”? I’d argue that people working 9-5 in an office are on average richer than the average retail employee by a fair margin even if they’re poorer than a CEO. It certainly feels a lot more relevant to the discussion at hand.
For what it's worth, my definition of rich has always been somebody who doesn't have to work. Having you and your family's livelihood dependent on the whims of an organization you don't have any control over is pretty daunting if you stop to think about it.
However, FAANG really exploded in size only recently (and then hit layoffs), FAANG jobs are concentrated in VHCOL locations, so savings aren’t great for all. So while their W2 may look impressive, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that they are “rich”.
To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. That doesn’t describe the vast majority of FAANG (or otherwise) employees. There certainly are outliers and success stories, but it’s not the default case.
Perhaps this is a good example of the uselessness of the term “rich” when used absolutely because I would never interpret the word that way and we’d be talking past each other in any discussion!
Anyways, I dont get your point. Rich people work ALOT! More for sure than 9-5 usually but they work. You seem to be confusing rich with "independently wealthy", aka: I inherited a large sum of money from my father Sam Walton, etc.
FAANG people are absolutely rich compared to anyone else and easily make the 1%. Think about that: out of 100 people do they make more than the other 99 people that work in cafes and Amazon warehouses?
The answer is yes.
Or
“According to recent studies, to be in the top 1% of earners in the U.S., you need to bring in an annual salary of at least $597,815. This means that the other 99% of earners in the U.S. make less than this amount per year. When it comes to net worth, the top 1% of Americans have a minimum net worth of around $11.1 million.”
Even within FAANG, most people won’t be coming near that
[0] https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa... [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/a...
The best I can do is: you're rich if you don't have to work to maintain your lifestyle. Anything else is going to be relative to some arbitrary evaluation scheme.
You can adjust those percents I suppose, but yes there is an objective standard for being rich and it depends on where you fit in the income and assets scale.
You can make a lot of money and still be poor if you spend all of it supporting a dependent with expensive healthcare needs, for instance.
Rich people don’t call themselves rich. It’s all relative. Director at Google doesn’t feel rich. Neither does the nurse who makes $90K in a town where most of their friends make $35K or the two teacher couple who brings in $200K working in Redwood City.
I am a "reasonably leveled FAANG eng" in Canada.
I have enough money to do the following:
- rent a 2 bedroom apartment in a smaller city.
- Order food from time to time.
Things that are difficult to afford:
- Any level of a car (currently car share). - I don't even look at house prices almost anywhere in my province.
My effective tax rate is around 48% and with the way things keep increasing in price I will likely never own a home.
Returning to the original question .... Am I rich?
By world standards you are certainly very rich, but probably even for Canada yes, you are rich.
Not sure if you're Canadian. But in case you're not most of Canadians net worth are tied up in housing that had been exploding in price the past few decades.
For most normal jobs what you make is pretty irrelevant compared to what do you own.
Many older teachers in Canada are far far richer than the equivalent of senior / staff SWEs.
Canada has become a very difficult place to "earn" your way to becoming "rich" without inherited wealth.
I think your definition of rich might be much closer to ... Maybe middle class (definitely not upper middle class).
In addition to this I grew up in objective poverty by Canadian standards so I'm not sure what you are on about.
It's often hard for people to truly grasp how utterly poor the vast majority of the population is. This also leads the wealthy to be confused as to why tech workers are often so hated and also envied in the general population. Essentially we are the rich, meanwhile we pretend we are somehow "average" simply because we only look at those very few people even richer than us.
For the actual average person these conversations are wealthy people complaining that they are not as wealthy as other wealthy people. I don't blame them for having no sympathy. Then you get articles and comments talking about the "end of in person work" pretending as though the majority of people who will never work from home because their jobs are such that they cannot are somehow simply not even people. It's not a good look.
Additionally I don't think most people on HN know what it's like to come from generational poverty.
Having to take out bad loans when you are young to afford basics.
Having parents leave / die early.
Having to take care of elderly / sick relatives who can't afford to take care of themselves.
Just getting a "high paying" job does not automatically erase all those things and make you rich.
It's a fact that the majority of tech workers are the rich. They are simply not satisfied with what they have and want even more, exactly what they accuse the 1% of. But to the 95% you and the 1% are both the enemy.
>- Any level of a car (currently car share).
>My effective tax rate is around 48%
I have a hard time believing this. Assuming you live in Ontario, the most populous province, 48% marginal rate translates to an income of at least $165k/yr. That works out to a take-home of $102k/year, or $8498/month. With that much money I don't see how it's "difficult to afford" a car. Even we assume you live in Toronto (ie. not a "smaller city") and pay $3000/month for a 2 bedroom, that still leaves you with nearly $5.5k to play with.
All of this assumes a single earner household. If you have a partner contributing income as well, I don't see how you can't also afford to buy an apartment after a few years of saving.
I'm closer to 100k, my SO own a business and make very little money. I rent a 2 bedrooms apartments close to Montreal, I order food regularly, own a Volt and I am currently looking at house 30 minutes away from Montreal. It's much cheaper than elsewhere in Canada though,
[1] https://www.rcgt.com/app/uploads/2023/03/individual_taxation...
With that being said I did miss speak. It's 42% effective tax rate (with nearly 0 back on tax return)
I can say I definitely dont make anywhere near 400k and idk if you know but Ontario is crazy expensive for everything
Quite often they're unrealistic expectations that work to preserve the status quo to the detriment of the majority.
It has caused this weird flip where it's now the guys making all of the plans because we're starved for social interaction, meanwhile our wives are more likely to opt for introvert-time.
Also, I'd argue that down down down is the right direction.
It's predominantly the women who are working form home far more. My guy friends do maybe one day a week at home while the women do 3-4.
Though I guess i have alot more white collar friends so this might explain why we're seeing different things?
We've assumed it was because women are more likely to do white collar work that you can do anywhere and men are more likely to do blue collar work that requires you to be on site.
Also could be that I'd imagine women still do more of the child care than men do and that is far easier done at home:)
So rather than white/blue collar I'm thinking that a distinguishing feature might be whether you need another human in the room to do the job.
Of course it's absurd that there would be gendered jobs, but then we live in an absurd world.
I would 100% believe that among highly credentialed knowledge workers, more men than women are in roles that make remote work feasible.
You’re not wrong, of course, about the broader population.
I don't know how to guess which gender among them works from home more. But people here underestimate amount of blue color female workers.
The fees to get to work go back into the employees pocket. Many of those workers live outside of the city so the city can't tax this group directly to make up the shortfall so they tax employees who's businesses are in city an extra %. With employees working from home the need for a downtown office changes.
Everyone who uses the service will need to pay more. The benefit is same service levels with less people so everyone gets a seat. If people cannot afford it wages go up or jobs go vacant
As a Canadian farmer, I would think working from home is the most common arrangement for farmers.
Farms wouldn't count as working remotely, since you're on the farm performing physical labor, even if it's at home. Software development in an office (or customer support in a call center) wouldn't count as working remotely, since you have to be in the office to perform that work (even if you use internet-connected devices to do so).
But using your computer at home to do software development for a company, or having a phone at home to do customer service, etc. would be working remotely.
IMHO it gets even more subjective around "software development from home wouldn't actually be remote if it's a startup that is based in your home, but it would still be working from home technically". But you get the idea.
WFH does not only mean sitting at a desk inside your house.
"Home" can have broader meanings than that, but if a mechanic owns the house his garage is in and lives on the first floor, I don't think most people would count that as "working from home". Farmers do office work too, and that's often done at home, but riding a tractor on a field (which is often leased) isn't, I think.
A mechanic building his garage on his home is absolutely working from home IMO.
Even for office-type work, needs of a pandemic aside, who staunchly works at a desk in their home? Working as a remote developer for 20-some-odd years, I've worked in coffeeshops, hotels, bars, libraries, parks, moving cars, other homes of friends and family, you name it. The freedom to work anywhere is the biggest perk. I have always called it WFH, even if not technically always done at home.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6534796
https://www.international.gc.ca/country-pays/mexico-mexique/...
Whether being effectively human trafficked counts as WFH is up to definition I guess.
Before I had kids it wasn’t a big deal. But now it’s such precious time that I cherish. I always thought avoiding the commute would be valuable. It is. But the real value for me is just being seconds away from my kids as they grow up.
I had a singular moment at my last job that sold it for me. I had a stupid meeting that ran until 6. It was completely pointless, serving to compensate for the incompetence of sales and product. I raced home and my 1yo was already asleep. Wife said he went to bed asking where I was. 12 days later I wasn’t working there anymore.
Life is fleeting.
I'd like to point out a couple of falsehoods in the article, right off the bat:
- Italy having lowest excess deaths -- popularized myth, but patently false. Compare here with some G7 and other Nordic countries [1]
- "as the pandemic dissipated in 2022 and 2023" -- the baseline Covid hospitalization rate across Canadian provinces is steadily climbing, already higher than peaks of some of the "waves" in 2021 and 2022. While coverage of the pandemic might have dissipated, the health emergency itself has become endemic [2]
It's interesting to see the Post take a WFH-friendly tone, up until recently they've been pro RTO. Wonder if C.A.M. has shuffled their holdings around, or perhaps insurance companies are starting to feel the weight of LTD payouts?
1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
2: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/coronavirus-covid-19-p... (click on Hospitalizations)
(I'm not arguing that this is right or wrong; I'm just saying how I think it is. This is an "is", not an "ought", argument.)
Policies like this are sometimes made because US employees might have state/federal tax breaks. Usually it is because the average developer wage in a region is a certain amount. Why pay $500k when $250k lands the same group of candidates. If it's too low let them know and move on.
When there is a complaint about a company not providing things a certain way, there’s a degree of unfairness owed that was perceived.
Companies do not owe anyone a location based factor of San Francisco and allow the employee to arbitrage it, or not. They have a hard enough time staying sustainable.
My preference is that location indexes are always in the employees favour.
I’m a familiar with some of Vancouver’s challenges, incl downtown.
Depending on one’s situation, it’s often easier to live elsewhere and fly to Vancouver on weekends to live, or schedule flights in advance cheap enough to be in for work meetings.
Anyone who’s had an Amazon recruiter chase them from outside of Vancouver to move there may have done the math.
Van has a lot of sustainability challenges, between schools closing, the amount of household income required to buy a home from outside of its circle, the cost of living.
If someone is able to live in Vancouver, and if they have a family, those kids may not be able to own a home of their own.
And bask in the 230 or so days a year that aren’t precipitating in some way. Incredible city those 100-130 days a year though when the sun is out.
Maybe they should.
I once worked it all out: if I was located in Seattle instead of BC I would be making over double for the exact same remote position I am in. Not only would I receive a 40% pay bump, but I would also not pay state income tax, and housing is cheaper in Washington than British Columbia. On top of that almost every single good/commodity is cheaper in the USA than in Canada.
All in all I would guess my purchasing power working in BC is around 35% of what it would be if I worked in Washington.
If I wasn’t happily married to someone who is very against living in the USA I probably would have jumped ship and moved to the USA like many of my Canadian peers. The TN visa is easy enough to get as a software engineer.
I suppose if your POV is very narrow and limited, then yes it is impossible. But giving up easily when things become difficult is a Canadian cultural staple, so rural dying towns for everyone it is.
But after years of WFH I've found I can't easily go back to work in that stress-inducing (for me) environment anymore. I've tried and couldn't make it more than a couple days. My coping skills have atrophied. I'd say it's even worse now with hybrid and online meetings or discussions from desks at the office.
Guess I'm lucky I still have a choice, but I'd jump at the chance of my own private office.
Young adults will no longer have to uproot their lives to live in an expensive city. They could probably even get a job right out of college without having to stress about living situations.
I realize you probably don’t mean actual interest (more investments), but the concept of interest gains is hilarious to me at this point.
A Canadian high interest savings account is paying out at 0.050% and only if you have $5000 or more in it.
1) We've got really high housing prices
2) Partially related we only have 4-5 big cities.
one of the US's strengths is that there are great cities in almost every state where someone can move to and find a job no matter their profession.
Canada has Toronto, Vancouver, and maybe Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa. I don't say that to shit on those cities and the ones I didn't mention but we don't have alot of huge job creating cities.
We just don't have the big job generating cities like other countries do because we're very concentrated in 2-3 areas.
That means our population is drawn to live in the GTA(surrounding area of Toronto) or Vancouver.
Work from home allows our population to spread out a bit, which is something our huge country sorely needs. it should also have the benefit of allowing people to move elsewhere and lower our property prices in the big cities.
We also have had dry runs for remote work in the form of satellite US offices with minimal supervision for a long time so we've got atleast some experience in our work force with remote work before the pandemic started.
WFM won't be a panacea that fixes our housing prices alone, we'll probably need to start taxing people who own multiple homes very heavily, but its a trend that could help bring them down and spread our population out to other areas,
Also, if you’re listing Ottawa and Calgary, you should list Edmonton too, all have metro populations in the 1.4-1.5 mil range.
Work from home denies the governments fares and taxes for the rail system to commute to the city, property tax from the fancy offices in the commercial center, sales tax from the shops and restaurants feeding the workers at the commercial centers, sales taxes and certification fees from childcare centers, etc.
Huh? The best evidence for lower productivity of wfh is a statement from a bank CEO who is de facto incentivized by commercial real estate loans.
WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes?
What if the vast majority prefer some level of isolation?
What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work?
Many preferences are not necessarily the best for us. I would prefer to eat nothing but hamburgers and never exercise, but that doesn’t mean I should.
> What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work?
For most people, I would argue this simply doesn’t happen very often. (Hence my question in my parent comment)
That might be said for the preference to work from an office.
> For most people, I would argue this simply doesn’t happen very often.
Well, perhaps those people ought to change their habits.
My social life and my work life are not the same thing.
Also, many people have families and choose to spend significant time with them instead of socializing at the workplace. Trust me, people with families, especially young kids, are usually not feeling isolated. With wfh and no commutes, they might even have some time to choose to be isolated during a run or other activity.
Also plain old Teams / tracking software showing you away more often more longer.
I'll counter you baseless claim with a baseless claim of my own - there's no evidence that WTH lowered performance or productivity. Quite the opposite, it likely improved.
What about the huge gains for both employees and companies?
For companies: much lower real estate costs, happier employees, access to workers across a larger geographic area, possibly lower wages paid, happier families of employees now that mom, dad, boyfriend, friend, wife, or husband aren’t commuting 5-10 hours per week
For employees: a better office and equipment in many cases and thereby more focus on work in many cases, access to live in a larger geographic region, no commutes, more stability since no move required when changing jobs, stronger communities now that people can stay in one place longer, happier families now that mom, dad, boyfriend, friend, wife, or husband aren’t commuting 5-10 hours per week
By all appearances, the WFH era has been very good to RBC...
I think this is likely more common in European countries as well and likely has a lot to do with socialized medicine.
The nature of this model leads to some pretty higher turnover then I’ve seen in the US as people roll onto different opportunities. I’m guessing this may have a large role in how this is shaping up.
I also don’t know what the laws are in Canada but I’m the US dictating where and when work gets done is the primary measure (from the IRS’s perspective) of whether you’re a full time employee or not. If it’s similar in Canada and you have a high number of contractors as part of your workforce it’s going to limit your leverage on forcing them to work from the office.
Of course this is also all anecdotal so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/
Also Canadian companies don't offer equity. The option programs that I have encountered have always been they type that you lose at the end of your employment. I've also seen companies fire everyone on the eve of a takeover to cancel any options.
I wonder if the differences in society will be exacerbated due to this or if governments will take measures to make commuting and living near workspaces affordable again.
So no. I don’t see this happening for every remote position. Some sure. But not all.
Source: a Canadian who has been working remote only for a decade across many different companies
They moved to a cheaper and smaller office that really doesn't have room for what you propose.
I don't doubt that there are some companies that will try to do that, but it just makes life easier for remote companies that are hiring.
Unmentioned in this article is what I think is one of the big reasons why, which is the housing affordability and vacancy crisis.
For older and wealthy workers they may have housing near the office, but for the new generation they've been priced out of anything in the cities, and young designers and programmers at my work are often still living at home in their parents' suburban basements. Of course they'd rather WFH than waste their day commuting in. I don't blame them.
On the other end of things many older workers with families used the opportunity to move elsewhere hours and hours away from the office and get a "cheap" SFH. They now have no option but to WFH.
Basically the government's complete inaction on housing policy has created an environment where everyone, except those lucky enough to already have housing, is worse off continuing to work in the big cities.
When I was a 20 year old I moved to Vancouver and got a cheap apartment in a cool part of town and I didn't even have that good of a job. Due to bad housing policy, that sort of opportunity is completely closed to young people these days.
I don’t get this part, if people put more time towards work, how is that less “productive”, what’s productivity definition by those employers?!
I personally left my previous job a couple weeks ago due to mandating full time at the office, even though I was working more at home and sometimes 15hrs a day -and wasn’t even paid those extra overtime-, but it was less stressful than 6hrs at the office, less wasted time at commuting, can snack any time, using my comfy chair/desk, quiet environment, no distractions in the “open office” or even catching other illnesses as all my peers working full at office were getting sick week after another, other peers who have families they liked spending more time with their kids as before the 2020 they barely see them a couple hours in the weekend, and I’m sure there are more benefits as those from my personal perspective. I understand it’s not for everyone, but going full crazy demanding everyone cramped in an area that is not even suitable for a call-center job let alone other type of jobs require extra focus, how about making the office more favorable to lure more people back to the office, how about having own closed office for all employees, relaxed schedules so people won’t waste time in the traffic, and so on, but that won’t happen, corps want the same old way which’s way worse than how work environment was back in the 60s for example, yeah employees won’t thats not gonna happen again.
Not talking about any given company or person’s decision to work from home.