Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

jacobwilliamroy

I actually prefer going to work. Being out of the house for 5 days a week really helps to reduce the utility bill.

Also I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.

View on HN

I think the general tone is, feel free to go, but don't drag us along.

Who was talking about you, specifically?

Ask yourself the same

I want to be in the office some. Three years of trying to work on complex systems/problems/concepts purely over video calls is quite enough of that.

But it doesn't need to be every day, and I also have non-work obligations that are often far easier to accomplish during the week if there's some flexible time.

Interesting, I and all of my neighbors disagree. Thankfully the whole conversation has nothing to do with one person.

I just think it's important to remember that not everyone is rich enough to have a home environment that's as good or better than the one at work. And also consider that the company bears a lot of expenses by having people work on-site and I rarely see discussions of who is going to be paying those bills or how that's supposed to work.

I don't think anyone is proposing forcing you to work from home.

No, but if many people are working from home (and socializing the costs of office space), then the company has less incentive to keep an office around at all, leaving people who prefer working from an office out of luck.

> socializing the costs of office space

Aren’t we talking about private businesses here?

I don't mean "socializing the costs" in the sense that the public sector is paying for it, but the employees are. It's a common strategy to spread your externalities and costs among your customers, employees, and the general public (see: large multi-national banks and automakers getting bought out by governments).

To look at it another way, if the money saved from commuting is put into home office setup everyone should eventually have something decent.

Have people not work on-site and the company can lower their bills.

The people who say this usually have a quick walk around the block to the office or a pleasant bike ride through a city park, not a 2 hour slog.

The majority of people do not need two hours to get to work. In my city, a metro area of nearly three million, you are 20 to 30 minutes from anywhere.

This probably depends on where you live. I don't currently work in a large city, but the last time I did, I lived 5 miles as the crow flies from my workplace. The commute time averaged 90 minutes one-way if I drove, and 2 hours one-way if I took mass transit. On bad days, both of those travel times would double.

Of course it depends on where you live and I'm saying most people don't need 90 minutes to two hours to travel five miles to work as you claim.

> The majority of people do not need two hours to get to work

The majority of people where, exactly? Your comment doesn't seem context-aware.

On planet Earth.

Ok, I'll bite. Where are the statistics supporting that?

In my case (Buenos Aires, IT work) it used to be the case that people all over the city and surrounding areas had to commute to the city's "microcenter" (what we call the financial/historical district), resulting in typical commute times of 1 to 2 hours. Dreadful.

So your statement doesn't ring true for us in Buenos Aires.

Does it hold true for the rest of the country? As in most of the country?

I think it's better in the rest of the country, but since (unlike say in the US) a disproportionate number of Argentinians are concentrated in Buenos Aires, and the major tech companies are here, the rest of the country doesn't really matter in this context (with a few exceptions that don't even come close to Buenos Aires).

What statistics are you working with to support your point about planet Earth?

>>In my city, a metro area of nearly three million, you are 20 to 30 minutes from anywhere.

Really, you know this for all 3 million people?

> Also I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.

It seems that you have some issues going on, no need to drag your colleagues into that.

I feel the same, but I am still not going to do the commute ever again. It is much easier to do meals and start automated tasks (like a load of laundry) during a break. It is nice to have time in the evening to do things so I can actually use the weekends for myself.

> I hate being at home. Nothing good ever happens there.

I'm truly sorry to hear that. :-\

Reply on news.ycombinator.com