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Comment by philote | Hacker News Reader

To each their own. Personally, I like being able to work and live where I choose and not be tied to a specific location due to availability of jobs. And I'm still able to shut down my laptop at the end of the day and ignore work until the next workday. My employer has "colonized" maybe 25sq ft of my home and I'm ok with that.

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Odd that you are being downvoted.

I work remote and travel around going wherever I want. The idea that my mental health and lifestyle can be “improved” by taking away my freedom and making me go into the office a number of days a week is preposterous.

I do meet up with my coworkers in person at a regular and infrequent cadence, and that’s always nice and pleasant. But that’s not what qualifies “hybrid” by any reasonable definition.

I paid $983/sqft for my apartment in the city, so unless my company wants to give me a $25k tax free bonus, and pay for a desk, chair, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and my internet, it’s a bad deal for me. Glad it works for you though.

Average commute in the US is 45 minutes each way, so as long as $25k is ~15% of your income or less, it may not be so bad of a deal as you think. (or total income of ~$167k; which isn't outlandish for even non-megacorp devs with some years under their belt.) And given you're mentioning paying that much for an apartment, I'm guessing you fall closer to that side of things vs. the general average.

> (or total income of ~$167k; which isn't outlandish for even non-megacorp devs with some years under their belt.)

Uh.. where might these unicorn jobs exist? All I've seen is salaries go down about $40k for like to like positions from my last senior role. They've all dropped out of the six figure park.

I've seen roles from mid 100s to mid 200s, all remote, for 5 YoE or so. Where are you looking and what roles are you looking for?

Looking anywhere I can at this point. Been unemployed with the rest of the industry for a while. Looking for intermediate to senior positions. Can do senior level work but tend not to go for them. I haven't seen salaries six figure plus in several months unless it's some ML guru rockstar ninja job posting.

LinkedIn has a bunch of 6 figure posts for full stack development so not exactly sure where you're looking. What's your field and YoE? And what's your physical location generally speaking?

Full stack. 10ish YoE. Midwest. Everything I see on LinkedIn for that is staff++ or team lead.

Probably should just apply to those then. Or search for senior software engineer on LinkedIn and apply to those. I just did that right now and get lots of hits with salaries above 100k.

It has those posts, yes, those salaries are also going down but I was talking senior to senior development salaries. Those are all under $100k that I can see. I don't have the requisite experience for staff++ or team leads, nor do I really care to have those jobs.

I honestly don't understand where you're seeing sub 100k salaries for senior developers. Can you send a link or screenshot of what you're seeing?

LinkedIn. Sub 100k salaries are the norm. What magic are you doing to get more money? Do I just need to like humblebrag leetcode or something to get the algorithm to spike my worth?

I'm not in the Midwest nor do I put my desired location as there, I set it as remote only and use the 100k+ filter. I haven't done any Leetcode for any of my jobs, just full stack.

Very few of the situations under discussion are about companies that don't have offices at all. So commuting is usually an option. Of course, in many cases, the commute will be to a suburban office park so you may have a long commute if you're determined to live in the city.

Are you expecting the right reference is for them to buy the 25 ft^2? Or just rent it for the time you're employed there?

I’m expecting them to give me $25k tax free to devote space in my home for the purpose of working during my work hours. I retain ownership of the property itself, but not the equipment; I would also reserve the right to use the space as I please outside of work hours, because it’s located in my home.

Those are my WFH terms. Companies can take those or provide me an office.

Fine, just say that figure; no one cares how you arrived at the figure (multiplying square feet times purchase price, nor what eggs cost at your local grocer).

The point was that real estate ain’t cheap, and I’m certainly not lending it to my gigacorp employer for free.

Of course it's not. You're free to set whatever price you want, but if you set that price and then try to explain it as "this is what it cost me to buy it", that second part undermines your first part.

Your employer, to the extent they want to agree to this, is renting space from you and you're citing and setting the price to buy it forever as justification. That undermines. Just name your price and see if they take it or counter.

I have been working from home on and off since pre-pandemic, but when it become a full time thing, I bought a KVM and a vertical laptop stand.

My team members do not care about being on video in calls, so this works really well for me.

I click shutdown, click the button on my KVM, and I'm done.

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