I have 2 kids. Commuting took a huge fraction of the available time I could be spending with them and for them -- asleep 8, working 8, kids sleep a couple hours longer than I do, so absolute max of 6 hours on a workday I could spend doing everything I need and want to do with my kids and spouse. Taking 2 of those hours for commuting is not just 2/24 of the day, it's 1/3 of the total time I have available. Juice is not worth the squeeze.
I think the fundamental problem you've identified is the workday is too long. 40 hours a week is a lot, and most people work more than just 40 hours, sometimes much more.
Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?
Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours. Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
Shitty workplaces will be shitty workplaces. You can have traditional offices where work-hours are respected, and you can have traditional offices where everyone is "forced" into doing crunches and staying until midnight.
I think one thing people always misunderstand it: WFH doesn't need to mean separating work and home is impossible. Separate room that you can close if you have a house. Or going to a co-working space. Or in my case: Renting a 2-people office with a colleague.
I disagree. I really like my work and I really like my family. The problem with commuting is that it introduces a gap of mediocre-to-awful time use in between those two things that I really like. Working fewer hours wouldn't solve that. I'd just be doing less of one of the things I like to do, replacing it with either a meh activity (if I can take public transport or there is no traffic on the drive) or a super frustrating activity of driving in traffic.
We haven't kept on lowering the weekly hours because despite the unstoppable productivity gains, people want more stuff.
Want to work 6h per week? Live on the strict minimum.
Want everyone to work less. Not happening.
Regaining time spent commuting is a pure gain of time without conceding on throughput.
An argument could be made that if all workers who can converted to remote but also went part time, all kids would truely have parents and environment deadlocks we face would be more half solved.
But here we are still debating which of hybrid, on-site or remote is best for some company cultures, whether the model benefits employers or employees most and how can we make populations and businesses swallow a carbon tax
Commutes are long. They also need to happen at specific times. It’s easy to start your day +/- an hour or two when working remotely. It’s not really an option if you’re expected to be on site by a certain time and have home obligations prior to that.
> Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?
There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too). That means the economically optimum equilibrium is still to concentrate knowledge into select employees and have them work hard. Imagine that to achieve a certain outcome we can do it with, say, either need X people working Y hours or 10X people working Y/10 hours. Of the two, X people is usually a much better choice for employers because it reduces the per-employee overheads.
People also seem to misjudge their own preferences. Many might say that they'd like shorter days, but when tested they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff. Employees would like to work less hours in principle, but if you offer them more hours + more pay they take that deal.
In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.
You may feel like we're working too much, but the statistics paint a different story: we continue to work far less than we have historically. I agree with your concerns about work-home separation, but related to your example we're less than a generation removed from when the expectation (outside of those downtown office jobs) was that you probably were working on Saturday.
i think it's an interesting question. to me, i actually don't mind being available for a bigger portion of the day because it has come with a lowered total amount of time doing work. i generally enjoy my job so i am a fan of the blend -- I'll wake up, do an hour of work, go to the gym, come back and do another few hours, go run an errand and make lunch, some more work, then maybe meet up with friends and finish up some stuff before bed. i find this to be a win win, I'm available for my coworkers across maybe 12 hours instead of a strict 8 but in total i work less than when I was going into the office
The problem with the idea of “everyone working less” is that some people won’t work less. Even now, there are people who work more than 40 hours / week.
Someone who works 25% more than you will make 25% more wages and will afford a 25% more expensive apartment, etc.
So long as you’re comfortable living in a suburb with lower desirability, you’ll be fine. But you might get priced out of places where people work more…
In fact, it doesn’t take a law for you to decide to start working less. Plenty of people work part time… You just need to balance how much you work with the affordability of the lifestyle you want to live.
I have 6 parrots. They require hours of care everyday. The fundamental problem is the workday is too long, and not that I made a choice to add 6 parrots to my life.
While that is true, in the 3 years I've been working from home I gladly trade a few hours on the occasional Saturday for 10 hours of commuting per week.
> I think the fundamental problem you've identified is the workday is too long. 40 hours a week is a lot, and most people work more than just 40 hours, sometimes much more.
Citation needed.
> Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours.
It this some plot from employers? "We are forcing you to the office for your own sake so we won't make you work from home on weekends"?
> Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
Is this a serious question? Because I have other more interesting things to do on Saturday.
The folks with wealth have seen our productivity gains. We as labor have not. We seem to have less free time because we're working more. We have less free time. We should be down at least to 32 hours per workweek at 4 days. If we unionized we'd be able to negotiate such things. Unfortunately, our industry as a whole seems somehow illogical about that as it, we're all some 100x rockstar type. As it stands that we (IT/Software Engineers) are classified as salary exempt (in the US at least) is incredibly damaging. When you can be made to work 70-hour workweeks with no additional pay and with your job hostage, I'd say that's a perfect time to unionize.
But broadly speaking we in the US view down time as somehow the greatest sin imaginable. Take time off? Better be sick. Don't want to spend 3+ hours of your day in waste? How dare you, you entitled commie!
WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have. I get to lose two hours commute and an hour lunch that wasn't really mine anyway. My work week isn't going to be reduced so the time I have around that is what I can reduce. Given that I see no other way to do that besides working from home. When we work from home we must be diligent to create boundaries. Don't install Slack on your personal phone. Don't put your email on your personal phone. At the end of your workday shut the work machine down and leave it until the start of your workday.
>so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
I don't work on my personal time without additional compensation. If you want that task done on Saturday you can do it yourself. If you want me to do it then you can wait until Monday.
The incentives in place for businesses seem to dictate an ever increasing production of profits. There's no target production quota, where any excess is reduced to give more profits to employees.
I mean...if I could teleport instantaneously, then yes, the office would be less of a problem. I could work directly with co-workers and then pop up back home for my breaks and lunch and so on. But that isn't possible at present (maybe ever).
Even if a close cycling trip, that's still a burden most don't want to deal with anymore. Just think about cycling in a heat wave or thunderstorm (they're common where I live and dense enough to where being outside for just a second is the equivalent to jumping in a lake)
It is a little nicer from an efficiency standpoint to have more experienced workers around to train the new ones, but that doesn't change the fact that those experienced workers are now quite mobile and can get a new job with little effort. When my old company went to hybrid we started immediately losing the best talent. It was a trickle at first and then a dam bursting. They're finally accepting remote-only because they don't have a choice. Their engineering staff went from an average of 8+ years of service to like maybe 3, and that has huge inefficiency losses.
WFH, everything is in a 5 minutes car or 15 mins walk radius for us. The office would be 1h+ of commute away. And all that just to go there and put noise cancelling headphones to concentrate on my work.
But it's not only that. Kids need more than just being transported, fed and put to bed. You need to rush home to cook, do chores because you didn't have time to pick up the mess in the morning, take care of them. Then once they are asleep, more chores, and then your free time starts at 9-10pm, until you crash.
Being at home, especially flex time, nothing prevents you from doing laundry, and because you eat at home, you can do a bit more dishes after lunch, start cooking something for supper, etc. It alleviates my routine a lot and I also work more time with less stress.
But location is a limited resource - and thus, the cost of living (such as real estate) in a location that is of such convenience would be higher than a further away location.
Therefore, you're just traded the time for money.
WFH solves both problems at once. AKA, it increases efficiency of the entire system.
Don't know about your location, but where I live (Switzerland), kindergarten or school is decided based on location people live, not work. You can't just arbitrarily pick any school you want your kid to attend to (or you can but then you pay non-trivially).
Also, most of us change work more often than where we live (wasn't true for me in the past but should be from now on, and I think I was an outlier).
Another point - moving kids older then say 6 between schools/locations is pretty harsh on them too. For every single one that thrives with such dramatic changes and finds new friends easily there are tens who struggle.
It changes, but not that much. Being 20 min from home is still a lot more than 0 min.
Having a quick chat when your kids get back from school, taking a 10 min break with your family, spending 15min cooking a fresh lunch instead of waiting in line at the restaurant etc.
Of course not everyone wants that proximity, but if you do that's a big deal.
In most of the places the HN crowd works, it is hard to live in close proximity to the office with a family, you need to be dual income earning the big bucks and if you live in a low col area, they you have no guarantee where your office is located because jobs aren't clustered close to each other.
Because even with Star Trek teleport WFH means do not need to dress up accordingly to some common social dress code, enough for traveling outside depending on the season and so on.
I WFH in my underwire in a dedicated, locked, room at my own home in my own environment. So the problem is ALSO the office, not just the commute. The problem is the absurdity of keeping up models that was needed in the past, but have no reason today for most, they are needed only by some giant capital who profit pasturing humans like cows.
This is the problem: a society not centered on actual tech levels and for the people instead of for exploiting the most for the interests of a very little cohort.
I don’t want to cycle 20 minutes when it’s 105F outside (today), or 30F outside (February). Frankly it could be a 5 minute cycle and it’s not going to happen in those temperatures.
Secondly, when I get there, I don’t want to sit in an open plan hell hole listening to other people on video calls talking about things which are irrelevant to me because there aren’t enough meeting rooms with AV equipment.
I like the office more than most of my coworkers like the office. And I hate the office.
If commuting was counted and paid as a job function (which it categorically should be if your employer is demanding it), I might consider it. The other issue is that I've invested a lot into my home office. It's comfy, ergonomic, and extremely unlikely to be matched by the bargain bin garbage that employers furnish with.
And then move as often as you change jobs? Never settle in somewhere and build something up? (I'm not too often changing employers, in fact they moved offices to some more distant location to ""optimize"" than I changed jobs..)
Yes this is true. I work remotely now but I often choose to "commute" into town via bike or car, I'd say more days than not most weeks. But I would never go more than ~20 minutes by choice.
Whilst more time could be spent at home relaxing, I've just had a soak in the bath and have finally worked out why my dog would not come in the bathroom.
I'm lying there detecting the foul odour of my neighbours diet wafting through the overflow hole in the bath and basin!
At least my supplements are improving my olfactory bulb, who would have thought being on a mains water supply is a low level neighbourly germ warfare zone.
No wonder the water companies tell us to spend no more than 4mins in the shower!
I'm not ashamed to say that as soon our company enforced return-to-work policies (and not even flex/hybrid which would have been acceptable), I absolutely quiet-quit.
Bare minimum productivity.
And in my quiet-quit zone, I'm spending at least 20% of that time in the office sifting through roles trying to find the perfect hybrid/remote role.
p.s. the title of this article says "WFH perks" ... that's exactly what's wrong with how the Big Cheese view WFH ... as a perk ... it's not a perk, it's leveraging technology to make your staff more productive with the benefit of a more balanced life ... while, literally, showing mercy on them by not forcing the sardine-commute on them 5 days a week.
I have yet to see anything indicate remote work makes knowledge workers more productive. I prefer hybrid word, but exclusively because of the benefits outside of work. Anecdotally, I’m probably around 80% as productive at home compared to at the office.
Anecdotally, I’m probably around 150% as productive at home compared to at the office. How's that for a reverse card?
Seriously, I can't stand hearing other people talk. I can't stand hearing their keyboards, or their mice clicking, I can't stand to hear people walking around, I don't want them to be able to talk to me abruptly.
Work gets done faster when I'm allowed to focus in my own controlled environment.
I clearly remember Sonia Lebel, a minister of the provincial government, explaining WFH worked and that the public workers were more productive in that environment.
It bears remembering the massive misalignment of incentives here: the funds like Blackrock holding large portions of the stock in these companies also hold significant positions in commercial real estate, so if they let WFH become permanently widespread they could suffer a big loss on that, hence the push for companies to enforce work from office. Many companies themselves also have commercial real estate positions (if only in their own office buildings), which they don't want to lose value.
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The state [New Jersey] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time.
I wonder why that is? I suppose the governments of states with big cities stand to lose a lot of tax revenue if employees no longer need to go to those big cities to do their jobs, and can instead work from (and pay tax to) states with lower cost of living.
I loved the concept of index funds at first glance.
But Blackrock et al convinced me that there must be a better way. It's the responsibility of capital holders to employ their capital intelligently, not to hand it off to some faceless corporation and hope it gets invested well.
This means owning shares in companies you understand, and then voting in their annual meetings (this can be done asynchronously).
Capital is power, and deferring all of yours to Larry Fink is a horrible idea, even if you agree with him on most things.
> It's the responsibility of capital holders to employ their capital intelligently, not to hand it off to some faceless corporation and hope it gets invested well.
Would this mean that billionaires would have to manually manage their portfolios themselves? I assume not because they could hire a non-"faceless" firm.
Ultimately, this feels like an objection to BlackRock that would prevent the average person from having a chance but do nothing to stop the problem of large companies and already powerful individuals gaining more power.
I think it is a far-fetched scenario that Blackrock execs are calling board members to put pressure on CEOs to mandate RTO. So citation needed on your hypothesis.
I think it's much simpler - remote work can be awesome but needs complete rewiring of corporate culture, especially how we collaborate and communicate. Biggest obstacle to that is the ingrained habits of decision makers, who have worked for decades and find it easier to mandate RTO rather than changing their habits. On the other hand, I see remote being adopted by startups, typically led by young-ish founders who got used to the flexible lifestyle during COVID.
Well the CEO of Blackrock is publicly calling for people to return to office: https://fortune.com/2022/09/07/blackrock-ceo-larry-fink-remo... . You think he'd publicly call for it but then not use any of the massive power he wields to also privately call for it?
Doesn't it make more sense for the rich portfolio holders if the companies just re-direct office lease payments to extra dividends? That would result in higher net returns than arbitrarily trying to keep an entire separate office industry afloat.
Far more reasonable to me is the idea that management wants a communal atmosphere when working on team projects. You can disagree with this, and say it's unnecessary, but I am not sure why we need to generate conspiracy theories about Blackrock's real estate holdings. Silliness.
Anecdotally there have been several weird management pushes in my own employer “make sure everyone shows up for meeting X” that felt alarming at first. And when I asked a friend what was going on, the answer was that because they’d just leased this building pre-covid there was leadership push to use the space so it didn’t look like a mistake/waste. And it was just various wires getting crossed by ineptly delivered messages from middle management, not a hint to be sure to show up cause they were dropping layoff notices or something.
And likely with the market right now you can’t exit a lease or sell a building without taking massive losses, cause nobody else wants commercial real estate either.
So what I’m saying is, there’s often quite a lot of internal push at these companies to avoid realizing losses/making the COO look like an idiot/etc. It’s not just “blackrock wants them to”, although I’m sure that exists at the government levels etc. There is also broad corporate level resistance to the idea of realizing losses and taking blame for real-estate investments that are now underwater.
Not that anyone in 2019 could have predicted that the nature of the workplace would fundamentally change 6 months later.
Top talent probably never had much issue negotiating whatever they want.
It's the rest of us who are impacted. Most companies don't need or want top talent, just good enough mediocrity that will fall in line, do the work, and not make a stink about it. They don't care if they lose a few percent of top workers as long as they have a steady stream of easier to manage mediocre applicants. It's kinda a filtering process both ways.
But it's not just "top talent" as in the people who can walk into the number one company in an industry and negotiate their millions in compensation, it's "top talent" as in "the upper segment of whatever talent pool suits the roles".
If there are ten small dev companies who aren't competing with FANG because the upper end of their salary range is $80k, the ones that force office work will lose out on the top talent within people who're willing to work for that salary to the other small companies who offer WFH, even if none of the companies are discussing the type of "top talent" who are the best of the best in their field.
In my experience quite recently, the smaller non-FAANG technology jobs are in the $100K to $120K range. FAANG jobs, if you can get one, are more in the $150K and up range.
I’ve seen projects DOA and entire product lines and services slowly die once the engineering talent leaves. Cheap talent can be used for maintenance but new products and major revisions need a certain creative drive to envision the future and push through corporate entropy.
Is it talent, or is it experience and a sense of ownership?
Projects and products can fail when key people leave, because the organization no longer knows what it's doing. When the knowledge is gone, new people will have a hard time rediscovering it on their own. But they can have more success with new projects, because it's their project and they understand it.
Disagree. Every place I've ever worked has had 1 or 2 key guys on each team who made shit work while 8-10 others worked as you described. In the 27 years I've been working in the industry I've seen endless attempts both by individual managers and the industry to re-org or best practice or agile their way out of this, but the situation remains the same like a law of the universe.
First two jobs out of university everyone pulled its weight. Great team spirit and atmosphere in both jobs, but after this the experience in my third job hit me even harder. Suddenly I am one of those two guys and the other one quits.
I don't think this is a reality we disagree on... companies accept it too, but still keep hiring those 8 to 10 folks. But those 1 or 2 usually get special treatment of some sort. The 8 or 10 are disposable commodities.
If you look at the valuation of companies that hire or were started by top talent, all companies should want them. Crab mentality can make you rationalize scaring them away.
Companies hoping people forgot how nice it felt living in a nicer place and not commuting.
Being able to close my laptop, walk down to the beach and meet my friends is not something I will forget easily, nor something I want to trade for living in Madrid or Barcelona for a few peanuts more.
The paradox is that remote townhalls are probably so much more productive since everybody can just put it in the background and actually get things done.
This comment hits very hard, I can fully relate with this.
Also pre-covid I often worked in peripherals zones of Rome, one of the worst cities in Europe about traffic and public transport. I still have nightmares about those trips.
I live outside London in the UK, and the cost of travelling in daily is around $7500/year taking into account train and parking costs. Most software engineer will be in the 40% tax bracket for the top end of their salary. That means a company need to pay an additional $12500 to just break even.
If you do live in London, you will reduce your travel costs but your rent goes up. I don't have figures for this, but I expect it will work out roughly the same.
That is not even taking into account the costs of extended child care,etc.
I've been making similar calculations, but I include the travel time. An hour or so each way adds about 25% to the remuneration I expect. Given that the time is effectively fallow time that the company will receive zero benefit from, but would be available to me for reading, I can come down to 20%.
However, having to travel in to the office at all, even one day a week, would mean I still have to live within travel distance; this is a massive and expensive inconvenience. Not sure quite how to price that in.
>> I live outside London in the UK, and the cost of travelling in daily is around $7500/year taking into account train and parking costs. Most software engineer will be in the 40% tax bracket for the top end of their salary. That means a company need to pay an additional $12500 to just break even.
The cost of lunch in Midtown Manhattan is now $15 to $20. People often say, "why not pack your own lunch" and others remind them they just took NJTransit-->PATH-->Subway1-->Subway2 with standing room only so carrying lunch is impractical.
Different segments of the population have different concerns. For the elderly and frail, it is their joint health and the difficulty of transportation without seating. For some, the $12500 cost is huge. For parents, it can be time with children.
I'd say the cost of commuting FOR ME is losing 40% of 50% of my free time with children. By the time I get home at 7:30pm or 8pm, their bedtime is approaching.
I'm currently on a 2/3 WFH/RTO schedule and it is a nice balance, especially after 20yrs or 5x schedules.
No it's just the money part. Taking a rush hour train to and from work in London adds 10 crappy hours to your week, and chances are you won't have a space to open your laptop either.
If you add those 10 hours the benefits of WFH become very very real.
I took a glance and it seems that your employer could pay for the ticket and then they don't pay income tax, or they can reimburse you for the ticket, but then they must pay income tax. Kind of a strange system. Would you be responsible for the income tax if they bought the ticket for you?
Not saying I believe you should work on site or remotely, just got curious about transit reimbursement rules in the UK.
A season ticket from Harlow to London - a 40 minute train ride - costs £4982.40/year (i.e. $6,351/year) if you're travelling 5+ days per week.
And that only gets you between national rail stations - it doesn't include the underground, or busses, or parking. They don't even guarantee you a seat.
Trying to frame remote in mainstream media as a perk of benevolence from great leadership is in my view a wage supressing strategy.
If a business cuts office space by half or eliminates office space completely then that is a saving for the company, end of. Lease, insurance, Energy bills, internet bills, etc.
Framing this in the context of business to business. If my service created a saving for your company then everyone would agree that I could charge more for my service, as I stand to benefit from your saving. Somehow that disolves if the relation involves an HR department.
Hang on, you're saying a plausible scenario in the US is office workers carrying guns. How common is that?
I've been sidestepping opportunities to go to Austin on the grounds that I might be shot trying to commute to the office. Do I also need to factor in that whoever I'm talking to at the office might be carrying a gun?
I dont even know how seriously to take this comment.
First of all, active shooters can be found anywhere. Of course someone can go crazy and show up at the workplace with a gun.
Second, it depends on what you mean by common. 80% of active shooter incidents happen at work. However, you probably have less than 0.5% chances of being involved in one. Sucks when you are for sure, but these are pretty good odds.
Finally, avoiding an entire city just for that is dumb. Especially when you have way more risks in NYC or Chicago.
Readit News
Why have society's productivity gains not gone into reducing the time we spend working? Why do we seem to have ever-less free time?
Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours. Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
I think one thing people always misunderstand it: WFH doesn't need to mean separating work and home is impossible. Separate room that you can close if you have a house. Or going to a co-working space. Or in my case: Renting a 2-people office with a colleague.
Want to work 6h per week? Live on the strict minimum.
Want everyone to work less. Not happening.
Regaining time spent commuting is a pure gain of time without conceding on throughput.
An argument could be made that if all workers who can converted to remote but also went part time, all kids would truely have parents and environment deadlocks we face would be more half solved.
But here we are still debating which of hybrid, on-site or remote is best for some company cultures, whether the model benefits employers or employees most and how can we make populations and businesses swallow a carbon tax
Commutes are long. They also need to happen at specific times. It’s easy to start your day +/- an hour or two when working remotely. It’s not really an option if you’re expected to be on site by a certain time and have home obligations prior to that.
There are per-employee overheads (training comes to mind, probably tax & conditions law too). That means the economically optimum equilibrium is still to concentrate knowledge into select employees and have them work hard. Imagine that to achieve a certain outcome we can do it with, say, either need X people working Y hours or 10X people working Y/10 hours. Of the two, X people is usually a much better choice for employers because it reduces the per-employee overheads.
People also seem to misjudge their own preferences. Many might say that they'd like shorter days, but when tested they usually prefer to work more and have more stuff. Employees would like to work less hours in principle, but if you offer them more hours + more pay they take that deal.
In short, in practice, employers and employees both seem to prefer it when people work long days. If employees get more productive, both side of the bargaining table tend to negotiate for hours to stay at about the limit of what workers are physically capable of.
Someone who works 25% more than you will make 25% more wages and will afford a 25% more expensive apartment, etc.
So long as you’re comfortable living in a suburb with lower desirability, you’ll be fine. But you might get priced out of places where people work more…
In fact, it doesn’t take a law for you to decide to start working less. Plenty of people work part time… You just need to balance how much you work with the affordability of the lifestyle you want to live.
Citation needed.
> Here's the thing: long term, I don't think work-from-home is a good way to reclaim time. Losing the geographic separation of an office makes it easier to start doing work outside of normal hours.
It this some plot from employers? "We are forcing you to the office for your own sake so we won't make you work from home on weekends"?
> Expectations of being always-available will continue to increase—after all, you're already in your work environment, so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
Is this a serious question? Because I have other more interesting things to do on Saturday.
But broadly speaking we in the US view down time as somehow the greatest sin imaginable. Take time off? Better be sick. Don't want to spend 3+ hours of your day in waste? How dare you, you entitled commie!
WFH is the best way to reclaim time that we presently have. I get to lose two hours commute and an hour lunch that wasn't really mine anyway. My work week isn't going to be reduced so the time I have around that is what I can reduce. Given that I see no other way to do that besides working from home. When we work from home we must be diligent to create boundaries. Don't install Slack on your personal phone. Don't put your email on your personal phone. At the end of your workday shut the work machine down and leave it until the start of your workday.
>so what is your excuse for not completing that task on Saturday?
I don't work on my personal time without additional compensation. If you want that task done on Saturday you can do it yourself. If you want me to do it then you can wait until Monday.
1) add an 'r' at the end and pronounce it in your head (looser, loser)
2) convert to past tense (loosed, lost)
Deleted Comment
If offices, schools/nurseries and housing are all within a 20mn cycle radius the question of remote or in-office work becomes different
Even if a close cycling trip, that's still a burden most don't want to deal with anymore. Just think about cycling in a heat wave or thunderstorm (they're common where I live and dense enough to where being outside for just a second is the equivalent to jumping in a lake)
It is a little nicer from an efficiency standpoint to have more experienced workers around to train the new ones, but that doesn't change the fact that those experienced workers are now quite mobile and can get a new job with little effort. When my old company went to hybrid we started immediately losing the best talent. It was a trickle at first and then a dam bursting. They're finally accepting remote-only because they don't have a choice. Their engineering staff went from an average of 8+ years of service to like maybe 3, and that has huge inefficiency losses.
But it's not only that. Kids need more than just being transported, fed and put to bed. You need to rush home to cook, do chores because you didn't have time to pick up the mess in the morning, take care of them. Then once they are asleep, more chores, and then your free time starts at 9-10pm, until you crash.
Being at home, especially flex time, nothing prevents you from doing laundry, and because you eat at home, you can do a bit more dishes after lunch, start cooking something for supper, etc. It alleviates my routine a lot and I also work more time with less stress.
I prefer my water cooler chat to be with my family, not random coworkers.
Therefore, you're just traded the time for money.
WFH solves both problems at once. AKA, it increases efficiency of the entire system.
Also, most of us change work more often than where we live (wasn't true for me in the past but should be from now on, and I think I was an outlier).
Another point - moving kids older then say 6 between schools/locations is pretty harsh on them too. For every single one that thrives with such dramatic changes and finds new friends easily there are tens who struggle.
Having a quick chat when your kids get back from school, taking a 10 min break with your family, spending 15min cooking a fresh lunch instead of waiting in line at the restaurant etc.
Of course not everyone wants that proximity, but if you do that's a big deal.
What if they are at home?
Because even with Star Trek teleport WFH means do not need to dress up accordingly to some common social dress code, enough for traveling outside depending on the season and so on.
I WFH in my underwire in a dedicated, locked, room at my own home in my own environment. So the problem is ALSO the office, not just the commute. The problem is the absurdity of keeping up models that was needed in the past, but have no reason today for most, they are needed only by some giant capital who profit pasturing humans like cows.
This is the problem: a society not centered on actual tech levels and for the people instead of for exploiting the most for the interests of a very little cohort.
I don’t want to cycle 20 minutes when it’s 105F outside (today), or 30F outside (February). Frankly it could be a 5 minute cycle and it’s not going to happen in those temperatures.
Secondly, when I get there, I don’t want to sit in an open plan hell hole listening to other people on video calls talking about things which are irrelevant to me because there aren’t enough meeting rooms with AV equipment.
I like the office more than most of my coworkers like the office. And I hate the office.
I'm lying there detecting the foul odour of my neighbours diet wafting through the overflow hole in the bath and basin!
At least my supplements are improving my olfactory bulb, who would have thought being on a mains water supply is a low level neighbourly germ warfare zone.
No wonder the water companies tell us to spend no more than 4mins in the shower!
Deleted Comment
Bare minimum productivity.
And in my quiet-quit zone, I'm spending at least 20% of that time in the office sifting through roles trying to find the perfect hybrid/remote role.
p.s. the title of this article says "WFH perks" ... that's exactly what's wrong with how the Big Cheese view WFH ... as a perk ... it's not a perk, it's leveraging technology to make your staff more productive with the benefit of a more balanced life ... while, literally, showing mercy on them by not forcing the sardine-commute on them 5 days a week.
Anyway.
Seriously, I can't stand hearing other people talk. I can't stand hearing their keyboards, or their mice clicking, I can't stand to hear people walking around, I don't want them to be able to talk to me abruptly.
Work gets done faster when I'm allowed to focus in my own controlled environment.
I clearly remember Sonia Lebel, a minister of the provincial government, explaining WFH worked and that the public workers were more productive in that environment.
Here is an article where she is quoted saying WFH employees were at their productivity peek: https://www.journaldequebec.com/2020/08/26/teletravail-des-e...
This whole productivity thing is so dumb.
>Of the billions in tax incentives granted to US companies every year by cities and states, many agreements require workers to come into the office some of the time, or at least live in the region. For companies receiving these incentives, relaxing in-office attendance could be costly.
>The state [New Jersey] said it will revoke benefits granted under the multibillion-dollar Enterprise Zone Program to companies whose employees no longer work on site at least half the time.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
https://archive.is/eOeIv
But Blackrock et al convinced me that there must be a better way. It's the responsibility of capital holders to employ their capital intelligently, not to hand it off to some faceless corporation and hope it gets invested well.
This means owning shares in companies you understand, and then voting in their annual meetings (this can be done asynchronously).
Capital is power, and deferring all of yours to Larry Fink is a horrible idea, even if you agree with him on most things.
Owners should always, always act like owners.
Would this mean that billionaires would have to manually manage their portfolios themselves? I assume not because they could hire a non-"faceless" firm.
Ultimately, this feels like an objection to BlackRock that would prevent the average person from having a chance but do nothing to stop the problem of large companies and already powerful individuals gaining more power.
I think it's much simpler - remote work can be awesome but needs complete rewiring of corporate culture, especially how we collaborate and communicate. Biggest obstacle to that is the ingrained habits of decision makers, who have worked for decades and find it easier to mandate RTO rather than changing their habits. On the other hand, I see remote being adopted by startups, typically led by young-ish founders who got used to the flexible lifestyle during COVID.
Far more reasonable to me is the idea that management wants a communal atmosphere when working on team projects. You can disagree with this, and say it's unnecessary, but I am not sure why we need to generate conspiracy theories about Blackrock's real estate holdings. Silliness.
And likely with the market right now you can’t exit a lease or sell a building without taking massive losses, cause nobody else wants commercial real estate either.
So what I’m saying is, there’s often quite a lot of internal push at these companies to avoid realizing losses/making the COO look like an idiot/etc. It’s not just “blackrock wants them to”, although I’m sure that exists at the government levels etc. There is also broad corporate level resistance to the idea of realizing losses and taking blame for real-estate investments that are now underwater.
Not that anyone in 2019 could have predicted that the nature of the workplace would fundamentally change 6 months later.
Have they heard of the innovator's dillema?
Bueller? Bueller?
It's the rest of us who are impacted. Most companies don't need or want top talent, just good enough mediocrity that will fall in line, do the work, and not make a stink about it. They don't care if they lose a few percent of top workers as long as they have a steady stream of easier to manage mediocre applicants. It's kinda a filtering process both ways.
If there are ten small dev companies who aren't competing with FANG because the upper end of their salary range is $80k, the ones that force office work will lose out on the top talent within people who're willing to work for that salary to the other small companies who offer WFH, even if none of the companies are discussing the type of "top talent" who are the best of the best in their field.
In my experience quite recently, the smaller non-FAANG technology jobs are in the $100K to $120K range. FAANG jobs, if you can get one, are more in the $150K and up range.
Projects and products can fail when key people leave, because the organization no longer knows what it's doing. When the knowledge is gone, new people will have a hard time rediscovering it on their own. But they can have more success with new projects, because it's their project and they understand it.
Being able to close my laptop, walk down to the beach and meet my friends is not something I will forget easily, nor something I want to trade for living in Madrid or Barcelona for a few peanuts more.
If you do live in London, you will reduce your travel costs but your rent goes up. I don't have figures for this, but I expect it will work out roughly the same.
That is not even taking into account the costs of extended child care,etc.
However, having to travel in to the office at all, even one day a week, would mean I still have to live within travel distance; this is a massive and expensive inconvenience. Not sure quite how to price that in.
The cost of lunch in Midtown Manhattan is now $15 to $20. People often say, "why not pack your own lunch" and others remind them they just took NJTransit-->PATH-->Subway1-->Subway2 with standing room only so carrying lunch is impractical.
Different segments of the population have different concerns. For the elderly and frail, it is their joint health and the difficulty of transportation without seating. For some, the $12500 cost is huge. For parents, it can be time with children.
I'd say the cost of commuting FOR ME is losing 40% of 50% of my free time with children. By the time I get home at 7:30pm or 8pm, their bedtime is approaching.
I'm currently on a 2/3 WFH/RTO schedule and it is a nice balance, especially after 20yrs or 5x schedules.
260 work days in a year X 2 hours daily commute / 16 awake hours in a day = 32 full days per year.
If you add those 10 hours the benefits of WFH become very very real.
Not saying I believe you should work on site or remotely, just got curious about transit reimbursement rules in the UK.
Does that estimate also include hours spent commuting or just fares/car expenses?
And that only gets you between national rail stations - it doesn't include the underground, or busses, or parking. They don't even guarantee you a seat.
If a business cuts office space by half or eliminates office space completely then that is a saving for the company, end of. Lease, insurance, Energy bills, internet bills, etc.
Framing this in the context of business to business. If my service created a saving for your company then everyone would agree that I could charge more for my service, as I stand to benefit from your saving. Somehow that disolves if the relation involves an HR department.
I've been sidestepping opportunities to go to Austin on the grounds that I might be shot trying to commute to the office. Do I also need to factor in that whoever I'm talking to at the office might be carrying a gun?
First of all, active shooters can be found anywhere. Of course someone can go crazy and show up at the workplace with a gun.
Second, it depends on what you mean by common. 80% of active shooter incidents happen at work. However, you probably have less than 0.5% chances of being involved in one. Sucks when you are for sure, but these are pretty good odds.
Finally, avoiding an entire city just for that is dumb. Especially when you have way more risks in NYC or Chicago.