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So, you found simple solution for very complicated dynamic and you actually believe you solved this problem? I don't care about offices with doors. Sure, they

So, you found simple solution for very complicated dynamic and you actually believe you solved this problem? I don't care about offices with doors. Sure, they're better, but still it doesn't solve my issues - I care about commute - time and money, especially time. I've been commuting like 3h / day before WFH and I don't want to go back unless you pay me at least 2.5x

dt3ft 3y ago
Only this would make me consider going back to the office: a 5 hour workday, paid as 8. The 3 remaining hours would be compensating for the commute, which includes the time to get dressed. Commuting costs and food should be compensated as well. Nothing else. Even with the above, I would still prefer a hybrid or remote positions as long as I have a choice. Standing on a crowded train is not something I want to do every day (once a week is plenty), there is simply nothing the company can offer to make me reconsider.
- laserlight 3y ago
  > which includes the time to get dressed Thanks for mentioning this. It drives me crazy how people think of commute time as the time their engines are running, whereas the overhead of doing so is relatively significant.
  - Thlom 3y ago
    Do you guys actually WFH in your underpants?
    - namrog84 3y ago
      Generally yes. I typically prefer just being in my boxers at home. No shirt or pants. Always strip down to that the moment I get home too. Many times if I needed to be on camera I'd only put on shirt long enough to be on camera and make sure my camera was positioned high enough that if I stood up. My boxers wouldn't be seen. Buy even then it did happen from time to time.
    - laserlight 3y ago
      I’m always in my home wear, t-shirt and shorts.
  - namrog84 3y ago
    Not just dressing or engine running but everything. When wfh I can prepare breakfast during morning meeting wearing wireless headset. When going into office I either had to make food before I leave or go out of my way to buy something (on way to work or at work). It's not hard to listen in on daily morning meetings and prep breakfast or same with lunch.
WirelessGigabit 3y ago
Even if you pay me 2.5x. I don't want to. I like living out there. No traffic, no people around me. I walk outside an I'm in the desert. Solitude.
samstave 3y ago
I am 1,000% with Chuck... My best, most productives were in offices with doors and one other space-mate and we both liked the door closed and the light off. I rebuilt Compaq 4U rackmount servers in the dark in that office. I loved it. - I hated Intel cubes - even though the cube was ~7' tall and the ceilings were ~13' - they still sucked. (I forgot the humble brag ;; my cube and Pee Schedule was right next to Andy Grove - and for who-knows we always ended up peeing next to eachother (never spoke) But I never went to my cube next to his (SC5) And we just ran the game lab... (golden gaming of my life (about to start BG3) - but yeah I have had surreal tech experiences in my life... I've hated every open office. (fb being the worst) -- The WAYMO campus should just be little auto-driving "cubicle pods" that roam around and find the magnettic connection to the person you want to talk to and you both agree to meet - and then on the SmartMAC (like tarmac) the little pods just route you to eachother and dock. Think Conways Game of Conferencing - and all the little pods can form SNAKE like elements, or TETRIS Rooms - gimme a big L!
rabuse 3y ago
Not to mention the people who have children at home, and the massive savings of not having to pay for daycare. That's major.
- seneca 3y ago
  How is working from home able to replace daycare? That's a new one to me.
  - cyberlurker 3y ago
    Yea that makes no sense. Maybe during the pandemic it made sense when daycares were closed down and people were worried about the health risks. But now, there is no way you can tend to a kid and be a productive remote employee at the same time.
    - xmcqdpt2 3y ago
      I'm a relatively young parent and I've had (childless) friends tell me similar things. Some people don't understand how much work it is to keep a 4 year old entertained. The article funnily mentions "pet or child care", with EY handing out 800$ per year for it. What's 800$ of childcare, like two weeks? One week?
      - cyberlurker 3y ago
        Based on what I know, $800 is roughly two weeks depending on where you live. A full month at $1600 is not unreasonable for an 8 hour work day, 5 days a week at a reasonably good daycare. It can be perhaps as much as $600 lower a month in low cost areas and hundreds higher in major metro areas. This is for one kid. But these costs are dwarfed by hiring a legal nanny for watching a single kid. To do it legally in most states requires making them a full time employee with benefits and insurance, which I suppose is nice and all except it makes the entire thing unaffordable for even upper middle class incomes. So of course plenty of people do it under the table, which has its own set of problems. Childcare and modern parenting is actually fascinating and depressing. The answer tends to be money and/or leaning on family. Also the government does some kind of tax savings account for daycare expenses but the total amount falls far short of enough to cover services for a full time job. An obvious policy tweak would be to do a means tested daycare spending account with caps that reflect realistic full time jobs and help low income folk. The current one is a joke. Back on topic: an underrated benefit of WFH is you can set your own hours with some clever time management with a partner. A parent can get up early and do work, have the other parent drop the kid at daycare, and then the first parent can pickup the kid from daycare so the second parent can work longer. And there can be trading of time between the parents to accommodate deadlines. Having to physically go into an office on a regular basis screws this entire system up. The forced nature of in-office work is something I will fight against as much as I can, even though I very much enjoy gathering with others to work in person when it makes sense.
vladslav 3y ago
Can't agree more. I don't care about a personal cubicle with a door. But I care how much time I spend in traffic on my way to and back from the office.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I think this is a great comment. > I care about commute - time and money, especially time. I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do? Not snark, 100% serious. Hired a consultant who was fairly specialized and she spent 6 months working for me and at the end quit but offered to come back in 6 months. Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved. She had worked out what was, to me, an ingenious solution to the conundrum that there isn't anywhere near where you want to live that you would like to work. There are a lot of reasons why people won't work in the office, and I get it, working from home is way better for the employee. One of the more interesting things COVID did was switch the "balance of power" from employers back to employees and so far it has been pretty awesome. In my lunch discussion my message was more "You are gonna have to make people be willing to work in your office if you want to compete for the best ones." The unemployment rate is low, but employees are a population, not a single type, their effectiveness falls along a standard distribution like most things. To compete for the talent you want is making management "cave" to things like offices. It has been relatively minor so far, but as work actions go the whole "I don't wanna go back" movement has certainly been felt in the Bay Area. Organizational dynamics is a really well studied topic and co-located organizations are able to respond faster, and more effectively, to changing conditions. Consider firefighters who used to respond to a call from home, get to the station, and then head out. Versus ones that are living in the station and can start out immediately. It is a dramatic illustration of the principle but one worth considering if you are managing a large organization. Reading the comments (which are great btw!) I have observed that a number of people haven't contextualized work yet. Specifically, an employer is an enterprise that employs people to achieve its goals. The employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss). They want you to stay of course, it is better for them, and this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful. Yes, making such demands forces them to decide, and their decision might be one you don't like, but if you are true to your goals and needs you will be happier with either decision. It is just harder to recognize that future happiness in the moment when you're crushed by them saying, "Okay then, we will call Friday your last day then."
nickjj 3y ago
> I've been commuting like 3h / day before WFH and I don't want to go back unless you pay me at least 2.5x I don't think this is even that crazy either. I do WFH but if I were to goto the office in NYC, here's what that 9-6 work schedule would look like when you're dependent on a train: - Wake up at 6am, eat breakfast, get cleaned up, prepare for the day - 6:50am, drive to the train station - Catch the 7:10am train to NYC which arrives at 8:30am - Walk 15 minutes to the office - Work until 6pm (no private offices, segments of open floors with desks and monitors to plug in a laptop) - Walk 15 minutes back to the train station - The next available train back is 6:40pm which arrives at 8pm - Drive home from the train station to be home around 8:10pm to 8:15pm Here's the direct costs associated with that: - $268 a month for 20 train trips (a business week) with a discount applied - $150 for 10 lunches (I'm trying to average out things like a slice of pizza sometimes or something nicer and maybe you bring lunch half the time) - $200 for 10 dinners (half the time you eat near the train station while waiting because the idea of cooking after getting home is too tiring) - $15 a month in gas (kind of rounding here based on miles per gallon, etc. but this is close) That's an extra $633 a month and the food budget is likely way lower than it would realistically be. It also assumes you never once take an Uber or the subway while in the city. Realistically this could easily be $900 a month not even accounting for wanting to do fun and cool things after work since you're already out there. That's 6:50am to 8:10pm end to end (~13.5 hours) and you still need to handle dinner half the time. You also pretty much have to get up around 6am every day so you can't do too much at night. You're lucky if you manage to get dinner and fall asleep while watching a movie. Compare that to working from home: - Wake up anytime before 8:45am to give you some time to get ready - Do whatever you want between 6am to 9pm if you wake up early - Work until 6pm (my own private office or anywhere within reason) - Do whatever you want until you decide to fall asleep Your food budget is fully up to you. You can do optimized meal prepping to your heart's desire or eat out every day. Pants are optional at any point during the work day. I say that as a joke but also kind of serious. Your work environment may require wearing pants even if it's 90f / 32c with 70% humidity. There's also a huge amount of flexibility in the sense that maybe you have something to do between 2pm and 4pm like a doctor's appointment. You can still work around those hours when doing WFH and maybe eat lunch at your desk and put an extra hour in the evening to make it for it. Or maybe your job is ok with you just taking that 2 hours to do your thing and don't worry about it. That's not really an option when you have a long commute. You have to take the full day off. So now you go back to the person I'm replying to who says they would need 2.5x to go back. That's not all that crazy. Your work day goes from 9 hours to 13.5 hours which is already 50% more. You can't just add 50% to your salary because you're going to get taxed on that, and all of that will be taxed at the highest bracket you're in. Your life transforms from "work with a decent amount of personal time" to "I can't really do anything except work and commute". That's priceless in value or at least requires a substantial increase to consider it given what you're giving up.
berkes 3y ago
I also don't care about offices with doors. For me the main reason is I want to keep living where I live. Village near a small city in western Europe. Cheap living, lots of nature. But no big tech around. The closest "hub" with some tech corps is too far to commute daily. There's no way I'm selling my house to go live in a shitty noisy, overpriced appartment in or near Amsterdam Paris, Berlin or whatever and spend double the current amount on groceries, dining etc. I imagine in the US this is way more the case even. So if you insist on RTO, regardless of doors, you'll miss out on a large group of individuals who live too far away to commute.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I always wondered (although never tested) if you could do this unilaterally. Which is to say, assuming you work 8AM to 5PM "nominally" (with an hour for lunch = 8 hours) and each morning got in your car at 8AM and got to the office whenever. Then when your favorite map application said "leave by x PM to arrive by 5PM at your home address" you left. It would certainly create some interesting tension right? At one time Google was discussing live-in housing on campus so that people could live there. It was a non-starter due to zoning issues but their reasoning was they could create dormitory style housing like Foxcon did and pay people less actual money for more hours of their time. At its heart it was profoundly evil but the pitch was all "they are young, single, they don't want to bother with renting and keeping house they loved their college environment and they will love it here." And through the lens of the founders, for whom the best times of their lives was living in college working through the night on cool technical problems, it no doubt seemed like heaven.

dt3ft 3y ago

Only this would make me consider going back to the office: a 5 hour workday, paid as 8. The 3 remaining hours would be compensating for the commute, which includes the time to get dressed. Commuting costs and food should be compensated as well. Nothing else. Even with the above, I would still prefer a hybrid or remote positions as long as I have a choice. Standing on a crowded train is not something I want to do every day (once a week is plenty), there is simply nothing the company can offer to make me reconsider.

laserlight 3y ago
> which includes the time to get dressed Thanks for mentioning this. It drives me crazy how people think of commute time as the time their engines are running, whereas the overhead of doing so is relatively significant.
- Thlom 3y ago
  Do you guys actually WFH in your underpants?
  - namrog84 3y ago
    Generally yes. I typically prefer just being in my boxers at home. No shirt or pants. Always strip down to that the moment I get home too. Many times if I needed to be on camera I'd only put on shirt long enough to be on camera and make sure my camera was positioned high enough that if I stood up. My boxers wouldn't be seen. Buy even then it did happen from time to time.
  - laserlight 3y ago
    I’m always in my home wear, t-shirt and shorts.
- namrog84 3y ago
  Not just dressing or engine running but everything. When wfh I can prepare breakfast during morning meeting wearing wireless headset. When going into office I either had to make food before I leave or go out of my way to buy something (on way to work or at work). It's not hard to listen in on daily morning meetings and prep breakfast or same with lunch.

WirelessGigabit 3y ago

Even if you pay me 2.5x. I don't want to. I like living out there. No traffic, no people around me. I walk outside an I'm in the desert. Solitude.

samstave 3y ago

I am 1,000% with Chuck... My best, most productives were in offices with doors and one other space-mate and we both liked the door closed and the light off. I rebuilt Compaq 4U rackmount servers in the dark in that office. I loved it. - I hated Intel cubes - even though the cube was ~7' tall and the ceilings were ~13' - they still sucked. (I forgot the humble brag ;; my cube and Pee Schedule was right next to Andy Grove - and for who-knows we always ended up peeing next to eachother (never spoke) But I never went to my cube next to his (SC5) And we just ran the game lab... (golden gaming of my life (about to start BG3) - but yeah I have had surreal tech experiences in my life... I've hated every open office. (fb being the worst) -- The WAYMO campus should just be little auto-driving "cubicle pods" that roam around and find the magnettic connection to the person you want to talk to and you both agree to meet - and then on the SmartMAC (like tarmac) the little pods just route you to eachother and dock. Think Conways Game of Conferencing - and all the little pods can form SNAKE like elements, or TETRIS Rooms - gimme a big L!

rabuse 3y ago

Not to mention the people who have children at home, and the massive savings of not having to pay for daycare. That's major.

seneca 3y ago
How is working from home able to replace daycare? That's a new one to me.
- cyberlurker 3y ago
  Yea that makes no sense. Maybe during the pandemic it made sense when daycares were closed down and people were worried about the health risks. But now, there is no way you can tend to a kid and be a productive remote employee at the same time.
  - xmcqdpt2 3y ago
    I'm a relatively young parent and I've had (childless) friends tell me similar things. Some people don't understand how much work it is to keep a 4 year old entertained. The article funnily mentions "pet or child care", with EY handing out 800$ per year for it. What's 800$ of childcare, like two weeks? One week?
    - cyberlurker 3y ago
      Based on what I know, $800 is roughly two weeks depending on where you live. A full month at $1600 is not unreasonable for an 8 hour work day, 5 days a week at a reasonably good daycare. It can be perhaps as much as $600 lower a month in low cost areas and hundreds higher in major metro areas. This is for one kid. But these costs are dwarfed by hiring a legal nanny for watching a single kid. To do it legally in most states requires making them a full time employee with benefits and insurance, which I suppose is nice and all except it makes the entire thing unaffordable for even upper middle class incomes. So of course plenty of people do it under the table, which has its own set of problems. Childcare and modern parenting is actually fascinating and depressing. The answer tends to be money and/or leaning on family. Also the government does some kind of tax savings account for daycare expenses but the total amount falls far short of enough to cover services for a full time job. An obvious policy tweak would be to do a means tested daycare spending account with caps that reflect realistic full time jobs and help low income folk. The current one is a joke. Back on topic: an underrated benefit of WFH is you can set your own hours with some clever time management with a partner. A parent can get up early and do work, have the other parent drop the kid at daycare, and then the first parent can pickup the kid from daycare so the second parent can work longer. And there can be trading of time between the parents to accommodate deadlines. Having to physically go into an office on a regular basis screws this entire system up. The forced nature of in-office work is something I will fight against as much as I can, even though I very much enjoy gathering with others to work in person when it makes sense.

vladslav 3y ago

Can't agree more. I don't care about a personal cubicle with a door. But I care how much time I spend in traffic on my way to and back from the office.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

I think this is a great comment. > I care about commute - time and money, especially time. I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do? Not snark, 100% serious. Hired a consultant who was fairly specialized and she spent 6 months working for me and at the end quit but offered to come back in 6 months. Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved. She had worked out what was, to me, an ingenious solution to the conundrum that there isn't anywhere near where you want to live that you would like to work. There are a lot of reasons why people won't work in the office, and I get it, working from home is way better for the employee. One of the more interesting things COVID did was switch the "balance of power" from employers back to employees and so far it has been pretty awesome. In my lunch discussion my message was more "You are gonna have to make people be willing to work in your office if you want to compete for the best ones." The unemployment rate is low, but employees are a population, not a single type, their effectiveness falls along a standard distribution like most things. To compete for the talent you want is making management "cave" to things like offices. It has been relatively minor so far, but as work actions go the whole "I don't wanna go back" movement has certainly been felt in the Bay Area. Organizational dynamics is a really well studied topic and co-located organizations are able to respond faster, and more effectively, to changing conditions. Consider firefighters who used to respond to a call from home, get to the station, and then head out. Versus ones that are living in the station and can start out immediately. It is a dramatic illustration of the principle but one worth considering if you are managing a large organization. Reading the comments (which are great btw!) I have observed that a number of people haven't contextualized work yet. Specifically, an employer is an enterprise that employs people to achieve its goals. The employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss). They want you to stay of course, it is better for them, and this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful. Yes, making such demands forces them to decide, and their decision might be one you don't like, but if you are true to your goals and needs you will be happier with either decision. It is just harder to recognize that future happiness in the moment when you're crushed by them saying, "Okay then, we will call Friday your last day then."

nickjj 3y ago

> I've been commuting like 3h / day before WFH and I don't want to go back unless you pay me at least 2.5x I don't think this is even that crazy either. I do WFH but if I were to goto the office in NYC, here's what that 9-6 work schedule would look like when you're dependent on a train: - Wake up at 6am, eat breakfast, get cleaned up, prepare for the day - 6:50am, drive to the train station - Catch the 7:10am train to NYC which arrives at 8:30am - Walk 15 minutes to the office - Work until 6pm (no private offices, segments of open floors with desks and monitors to plug in a laptop) - Walk 15 minutes back to the train station - The next available train back is 6:40pm which arrives at 8pm - Drive home from the train station to be home around 8:10pm to 8:15pm Here's the direct costs associated with that: - $268 a month for 20 train trips (a business week) with a discount applied - $150 for 10 lunches (I'm trying to average out things like a slice of pizza sometimes or something nicer and maybe you bring lunch half the time) - $200 for 10 dinners (half the time you eat near the train station while waiting because the idea of cooking after getting home is too tiring) - $15 a month in gas (kind of rounding here based on miles per gallon, etc. but this is close) That's an extra $633 a month and the food budget is likely way lower than it would realistically be. It also assumes you never once take an Uber or the subway while in the city. Realistically this could easily be $900 a month not even accounting for wanting to do fun and cool things after work since you're already out there. That's 6:50am to 8:10pm end to end (~13.5 hours) and you still need to handle dinner half the time. You also pretty much have to get up around 6am every day so you can't do too much at night. You're lucky if you manage to get dinner and fall asleep while watching a movie. Compare that to working from home: - Wake up anytime before 8:45am to give you some time to get ready - Do whatever you want between 6am to 9pm if you wake up early - Work until 6pm (my own private office or anywhere within reason) - Do whatever you want until you decide to fall asleep Your food budget is fully up to you. You can do optimized meal prepping to your heart's desire or eat out every day. Pants are optional at any point during the work day. I say that as a joke but also kind of serious. Your work environment may require wearing pants even if it's 90f / 32c with 70% humidity. There's also a huge amount of flexibility in the sense that maybe you have something to do between 2pm and 4pm like a doctor's appointment. You can still work around those hours when doing WFH and maybe eat lunch at your desk and put an extra hour in the evening to make it for it. Or maybe your job is ok with you just taking that 2 hours to do your thing and don't worry about it. That's not really an option when you have a long commute. You have to take the full day off. So now you go back to the person I'm replying to who says they would need 2.5x to go back. That's not all that crazy. Your work day goes from 9 hours to 13.5 hours which is already 50% more. You can't just add 50% to your salary because you're going to get taxed on that, and all of that will be taxed at the highest bracket you're in. Your life transforms from "work with a decent amount of personal time" to "I can't really do anything except work and commute". That's priceless in value or at least requires a substantial increase to consider it given what you're giving up.

berkes 3y ago

I also don't care about offices with doors. For me the main reason is I want to keep living where I live. Village near a small city in western Europe. Cheap living, lots of nature. But no big tech around. The closest "hub" with some tech corps is too far to commute daily. There's no way I'm selling my house to go live in a shitty noisy, overpriced appartment in or near Amsterdam Paris, Berlin or whatever and spend double the current amount on groceries, dining etc. I imagine in the US this is way more the case even. So if you insist on RTO, regardless of doors, you'll miss out on a large group of individuals who live too far away to commute.

ChuckMcM 3y ago

I always wondered (although never tested) if you could do this unilaterally. Which is to say, assuming you work 8AM to 5PM "nominally" (with an hour for lunch = 8 hours) and each morning got in your car at 8AM and got to the office whenever. Then when your favorite map application said "leave by x PM to arrive by 5PM at your home address" you left. It would certainly create some interesting tension right? At one time Google was discussing live-in housing on campus so that people could live there. It was a non-starter due to zoning issues but their reasoning was they could create dormitory style housing like Foxcon did and pay people less actual money for more hours of their time. At its heart it was profoundly evil but the pitch was all "they are young, single, they don't want to bother with renting and keeping house they loved their college environment and they will love it here." And through the lens of the founders, for whom the best times of their lives was living in college working through the night on cool technical problems, it no doubt seemed like heaven.