Hacker News Reader

Comment by lnsru | Hacker News Reader

I love your advice. I also hate driving very much. But current city planning isn’t for pedestrians. Distance to office is 2 miles, it takes me 40 minutes to walk there, 20 minutes by car and at least 45 minutes by bus and subway. I would love to have an office, I can reach without driving in 30 minutes, but it is extremely seldom and expensive case.

Let’s talk about vacation. Going to neighbor warm country costs 200€ by car, 180€ by plane (plus rental car) or 540€ by a night train. I’ll take night train once to experience this, but other times I’ll take the car.

My factor now for choosing a new job is days I can work from home and 99% time it is zero. Companies suffer heavily from “general wants to see his army” syndrome (in Germany?). Home office could reduce driving easily by at least 20%, but companies have no benefit from it. Office rent will be paid anyway.

View on HN

>Companies suffer heavily from “general wants to see his army” syndrome (in Germany?).

Can confirm this. But I've usually been able to get 1 day working from home a week. (I think home office is a Denglish word btw, not sure if others will understand)

"Home office" is a fairly normal word in American English usage, though it's more likely to refer to a room in your house (where you work) than to the activity of working at home.

For example, there are tax advantages to having a home office (the room), versus having the entire value of your house be considered personal non-business consumption.

> (I think home office is a Denglish word btw, not sure if others will understand)

Native English speaker here: Generally `home office` would refer to the actual office room rather than the concept of working from home.

That said, I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary until you pointed it out, it does feel like a natural way to say it. I think people will understand fine.

I've heard Americans say Handy for phone, public viewing for outdoor sports events and home office, if they've spent enough time in Germany. So I guess Germanisms can spread. I used home office as well and I was told "we don't say that here",that's why I pointed it out.

For those distances I like to ride a bike, but that's probably a terrible idea if you want to minimize your risk of being killed by a car.

Distance to office is 2 miles

I literally have never driven as short a distance as 2 miles. It would never occur to me - I'd automatically walk or cycle. I think this comes from having come to car use relatively late in life. I relied on public transport or hitch hiking until my late '20s, and using my body to get around still feels much more natural to me than driving.

German here as well - the lack of employer flexibility is why in the last 15 years, I have been working exclusively for companies overseas, remotely. I found it much easier to negotiate remote work with an employer based in San Francisco than one in Berlin or Munich.

That's awesome. How do you find such good remote gigs?

Part of it is pure luck - being at the right place at the right time. An on site internship gave me a foot in the door for my first remote job. After that, I had experience in a certain niche and a couple of open source contributions under my belt.

Another part is just having the guts to ask for a remote job straight away and accept getting turned down dozens of times.

Nice, sounds like it worked out for you. Could you please say which niche or contributions gets you the most chances in landing remote work?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com