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Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure work from home always meant work from anywhere.

As an employer anywhere makes it real complicated. Many jurisdictions have a tax on wages earned while there, couple of big examples CA, NY and then even NYC on city income tax.

If you choose to work in NYC as an employer I'm obligated to collect and remit tax there. For individuals or on a one off basis this doesn't get tracked or audited much. If it became systematic it would.

This doesn't even contemplate the complexity if you choose to work from a different country. As an employer if I allow you to change your permanent address to France am I bound to manage your employment under French labor law? IANAL but I believe I am.

What if I knowingly allow you to work from a country where you keep your permanent address in the US and you are on a vacation visa instead of one where work is permitted. As a business am I obligated to report or am I running the risk of penalties from that country too?

Anywhere is really complicated.

w.r.t ". As an employer if I allow you to change your permanent address to France am I bound to manage your employment under French labor law?", IANAL either, but I know for a fact that this is the case. The tax man wants his cut, so the employer would have to establish a (subsidiary) company in France, and that becomes the local employer. There's absolutely no way you could be an employee (in the French labor law sense, which is very specific) of any foreign company while working in France (that would be "clandestine labor", see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travail_dissimul%C3%A9_en_Fran...).

It's not specific to France, either. All countries need their tax base (well not just taxation, there's also retirement/joblessness/healthcare contributions, etc...).

Not really if your office is full of hardware.

That's one thing that blows my mind - how are people productive sitting in a coffee shop typing away on a 15" dell? I don't know how effective I'd be with only one monitor and a trackpad.

Yeah, my productivity would take a hit if I didn't have a quiet space and a good monitor setup. I've always assumed that coffee shops were more for meeting people than actually getting work done.

I have a very different experience. I’ve often found sitting in a coffee shop helps things click and helps me get into a flow when doing development. It’s the right level of background noise for me and the little bit of public observation helps me get less distracted. A few hours of focused work can go by in a flash. When I worked in an open office I would sometimes spend an hour or two at the coffee shop knocking out some development tasks so that a big chunk of my days work was done, then when in the office I could focus more on collaboration, helping others, socializing a bit, without the big struggle to regain focus after the natural interruptions that happen at work.

Maybe for some people, having other people around means they're somehow more happy/fulfilled/something like that, and that increases their productivity more than the poor setup decreases it.

I normally have a 42” widescreen monitor at my office, but I still use the laptop keyboard and trackpad under it. Using the laptop alone isn’t that different

It would be for me. I am constantly handling looking at reference material and it's easier to turn my head than alt-tab, but I suppose that's a learned skill, same as changing out a trackpad for a mouse.

It depends on what work you’re doing. It wasn’t all that long ago that most people were using 17” monitors in the office. For a lot of people (myself included) lots of screen real estate is nice occasionally but I can work fine 95% of the time on my 16” laptop screen. A laptop stand and external keyboard/mouse makes a big difference to productivity when working from a laptop all day mostly because it’s much more comfortable.

I've adjusted, but for the first few weeks of working from home with a single monitor felt like losing a few intelligence points. But I didn't want to give up working on the couch where I could hang out with my kids.

I RDP into my laptop from my home computer just to keep my monitors, keyboard, and mouse, and it's not that slow with the laptop and the computer running on the same network.

I'm fortunate that I can access all work resources from my personal computer, especially now that my workplace has been more liberal in providing VPN access to certain resources, about which they were previously reluctant (Well, they funneled many people to a poorly performing Citrix "Workspace", especially overloaded at the moment. It hurts to have to spend 7 or 8 minutes waiting for a remote-hosted version of Excel to load, navigate to a network drive, just to open a file)

In any case, I'm set now, and my home setup is significantly faster than work-issued laptops. Even with multi monitors, it will be tough going back to a slow setup. Maybe I'll start RDP'ing into my home computer to "work from home" while at the office when everything opens up again.

A lot of what I do is the cloud as well, but I'm resisting installing all the supporting software (Visual Studio, SSMS, all the various repos I manage) I'd need onto my home computer.

Maybe I should, as, yeah, my home setup is much much faster than my work laptop.

Paper, pencils, and extra punch cards, just in case you make mistakes.

Funny, I read the original comment the way around. Hardware as in products I work on. At home I have a whole rack of different equipment from different product lines that I need to access from time to time. Sometimes I’m using them all day, sometimes it can be weeks before I power them on again. If you aren’t selling something physical then it doesn’t matter.

And I use a laptop with mouse in my home office, no external screen.

That's what I was sort of going after, although the workstation setup is important too.

My desk is full of exposed boards, cat5 cables going in and out of them, rs232 cables going in and out of them, power supplies, switches, multimeter, oscilloscope, breadboard, jumper wires, sd cards, screwdrivers, pliers, random components, and yes a couple laptops. With a big external screen & keyboard and mouse :) (Oh and yes, papers & pencils too!)

I wouldn't want to read schematics too much on a laptop screen. In fact I'm thinking my 30" screen is kinda small for that.

Traveling around with a smallish monitor, keyboard, and mouse seems pretty doable to me

Except right now, when all my favourite working places are closed because of the virus...

unless your equipment is a workstation that weighs 20 lbs all together on the cart and requires plugging in a dozen wires to move it more than three feet

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