Hacker News Reader

Comment by FlyingSnake | Hacker News Reader

Companies who go permanent WFH must be saving a fortune on leasing space costs. If these savings don’t make it to the employees who’re using their private space for office work for free, then it’s really bad.

View on HN

In the steady state your point is right, but transiently a lot of companies are holding the bag right now. Dropbox specifically just built a 770000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco which, let's face it, they didn't need in the first place (they were already trying to sublease 100k sq ft before COVID). Now they're marketing 1/3rd of that space into a massive glut of unwanted SF office space.

Graph of SF office space availability: https://socketsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/San-Franci...

What I find more interesting in that graph is the steady state of about 4M sq ft of vacant space at all times.

There's about 80 million square feet of office space in SF. 95% occupancy is actually extremely high.

As far as I'm concerned, saving an hour of commute each day more than covers the costs of a desk and using a bit more electricity :)

Indeed. I would gladly take a pay cut to not have to commute if it were an option at my company.

Hate this argument, because many of us deliberately live close to workplaces - and often for environmental reasons.

Yup.

In Canada, those who are overleveraged with massive mortgages far away form the office, are rewarded with mortgage deferrals and low interest rates.

Those who save money, rent, and made sacrifices to live close to work, are the ones to are losing.

The real issue is that one made a bet on a future that didnt come true. The opposite could easily have happened too. Oil prices could have hit $1k a barrel and people in the suburbs would be crying about the $500 fill up.

Except fuel prices going up was within the reasonable range of potential futures. Everyone suddenly forced to work from home wasn't.

2015 Bill gates disagrees with you.

Surely environmentalists would be glad that their car-owning colleagues are no longer driving to work?

Great for you. But not everyone has the same circumstances. I was a short walk from my office, a beautiful route I run everyday anyway. But I live in an old flat that expensive to heat. Wfh saves me nothing at all and is going to be extortionate over Christmas (additional ~5-10% of my income in bills).

Not only will they save money on office space but many of these companies are requiring employees to take pay cuts if they move to a lower cost area. Like all the sudden your value to the company changes because you moved?

It's not like the commercial leases all ended overnight. By the time many of those leases are done, the world will be on track towards normalcy instead of away from it, and people will be dying to get out of the house and interact with other people regularly again. Permanent WFH will eventually become an artifact of covid time like mask usage.

>Permanent WFH will eventually become an artifact of covid time like mask usage.

Lots of us were remote before this, even if we were commuting distance from an office.

But, in general, I don't disagree. I expect a lot of people will move back to being in an office at least 1-2 days a week.

What if they make it to customers in the form of lower pricing?

Or investors in the form of greater profit?

Let’s be honest, that’s where most of the money is going to go.

It's not a zero sum game. WFH can simultaneously save money for the company and for the employees.

The complaint is the distribution of that savings particularly in a highly leveraged scenario like COVID. Employee power is at an all time low.

Leasing is only a small fraction of the costs compared to salaries, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com