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> At the end of the day, like it or not, the majority of people working for a company of beyond a small size are going to be in some level of a collaborative environment. Logistically, it's easier to accomplish that in person.

You say this like it's a foregone conclusion, a fact. I disagree with it completely. It's far easier to collaborate remotely. You don't need find a meeting room, you don't need to worry about making too much noise, you don't need to worry about adding one person from another location suddenly changing the entire dynamic.

It's nice to work together in person occasionally, but I'd much rather collaborate remotely... and get together for lunch now and again.

> You don't need find a meeting room

You have to pay for your own.

> you don't need to worry about making too much noise

Unless other people live in your home.

> you don't need to worry about adding one person from another location suddenly changing the entire dynamic.

That’s comparing all-remote to some-remote, which is a different comparison than all-remote to all-in-office.

If you have a company with more than one office I think having some meetings with remote participants is an unavoidable truth. Perhaps not every meeting - but anything requiring collaboration between teams or features groups could require it.

> You have to pay for your own.

You have to do it anyway. The rent did not went up due you being at home during day.

Either you paid for more space or you lost space at your home during the 8 hours you were previously working at an office.

> you lost space at your home during the 8 hours

I guess that's true, but I'm not sure why I would care about my home getting slightly smaller when I'm at work. It will affect some people, but I don't know if it's many.

I would expect it impacts a large number of people that work primarily remotely. A lot of us have a home office because working from the kitchen or other shared space just isn't effective. The cost of an extra room (even if a bonus room, not a full bedroom) can increase the cost of a house by a dramatic amount; and then you also have to consider utilities and the like. Every time I've done the math, working from home costs more (for the worker) than going into the office; usually my many thousands of dollars a year.

Needing a dedicated home office room for various reasons is a big issue but it is not the issue I was responding to.

In "Either you paid for more space or you lost space at your home during the 8 hours", a dedicated office is the "paid for more space" side, and I was talking about the "lost space" alternative.

Not just when you’re at work, unless you tear down your desk and store it out of sight every single day!

Only if you got an extra work-only desk. Even then, an extra desk by itself isn't very big.

A desk is big if you live somewhere where property and rent prices are high. Like California, for instance.

Still, it's a tenth of what an entire room costs. When you do something like weigh the cost of commuting vs. the cost of that space, a desk is probably going to win.

And maybe I'm weird but I'm going to have a desk no matter what.

If you already have a desk that easily accommodates both your work computer and whatever other non-work things you use the desk for, then sure, but you could say the same thing for any new at-home requirements for a job that you just happen to already satisfy. I don't have any reason non-work reason to have living space dedicated to a computer desk, and I suspect that's true for most people.

> I don't have any reason non-work reason to have living space dedicated to a computer desk, and I suspect that's true for most people.

How do you typically browse websites at home? Do you play any PC video games? Steam has a ton of users.

(And if you use a table, then you could use the same table for working.)

Home computer use is limited to my phone and tablet on the couch or in bed. Haven't had a gaming PC (or any Windows computer) since around 2013. I get enough desktop computing exposure at my day job, thank you very much!

It's true that PC gaming is as popular as ever, but I suspect its rise has been at least somewhat countered with a decrease in desktop computing at home as smartphones became ubiquitous.

Unless you're typing all these comments with no keyboard (why??), then I think your work experience, with getting your fill there, isn't the most typical.

And there's been a decrease in desktops, but far more households have a desktop/laptop than a tablet and it's not far behind the rate of having broadband.

We're probably both just swapping anecdotes, but I suspect you might be surprised just how many general computer users overwhelmingly use their smartphones for nearly everything. I remember years ago being confused by the steady and swift increase in smartphone screen size. Why in the world would people want the little communication gadget in their pocket to be larger? The reason, I realized, is that it's not "the communication gadget in their pocket." It's their only computer.

I'm not working off anecdotes. It's 78% of people that have a desktop or laptop at home. Households that only have a phone or tablet as a computer are only 14%.

Laptop is a different story, because of the whole lap top thing.

If your laptop is comfortable to use that way, then you can work on it that way.

Or just put it on a table.

I don't see any need to distinguish between desktops and laptops for working from home. Laptops have built-in webcams too.

It sounds like your office setup is much much more minimal than mine too then. Obviously you’re very fortunate if you’re fine working 8+ hours a day on a laptop on your dining table.

I'm not exactly recommending a minimal setup, I'm saying that if someone already has a minimal setup they're happy with then they can repurpose it for work.

I'd add a big screen or two, a real mouse, and a better keyboard. But that would take up very little extra space when not in use.

Desk, monitors, keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and other things that go on a desk. I'm certainly not going to tear all that down every evening and set it back up every day.

Plus a separate office means a door to keep out noise, room for bookshelves and other office items, and the ability to just "put things down" without having to spend time cleaning off the kitchen table before dinner.

Any setup other than having a specific office for work is, in my opinion, sub-optimal. Sure, you can make due... but you could make due with a poor environment in an office building too... but why would you? You can't compare the setup in an office building to a much worse environment at home and then say "home is cheaper". For a like-for-like comparison, it costs the employee more to work from home.

> Desk, monitors, keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and other things that go on a desk. I'm certainly not going to tear all that down every evening and set it back up every day.

At worst that's still only a desk of space wasted.

And if you're willing to commute, you should probably be willing to spend 2 minutes putting all that stuff away. If you still decide not to, then it's because that space isn't needed very much.

> Any setup other than having a specific office for work is, in my opinion, sub-optimal.

I agree, but this line of conversation is specifically about if you don't have a separate office.

If you don't have a separate office, then odds are you have a sub-optimal work environment. So you're not considering "if you can save money working from home" but rather "if you can save money by working from a worse work environment". Which I guess is a valid argument, it's just somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether or not working from home saves money.

> only a desk of space wasted

There is a lot more to a dedicated, optimal work environment than "only a desk of space". Plus the fact that a LOT of people live in places that don't have an extra "desk of space". Approximately half the places I've worked couldn't give up a desk's worth of space without it being in everyone's way.

That’s still aligned with my point. Either you pay rent for an additional separate office (lots of money), or you reduce your existing living space to make room for work stuff. The only case where you don’t notice is this is when you just so happened to already have completely unused living space that you don’t mind filling up with work stuff, or you just so happened to have an office setup at home that overlaps perfectly with what you need for work.

> That’s still aligned with my point. Either you pay rent for an additional separate office (lots of money), or you reduce your existing living space to make room for work stuff.

Yes, but the reduction for a desk is only if you don't have another usable surface, and even then it's only a tenth of "lots of money" because a desk is so much smaller than a room.

A tenth of lots of money is not all that much, and very likely cheaper than commuting.

I think part of the disconnect is that (it appears that) for you, a suitable work from home environment is

- a 2'x3' area on a table, anywhere in the place you live

For a lot of us (at least for me and some others), a suitable work from home environment includes

- a 4'x3' desk (or larger, for multiple monitors)

- a door or other way to separate the workspace from house interruptions (and vice versa)

- a bookshelf and other miscellaneous items

- good lighting

In general, all that ^ is necessary to be as effective as one would be at an actual office, and generally means a separate room in the house/apartment; and that is fairly costly. The last time I did the calculations, it came out to several thousands of dollars per year.

All of that except the door is easy to do at low cost.

Whether you can get a nice isolated place depends on the particular place you're living.

But I was never arguing that isolation isn't necessary! Please look again at the initial comment I replied to.

"Either you paid for more space or you lost space at your home during the 8 hours you were previously working at an office."

My concern was only with the second half of that "or". To get to the second half of the "or", you have to take it as given that there's a suitable spot in your home. When you argue that many homes don't already have such a spot, I agree, but that's irrelevant to what I was trying to comment on.

Everything I've said here should be interpreted like this: "Okay, so you've decided you don't need an additional room? Well in that case, I don't think the space taken up by working from home in an existing room is a big deal, because xyz."

Literally neither. Same space, nothing changed. I pay maybe more on electricity, but save much more on food and transport.

>You don't need find a meeting room,

maybe it's just because I've never been the meeting room finding person but in most places I've worked it hasn't been a big problem.

>you don't need to worry about making too much noise,

I've never had the problem that a meeting was being too noisy for the people outside a meeting, but I have had the problem that kids in the house were being too noisy for the online meeting and everyone has to laugh and talk about how wonderful having the kids is.

>you don't need to worry about adding one person from another location suddenly changing the entire dynamic.

Why wouldn't this affect remote meetings?

Obviously there are any number of things that can affect remote meeting quality. I would think for meeting quality an in person one is likely to work better as a meeting, although people might prefer the remote one for all sorts of other reasons.

> in most places I've worked it hasn't been a big problem

In every place I've worked, there's been a limited number of meeting rooms and you needed to plan ahead to get one. And if your meeting ran over, it wasn't uncommon to have a group of people standing outside waiting for you to vacate.

> I've never had the problem that a meeting was being too noisy for the people outside a meeting

Fair. I was really thinking about the impromptu meetings of 3-4 people around a desk (because getting a meeting room takes too much time). Those almost infallibly annoy other people in the area, even if they don't say anything.

> Why wouldn't this affect remote meetings?

Suddenly adding a remote person to a meeting that was planned to be in person is difficult at best. It's common for the people on location to just not "play well" with the remote person. When meetings are "remote first", adding one more remote person doesn't wind up with that person being an afterthought. This is a fairly well known issue, honestly.

> I would think for meeting quality an in person one is likely to work better as a meeting

Under optimal circumstances, the in person meeting does tend to be best. However, there are so many different variations from optimal, it's my experience that remote-first meetings wind up being better in nearly every _actual_ case.

>And if your meeting ran over, it wasn't uncommon to have a group of people standing outside waiting for you to vacate.

having a meeting run over is a problem, having someone waiting to get into that room is a solution to the problem.

Our experience following the covid lockdowns and everybody working from home is that even if a majority of us are in the office, we still have meetings over Teams. It allows far better control, easier background chat, sharing ideas that can be raised in the verbal meeting and people to get on with real work if the topic under conversation is not important to them, but keeping them in the loop. Win win.

Even before the pandemic, in the office, most of the collaboration was remote. Even with people in the same building, because lack of meeting rooms, noisy open-space office and loong looong walks down endless hallways we'd all rather do a quick telephone conference. My direct colleagues were just a table away of course, but collaboration isn't just with them. On the other hand, teams were also spread out across half the world, so lots of things could only be done remotely. Working from home wasn't much of a change there. In total, 90% of communication wasn't done in person but by some kind of remote com.

And since the current trend in our company (and I guess a lot of others) is "hotdesking", where you pull a ticket when entering the building which tells you what desk might be free. Well, no sitting near direct colleagues anymore. So the last advantage of the office is gone as well. Unfortunately it doesn't stop management from hallucinating the great back-in-the-office future after the pandemic...

Yes, I'll also be looking for a new job.

Don't forget the hours of commute time lost daily. Compared to a few minutes lost by a few people in Zoom, commute is everybody every day.