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Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

I will never go back to an office in my life if I can do anything about it. Everything you described was a miserable part of every day of my working life before the pandemic. The most insulting part is the money: if you work 40h/wk and have a 30m commute, that's probably another 30m each way to change and pack, so at least 1h of extra time per day, for a total of 2h/day (IF you're lucky and your commute is ONLY 30m each way. imagine the people commuting 1-2h each way, like I once did). For 5 days in the office, 2h/day adds up to 10h/week, or an extra 25% of time spent on work. I doubt any company is going to offer you a 25% pay raise to compensate for the extra 25% of time that working in the office really costs you, let alone pay you on top of that 25% to compensate for the added miseries and discomfort of being in an office.

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My commute is about 7 minutes and it's still too much. We need to drop everything we're doing and invent portal guns.

In my perfect world, my commute would be a 20 minute walk through a park, or along a beach. I actually had that once when I lived on a boat and walked to my favorite coffee shop along the beach. It's better than WFH.

Yeah. For me, it's much more about the commute than being in an office, especially if the in-office time is flexible. If I lived in a city and had a nice walk to an office, I would almost certainly go in fairly frequently.

Before I went to WFH, my commute was a 20 minute bike ride through a park, I really miss that part of my day.

I still ride my bike through there, but not nearly every day like I used to.

Plus the cost of commuting itself, be it a monthly transit pass or the cost of a vehicle, maintenance, wear and tear, fuel, insurance, parking etc.

So it's a massive cost to workers. Paying to work.

Of course, there's also the counterargument that WFH means you're paying to provision your own office space. To be fair, that argument mostly applies only if people don't have the option to come into an office. Otherwise, they're forced into paying to buy/rent a suitable workplace, pay any incremental utilities, etc. For people with houses, it's mostly not a big deal but if someone lives in a small studio it may be. Early on in the pandemic, this is what a fair number of people were complaining about.

This begs the question how effective remote work would be if society actually catered to it, rather than catering to mass transit to the city. Most arguments rely on the status quo of western society as a whole, and many still rely on the pandemic situation.

I'm not sure what "society" catering to it means exactly. To the degree that individuals can do their jobs remotely and they can reliably find companies willing to pay them to do so--which seems to be widely though hardly universally the case for "knowledge worker" roles today--they have the choice to move somewhere cheaper. Of course many, especially younger, folks like living in a larger city and that's a tradeoff they need to make.

It's hard to predict how things will play out. My guess is that there will be more remote and 3/4 days a week in office than there was before. But probably not the sort of radical transformation some people were predicting/hoping for. (To be fair, most surveys I saw, all along, suggested that 3 days or so in office was going to be the most common mode.)

> Otherwise, they're forced into paying to buy/rent a suitable workplace, pay any incremental utilities, etc

I view this as just the opposite side of the coin of being forced to live physically near where you work, so you can come into the office. Remote gives you more freedom here, though.

I think part of the reason people choose to live in overpriced studio apartments is to live closer to their workplaces.

The pandemic was an unusual circumstance for forced remote work. Normally people would have a lot more options for where they choose to do that work, be it at a cafe or coworking space or at a library or wherever else.

As for utilities, Canada at least is providing tax breaks for people working from home to help cover internet, electricity, etc. I've never gotten a commute subsidy from my government.

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