Surprisingly bosses are not offering to pay more to offset the cost and duration of commutes.
When I was doing contract field engineering work, I would charge 50% of my hourly rate for any travel in excess of 30 minutes. Surprisingly I actually received a greater share of clients at remote locations and ended up earning quite a bit for the drive times.
People need to itemize all the costs (time, fuel, wear and tear) of a commute and just bill their employer. You do this already when you have to e.g. use your private vehicle to go to a work conference. The commute should follow that same logic if its required travel using your own equipment.
When you take on a job it's up to you to determine if your commute is acceptable. Your employer is not required to pay you for travel to and from your primary place of employment. If there is special travel and or needs thats one thing, but to your daily job that's just not going to happen. If you took a job that was remote 100% and they changed the job to in person, it's your right to decline and accept employment elsewhere.
Why? Anything we don't want to do, we should get paid for. Commuting sucks, they should pay us for it. We should get more to work in an open plan office, for dealing with a shitty boss, or for a miserly vacation policy too. Unless there is a cost, they'll keep doing it.
At the end of the day, the amount of money that can be allocated to workers is finite, so we have to choose some way of distributing that money. Doing that by how much you "worked" (ie. commuted) might seem superficially fair, but comes with other issues like encouraging people to live far away because they no longer bear the costs. I don't think most people are on board with subsidizing commutes.
>We should get more to work in an open plan office, for dealing with a shitty boss, or for a miserly vacation policy too. Unless there is a cost, they'll keep doing it.
You're free to do that by voting with your feet, and companies pay by having less applicants. If they're not "paying for it" (via higher wages or poorer quality candidates), then that probably indicates it's not a big factor for the average employee (ie. they might complain about it, but they won't give up a $300k job for it).
>At the end of the day, the amount of money that can be allocated to workers is finite, so we have to choose some way of distributing that money.
Agreed, and this method has been chosen in advance for us: employers squeeze as hard as they can, while we squeeze back as hard as we can. If billing for our commute is a strategy that will allow us to extract more wealth from ownership, we should do it. If not, we shouldn't. It has nothing to do with what makes more "sense" or what is "fair."
There is no policy decision to make here. I'm just describing reality.
I guess, but these are all just statements about the way things are. You could also say "Sure, if you'll compensate me for my time and subsidize a means to get there, or increase my salary by such an amount that I'm able to live within 10 minutes walking distance and net the same" and they have the right to turn you down.
If my employer required me to move to the city the company is mainly based out of, I'd ask for visa support and moving expenses, and if the living expenses were higher, a compensatory increase. If the terms aren't reasonable, then ya they can get fucked.
Upon hire though, yes that's part of the negotiation I suppose. If what they're offering to pay is only persuasive if you had no or a free commute, then you should ask for sufficiently more to make it worthwhile.
I commuted 2 hours each way. Now I work 2 jobs from home and it's obvious that commuting was not only not paid but preventing me from making a decent income, keeping me poor and trapped in a crappy suburb.
So that means that for employees that were hired fill-time in-office that are now remote should get a pay cut? Or that someone that chooses to pay less in rent and commute longer should be paid more than someone who pays more in rent and commute less?
That doesn’t address part two of my question, and if the answer is make the commute amount the same for everyone, than, all you are asking for is an across the board pay raise for everyone
Commute costs were always taken into account, and always will be, either implicitly or explicitly.
Highly in demand labor sellers have even gotten weekly flights paid for. The only difference is most people are not that in demand, or do not produce work that make it economical to pay them that extra commuting premium.
Hopefully at some point they'll be desperate enough to install walls and doors so that we can focus on work instead of being stuck in an open plan developer ranch.
It seems on the other end that many companies are realizing the only thing cheaper than an empty room with some Ikea desks shoved side-to-side is to have people work remotely and pay for their own office space.
If they’re desperate enough they should promote bosses that can manage remote teams without feeling desperate and fire the ones that are so narcissistic they need an in person audience even if it makes their employees less productive.
My job is project management. I hate remote working. And that's because by the time something is big enough that someone feels like they need to notify me, my first options of mitigation have already passed. If I hear two engineers at the desk next to me discuss something, or if someone gives me a headsup because we happened to meet at the coffee machine, my job becomes so much easier. I much, much, much prefer a hybrid style where people spend 1-2 days a week doing focus work at home, and spend the other 2-4 days in the office doing collaborative or less focussed work.
It has nothing to do with me needing an 'in person audience because I'm narcissistic'.
As a manager I see my job as finding ways to do my job with the least intrusiveness on my peoples preferred working style. I’ll posit constructing a workflow that depends on random events to be effective isn’t effective or predictable, and your challenge can be solved in other ways than requiring employees to do something they don’t want to for your convenience. If you work in a global company you’ll often have teams spread out between locations. You can’t ask everyone to get together a few days a week. That’s been true since global teams were possible. How did they ever function before the pandemic? Frankly not as well as they do after.
"by the time something is big enough that someone feels like they need to notify me, my first options of mitigation have already passed"
That's a communication issue which managers believe is rooted from remote work. I'm on the other end of your example, and there's a reason why people aren't telling you problems immediately, perhaps reflect on that.
Ending free coffee is weird. You would think employers would pay employees to take speed, the fact they just gave it away and folks amped themselves up to work with more focus seemed like a pretty good deal to me.
Oh no, what will happen to middle management if we continue working remotely?
Let’s face it, remote working is not for everyone and not for all companies, but there are many cases where it’s a perfect fit.
“Bosses” have ta face the new reality, remote work is here to stay since we need some of our lives back.
I feel like this entire article was literally just made up out of thin air. Really? They just laid off a shit ton of people in tech. It’s like a staff writer gets a free pass to invent a trend that was believable six months ago but not now and they didn’t get the memo the tide has turned.
The relationship is that owners of and investors in mid- and high-rises are trying to staunch the bleeding while they divest themselves of hard assets. They've suffered enough this year with the stock pinch, so they're especially grumpy about WFH.
If you haven't been hearing about this every day for the past three years, you may not know anyone outside of your class.
The inner city office park investment devaluing, could lead to a whole investment bubble collapsing. Sudden oversupply of "cheaper" housing at city center and all the overprice assets in some funds portfolio trade at that lower price.
it's rare if others anecdotal stories are to be believed
I think it's more likely that anecdotes about reasonable bosses making reasonable demands in a reasonable way are so boring no one tells them. Most of my 'fun' anecdotes are from the 12 months I worked for a bad boss, rather than the 12 years I've worked for good bosses.
There are some executives that are trying to mandate a return to 100% in-office at my company, but it will literally decimate all top workers (the ones that do most of the work). There's literally only going to be very junior staff and upper management if they're not careful. This is happening right as they're committing us to several major projects. No it's not a cost saving technique either.
Once the worker has returned to the norm of onsite, the perks may slowly evaporate. But the norm of onsite will be re-established and hard to break free from.
I wholeheartedly recommend employees to keep office laptop & equipment in the office drawers or lockers. No need of taking them home or tunring on the work profile on your personal devices after work hours. Coz apparently you cannot perform work at home right? Let this come back to bite insecure managers & defunct HR policies in today's day and age where developers arrive at one location to log in to the cloud on another continent to serve users on some other continent!
That has always been my practice anyway, whether my job is remote or in-office. Work is work, personal is personal; separate devices for separate purposes. I don't bring my work hardware home unless I plan to spend the next day working from home.
People often seem to get themselves in trouble when they fail to distinguish between work time and personal time. There's no way to get stressed out by late night emails when you don't check your work email at night, and there's no temptation to check your work email at night when the machine with the credentials is back in the office where it belongs.
I wholeheartedly recommend employees to keep office laptop & equipment in the office drawers or lockers.
That was one of the main things I liked about working 100% in the office. My work computer and all my work stayed at the office and it was basically impossible for me to 'just fix a thing' after having left the office.
Sometimes quickly fixing a thing is better than carrying it with you for the rest of the day.
One trick that may work is to write it down or schedule a task/email for next day.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadWhen I was doing contract field engineering work, I would charge 50% of my hourly rate for any travel in excess of 30 minutes. Surprisingly I actually received a greater share of clients at remote locations and ended up earning quite a bit for the drive times.
At the end of the day, the amount of money that can be allocated to workers is finite, so we have to choose some way of distributing that money. Doing that by how much you "worked" (ie. commuted) might seem superficially fair, but comes with other issues like encouraging people to live far away because they no longer bear the costs. I don't think most people are on board with subsidizing commutes.
>We should get more to work in an open plan office, for dealing with a shitty boss, or for a miserly vacation policy too. Unless there is a cost, they'll keep doing it.
You're free to do that by voting with your feet, and companies pay by having less applicants. If they're not "paying for it" (via higher wages or poorer quality candidates), then that probably indicates it's not a big factor for the average employee (ie. they might complain about it, but they won't give up a $300k job for it).
Agreed, and this method has been chosen in advance for us: employers squeeze as hard as they can, while we squeeze back as hard as we can. If billing for our commute is a strategy that will allow us to extract more wealth from ownership, we should do it. If not, we shouldn't. It has nothing to do with what makes more "sense" or what is "fair."
There is no policy decision to make here. I'm just describing reality.
If my employer required me to move to the city the company is mainly based out of, I'd ask for visa support and moving expenses, and if the living expenses were higher, a compensatory increase. If the terms aren't reasonable, then ya they can get fucked.
Upon hire though, yes that's part of the negotiation I suppose. If what they're offering to pay is only persuasive if you had no or a free commute, then you should ask for sufficiently more to make it worthwhile.
And Silicon Valley giants are famous for offering this. Proving that companies will provide if people want it enough.
Highly in demand labor sellers have even gotten weekly flights paid for. The only difference is most people are not that in demand, or do not produce work that make it economical to pay them that extra commuting premium.
My job is project management. I hate remote working. And that's because by the time something is big enough that someone feels like they need to notify me, my first options of mitigation have already passed. If I hear two engineers at the desk next to me discuss something, or if someone gives me a headsup because we happened to meet at the coffee machine, my job becomes so much easier. I much, much, much prefer a hybrid style where people spend 1-2 days a week doing focus work at home, and spend the other 2-4 days in the office doing collaborative or less focussed work.
It has nothing to do with me needing an 'in person audience because I'm narcissistic'.
That's a communication issue which managers believe is rooted from remote work. I'm on the other end of your example, and there's a reason why people aren't telling you problems immediately, perhaps reflect on that.
Inertia?
If you haven't been hearing about this every day for the past three years, you may not know anyone outside of your class.
My boss and most of my previous bosses don't care about 90% of this shit as long as I am actively engaged and get things done. Maybe I am just lucky.
I think it's more likely that anecdotes about reasonable bosses making reasonable demands in a reasonable way are so boring no one tells them. Most of my 'fun' anecdotes are from the 12 months I worked for a bad boss, rather than the 12 years I've worked for good bosses.
It makes it easier for us remote-forever companies to recruit!
People often seem to get themselves in trouble when they fail to distinguish between work time and personal time. There's no way to get stressed out by late night emails when you don't check your work email at night, and there's no temptation to check your work email at night when the machine with the credentials is back in the office where it belongs.
That was one of the main things I liked about working 100% in the office. My work computer and all my work stayed at the office and it was basically impossible for me to 'just fix a thing' after having left the office.