Canada has some of the most unaffordable housing in the world. It makes sense that people want the freedom to work from cheaper locations. I moved from Vancouver to Calgary when I went 100% remote and I have not regretted the decision at all
And yet, we get the short end of the stick when you get a job at a company that applies a location factor, where even living in a rural backwater in Washington pays more than living in downtown Vancouver, BC.
What does this have to do with "owing" anything? They will tell you they use location factor to determine salary, and then use a location factor that isn't actually based on cost of living so that a Canadian city that is far more expensive to live in still ends up paying less than a place where the cost of your Vancouver single-room apartment buys you two houses and several acres of land out in the US boonies, and your monthly living cost outside of rent pays for an entire family.
The location factor is based on the local job market (what your next best option is), which is related to the cost-of-living, but is not directly such a measure.
(I'm not arguing that this is right or wrong; I'm just saying how I think it is. This is an "is", not an "ought", argument.)
They probably are using Seattle rate for the entire state. They probably get most applicants from Seattle so it makes sense. Someone could move to a smaller town in state and profit over the difference.. you could do the same in BC or move to rural Alberta.
Policies like this are sometimes made because US employees might have state/federal tax breaks. Usually it is because the average developer wage in a region is a certain amount. Why pay $500k when $250k lands the same group of candidates. If it's too low let them know and move on.
When there is a complaint about a company not providing things a certain way, there’s a degree of unfairness owed that was perceived.
Companies do not owe anyone a location based factor of San Francisco and allow the employee to arbitrage it, or not. They have a hard enough time staying sustainable.
My preference is that location indexes are always in the employees favour.
I’m a familiar with some of Vancouver’s challenges, incl downtown.
Depending on one’s situation, it’s often easier to live elsewhere and fly to Vancouver on weekends to live, or schedule flights in advance cheap enough to be in for work meetings.
Anyone who’s had an Amazon recruiter chase them from outside of Vancouver to move there may have done the math.
Van has a lot of sustainability challenges, between schools closing, the amount of household income required to buy a home from outside of its circle, the cost of living.
If someone is able to live in Vancouver, and if they have a family, those kids may not be able to own a home of their own.
And bask in the 230 or so days a year that aren’t precipitating in some way. Incredible city those 100-130 days a year though when the sun is out.
Companies can only owe what they contractually agreed to owe. So by definition they already do. Getting paid based on cost of living is a request based on an argument of fairness, something which companies (rather than people - companies are ant colonies, not ants) don't need to care about in the slightest. And thus, Canadians get the short end of the stick. The end, no moral.
Companies exist only because of the law, which can certainly (in theory) mandate that they owe additional things to their employees, such as "a minimum wage" and "a safe workplace free of harassment".
Yea this pains me greatly as someone who lives in BC. I work for a fully remote bay area company and I get paid less than someone who is a full job level below me living in Kansas.
I once worked it all out: if I was located in Seattle instead of BC I would be making over double for the exact same remote position I am in. Not only would I receive a 40% pay bump, but I would also not pay state income tax, and housing is cheaper in Washington than British Columbia. On top of that almost every single good/commodity is cheaper in the USA than in Canada.
All in all I would guess my purchasing power working in BC is around 35% of what it would be if I worked in Washington.
If I wasn’t happily married to someone who is very against living in the USA I probably would have jumped ship and moved to the USA like many of my Canadian peers. The TN visa is easy enough to get as a software engineer.
We can't all live in Vancouver or the GTA, nor should we. WFH is exactly what a large and sparsely populated country needs. Heck, the government should be encouraging it as much as they can. Maybe they can turn the tide around in some of those dying rural towns out east.
The housing crisis has cemented in people’s minds that living in Vancouver or the GTA is essentially an impossible feat because everything is zoned for cars and single-family housing.
I suppose if your POV is very narrow and limited, then yes it is impossible. But giving up easily when things become difficult is a Canadian cultural staple, so rural dying towns for everyone it is.
As someone who has been working from home since the pandemic and preferring it these articles still bug me: the new normal for who? Not for retail workers, agricultural workers, manufacturing, first responders, those who work in trades etc etc etc.
It’s a very notable shift for office workers. It just so happens that every newspaper opinion writer is in the exact socio-economic group most affected and way too often it’s talked about as if it’s universal.
It also leads to under coverage of important side effects: for example, here in NYC the economics of the subway system have been messed up since the start of the pandemic. If every office worker works from home the system suddenly loses a ton of revenue. But if they cut back on service it’ll disproportionately affect the (typically lower income) workers that still depend on it. Not unsolvable but rarely talked about.
Canada actually has a larger resource extraction industry as percent of gdp than any other oecd country and I would be surprised if office workers outnumber primary industries +retail+food service+trades+manufacturing
This opinion-piece is about how working remotely is now a normal, permanent option for employees, as opposed to a temporary one that was necessary during the pandemic. The author argues that Canadian policymakers and business-leaders should accept remote work as permanent.
The most interesting second order effect is that when a large share the high-income people work from home, the spending gets distributed away from commercial centers, pushing more working positions away from it.
I'd say that nobody can reliably predict even short term problems. WFH is just too different. We can only react to them, and not know if the reaction solved them or if it just got fixed by another change.
It's hard to say what the long-term effects look like. It looks to me that when I (rarely) go into Boston, commuting traffic is at pre-pandemic levels although broader stats suggest commuting is still down somewhat (and local transit still seems reduced).
But, especially as leases expire, for both major employers and various support businesses like restaurants and bars we'll start to have a better idea of what the new normal looks like. (There's of course also no reason to think that the same preferences for work and living will automatically be picked up by new generations.)
Yeah, it might be the new normal for a small rich subset of society. To say it’s the new normal full stop, is to ignore most of the working class. Ironically the group that’s usually wagging its finger at everyone else about privilege, does not realize its own privilege.
Perhaps but the OP asserted that no one working a 9-5 is rich.
I don’t think absolute terms like “rich” really help much in these discussions anyway. What is “rich”? I’d argue that people working 9-5 in an office are on average richer than the average retail employee by a fair margin even if they’re poorer than a CEO. It certainly feels a lot more relevant to the discussion at hand.
Generalizations are a hard habit to get out of (no one working 9-5...) etc. Whenever I read that, I read "most."
For what it's worth, my definition of rich has always been somebody who doesn't have to work. Having you and your family's livelihood dependent on the whims of an organization you don't have any control over is pretty daunting if you stop to think about it.
That depends on tenure - if this hypothetical person has been in that position for many years AND has saved a significant part of their income, they may be “rich”.
However, FAANG really exploded in size only recently (and then hit layoffs), FAANG jobs are concentrated in VHCOL locations, so savings aren’t great for all. So while their W2 may look impressive, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that they are “rich”.
To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. That doesn’t describe the vast majority of FAANG (or otherwise) employees. There certainly are outliers and success stories, but it’s not the default case.
> To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5.
Perhaps this is a good example of the uselessness of the term “rich” when used absolutely because I would never interpret the word that way and we’d be talking past each other in any discussion!
High income and rich are not the same thing) I agree with grandparent comment that rich/wealthy denotes an accumulated level of assets, not just a high income (which may or may not be transient)
Thank you for your comment! It spurred another thought of why high income != rich - high new income usually is associated with high loads of debt in US, e.g. a mortgage to buy a house. Such leverage puts the recipient of this new wealth (compared to generational wealth or even an outsized exit in tens of millions or higher) into an even more precarious position and ups the dependence on the employer. Which of course matches with most financial advice to watch the lifestyle creep.
Agreed! Definitions matter, as another reply pointed out, I differentiate high income (a fairly attainable goal) with “rich”, or more specifically wealth, where the person is not dependent on the employer. Note that one cannot say “not dependent on others”, as people are always interdependent - stocks represent companies selling products, landlords depend on renters, etc
I also agree. Rich for me denotes a level of freedom that you can't have with _only_ high income. If your parents weren't high income for example, you might be building from zero, or negative, net worth.
Anyways, I dont get your point. Rich people work ALOT! More for sure than 9-5 usually but they work. You seem to be confusing rich with "independently wealthy", aka: I inherited a large sum of money from my father Sam Walton, etc.
FAANG people are absolutely rich compared to anyone else and easily make the 1%. Think about that: out of 100 people do they make more than the other 99 people that work in cafes and Amazon warehouses?
“ According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average annual wage of the top 1% was $823,763 as of 2020”[0]
Or
“According to recent studies, to be in the top 1% of earners in the U.S., you need to bring in an annual salary of at least $597,815. This means that the other 99% of earners in the U.S. make less than this amount per year. When it comes to net worth, the top 1% of Americans have a minimum net worth of around $11.1 million.”
Even within FAANG, most people won’t be coming near that
I think my definition is actually useful. Your definition means if I am on a bus with 100 people, at least one of them has a net worth of 11 million USD. I don't think so. Totally don't believe this.
Not every software dev in Canada works in FAANG. Heck unless you're making more than 180k/year, it's going to be hard to afford a townhouse/house in Toronto. And not a lot of people make that money here.
The best I can do is: you're rich if you don't have to work to maintain your lifestyle. Anything else is going to be relative to some arbitrary evaluation scheme.
Rich is relative to others around you. Generally if you are in the top 25% you are rich, middle 50% you are middle class, bottom 25% you are poor.
You can adjust those percents I suppose, but yes there is an objective standard for being rich and it depends on where you fit in the income and assets scale.
People who make $400k and have it easy, want it a bit more easier so they convince those who make $40k that the problem is with 0.01% of the ultra-wealthy.
I’m sorry, how is the $400k worker convincing folks earning $40k of anything? As opposed to the ultra rich that literally own the news networks those folks watch?
Rich people don’t call themselves rich. It’s all relative. Director at Google doesn’t feel rich. Neither does the nurse who makes $90K in a town where most of their friends make $35K or the two teacher couple who brings in $200K working in Redwood City.
I guess by world standards working almost any job in G7 makes you relatively rich so I'm not sure that is a useful standard.
Not sure if you're Canadian. But in case you're not most of Canadians net worth are tied up in housing that had been exploding in price the past few decades.
For most normal jobs what you make is pretty irrelevant compared to what do you own.
Many older teachers in Canada are far far richer than the equivalent of senior / staff SWEs.
Canada has become a very difficult place to "earn" your way to becoming "rich" without inherited wealth.
I think your definition of rich might be much closer to ... Maybe middle class (definitely not upper middle class).
In addition to this I grew up in objective poverty by Canadian standards so I'm not sure what you are on about.
Another reason why “rich” as an absolute term rarely makes sense. Are you rich? I don’t know. Are you richer than the person cooking the food you order from time to time? Almost definitely yes. Are you richer than most people who live around you? Likely still yes.
Assuming you make something like 130k CAD you are in the top 5% of earners in Canada and the top 1% in the world. Hacker news and other online communities are extremely biased in terms of representation of income.
It's often hard for people to truly grasp how utterly poor the vast majority of the population is. This also leads the wealthy to be confused as to why tech workers are often so hated and also envied in the general population. Essentially we are the rich, meanwhile we pretend we are somehow "average" simply because we only look at those very few people even richer than us.
For the actual average person these conversations are wealthy people complaining that they are not as wealthy as other wealthy people. I don't blame them for having no sympathy. Then you get articles and comments talking about the "end of in person work" pretending as though the majority of people who will never work from home because their jobs are such that they cannot are somehow simply not even people. It's not a good look.
It's not about percentiles. It's about not having to work. Otherwise we would need to call the top 5% of a homeless camp "rich", and the bottom 95% of a royal family "poor".
If you want to define rich as not having to work then the percentiles get even worse for your case. It is about percentiles. You just don't want to accept that you have way way way way way more than the vast majority of people already.
Yes! Thank you! This is why I am always irked when people make a big fuss about income inequality. It's like dude, WEALTH inequality is the problem! In fact people should be HAPPY about income inequality as it offers one the opportunity to try and bridge the gigantic wealth gap between themselves and the oh-so-holy historical "winner" families of capitalism. I'm sure the super-rich are laughing maniacally while bankrolling clueless youngsters who try and fight against high wages for the workers of the US.
No one is fighting against high wages. And people with more wealth have vastly more income. People with low wealth have vastly less income. Income is not just what you earn working, it includes what your wealth generates.
It's a fact that the majority of tech workers are the rich. They are simply not satisfied with what they have and want even more, exactly what they accuse the 1% of. But to the 95% you and the 1% are both the enemy.
I have a hard time believing this. Assuming you live in Ontario, the most populous province, 48% marginal rate translates to an income of at least $165k/yr. That works out to a take-home of $102k/year, or $8498/month. With that much money I don't see how it's "difficult to afford" a car. Even we assume you live in Toronto (ie. not a "smaller city") and pay $3000/month for a 2 bedroom, that still leaves you with nearly $5.5k to play with.
All of this assumes a single earner household. If you have a partner contributing income as well, I don't see how you can't also afford to buy an apartment after a few years of saving.
Are you kidding? You definitely don't have an effective tax rate of 48%... Here in Quebec (which has the highest tax rate) that would make you higher than 400k a year... (45% at that point) [1]. You most probably meant marginal rate, and probably live in a pretty high cost area, but still 160k shouldn't stop you from being quite wealthy.
I'm closer to 100k, my SO own a business and make very little money. I rent a 2 bedrooms apartments close to Montreal, I order food regularly, own a Volt and I am currently looking at house 30 minutes away from Montreal. It's much cheaper than elsewhere in Canada though,
People complaining about income vs. wealth in the replies have a point, yes the real distinction of wealth is the ability to not work. I wonder if they've considered why themselves, as a reasonably leveled FAANG engineer, have far more capability to "become" rich than almost every other citizen.
Re side effects, I can easily see it worsening inequality. Anecdotally I feel like we're moving towards the well-off staying close to home, while a growing servant class brings us our stuff.
I'm not in Canada, but in my social circles, the answer to "for who" is: "for men". For whatever reason, most of my male friends now work from home. The women I know work in labs, classrooms, and other places that you have to go to for a reason.
It has caused this weird flip where it's now the guys making all of the plans because we're starved for social interaction, meanwhile our wives are more likely to opt for introvert-time.
My point was than men are being more authentically social now that they're not forced to be artificially social in an office. So it's kind of the opposite of what you said.
Also, I'd argue that down down down is the right direction.
Hmm, that's interesting. it's the exact opposite for me and my social circle.
It's predominantly the women who are working form home far more. My guy friends do maybe one day a week at home while the women do 3-4.
Though I guess i have alot more white collar friends so this might explain why we're seeing different things?
We've assumed it was because women are more likely to do white collar work that you can do anywhere and men are more likely to do blue collar work that requires you to be on site.
Also could be that I'd imagine women still do more of the child care than men do and that is far easier done at home:)
This is almost certainly wrong. Maybe for men in a narrow demographic. But substantially all of truck drivers, taxi/uber/delivery drivers, construction workers, etc etc are men. Most "physical" jobs that need somebody there, are still done by men. I understand the point that nurses and teachers are female dominated professions, but in the balance it's most likely still men who are out more.
The other female dominated professions are service staff, receptionists, cleaners. Majority of people in lower paid positions work out of home due to nature of the work.
I don't know how to guess which gender among them works from home more. But people here underestimate amount of blue color female workers.
The fees to get to work go back into the employees pocket. Many of those workers live outside of the city so the city can't tax this group directly to make up the shortfall so they tax employees who's businesses are in city an extra %. With employees working from home the need for a downtown office changes.
Everyone who uses the service will need to pay more. The benefit is same service levels with less people so everyone gets a seat. If people cannot afford it wages go up or jobs go vacant
I think "working from home" is usually used to mean "working remotely" here, not literally "working from a residential house that you own". Though some offices are still used for remote work (i.e. software development), it's not exactly "working remotely" since you have to be present in the office.
Farms wouldn't count as working remotely, since you're on the farm performing physical labor, even if it's at home. Software development in an office (or customer support in a call center) wouldn't count as working remotely, since you have to be in the office to perform that work (even if you use internet-connected devices to do so).
But using your computer at home to do software development for a company, or having a phone at home to do customer service, etc. would be working remotely.
IMHO it gets even more subjective around "software development from home wouldn't actually be remote if it's a startup that is based in your home, but it would still be working from home technically". But you get the idea.
I think if we talk about WFH, then yes, it pretty much means "a desk inside your house".
"Home" can have broader meanings than that, but if a mechanic owns the house his garage is in and lives on the first floor, I don't think most people would count that as "working from home". Farmers do office work too, and that's often done at home, but riding a tractor on a field (which is often leased) isn't, I think.
> it pretty much means "a desk inside your house".
Even for office-type work, needs of a pandemic aside, who staunchly works at a desk in their home? Working as a remote developer for 20-some-odd years, I've worked in coffeeshops, hotels, bars, libraries, parks, moving cars, other homes of friends and family, you name it. The freedom to work anywhere is the biggest perk. I have always called it WFH, even if not technically always done at home.
I've done some of that, but I actually only work on my desk in my designated room now - I find I can concentrate much better when there are no distractions. But you're absolutely right, for those roles where work essentially only requires a laptop and your brain, it home is where your brain and laptop are.
I’m not an expert on the situation in Canada but I grew up in a rural community, “the farm” that many people in town worked on was a pretty sizeable operation you’d drive to. I was definitely thinking more of the industrial-size agricultural operation than a small farm. I definitely don’t automatically equate “agricultural worker” with “farmer”.
I think a more common situation at this point is agricultural workers being temporary foreign workers with their employer holding some sort of leverage over them that doesn't let them leave.
I'm thankful that I'll never have to work in a city again. It used to be that WFH jobs were "rare" or special case but I've seen tons of postings for totally remote.
Young adults will no longer have to uproot their lives to live in an expensive city. They could probably even get a job right out of college without having to stress about living situations.
Though, in fairness, many college-educated young professionals are precisely one of the demographics that often want to live in that expensive city right out of school.
That's the ones that should (enjoy life and take more risks when you're young). I know a lot of people have "no choice" if they want a shot at a decent job though. Also, much harder if you want to start a family, it honestly seems like a win-win for both types of people. Less competitive housing prices.
Financially though we can be better off saving when we’re young so we can enjoy the fruits of compounding interest over a longer period. This could leave more money to invest in one’s own business once we are older with more experience and contacts to leverage, resulting in higher success rate of ventures.
So one thing I’ve noticed with Canadian companies, much more so then US based one’s is that they have a much higher reliance on contractors. Many “full-time” employees at the companies I’ve worked with (generally the tech side of cable cos, Shaw and Quebecor) have been on 6 month contracts.
I think this is likely more common in European countries as well and likely has a lot to do with socialized medicine.
The nature of this model leads to some pretty higher turnover then I’ve seen in the US as people roll onto different opportunities. I’m guessing this may have a large role in how this is shaping up.
I also don’t know what the laws are in Canada but I’m the US dictating where and when work gets done is the primary measure (from the IRS’s perspective) of whether you’re a full time employee or not. If it’s similar in Canada and you have a high number of contractors as part of your workforce it’s going to limit your leverage on forcing them to work from the office.
Of course this is also all anecdotal so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/
Canada is an extremely risk averse place, so nobody likes to hire anyone all that permanently outside of high growth companies. Whether it be the government, telecom, banks, etc, many start with a 12 month contract. I have a friend who is a lawyer for the government and she can only expect a permanent job in 3 years or so.
As a contractor in Canada, it's because it's a way to get paid more. I've been contracting for so long I might be out of touch with current IT salaries. But when I switched in the mid 2000s 100,000 CAD was a hard cap.
Also Canadian companies don't offer equity. The option programs that I have encountered have always been they type that you lose at the end of your employment. I've also seen companies fire everyone on the eve of a takeover to cancel any options.
If/when a recession hits, every single employer is going to use that to force people back into the office. No ifs, ands or buts. You can see the largest tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc. start to enforce RTO, with the veiled threat of being laid off. By the end of next year, I assume most people will be back in the office at least 4 days a week if not 5. Employers will definitely use layoffs as the hammer to get people back in and working under their watchful gaze.
Big employers sure but small and medium? I doubt it. A whole lot of smaller businesses just discovered they don't need the overhead of a real estate lease and the owners are quite happy to keep working and pocket that extra money.
Why you want to work for fully distributed companies that are smaller and thus couldn't afford to do that. At my job 1, the city with the most employees has only 20% of the staff. The rest are spread throughout Canada.
Not for everyone. A new societal class has emerged, comprising individuals who can work remotely indefinitely (I'm lucky to be one of them). In contrast, workers in industries requiring proximity to their workplaces, such as truck drivers, caregivers, and healthcare providers, face a different set of challenges.
I wonder if the differences in society will be exacerbated due to this or if governments will take measures to make commuting and living near workspaces affordable again.
With remote workers possibly leaving big cities to less expensive places, the lives of the people who can't work from home might become easier and more affordable.
I mean the jobs that can most easily be done from home are most easily replaced because all they require is a sufficiently intelligent agent, human or artificial, on the end of an internet connection, no physical presence.
Not talking about any given company or person’s decision to work from home.
It better stay as the new normal because most cannot afford to work downtown in cities and while being paid what previous generations were paid but nowadays in timelines where inflation/housing cost is ridiculously high for no justified reason other than making existing housing owners richer.
This is just based on my own experience, but I wonder if the preference for working from home is really more a preference to not have to be in a company office. I worked from home for months and then ended up getting my own office space, a beautiful light- and plant-filled private space of my own. Close enough to my home to walk to work (25 mins), but downtown, where’s there’s lots of restaurants and amenities. I love it and I much prefer it to working from home now. I know it’s a huge privilege, but I wonder if companies offered to pay a portion of people’s office rent, if a lot of WFH folks would work out of their own offices.
This is an important distinction. The difference is "private office" which happens to be at home vs "cubicle farm" or "hotel desk farm" at work. Prior to 2010~ era where it wasnt so uncommon to have private/semi-private offices for knowledge workers this would be a different discussion.
Agreed. A proper office with walls is critical for many people and roles. However, even if a proper office were provided at the company location, not having to commute is a huge time and cost savings for the worker that if difficult to ignore.
25 minutes walk to work is also a huge factor. Even with cubes, if I could easily walk to the office I'd do so some days. As it is, my assigned office is about a 30 minute drive and I haven't gone in for 4 years or something like that. Have to go into another office for customer visits now and then but that's almost 2 hours each way.
Pretty much the reason in my case. I like being in an office itself well enough, but mainly just don't like packed-in seating arrangements. If things were spaced out more and I had the feeling of more personal space, it could feel completely different. I don't generally have a problem focusing in a busy cafe for example.
But after years of WFH I've found I can't easily go back to work in that stress-inducing (for me) environment anymore. I've tried and couldn't make it more than a couple days. My coping skills have atrophied. I'd say it's even worse now with hybrid and online meetings or discussions from desks at the office.
Guess I'm lucky I still have a choice, but I'd jump at the chance of my own private office.
The government should be encouraging it. A way to take pressure off of the urban centers would be to get people to WFH and work in small towns where you can get houses for 50-100k. Yes would not work for everyone but it could revitalize the dying small farm towns that are spread out across the country.
Two things that makes Canada a bit different from teh US that might help accelerate this trend.
1) We've got really high housing prices
2) Partially related we only have 4-5 big cities.
one of the US's strengths is that there are great cities in almost every state where someone can move to and find a job no matter their profession.
Canada has Toronto, Vancouver, and maybe Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa. I don't say that to shit on those cities and the ones I didn't mention but we don't have alot of huge job creating cities.
We just don't have the big job generating cities like other countries do because we're very concentrated in 2-3 areas.
That means our population is drawn to live in the GTA(surrounding area of Toronto) or Vancouver.
Work from home allows our population to spread out a bit, which is something our huge country sorely needs. it should also have the benefit of allowing people to move elsewhere and lower our property prices in the big cities.
We also have had dry runs for remote work in the form of satellite US offices with minimal supervision for a long time so we've got atleast some experience in our work force with remote work before the pandemic started.
WFM won't be a panacea that fixes our housing prices alone, we'll probably need to start taxing people who own multiple homes very heavily, but its a trend that could help bring them down and spread our population out to other areas,
Mostly agree, but it doesn’t make sense to call Vancouver a big city, but Montreal only “maybe” a big city. Montreal’s metro population is 4.3 mil, Vancouver’s 2.6 mil, Montreal is a much bigger city than Vancouver, not the other way around.
Also, if you’re listing Ottawa and Calgary, you should list Edmonton too, all have metro populations in the 1.4-1.5 mil range.
Exactly! In Canada the remote work should be encouraged, before the pandemic, a friend used to drive from his small city to the train station to go to Toronto, then public transport to the office plus walk, totaling 2+ hours in the morning and another 2+ going back, I remember him always exhausted, that or taking the 401 by car plus the wasted gas. Now, he enjoys the time with family and more energetic most of the time, while staying in his small city, contributing to its economy, how’s that a bad thing from the gov perspective?
Governments are greedy. They want more tax revenue and the power huge budgets convey. Efficient use of resources is only lip service, making good talking points when getting elected.
Work from home denies the governments fares and taxes for the rail system to commute to the city, property tax from the fancy offices in the commercial center, sales tax from the shops and restaurants feeding the workers at the commercial centers, sales taxes and certification fees from childcare centers, etc.
Been WFH in Canada for about five years now. Never ever going back.
Before I had kids it wasn’t a big deal. But now it’s such precious time that I cherish. I always thought avoiding the commute would be valuable. It is. But the real value for me is just being seconds away from my kids as they grow up.
I had a singular moment at my last job that sold it for me. I had a stupid meeting that ran until 6. It was completely pointless, serving to compensate for the incompetence of sales and product. I raced home and my 1yo was already asleep. Wife said he went to bed asking where I was. 12 days later I wasn’t working there anymore.
Thanks for sharing, that situation is not great and you did the right thing. One a side note, is your username a reference to the University of Waterloo?
>In other words, even if it’s true that working from home is less productive, people put more time into their work, so it’s hard to know how these effects balance out.
I don’t get this part, if people put more time towards work, how is that less “productive”, what’s productivity definition by those employers?!
I personally left my previous job a couple weeks ago due to mandating full time at the office, even though I was working more at home and sometimes 15hrs a day -and wasn’t even paid those extra overtime-, but it was less stressful than 6hrs at the office, less wasted time at commuting, can snack any time, using my comfy chair/desk, quiet environment, no distractions in the “open office” or even catching other illnesses as all my peers working full at office were getting sick week after another, other peers who have families they liked spending more time with their kids as before the 2020 they barely see them a couple hours in the weekend, and I’m sure there are more benefits as those from my personal perspective. I understand it’s not for everyone, but going full crazy demanding everyone cramped in an area that is not even suitable for a call-center job let alone other type of jobs require extra focus, how about making the office more favorable to lure more people back to the office, how about having own closed office for all employees, relaxed schedules so people won’t waste time in the traffic, and so on, but that won’t happen, corps want the same old way which’s way worse than how work environment was back in the 60s for example, yeah employees won’t thats not gonna happen again.
I'm WFH but would happily come in a few days a week if others would. I miss the connection of talking to people. Sadly the new normal at my office has meant the buildings are ghost towns now.
You can't exactly trust the National Post, even though it's one of Canada's largest newspapers - it's owned by the Postmedia Network, itself majority owned by New Jersey-based Chatham Asset Management.
I'd like to point out a couple of falsehoods in the article, right off the bat:
- Italy having lowest excess deaths -- popularized myth, but patently false. Compare here with some G7 and other Nordic countries [1]
- "as the pandemic dissipated in 2022 and 2023" -- the baseline Covid hospitalization rate across Canadian provinces is steadily climbing, already higher than peaks of some of the "waves" in 2021 and 2022. While coverage of the pandemic might have dissipated, the health emergency itself has become endemic [2]
It's interesting to see the Post take a WFH-friendly tone, up until recently they've been pro RTO. Wonder if C.A.M. has shuffled their holdings around, or perhaps insurance companies are starting to feel the weight of LTD payouts?
Did they study the long term impact? What happens if a large group of people wfh for a long time? Does it increase their stress levels? What’s the impact on productivity long term? IMO without proper studies I wouldn’t normalize WFH
“Employers contend there is lower productivity when their employees work from home. The CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada, Dave McKay, has asserted that two plus years of work-from-home has had a negative impact on productivity and innovation.”
Huh? The best evidence for lower productivity of wfh is a statement from a bank CEO who is de facto incentivized by commercial real estate loans.
Every managers from small and big rims I've heard or talked to say the same thing about remote working, not just CEOs of RBC and Elon. Remote work kills productivity. It's great as an option, especialy during storms and for parents, and maybe keep the rockstar Brent around, but apart from that it's a net loss.
As someone who hates WFH and always has, I believe that working from an office brings intangible benefits.
WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes?
> WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes?
What if the vast majority prefer some level of isolation?
What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work?
How does having more time per day to socialize outside of work by avoiding commutes result in less socializing outside of work? Intuitively it makes no sense.
Also, many people have families and choose to spend significant time with them instead of socializing at the workplace. Trust me, people with families, especially young kids, are usually not feeling isolated. With wfh and no commutes, they might even have some time to choose to be isolated during a run or other activity.
This is an extraordinary claim, and as such it would require extraordinary evidence.
I'll counter you baseless claim with a baseless claim of my own - there's no evidence that WTH lowered performance or productivity. Quite the opposite, it likely improved.
Even if what your narrative claim holds true across the board (which I doubt), it represents a net loss to companies of how much? A few tickets every week? Also, the wfh trend is new and workflows are still being perfected of course; there is room for improvement.
What about the huge gains for both employees and companies?
For companies: much lower real estate costs, happier employees, access to workers across a larger geographic area, possibly lower wages paid, happier families of employees now that mom, dad, boyfriend, friend, wife, or husband aren’t commuting 5-10 hours per week
For employees: a better office and equipment in many cases and thereby more focus on work in many cases, access to live in a larger geographic region, no commutes, more stability since no move required when changing jobs, stronger communities now that people can stay in one place longer, happier families now that mom, dad, boyfriend, friend, wife, or husband aren’t commuting 5-10 hours per week
Our office has been back open for months and months now. Barely anyone comes in.
Unmentioned in this article is what I think is one of the big reasons why, which is the housing affordability and vacancy crisis.
For older and wealthy workers they may have housing near the office, but for the new generation they've been priced out of anything in the cities, and young designers and programmers at my work are often still living at home in their parents' suburban basements. Of course they'd rather WFH than waste their day commuting in. I don't blame them.
On the other end of things many older workers with families used the opportunity to move elsewhere hours and hours away from the office and get a "cheap" SFH. They now have no option but to WFH.
Basically the government's complete inaction on housing policy has created an environment where everyone, except those lucky enough to already have housing, is worse off continuing to work in the big cities.
When I was a 20 year old I moved to Vancouver and got a cheap apartment in a cool part of town and I didn't even have that good of a job. Due to bad housing policy, that sort of opportunity is completely closed to young people these days.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 198 ms ] thread(I'm not arguing that this is right or wrong; I'm just saying how I think it is. This is an "is", not an "ought", argument.)
Policies like this are sometimes made because US employees might have state/federal tax breaks. Usually it is because the average developer wage in a region is a certain amount. Why pay $500k when $250k lands the same group of candidates. If it's too low let them know and move on.
When there is a complaint about a company not providing things a certain way, there’s a degree of unfairness owed that was perceived.
Companies do not owe anyone a location based factor of San Francisco and allow the employee to arbitrage it, or not. They have a hard enough time staying sustainable.
My preference is that location indexes are always in the employees favour.
I’m a familiar with some of Vancouver’s challenges, incl downtown.
Depending on one’s situation, it’s often easier to live elsewhere and fly to Vancouver on weekends to live, or schedule flights in advance cheap enough to be in for work meetings.
Anyone who’s had an Amazon recruiter chase them from outside of Vancouver to move there may have done the math.
Van has a lot of sustainability challenges, between schools closing, the amount of household income required to buy a home from outside of its circle, the cost of living.
If someone is able to live in Vancouver, and if they have a family, those kids may not be able to own a home of their own.
And bask in the 230 or so days a year that aren’t precipitating in some way. Incredible city those 100-130 days a year though when the sun is out.
Maybe they should.
I once worked it all out: if I was located in Seattle instead of BC I would be making over double for the exact same remote position I am in. Not only would I receive a 40% pay bump, but I would also not pay state income tax, and housing is cheaper in Washington than British Columbia. On top of that almost every single good/commodity is cheaper in the USA than in Canada.
All in all I would guess my purchasing power working in BC is around 35% of what it would be if I worked in Washington.
If I wasn’t happily married to someone who is very against living in the USA I probably would have jumped ship and moved to the USA like many of my Canadian peers. The TN visa is easy enough to get as a software engineer.
I suppose if your POV is very narrow and limited, then yes it is impossible. But giving up easily when things become difficult is a Canadian cultural staple, so rural dying towns for everyone it is.
It’s a very notable shift for office workers. It just so happens that every newspaper opinion writer is in the exact socio-economic group most affected and way too often it’s talked about as if it’s universal.
It also leads to under coverage of important side effects: for example, here in NYC the economics of the subway system have been messed up since the start of the pandemic. If every office worker works from home the system suddenly loses a ton of revenue. But if they cut back on service it’ll disproportionately affect the (typically lower income) workers that still depend on it. Not unsolvable but rarely talked about.
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=141002...
Option for SOME employees.
I'd say that nobody can reliably predict even short term problems. WFH is just too different. We can only react to them, and not know if the reaction solved them or if it just got fixed by another change.
But, especially as leases expire, for both major employers and various support businesses like restaurants and bars we'll start to have a better idea of what the new normal looks like. (There's of course also no reason to think that the same preferences for work and living will automatically be picked up by new generations.)
I don’t think absolute terms like “rich” really help much in these discussions anyway. What is “rich”? I’d argue that people working 9-5 in an office are on average richer than the average retail employee by a fair margin even if they’re poorer than a CEO. It certainly feels a lot more relevant to the discussion at hand.
For what it's worth, my definition of rich has always been somebody who doesn't have to work. Having you and your family's livelihood dependent on the whims of an organization you don't have any control over is pretty daunting if you stop to think about it.
However, FAANG really exploded in size only recently (and then hit layoffs), FAANG jobs are concentrated in VHCOL locations, so savings aren’t great for all. So while their W2 may look impressive, it’s far from a foregone conclusion that they are “rich”.
To me “rich” implies independence and the ability to stop working 9-5. That doesn’t describe the vast majority of FAANG (or otherwise) employees. There certainly are outliers and success stories, but it’s not the default case.
Perhaps this is a good example of the uselessness of the term “rich” when used absolutely because I would never interpret the word that way and we’d be talking past each other in any discussion!
Anyways, I dont get your point. Rich people work ALOT! More for sure than 9-5 usually but they work. You seem to be confusing rich with "independently wealthy", aka: I inherited a large sum of money from my father Sam Walton, etc.
FAANG people are absolutely rich compared to anyone else and easily make the 1%. Think about that: out of 100 people do they make more than the other 99 people that work in cafes and Amazon warehouses?
The answer is yes.
Or
“According to recent studies, to be in the top 1% of earners in the U.S., you need to bring in an annual salary of at least $597,815. This means that the other 99% of earners in the U.S. make less than this amount per year. When it comes to net worth, the top 1% of Americans have a minimum net worth of around $11.1 million.”
Even within FAANG, most people won’t be coming near that
[0] https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa... [1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/financial-advisor/a...
The best I can do is: you're rich if you don't have to work to maintain your lifestyle. Anything else is going to be relative to some arbitrary evaluation scheme.
You can adjust those percents I suppose, but yes there is an objective standard for being rich and it depends on where you fit in the income and assets scale.
You can make a lot of money and still be poor if you spend all of it supporting a dependent with expensive healthcare needs, for instance.
Rich people don’t call themselves rich. It’s all relative. Director at Google doesn’t feel rich. Neither does the nurse who makes $90K in a town where most of their friends make $35K or the two teacher couple who brings in $200K working in Redwood City.
I am a "reasonably leveled FAANG eng" in Canada.
I have enough money to do the following:
- rent a 2 bedroom apartment in a smaller city.
- Order food from time to time.
Things that are difficult to afford:
- Any level of a car (currently car share). - I don't even look at house prices almost anywhere in my province.
My effective tax rate is around 48% and with the way things keep increasing in price I will likely never own a home.
Returning to the original question .... Am I rich?
By world standards you are certainly very rich, but probably even for Canada yes, you are rich.
Not sure if you're Canadian. But in case you're not most of Canadians net worth are tied up in housing that had been exploding in price the past few decades.
For most normal jobs what you make is pretty irrelevant compared to what do you own.
Many older teachers in Canada are far far richer than the equivalent of senior / staff SWEs.
Canada has become a very difficult place to "earn" your way to becoming "rich" without inherited wealth.
I think your definition of rich might be much closer to ... Maybe middle class (definitely not upper middle class).
In addition to this I grew up in objective poverty by Canadian standards so I'm not sure what you are on about.
It's often hard for people to truly grasp how utterly poor the vast majority of the population is. This also leads the wealthy to be confused as to why tech workers are often so hated and also envied in the general population. Essentially we are the rich, meanwhile we pretend we are somehow "average" simply because we only look at those very few people even richer than us.
For the actual average person these conversations are wealthy people complaining that they are not as wealthy as other wealthy people. I don't blame them for having no sympathy. Then you get articles and comments talking about the "end of in person work" pretending as though the majority of people who will never work from home because their jobs are such that they cannot are somehow simply not even people. It's not a good look.
Additionally I don't think most people on HN know what it's like to come from generational poverty.
Having to take out bad loans when you are young to afford basics.
Having parents leave / die early.
Having to take care of elderly / sick relatives who can't afford to take care of themselves.
Just getting a "high paying" job does not automatically erase all those things and make you rich.
It's a fact that the majority of tech workers are the rich. They are simply not satisfied with what they have and want even more, exactly what they accuse the 1% of. But to the 95% you and the 1% are both the enemy.
>- Any level of a car (currently car share).
>My effective tax rate is around 48%
I have a hard time believing this. Assuming you live in Ontario, the most populous province, 48% marginal rate translates to an income of at least $165k/yr. That works out to a take-home of $102k/year, or $8498/month. With that much money I don't see how it's "difficult to afford" a car. Even we assume you live in Toronto (ie. not a "smaller city") and pay $3000/month for a 2 bedroom, that still leaves you with nearly $5.5k to play with.
All of this assumes a single earner household. If you have a partner contributing income as well, I don't see how you can't also afford to buy an apartment after a few years of saving.
I'm closer to 100k, my SO own a business and make very little money. I rent a 2 bedrooms apartments close to Montreal, I order food regularly, own a Volt and I am currently looking at house 30 minutes away from Montreal. It's much cheaper than elsewhere in Canada though,
[1] https://www.rcgt.com/app/uploads/2023/03/individual_taxation...
With that being said I did miss speak. It's 42% effective tax rate (with nearly 0 back on tax return)
I can say I definitely dont make anywhere near 400k and idk if you know but Ontario is crazy expensive for everything
Quite often they're unrealistic expectations that work to preserve the status quo to the detriment of the majority.
It has caused this weird flip where it's now the guys making all of the plans because we're starved for social interaction, meanwhile our wives are more likely to opt for introvert-time.
Also, I'd argue that down down down is the right direction.
It's predominantly the women who are working form home far more. My guy friends do maybe one day a week at home while the women do 3-4.
Though I guess i have alot more white collar friends so this might explain why we're seeing different things?
We've assumed it was because women are more likely to do white collar work that you can do anywhere and men are more likely to do blue collar work that requires you to be on site.
Also could be that I'd imagine women still do more of the child care than men do and that is far easier done at home:)
So rather than white/blue collar I'm thinking that a distinguishing feature might be whether you need another human in the room to do the job.
Of course it's absurd that there would be gendered jobs, but then we live in an absurd world.
I would 100% believe that among highly credentialed knowledge workers, more men than women are in roles that make remote work feasible.
You’re not wrong, of course, about the broader population.
I don't know how to guess which gender among them works from home more. But people here underestimate amount of blue color female workers.
The fees to get to work go back into the employees pocket. Many of those workers live outside of the city so the city can't tax this group directly to make up the shortfall so they tax employees who's businesses are in city an extra %. With employees working from home the need for a downtown office changes.
Everyone who uses the service will need to pay more. The benefit is same service levels with less people so everyone gets a seat. If people cannot afford it wages go up or jobs go vacant
As a Canadian farmer, I would think working from home is the most common arrangement for farmers.
Farms wouldn't count as working remotely, since you're on the farm performing physical labor, even if it's at home. Software development in an office (or customer support in a call center) wouldn't count as working remotely, since you have to be in the office to perform that work (even if you use internet-connected devices to do so).
But using your computer at home to do software development for a company, or having a phone at home to do customer service, etc. would be working remotely.
IMHO it gets even more subjective around "software development from home wouldn't actually be remote if it's a startup that is based in your home, but it would still be working from home technically". But you get the idea.
WFH does not only mean sitting at a desk inside your house.
"Home" can have broader meanings than that, but if a mechanic owns the house his garage is in and lives on the first floor, I don't think most people would count that as "working from home". Farmers do office work too, and that's often done at home, but riding a tractor on a field (which is often leased) isn't, I think.
A mechanic building his garage on his home is absolutely working from home IMO.
Even for office-type work, needs of a pandemic aside, who staunchly works at a desk in their home? Working as a remote developer for 20-some-odd years, I've worked in coffeeshops, hotels, bars, libraries, parks, moving cars, other homes of friends and family, you name it. The freedom to work anywhere is the biggest perk. I have always called it WFH, even if not technically always done at home.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6534796
https://www.international.gc.ca/country-pays/mexico-mexique/...
Whether being effectively human trafficked counts as WFH is up to definition I guess.
Young adults will no longer have to uproot their lives to live in an expensive city. They could probably even get a job right out of college without having to stress about living situations.
I realize you probably don’t mean actual interest (more investments), but the concept of interest gains is hilarious to me at this point.
A Canadian high interest savings account is paying out at 0.050% and only if you have $5000 or more in it.
I think this is likely more common in European countries as well and likely has a lot to do with socialized medicine.
The nature of this model leads to some pretty higher turnover then I’ve seen in the US as people roll onto different opportunities. I’m guessing this may have a large role in how this is shaping up.
I also don’t know what the laws are in Canada but I’m the US dictating where and when work gets done is the primary measure (from the IRS’s perspective) of whether you’re a full time employee or not. If it’s similar in Canada and you have a high number of contractors as part of your workforce it’s going to limit your leverage on forcing them to work from the office.
Of course this is also all anecdotal so who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/
Also Canadian companies don't offer equity. The option programs that I have encountered have always been they type that you lose at the end of your employment. I've also seen companies fire everyone on the eve of a takeover to cancel any options.
So no. I don’t see this happening for every remote position. Some sure. But not all.
Source: a Canadian who has been working remote only for a decade across many different companies
They moved to a cheaper and smaller office that really doesn't have room for what you propose.
I don't doubt that there are some companies that will try to do that, but it just makes life easier for remote companies that are hiring.
I wonder if the differences in society will be exacerbated due to this or if governments will take measures to make commuting and living near workspaces affordable again.
Not talking about any given company or person’s decision to work from home.
But after years of WFH I've found I can't easily go back to work in that stress-inducing (for me) environment anymore. I've tried and couldn't make it more than a couple days. My coping skills have atrophied. I'd say it's even worse now with hybrid and online meetings or discussions from desks at the office.
Guess I'm lucky I still have a choice, but I'd jump at the chance of my own private office.
1) We've got really high housing prices
2) Partially related we only have 4-5 big cities.
one of the US's strengths is that there are great cities in almost every state where someone can move to and find a job no matter their profession.
Canada has Toronto, Vancouver, and maybe Montreal, Calgary and Ottawa. I don't say that to shit on those cities and the ones I didn't mention but we don't have alot of huge job creating cities.
We just don't have the big job generating cities like other countries do because we're very concentrated in 2-3 areas.
That means our population is drawn to live in the GTA(surrounding area of Toronto) or Vancouver.
Work from home allows our population to spread out a bit, which is something our huge country sorely needs. it should also have the benefit of allowing people to move elsewhere and lower our property prices in the big cities.
We also have had dry runs for remote work in the form of satellite US offices with minimal supervision for a long time so we've got atleast some experience in our work force with remote work before the pandemic started.
WFM won't be a panacea that fixes our housing prices alone, we'll probably need to start taxing people who own multiple homes very heavily, but its a trend that could help bring them down and spread our population out to other areas,
Also, if you’re listing Ottawa and Calgary, you should list Edmonton too, all have metro populations in the 1.4-1.5 mil range.
Work from home denies the governments fares and taxes for the rail system to commute to the city, property tax from the fancy offices in the commercial center, sales tax from the shops and restaurants feeding the workers at the commercial centers, sales taxes and certification fees from childcare centers, etc.
Before I had kids it wasn’t a big deal. But now it’s such precious time that I cherish. I always thought avoiding the commute would be valuable. It is. But the real value for me is just being seconds away from my kids as they grow up.
I had a singular moment at my last job that sold it for me. I had a stupid meeting that ran until 6. It was completely pointless, serving to compensate for the incompetence of sales and product. I raced home and my 1yo was already asleep. Wife said he went to bed asking where I was. 12 days later I wasn’t working there anymore.
Life is fleeting.
I don’t get this part, if people put more time towards work, how is that less “productive”, what’s productivity definition by those employers?!
I personally left my previous job a couple weeks ago due to mandating full time at the office, even though I was working more at home and sometimes 15hrs a day -and wasn’t even paid those extra overtime-, but it was less stressful than 6hrs at the office, less wasted time at commuting, can snack any time, using my comfy chair/desk, quiet environment, no distractions in the “open office” or even catching other illnesses as all my peers working full at office were getting sick week after another, other peers who have families they liked spending more time with their kids as before the 2020 they barely see them a couple hours in the weekend, and I’m sure there are more benefits as those from my personal perspective. I understand it’s not for everyone, but going full crazy demanding everyone cramped in an area that is not even suitable for a call-center job let alone other type of jobs require extra focus, how about making the office more favorable to lure more people back to the office, how about having own closed office for all employees, relaxed schedules so people won’t waste time in the traffic, and so on, but that won’t happen, corps want the same old way which’s way worse than how work environment was back in the 60s for example, yeah employees won’t thats not gonna happen again.
I'd like to point out a couple of falsehoods in the article, right off the bat:
- Italy having lowest excess deaths -- popularized myth, but patently false. Compare here with some G7 and other Nordic countries [1]
- "as the pandemic dissipated in 2022 and 2023" -- the baseline Covid hospitalization rate across Canadian provinces is steadily climbing, already higher than peaks of some of the "waves" in 2021 and 2022. While coverage of the pandemic might have dissipated, the health emergency itself has become endemic [2]
It's interesting to see the Post take a WFH-friendly tone, up until recently they've been pro RTO. Wonder if C.A.M. has shuffled their holdings around, or perhaps insurance companies are starting to feel the weight of LTD payouts?
1: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-deaths-cumulative-...
2: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/info/2022/coronavirus-covid-19-p... (click on Hospitalizations)
Huh? The best evidence for lower productivity of wfh is a statement from a bank CEO who is de facto incentivized by commercial real estate loans.
WFH breeds isolation. If you're WFH, I ask you this: when was the last time you met up with someone outside of your household for longer than 10 minutes?
What if the vast majority prefer some level of isolation?
What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work?
Many preferences are not necessarily the best for us. I would prefer to eat nothing but hamburgers and never exercise, but that doesn’t mean I should.
> What if they prefer to socialize with people outside of work?
For most people, I would argue this simply doesn’t happen very often. (Hence my question in my parent comment)
That might be said for the preference to work from an office.
> For most people, I would argue this simply doesn’t happen very often.
Well, perhaps those people ought to change their habits.
My social life and my work life are not the same thing.
Also, many people have families and choose to spend significant time with them instead of socializing at the workplace. Trust me, people with families, especially young kids, are usually not feeling isolated. With wfh and no commutes, they might even have some time to choose to be isolated during a run or other activity.
Also plain old Teams / tracking software showing you away more often more longer.
I'll counter you baseless claim with a baseless claim of my own - there's no evidence that WTH lowered performance or productivity. Quite the opposite, it likely improved.
What about the huge gains for both employees and companies?
For companies: much lower real estate costs, happier employees, access to workers across a larger geographic area, possibly lower wages paid, happier families of employees now that mom, dad, boyfriend, friend, wife, or husband aren’t commuting 5-10 hours per week
For employees: a better office and equipment in many cases and thereby more focus on work in many cases, access to live in a larger geographic region, no commutes, more stability since no move required when changing jobs, stronger communities now that people can stay in one place longer, happier families now that mom, dad, boyfriend, friend, wife, or husband aren’t commuting 5-10 hours per week
By all appearances, the WFH era has been very good to RBC...
Unmentioned in this article is what I think is one of the big reasons why, which is the housing affordability and vacancy crisis.
For older and wealthy workers they may have housing near the office, but for the new generation they've been priced out of anything in the cities, and young designers and programmers at my work are often still living at home in their parents' suburban basements. Of course they'd rather WFH than waste their day commuting in. I don't blame them.
On the other end of things many older workers with families used the opportunity to move elsewhere hours and hours away from the office and get a "cheap" SFH. They now have no option but to WFH.
Basically the government's complete inaction on housing policy has created an environment where everyone, except those lucky enough to already have housing, is worse off continuing to work in the big cities.
When I was a 20 year old I moved to Vancouver and got a cheap apartment in a cool part of town and I didn't even have that good of a job. Due to bad housing policy, that sort of opportunity is completely closed to young people these days.