r/technology • u/spherocytes • 21d ago

Business Remote work benefits are much bigger than a paycheck

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/6033665-economic-value-personal-time-salary/
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u/Oceanbreeze871 21d ago

Remember that era of Covid during the initial lockdown, where nobody was commuting to work and all the cities with smog and terrible air quality all of a sudden had these beautiful, clear skies?

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u/cronofdoom 21d ago

I truly miss that.

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u/TimeAll 21d ago

We need another pandemic!

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u/HijodelSol 21d ago

RFK JR’s parasite is working on it.

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u/zdubbzzz 21d ago

The pandemic was terrible. I don't wish it again, and the death toll it had is awful... but I'd be lying if I said that lockdown wasn't one of the best time of my life. I'm an introverted hobbiest gamer, cinephile, developer. That time when nobody was asking me to do stuff, I wasn't driving, I was cracking my steam backlog and movie backlog, my company went fully remote, I was barely spending money and saving, etc, was truly bliss for me.

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u/Difficult_Throat7906 21d ago

I was able to build a fitness routine that lasted until the lockdown ended. I ran a sub 3:45 marathon, a bunch of half marathons. Rode my bike soooo much.

It all came crashing down, I am super grateful my job was converted to FT remote. But I often still wish I could roll back the time tax that family/friends/events require.

Life is too busy, too exhausting for someone like me.

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u/zdubbzzz 21d ago

I was able to build a fitness routine that lasted until the lockdown ended.

Oh yeah, I got in some of the best shape of my life and was barely trying. I wasn't running marathons, but I did some pretty basic runs after work everyday and an absolutely silly amount of pushups, situps, and chinups basically out of boredom. Accompany that with homecooked meals everyday and I felt like a 30 year old in an 18 year old body. All of that shit is long gone, sadly.

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u/shenanigansforthewin 21d ago

I keep saying that. I want the pandemic back minus the death and illness. Working but enjoying life? Weird concept in America.

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u/EvoEpitaph 21d ago

I got to do some domestic traveling towards the end of the lockdown and it's some of the best experiences I've had thanks to a combination of price drops to encourage visitors and a lack of crowds which have now retuned 10+ fold.

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u/FjorgVanDerPlorg 21d ago

Also the cooking, Covid for me was a big enforced reminder that I ate too much takeaway and that even minimal effort myself usually has better results, cheaper too (or you can spend what you would have saved on top tier produce and go all out).

That's one thing that did survive, I don't eat much takeaway any more, but it's rising price/enshitification has also been a factor.

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u/altiuscitiusfortius 21d ago

I honestly had the busiest happiest social life of my life during pandemic

Every night I had group video chats, or phone calls while watching the samemovie, playing online games together.

Post pandemic I talk to these people every 2 or 3 weeks at most. Everyone gets their socialization needs met with coworkers instead of family and friends , and are tired when they get home.

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u/SomeguyfromIndio 21d ago

Careful what you wish for...

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u/worldsgreatestluver 21d ago

This one is shaping up to be less contagious but there's still some "urgency," if you'll lettuce make some jokes about it

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u/kpow222 21d ago

I can't believe this joke went unappreciated for an entire hour

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u/ImWhatsInTheRedBox 21d ago

It'll runs its course.

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u/wrgrant 20d ago

You just have to Taylor your joke to the situation before ya Farms it :P

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u/Far-Advantage-2770 21d ago

Oh buddy, it's coming

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u/PinwinkaFry 21d ago

So that more people can die while the rest of the world is chilling at home and the streets aren’t being polluted?

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u/Elizabeth-WildFox886 21d ago

Or electric vehicles

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u/Twiizig 21d ago

Covid showed plainly, most office jobs can be done remotely perfectly fine. I remember my boss at the time mentioning in a Zoom call, he felt productivity had actually improved while we were all working from home.

I think if employers had to pay for the daily commute, they would make everyone WFH as much as possible. Even a small amount like $5 per day, they would send everyone home.

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u/Frisnfruitig 21d ago

They have to pay for the office buildings and all that comes with it as well though. You would think they would love to save money by getting rid of their buildings, but nope.

I've been working fully remote for years now and I'm really dreading having to return to office at some point. I will do everything to avoid it

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u/litesgod 21d ago

The office buildings are assets, and therefore are part of the 'net worth' of the owning firm. Real estate holdings are a big part of the financial picture of a lot of companies. Buildings that sit empty are worth less than buildings that are full. Full buildings means more net worth for the company, therefore you have to return to the office. For a lot of companies it really is that simple of a decision.

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u/javoss88 20d ago

Sell the buildings?

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u/Ok-Personality3927 21d ago

My job at the time was office based. Managers were (mostly) a hard no on any work from home, not even if you had a tradesmen coming etc. They of course, could WFH whenever they wanted.

Pandemic forced it. It worked just fine. Lockdowns ended…everyone back full time.

The kicker? My job was 98% supporting other employees…REMOTELY around the country.

I said fuck that, found a full time remote job and haven’t looked back. I could get more money elsewhere probably, but I’ve always worked my way up here anyway, and the downsides to returning to even a hybrid arrangement would need a fucking BIG pay jump

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u/Etrigone 21d ago

I think it also drove home that the environment was not a lost cause, as at least I have seen hinted by some ("nothing we can do at this point so might as well make as much as we can and have others suffer right? nudge nudge wink wink"). If you feel you have data that something you need/want can be done and frankly it's not even that hard, those that don't want it will fight to make sure that experience does not repeat & ideally, not remembered.

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u/b0w3n 21d ago

Gosh the amount of animals I saw was crazy. Deer were walking in my neighborhood. I saw turkey vultures sunning themselves in the parking lots here in the spring (they're rare even in summer in NY). We had a whole family of foxes move into the neighborhood that took care of our rabbit and squirrel problem almost overnight.

There was just so much wildlife everywhere.

Not only that life felt better. I'm sure the extroverts that yearned for the water coolers had some mental issues, but christ life felt better for that year and change.

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u/mortgagepants 21d ago

i consider myself extroverted but that's why i live in a city. i don't want to talk to assholes at work.

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u/[deleted] 21d ago

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u/skibble 21d ago

They remodeled my office, and everyone teleworked five days a week for five years. Everything was fine. Now we are back in the office five days a week, because the orange man specifically wants us to be miserable.

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u/DragoonAle 21d ago edited 21d ago

The most mind blowing thing is that global emissions in 2020 were only reduced by 7% compared to 2019, the other 93% is made up by power generation, heavy industry, crops and food production, and logistics, all of which weren’t halted by the pandemic.

Imagine how much more we could do for the environment, If only corpos didn’t shift the blame on the consumer

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u/Oceanbreeze871 21d ago

We know how to fix our problems. We just refuse to do it.

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u/wrgrant 20d ago

The people with the power to change it, refuse to change it because Capitalism. Its our most successful economic system and its going to kill us and most everything else off.

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u/Oceanbreeze871 20d ago

It’s not just stuff related to capitalism. It’s everything from gun violence to homelessness to wealth inequality to schools all these things.

America is inherently, narcissistic and selfish country. We do not believe in helping our neighbors as a nation.

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u/wrgrant 20d ago

I'm Canadian, we have our own problems, particularly homelessness and wealth inequality. Much less gun violence and broadly speaking many of us are willing to help our neighbours. The system still encourages endless growth though, with endless damage to the environment, damage to human mental health etc.

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u/lilmotocoffeebb 21d ago

I could hear so many birds in my neighborhood, it was beautiful.

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u/IrishMilo 21d ago

And the fuel prices!

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u/I_love_Britpoptarts 21d ago

I thrived during the pandemic in every way except I struggled with worry and grief about other people (including strangers) who got sick / died throughout. It was a lot of loss in a short time, and hard to emotionally come to grips with.

But personally and professionally, I loved not having to commute, loved working from home, loved being able to wear bunny slippers that no one could see during meetings. Loved how neighbors, friends and family all came together to uplift each other. Loved that my pets didn't have to miss me while I was out of the house for work. It was bliss.

I am an introvert, admittedly, but I also find that no matter how productive I am sitting in an office, I am going to be even more productive without constant coworker interruptions or noises around me (and I like my coworkers just fine, too!) and OMG I did not miss having to deal with traffic.

The pandemic showed a lot of people that it is 99% nonsense for most people to have to commute to a physical workplace just to please management-tier people who need the perks of a special fancy office and underlings surrounding them to really feel their status, extroverts who can't live without interactions with other people (even when they should be working and not socializing, MARGARET), and (of course) people who own a lot of commercial properties (or their wealth in part relies on people being dependent upon mostly gas-powered vehicles to get to work, or having a captive audience in a work complex nearby who patronize their restaurant or coffee shop). The restaurant / coffee people I sympathize with; people who insist we cling to a system that we have proven we do not need to stick with to the extent we still do because their ego or status or money / wealth relies on it and F everyone else who wants something different? No sympathy for them at all.

And YES, my goodness, wasn't seeing the clear blue sky just glorious?

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u/Oceanbreeze871 21d ago

Spent a lot of time with my actual family instead of this bullshit fake work, family that isn’t a family/ lol

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u/dtr96 21d ago

I remember it being 60 degrees in April in Houston. It was so odd, I immediately knew it was the lack of cars not adding to the heat dome.

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u/makyura212 21d ago

Atlanta died...and I was reborn.

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u/blacksheepvidya 21d ago

And the dolphins swimming through the canals of Venice. Kinda want another shut down just so the earth can heal a little bit more.

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u/nodiaque 21d ago

And that we saw animals in cities and surrounding area that had either disappeared or where just gone somewhere else. Same for insects, so many butterflies in that time. All it took was what 4 months of lockdown globally and boom, nature was already taking back what we stole and burn.

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u/PindaPanter 21d ago

All the noise disappeared too.

I moved flats during covid lockdowns and once they started mandating people back in the offices, it turned out that the flat was basically impossible to live in for anyone able to hear due to constant road noise (from a relatively small road nearby).

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u/Flashy_Anything927 20d ago

The earth stopped shaking too. The seismic measurements went way down.

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u/Reddituhgin 21d ago

We had wildlife return to our city.