> You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle.
This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale.
> Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia.
So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions.
> Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data.
I can win the debate this way too.
That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only. Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
> If you're e.g. a tech company…
What if you are not? what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center? You cannot make the assumption that every organization can just close “some” offices and leave others open. What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can? Is it worth the office/desk footprint savings for leadership to create an elite group with a special benefits that pisses for every other person at the org? Probably not…
> That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
Now you are back to dealing with an individual impact here. If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes. That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for. I have been on a salary for nearly 40 years…my employers have never expected me to work 168 hours a week. The expectation was an average of 40.
> They are still general living expenses. Those don’t go away based on employment or not, at home or not. They could decrease/increase some, but you can’t assume the whole amount is tied to employment only.
That wasn't the assumption. The assumption was that the difference was $2500/mo. Real estate in the heart of the downtown is significantly more expensive.
> Besides, if you don’t like your living expenses…quit or move.
At which point we're back to the efficient market hypothesis. If you live downtown, your rent is $2500/mo higher than if you live an hour away, but if you live an hour away you spend $2500/mo in time and commuting costs to get to the office.
But if you work from home then you live an hour away from the office, never go there and have no commuting expense, so you're ahead by $2500/mo and the company would have to compensate you for refusing to allow that.
> What if you are not?
Then you probably still have the same structure where the facilities that require in-person work are separate from the corporate offices:
> what if you are a bank, a hospital, a factory, an insurance company, a processing center?
A company is not a factory etc., a company has factories, or bank branches, or warehouses, or medical facilities. These facilities are generally already separate facilities from the offices where SWEs and other administrative staff work, because those facilities have different geographic requirements. Bank branches or medical facilities have to be near customers or patients. Warehouses or factories will be in places with cheap real estate or industrial zoning.
Offices have traditionally been in cities.
> What about the HR and morale impact when 75% of your employees cannot work remote, but your SWEs can?
This is a really dim view of people. Nurses and factory workers know perfectly well why they can't work from home. Why would they resent that someone else can when their job doesn't have the same requirements? Do they get mad at park rangers because their job allows them to spend time in the outdoors?
They might even notice that it's to their advantage because it gets 25% of the cars off the road so there isn't so much traffic during their commute, and stops them from being in competition with SWEs for the housing within reasonable distance of where they work.
> If they are a salaried employee, the amount of work required for completion in a given week doesn’t change whether a commute is 10 hours or 10 minutes.
You might expect that bosses would get away with giving you more work when you have more time, or that the quality of any given work might be influenced by how much time someone has available to spend on it. And nobody says you're working 168 hours a week, but a lot of people do more than 40, when they have the time.
> That’s time the employee is investing by choosing to live where they live and work for the employer they work for.
It's time the employee is being cost by being forced to commute into the office, which time would be available for other things in the alternative.
Honestly, you have a really strange way of looking at all this in my opinion. You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not. At no point in my life have I ever seen that expectation from anyone else.
You also seem to have really limited experience with organizations that have in office work. My guess is your career started relatively recently (<5 years). Perhaps all you have known is remote—that would track with the strange perspectives you have posted on this thread.
> You seem to believe that your employer should compensate you not just for the time you are working for them, but also the time you are not.
They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
If another company allows WFH and you don't, and that costs the employee $30,000/year to not have, what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary? Or even $10,000 less? And what will you have to do in response?
> They have to compensate you for the relative difference in value between working for them and working for someone else.
No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
> what do you expect them to do when the employer offering WFH offers the same salary?
Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH? Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering. That’s not the case in 2025 (at least in the US). Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants. Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast. My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
> No. They only have to offer enough compensation and benefits to attract enough people into the roles they need filled.
In the absence of an infinite labor pool, in order to do that they need to outbid the other employers.
> Does it matter what another company does if the other company can still fill the role without offering WFH?
Of course it does, because you have the opportunity to be the other company. You would be able to hire the same person for thousands of dollars less by allowing them to work from home and they would still take the job.
> Your whole premise seems to hinge on this concept that a company offering an in office position can’t effectively fill the opportunities they are offering.
I feel like we've been over this. You can obviously fill the job by paying more, but since the difference in the amount you'd have to pay is more than the value of forcing people to come into the office, why would you throw away money just to have less satisfied employees?
> Specifically with tech jobs every opening whether WFH or in office generates hundreds of applicants.
Applying to job postings on the internet takes a matter of seconds. Have a guess what "hundreds of applicants" implies if the average applicant applies to hundreds of job postings.
Now consider that a lot of the applicants won't be qualified.
> Some people might prefer WFH, others might prefer in office, but if RTO is the trend, WFH opportunities will start decreasing and will fill up fast.
It sounds like you're saying employers offering WFH opportunities will find it even easier to hire at a given level of compensation.
> My guess is that given the option between unemployment and employment in an office anyone and everyone who needs an income will opt for the latter and will not sit around stubbornly waiting for a WFH opportunity like a petulant child that has to eat their broccoli before they are allowed to get up from the dinner table.
Surely this attitude will have no effect on morale or turnover?
I am quite convinced that you probably started your career around or near to 2020, you seem to have a real naïveté around what is actually important to a company and how they calculate value. Especially a company that puts real value on in office work for its employees. I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
But here is the thing—people adapt. People adapted in 2020 when a good portion of the workforce went remote. There were griping then while people learned to balance home and family distractions with work. There were complications around finding appropriate workspace in their homes but people managed to make it work. If your company RTOs you might have a choice to make: adapt and deal with the commute/rent/whatever challenges with it, or perhaps try and convince your organization’s leadership how wrongheaded and stupid they are for RTO (Good luck…as a former senior leader in a few orgs both public and private…you better work on your argument). If you can’t adapt or convince your leaders of the error of their ways—quit and take your chances to find and compete for those remaining, but shrinking inventory of remote gigs out there.
I say all of this as a remote worker happily riding out the sunset of my career for a few more years in a lovely low stress non-management gig. I definitely don’t want to RTO, but if my company chose that route I know won’t have a good argument to counter because there isn’t one. I know and my leadership know that I can adapt and be just as productive at the office as I am at home…in short order.
> I suspect you have probably had limited experience with in office work and automatically assume that everyone was miserable back pre-pandemic about it.
Fully 91% of IT workers prefer to be fully remote or remote-first with no requirement to go into the office regularly, and it was disproportionately the first one. 6 of the remaining 9% still wanted to be remote first.
Only 1% of people wanted to be fully office-based. That's 3% less than the Lizardman's Constant.
> But here is the thing—people adapt.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -George Bernard Shaw
I prefer steak, but will eat chicken if that is what is available.
I prefer gin, but will drink vodka when that is what is available.
I prefer to fly first class, but economics often force me into economy.
A preference does not equal entitlement and frankly the only preference that matters in this case is what the employer’s preference is, especially when the workers are willing to compromise their preference where it differs from the employer’s preference.
The employer’s are the ones that hold the little green pieces of paper that you want and need and are willing to trade your labor to get. They will occasionally attach strings to those little green pieces of paper. As long as you or someone is willing to deal with those strings, your preference really only matters to you…at least to them.
This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale.
> Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal.
Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia.
So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions.
> Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data.
I can win the debate this way too.
That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.