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> The amount of money you are saving by WFH full-time, assuming you properly leverage the opportunity (i.e. cooking own meals and multitasking chores), far outweighs any paltry notion that could be provided in recompense for you dutifully enshrining a guest bedroom as your employment zone. This one's really important. Prior to moving to my current job, I had a 15-20 minute drive to work every day. I was filling my car up with gas every 2 weeks like clockwork. I was also going out for lunch semi-regularly. Moving to WFH (before the pandemic, because this was a planned move for me) totally changed the math on a lot of stuff. I haven't filled my car up with gas since early February at this point, though even before social distancing the previous fillup was in early December. My insurance cost on my car went down due to no commute. Food costs went down because I was cooking when I wanted lunch. These changes made a pretty noticeable improvement to our finances and we're now getting ready to move into a house where I'll have a dedicated office for work instead of a corner of the basement, and that's going to have some nice tax impacts too. My employer has done a really good job embracing remote. There was a time when they actually retracted all ability to work remotely and had everyone move to work at our main office or look for another job. A shift in regime happened, and remote eventually came back, and now we've got a whole pile of benefits specifically for our remote employees, to help counterbalance the fact that they don't get some of the benefits that our in-office employees get. One thing that we all get is a stipend we're allowed to use generally on things that help improve our lives or help us grow as people (a few examples of expensible things would be a new mattress, cooking classes, voluntarily chosen equipment for our workspace, etc). So we really already had the ability to expense the things we need for WFH, which has definitely been a big help. As far as Overwatch between PRs... I mean, let's be real. Think about how much time you spend in the office chatting with coworkers about weekend plans, or what was on TV last night, or any other thing. Or, for those of you that have something like it, playing pool or ping pong. This is just an evolution of that. Taking a break now and then to do something to blow off steam is good and healthy. |