[cwmoreiras]

1. I like my commute. If my commute changed I would feel differently. Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

2. I don't have an office in my house. Even if I had the space I don't think I would want to use it for work. However, since coronavirus happened I have had way more space in my office than I did before, and I refuse to be sandwiched between two other engineers in an open office floor plan. So if my company tries to do that they will have a problem, at least from me.

3. I pack my lunch as often as possible and don't really know anyone who works near me.

I do think there are many developers for whom it makes sense to work from home. Especially if they are seniors, and their company workflow is well organized for it. Also, I do think that there are people who are very efficient working from home, but if they are WFH it will still be harder for junior engineers to collaborate with them or learn from them.

I've seen it suggested that in the future, companies who want people to come back to the office will lose all their best employees and will only be able to retain the people who can't get a WFH job. I think a lot of what makes someone a good engineer comes down to experience, so if that were to come true it would ultimately mean that senior engineers (best employees) will work remotely and junior engineers (can't get a WFH job) will be working on site. That kind of leaves junior engineers in the dust as far as mentorship is concerned so I would not consider that a good thing, even though it seems to be fine with certain people who think that they are "good engineers", when in reality they are probably just seniors.

[shagie]

> Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

This opens up way too many cans of worms - some of which (I feel) are very unfair.

(Morning shift)

I worked at SGI doing tech support on the "East" team. The teams were split up by timezone (we were all in Mountain View - where the Google campus is now). My shift started at 5am (no traffic at all) and I lived about 10 minutes away at that time of day.

One of my coworkers lived in Gilroy, and was on the west team (a 9-5 working hours) and would sometimes have a commute of an hour and a half each way if traffic was bad.

So, the guy in Gilroy should be getting paid an extra $100 to $150/day for living further away from me and not working the morning shift?

Or how about the sf2g types ( https://sf2g.com )?

---

I can find other examples of this through my professional career. I had a co-worker who lived in Minneapolis driving to Eau Claire, WI each day. One bad snow storm, it took him 3 hours to get in that morning.

I currently have a coworker who lives in northern Wisconsin and the office is in southern Wisconsin. He's been very happy with WFH. But he had quite a commute (he likes driving).

This furthermore complicates the question of overtime. If you've got a 90m commute each way, does that mean you should only be working for 5h/day to avoid overtime? If I take the scenic route, do I get paid more?

The "ok, here's the consequences of paying for the commute" that I would see is that for companies that need people in the office (e.g. nurses), they would then have the constraint "you must live within 15 minutes from the office and public transportation is not acceptable as that may cause additional delays."

While I recognize the "this is time lost", the "lets compensate for this time spent" is a mess and would cause more problems and discontent than the lost time discontent currently has.

[cwmoreiras]

So do you think it's fine that people spend hours each day in service of their company and not getting paid for it?

[shagie]

This gets to the question "what is the employer paying for?"

Let me flip your question around - do you think that it is fine that one person is paid extra to live 2h away or that they should be paid twice what I get paid for effectively the same time spent in service of the company because I only have a 10 minute commute?

Alternatively, consider the person who commutes into the office 1h each way while I'm WFH and have effectively 0 commute. Let's say the wages are $50/h. Should they get paid an extra $100 a day because they are commuting rather than taking advantage of the WFH option?

On Wednesday nights I'd head to dinner with my family from the office. This involved going about 20-30 minutes out of my way from my normal commute. Should I get paid for that adjustment to my commute?

Alternatively, instead of taking route 1 home, I took route 2 home and did some shopping on the way (the route is actually faster sometimes, but less enjoyable and a harder drive), how does that factor into what I should get paid for my commute?

If I took a 15 minute deviation from my normal commute to drive through McD's for breakfast, should I get paid for 15 more minutes?

I'm older now than I was, and so prefer taking city surface streets that are properly illuminated and plowed in the winter rather than country roads. This was a change that I made to my commute back in '18. Should I get paid more because I changed my commute to surface streets? It's a 30 minute drive... I could switch to taking a bus, but that's 80-100 minutes each way (yea, the particular route options are awkward - two transfers for the fastest route).

When I was in Northern Wisconsin, there was a Hmong community that lived 45 minutes away from the office. Would it be fair for the employer to say "you must live within 30 minutes of the office because we're not going to be paying more than 1h/day for a commute"?

The "not paying for commute at all" is the simplest and (I believe) most fair way to approach the commute and issues of non-productive time, personal choices for transportation, personal choices for "where you want to live", and significant complications for overtime and verification of overtime. It avoids issues of outright discrimination of people who take public transportation or live certain distances from the office.

[cwmoreiras]

Your examples have a level of granularity that borders on absurdity. We all know that what it comes down to is this: Company makes an offer, i.e. "One of the perks of this job is you receive a 2 hour daily commute stipend". Employee accepts or rejects that offer.

[shagie]

Why not raise everyone's salary by $100/day ($2,500/y) and call it even?

Less accounting to be done when someone's commute changes based on inclement weather, no needing to punch time clock when you leave and get home (or record milage on your vehicle), no difficulty with alternate commute choices (if I bike to work and it takes 1h rather than 30 min driving)...

What benefit to the employer is there to pay someone more if they live further away? What problem would there be if every employee was given the same pay increase regardless of where they lived?

It means that payroll has a lot less work to do too (rather than trying to keep track of everyone's commute).

If Meta HQ did this, would they be giving less to someone who lives in East Palo Alto rather than Gilroy (because of the "difference in commute")?

[lotsofpulp]

> Regardless, I feel employees should get paid for their commutes.

Why? How would it even be practical? What if there is congestion? What if someone moved after starting a job, or their commute time changes drastically? Does the employer pay for tolls?

[cwmoreiras]

That sounds like a problem for the company to figure out, not the commuter.

[lotsofpulp]

That sounds like it would result in the company allocating more of the budget towards people who commute more than to people who commute less.

As someone that commutes less, it means I get less pay, for no benefit to me.

[cwmoreiras]

The benefit to you is that you don't have to commute as far!

[lukas099]

> I feel employees should get paid for their commutes. This would lead to more pollution, sprawl, and deaths by automobile as people would be incentivized to live further from work.

[cwmoreiras]

People are already incentivized to live far from their jobs because of HCOL near their workplaces. Also, it would be nice if people's choices were as binary as this line of thinking seems to suggest. It seems to me that many people would rather have a shorter commute either way.

[lukas099]

> People are already incentivized to live far from their jobs because of HCOL near their workplaces.

Yes, and now they would be even more incentivized.

> Also, it would be nice if people's choices were as binary as this line of thinking seems to suggest.

What's your point?

> It seems to me that many people would rather have a shorter commute either way.

Yes. But if further incentivized to have a longer commute, they would (in aggregate).

[cwmoreiras]

That's great, thanks.