[cableshaft]

When I worked in the office I drove home during lunch, let the dogs out, scarfed down food for ten minutes, then headed back to work. I know others that just cage their dogs for eight hours (which I would never do to my dogs) or took them to doggy daycare every day, which the average day-rate around me is $40/day per dog (and I have two dogs, so it would be $80/day, or $1600/month).

My new job is downtown and at least an hour drive away, so I couldn't feasibly drive home during lunch anymore. It would be a significant inconvenience for me to start going to work every day (or at least it would if my wife was also forced to go back to work, she currently works from home also).

It's also inconvenient for many other reasons, including a 2-3 hour commute, but yeah, having dogs complicates things, and pre-pandemic, there were very few remote jobs, so people just had to deal with it. But it still sucked.

[midoridensha]

Why not just not have a dog? Even kids aren't this much of a difficulty. Why do people want such an inconvenient and expensive pet? It seems like either virtue signaling or wealth signaling to me.

[meowfly]

Or... Perhaps people love and feel responsible for their pets?

This problem doesn't seem new to me. Startups letting people bring their dogs to work was a benefit before remote.

[midoridensha]

It wasn't a benefit to coworkers who were allergic to or uncomfortable around dogs.

Many people love and feel responsible for their elderly and incapacitated parents. Should companies allow workers to bring their parents (possibly with dementia) to work with them?

[meowfly]

I was never claiming pets should come to the office.

I am saying it's not signaling wealth or virtue to take care of your pet. Some people really love their animals, and are willing to part with their money for them. Using your example, I would never begrudge someone spending lots of money on their family either.

It seems you don't like pets, and that's OK. It's also OK for other people to love their pets even if it doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to be signaling.

[cableshaft]

> Even kids aren't this much of a difficulty.

That's assuming daycare, i.e. letting someone else take care of them at a significant price ("51% of parents say they spend more than 20% of their household income on child care"), or that they're old enough they can do things on their own, like get themselves to school and go to the bathroom on their own.

The main reason I went home is to not force my dogs to have to either pee in the house or go 9+ hours without going to the bathroom. They're not capable of using the toilet in my bathroom or letting themselves outside, unlike people.

And I don't want to force them to be outside the entire time I'm gone either, there's too much risk of bad things happening (one being the coyotes that are in the prairie beyond our fence, we have several hawks in the area so hawk attacks, which happened to our next door neighbor's dog, bad behavior from neighbors -- one neighbor was talking about kids that kept opening their gates and letting their dogs loose in the neighborhood for example, also prolonged exposure to heat, cold, or storms, etc)

[1]: https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/

> Why do people want such an inconvenient and expensive pet?

My dogs are much less expensive than children, yet people still have those. And I work from home so I don't have to pay for doggie daycare.

It wasn't inconvenient at all when we first got our dogs. I worked much closer to home (just a 7 minute drive), and my girlfriend (now wife) worked from home most days anyway (this was way back in like 2016, pre-pandemic). Times and circumstances change, but our love for our dogs have not. My job (software engineering) can be done fully remotely and I've proven that the past five years (my current job and previous job has been fully remote for longer than the pandemic also), so there's no reason to compromise on giving up a loved member of the family (and risk something terrible happening to them on top of that) just for the sake of a job.

The period of time where I had to make that long drive every day was only about 8 months, by the way. My wife also had to Uber home every day, costing about $500 extra per month, because we only had (and have) one car, and could only drop her off at work in the mornings, but we also did that for eight months, despite it also being inconvenient.

There was a story that blew up just this past week when a CEO in an all-hands meeting praised someone for giving up their dog to return to office, and the response by the general public has not been kind, to put it mildly. There are lots of people who love their pets and wouldn't give them up for anything (short of me being completely incapacitated and unable to care for them), I'm far from unique here.

[midoridensha]

>or that they're old enough they can do things on their own, like get themselves to school and go to the bathroom on their own.

Kids can do these things by the time they're 2-6 years old (bathroom earlier than school of course). Dogs never can: you're basically signing up to take care of an invalid for 12-15 years. And kids can use diapers before this age.

>And I work from home so I don't have to pay for doggie daycare.

Yeah, that's a luxury most working people don't have. So as I said, dogs are pets for rich people.

>My dogs are much less expensive than children

Children aren't pets; they're actual human beings and the next generation. Dogs are just animals and pets.

>My wife also had to Uber home every day, costing about $500 extra per month, because we only had (and have) one car, and could only drop her off at work in the mornings, but we also did that for eight months, despite it also being inconvenient.

This is what you get for living in a car-centric society with no public transit. Again, rich people problems.

>I'm far from unique here.

You're far from unique in modern America, but go back in time 30 years and people would laugh at you. It's pretty obvious why American society is so unproductive these days and unable to compete with China.