• 3 Posts
  • 194 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 10th, 2023

help-circle







  • If it counts, I encountered a Java file that, unbeknownst to me at the time, was duplicated across two different places. The project was essentially abandoned for years, and the file was one that didn’t change much so I left it alone for a year or so.

    Eventually I had to add a method to it. Compiled just fine, runtime threw a no such method error. Turned out Eclipse was using one, but when Maven did its build it used the old duplicate I didn’t know existed.

    Took me a while to find that one!





  • Choose a house with 1 extra room, courtesy of your WFH savings.

    You’re not totally off-base there

    An itemized cost paid straight by your employer will have the effect of encouraging them to waste less of your time with a commute.

    When WFH is an option. Where it isn’t (eg, the sandwich dude)…

    They might try to hire locally, might pay for moving expenses, might keep you out of rush hour traffic, might be worried about keeping you late such that now you’re driving on overtime, might actually align their concerns with the planet’s by reducing all the oil going literally up in flames to transport people around to do knowledge work in a cubicle.

    I have a really hard time seeing this actually happening in practice, especially on low-level jobs. Or people who live with their family (of whom others work elsewhere). Or when you say “hire locally” I say “can’t get a damn job in my field because I don’t live nearby and moving would take my wife away from her job”




  • You’re talking about giant differences in location (cross-country) which, of course, would need some hard decisions to be made. I’m talking about realistic compromises that may have to be made between a couple with very different work locations in the same general area. When I talked about Lincoln vs Omaha, NE, those two cities are an hour apart. But could be a 30-minute commute in opposite directions for each. Maybe one person works in downtown Chicago, while the other works in the O’Hare airport. Maybe people work in two different boroughs of NYC. If the employer incentived an employee to live nearby, what about their family who works across town? Things crumble apart with that.


  • Coming in hot with my personal financial situation, eh? Nice. For what it’s worth a major reason I was able to buy the home I have is because we’ve been here over a decade - bought just as the crash started to recover. And if you re-read what I said, cost was absolutely a factor in my choosing where to live. If I could afford to spend at least double for a similar house in the middle of the city, maybe I would have. But I couldn’t. The last thing I want to do is take a “fuck you, I’ve got mine” attitude but that doesn’t mean I can’t point out giant issues with ideas people are coming up with. You’re welcome to pick apart those arguments, but if you feel the need to go after me personally instead, maybe you should think about why that is.

    Like when you bring up taking location into account for an office location. I live on one side of the metro area, many of my coworkers live elsewhere. Take a company with enough people working somewhere, and their “average” location will probably end up near the middle of the city - more than likely a downtown area. Which brings us right back to where we started.

    What’s more, everything you say may theoretically work for one person going to one workplace from one home. What about a married couple who work in entirely different places? If one person has a job in (for example) Omaha, NE and the other in Lincoln, that couple could conceivably live in between those two cities and each have a sorta long but doable commute. If a company were to “provide a benefit like a subsidized loan for property closer to the work” (you mean like a mortgage?) that would not only be insane for that random shop with 3 employees (not all business owners are automatically in the <1%) but it would put that employee’s partner at a disadvantage by making them have a longer commute.





  • Arguably there is an average commute time baked into the wage already along with other expenses people have in life. I’m not sure it needs to be itemized out as its own thing.

    And this also assumes an IMO flawed assumption that working from home is entirely expense-free. I have a decent work area in my home. If I didn’t, that space could be used for another kid’s bedroom. Or a craft room for the wife. Or a dedicated Lego room. Or a sex dungeon. Maybe some of those things can be paired up with an office easily enough, but that’s my choice, not my employer’s. Plus there are other day to day costs, like the electricity to run my equipment, the Internet connection I probably would have had in the 21st century but technically don’t have to, heating/cooling costs… You get the idea.