Ask HN: Why isn't remote work advertised as a pro environment initiative?

I asked myself the same thing and I'm afraid the effect is not as big as expected (in relation to other emissions).

From https://www.agora-verkehrswende.de/veroeffentlichungen/wende... For Germany:

The climate effects of home office were estimated for 40 percent of the workers, each with two home office days per week, were estimated to save 5.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year.

This corresponds to 18 percent of percent of the emissions from commuting to work or 4 percent of the of total passenger transport emissions (Büttner and Breitkreuz 2020).

There was a big "Slack is where work happens" campaign, on billboards and expensive full page newspaper ads etc. By the same token that would also seem to have little purpose.

Maybe these kinds of ads are made as memes to be repeated uncritically by decision makers with little specific expertise, or something like that

My own experience as a junior during the forced WFH transition of the pandemic is, albeit anecdotal, proof for me.

It sucked. If the company doesn't shift and completely overhaul its entire culture from the ground up to full remote including junior mentoring, it's difficult to see, especially from the managers and senior perspective who already know the "games" of the organization and the know-how to get their work done and be productive while advancing their career, just how much knowledge and development potential I missed out on as a remote junior.

When I was in the office, I would pass by a coworkers and see some new development environment or tool on their monitor and I would ask them "Hey, sorry, what's that you use", "Oh yeah, it's a tool for doing X, it's very useful, you should try it.", "Oh neat, thanks". When we switched to remote I would have no way of seeing the tools others use that later help me also be more productive.

Or when two of the most senior colleagues who sat next to me would be discussing some very high level technical stuff together, I would sometimes listen in and learn something new and sometimes ask them questions later about it and even volunteer to work on that if they need help. With the switch to remote, I have no chance of hearing 1:1 technical discussion calls between the seniors and find out new things or challenges they face.

Basically, I was missing out on a lot of ideas, challenges, solution, technical development know-how, and became this anonymous avatar that needs to takes Jira issues as input and produce Gitlab merge requests as output, pigeonholing myself and stagnating my growth both as an engineer and inside the organization.

I suspect these issues might be less common in startups and companies that have been built from the start as distributed remote, but are probably very present for older organizations that have always ben in the office, and switched to hybrid or remote because of the pandemic.

Again, even if they have some qualities that make them different in order to achieve big things, I would expect a Gauss curve to represent most traits distribution at the top like at the bottom. While most people show restrain, a few will be exhuberant, no matter the sample.

I'm surprised corporations haven't already reframed it with stories like:

"Home energy usage SKYROCKETS as workers abandon the eco-friendly advantages of a shared work space"