151–160 of 264 posts
Working from home not only saves businesses money it also increases your salary take-home here.
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A trend that started already in a lot of companies a couple of years ago and will only be accelerated by Covid. Many places do overbook desks in offices right now and have flex-tables without fixed assigned workers. Seems fair to think about compensating employees for the costs that are being pushed to their side.
What cost? If anything the employee now saves time and money from the commute alone.
Whether or not it's a net saving vs. transport costs really depends on where you happen to live.
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Compared to SF, Zurich is 50% cheaper in rent, but pretty much more expensive across the board for everything else. From Numbeo: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
After taxes and rent, "everything else" is fairly insignificant in practice, even though both cities are very expensive. Also I would be careful about numbers from Numbeo, I certainly don't pay $50/kg for beef.
It's financial death by a thousand cuts.
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Regardless of the home situation of the worker, the worker needs to reserve space from the home they paid for or are paying for. Many who don't pay rent still pay mortgages. And even if the house is paid off, the company is still basically claiming a working space that they can skimp out on. The idea is that when a company lays claim to a space in your house, you should get something in return. It doesn't matter if t…
But that's exactly what I'm saying then. The way to reason about this is that, as an employee, you leasing (or subletting) a portion of your home to the company, and hence they need to pay you rent for occupying your home. This is very much not paying your share of any rent (which may not even exist); it's paying their own share of a rental agreement they've effectively entered into. It makes so much more sense that…
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> I'm sure that there are other unintended consequences, such as higher rents, but who knows. For Amazon's reputation for internal cost-cutting (such as displaying the pricing on computer peripherals in vending-machines in their SLU offices), Amazon makes me scratch my head for building-up their HQ in one of the most expensive cities to buy land in the world - ditto Facebook in Menlo Park. Why didn't Amazon choose Ke…
Because SF & Seattle are some of the best labor markets for tech talent in the world? How is this a mystery?
This seems very distortionary to the market. So if you're a blue-collar worker, your ability to pay for housing is "less" compared with a similarly-aged white-collar worker just because the latter has his company subsidise his rent.
Some companies will pay your gas or car insurance if owning a car is an inherent part of the job, it's kind of the same thing here.
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That's not what it is either. As a person in the US where "health insurance" is so tangled up with employers I can tell you, the last thing anyone should want is more financial entanglements between employees and employers.
Health insurance is a benefit, paying for equipment necessary to do the job isn't. I agree that health care shouldn't be tied to employment, but saying a company shouldn't buy you e.g. a laptop, desk, chair, and space to work seems wild to me.
Thought: - Companies that now realised that remote schemes works for them, will push for that scheme to remain, with the aim of reducing their fixed costs (office rent, utilities, insurance, etc). - This eliminates a big chunk of fixed costs... as most are shifted to the employees. - If authorities/employees start demanding that part of those costs are covered by the company, companies will push to get avoid work-fro…
That’s an unfair treatment. Most if not all of those are sunk costs for the remote employee.
Thought: - Companies that now realised that remote schemes works for them, will push for that scheme to remain, with the aim of reducing their fixed costs (office rent, utilities, insurance, etc). - This eliminates a big chunk of fixed costs... as most are shifted to the employees. - If authorities/employees start demanding that part of those costs are covered by the company, companies will push to get avoid work-fro…
A trend that started already in a lot of companies a couple of years ago and will only be accelerated by Covid. Many places do overbook desks in offices right now and have flex-tables without fixed assigned workers. Seems fair to think about compensating employees for the costs that are being pushed to their side.
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Somewhere in between. In Zurich 1500 would be a low rent, and 3000 would get you a 2 bedroom with view and quite spacious +80m^2
Wow I had thought the cost of living was high in Switzerland but I guess when you’re used to the Bay Area everything else seems cheap. In SF you’d pay like $5000 for that 2bd unless you go out pretty to the more remote, harder to commute from neighborhoods. In any case, $154 is still not that significant, definitely not enough on its own to let you afford an extra bedroom to turn into an office, for instance.
For $5k in the city, I would think you could at least get 1200 sqf or better. Also, it is hard to rent in Switzerland...like...the prices aren’t your biggest problem in renting a place, finding a place to rent at all and getting accepted by the real estate company is a PITA and you’ll often wish you could just pay more money to skip all of it.