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

• paulcole 4y ago
  I don’t understand who the advertisements are meant to reach as their audience? The companies? They care about profit not the environment. The employees? They are either already sold on remote work or don’t like remote work. Whose mind is changed by being told the environmental benefits of remote work?
  • seydor 4y ago
    The companies? they care about their ESG image. "We support green, remote work" would be a nice touch The employees? Isn't that the whole point of the "corporate culture" BS? - The mind of those people who can't live without the daily commute to office
    • paulcole 4y ago
      What do companies care about more? Their ESG image or money? The employees don’t need to be advertised remote work software. They either like remote work or they don’t. An ad for “Slack is good for the environment” doesn’t change anyone’s mind.
      • seydor 4y ago
        By the same token "EVs are good for the environment" wouldn't change anyone's mind
        • paulcole 4y ago
          That doesn’t make any sense. The “EVs are good for the environment” ads are for the consumers, many of whom haven’t made their minds up about which car to buy next. People have made their minds up about whether they like remote work or not — see every HN thread ever.
      • xkcd-sucks 4y ago
        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
        • paulcole 4y ago
          > By the same token that would also seem to have little purpose. No. It’s brand advertising which has a pretty specific purpose.
• makz 4y ago
  What we are being told at my company is that the corporate building has all of these green technologies, so it’s more environmentally friendly to work there even taking into account commuting.
• eimrine 4y ago
  Who is supposed to be such an advertiser and such an advertisee?
  • badpun 4y ago
    > Zoom/MS Teams/Slack
• hayst4ck 4y ago
  What makes you so sure that commuting is more environmentally harmful than datacenters full of hardware and the construction and transport of said hardware and mining of raw materials for the hardware? Additionally, lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl. I am not saying that's the case, but I don't buy that it's a strictly pro-environment win a-priori. If anything commuting is the daily theft of an hour of everyone's life, more so for drivers. "Get an hour of your life back every day" should be all the marketing that's ever needed.
  • luminouslow 4y ago
    I don't know about you but we still use the internet/zoom etc. in the office so you still need datacenters >lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl I dont understand this point, IMO commuting leads to more suburban sprawl? Also i think this is a very USA-centric problem.
    • hayst4ck 4y ago
      Sure zoom is still used, but I would be surprised if it's on the same order of magnitude. I'm not trying to argue that commuting is more environmentally friendly, it's very likely not, only that I need a bit more substantiation than "it's obviously true," and I particularly would want substantiation on the long term. I also would want to understand if electric cars are being accounted for. The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl. Definitely a USA problem. Cars are poison, literally and metaphorically. I don't think the average American has experienced what car-less living is like and how much better it is. My critique of your original post is that there are many reason's remote work might be better, but environmentalism probably isn't the strongest.
      • zer0tonin 4y ago
        My team is located in 3 different timezones. Using zoom/meet is a requirement for absolutely every single one of our meetings, whether we are in office or at home. Situations like this are extremely common in the industry, at least common enough to justify almost every company I've ever word equipping their meeting rooms with video-conferencing hardware.
• moooo99 4y ago
  My guess would be that the target audience that buys these products (read companies) don’t really care about the environment
• lm28469 4y ago
  I'm not convinced it is a net positive in the end. Especially for big companies, heating an office space with 500+ people is probably much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses for example Not everyone commute with an ICE vehicle too
  • luminouslow 4y ago
    >heating an office space with 500+ people is much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses Citation needed. I would argue its very hard to make any general statement about this. In my case the office is much more wasteful than the space I use for remote work for a multitude of reasons.
    • lm28469 4y ago
      I said I'm not convinced, it obviously isn't a general thing. A friend of mine spends 500+ euros per month on gas for heating since he works from home, no way on earth his office uses 500 per person and per month on heat
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • mcv 4y ago
        Is that € 500 for just the working hours? Because homes are also generally heated for other uses than work. Those reasons don't go away if you work at the office. If you've got a spouse working from home, or kids coming from school, that house is going to be heated anyway.
        • lm28469 4y ago
          > Because homes are also generally heated for other uses than work I've never heard of anyone heating their home when not in it, given the other comments it seems like it's the norm, weird
• simonmesmith 4y ago
  Similarly, I often wonder why cities don’t promote local telecommuting over building expensive public transportation infrastructure. Building one kilometre of subway costs anywhere from around $100 million to $1.6 billion (https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/events/how-much-does-it-cost-to-build-a-subway https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/events/how-much-does-it-cost...), and then requires subsidies to run. Why not use this money to provide incentives for people to telecommute? And while some might say, “but then people who rely on public transit for things other than commuting to work would be hurt,” note that most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns. Example: https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/01/public-transit-services-in-canadian-cities-not-meeting-many-womens-travel-needs.html https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/01/public-transit-service....
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • mcv 4y ago
    Not all jobs can be done by telecommuting. It's a great solution for office work, but it doesn't work so well for manufacturing, retail or the service industry. > most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns. Does it? Work-related travel is mostly during morning and late afternoon, but public transit also runs outside those hours. In my experience public transit works quite well for non-commuting travel. Of course this can vary wildly by country, but the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.
    • simonmesmith 4y ago
      I don’t know about universally true, so you may be right that there are exceptions, but as one example, such as linked above, public transit tends to underserve the needs of female caregivers who often need to make multiple short trips rather than two long trips each day.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      > the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true. It is always partially true, but each city is different. People who travel in the very early hours (like 2:30am) always have problems, (even the best cities run reduced and thus inconvenient service for maintenance reasons, most give up on transit completely). While those hours are not common it is safe to bet everyone reading this has had reason to travel at those times at least one night in their life. In far too many cities, (and not just in the US) additional service is run during the peaks. By additional service I mean they run more buses/trains as opposed something with more seats (that is longer). This means people who travel at non-peak hours have to be careful about when they travel to ensure there is service without waiting. Of course if the wait is still less than 5 minutes nobody cares, but as waits get longer - humans don't have time for that.
• rubyist5eva 4y ago
  Because people don't actually care about the environment, the vast majority just say they do - until it's inconvenient to them.
• acapybara 4y ago
• rr888 4y ago
  I live in a small apartment a short train ride from the office. It isn't big enough to work from home. If I worked from home I'd get a big house in the suburbs, and buy a car to get around. My environmental footprint would be much bigger. Edit - if I didn't have kids I'd totally have a beach house and a mountain house to live in. Maybe in different countries too.
  • fundad 4y ago
    There must be ample apartments near train stops that take you to all the jobs so you’re right.
  • chitowneats 4y ago
    I completely agree. Ever since WFH started I'm feeling this gravitational pull away from the city center because of cost of living and space considerations. If salary takes a nosedive this will become untenable for many. Mountains of research show that this will increase total emissions. It would be one thing if the U.S. was developing medium density suburban cores, but that seems to be on the table in very, very few places.
    • tluyben2 4y ago
      That seems more a US thing though because of how things are laid out? I picked my multiple places of living (EU) to have everything walking distance and I managed that for the past 30 years with wfh, city or not. We don't touch the car (or anything else) for weeks on end.
      • rr888 4y ago
        Definitely USA and Europe are built differently. I'd class most European city centers are medium-high density where smaller towns are still quite dense. Compare this to NYC where I am and Manhattan is higher density, but 2 hours drive away its normal to have a 4+ bedroom house on a big piece of land with bears and deer roaming around for a quarter of the price.
      • closeparen 4y ago
• stcroixx 4y ago
  Because employers do not really care about the environment. They’re pretending to because they think supporting the cause positively impacts their revenue. When they have a choice to make an impact, like now, they pass.
  • dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
    >Because employers do not really care about the environment. This is the correct answer. Most environment related stuff (and other causes that are taken up) is mostly virtue signalling.
    • bombcar 4y ago
      Yep. You have to make the environmental goal correspond to a money goal of some sort. And this can be exceptionally difficult because it can be almost impossible to actually work out the long-term effects of things like "more people should work from home". It's easy to say "shutting down a coal power plant will reduce emissions" because they're so bad, but more remote workers could result in MORE pollution if it enabled more "working holidays" and therefore more flying. And that's only one tiny aspect of all the long-term changes that could occur.
  • psychomugs 4y ago
    The best part is when they deflect blame onto the individual and tell us to "do our part" while they guiltlessly continue their polluting practices. Just like they do with mental health.
• Someone1234 4y ago
  Because corporations are doing the majority of that pro-environmental advertising. I mean that both in terms of companies making changes (both real and greenwashing) and the News/Media corporations reporting on it. Telecommuting could be absolutely massive for reduced emissions, could bring down urban house prices, improve inter-family relationships, and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas). Plus increase wealth to relatively poor rural areas. Even some corporations are starting to realize that telecommuting isn't their enemy, but large ships move slowly, and recently we've been seeing a lot of "return to work" used as a way to conduct layoffs with lower negative PR/stock tanking. This isn't a byproduct but a goal of return-to-work (e.g. see Musk's text message conversation during Twitter-lawsuit discovery).
  • bilbo0s 4y ago
    This. We need to learn that corporations care even less about the environment than they care about remote work. Invoking the environment to gain their support of remote work is just misunderstanding their priorities. The game is to make remote work attractive to them. You think Elon Musk wants to hear your spiel about the environment? Or does he want you to get back into your office and work a 16 hour day? If we want to get corporate america on the side of remote work, then we need to do it with dollars and cents. Not "indirect savings", not "improved morale", but concrete examples of how remote work is increasing their profit. (Even better, would be if it could increase their revenue as well. That would be a slam dunk.) We almost got there with the idea of lowering rent costs after the pandemic, but now it just seems that the idea of getting rid of office space in favor of remote work is getting a lot of push back. Maybe even backlash would be a better term.
    • crypot 4y ago
      Even the environmentalists don't care about the environment. 45000 people went to cop27.
      • baxtr 4y ago
        Which happened to be in a desert. They cooled the venue down so that people were freezing inside. What a joke.
• swader999 4y ago
  It's because the whole climate thing is a ruse to scare us into cbdc/surveillance/control. Yes there's climate change, Yes there's human influence to it. And well sure as hell adapt to this slow moving challenge.
  • enkid 4y ago
    It's either a ruse or we will adapt. Can't be both.
    • leesalminen 4y ago
      There can be parties exaggerating the severity of an issue to lend credence to their proposed solution. Bonus points if the proposed solution won’t solve the root cause, but will give more power and control over people to government. Kind of like Republicans on the southern border. The issue can exist, the extent of the issue can be exaggerated, and the proposed solution would do nothing to solve the root cause.
  • _joel 4y ago
    I'm glad the majority of the world disagrees with you.
    • leesalminen 4y ago
      China and India seem to disagree seeing that they will be firing up new coal plants for the next 3 decades, at least. That’s a pretty big chunk of the global population.
    • leetcodesucks 4y ago
      I don’t remember anyone voting to triple their electricity bills. I for one don’t believe all the mega Corps advertising and social movements like cancer cell fake meat being better for the environment
    • swader999 4y ago
      The elite sure do disagree with me publicly but still fly privately, buy up ocean frontage, ignore lower hanging fruit in favour of schemes that enrich them. And we all vote them in again and again.
• seydor 4y ago
  Because it's so obvious it doesn't need advertising ;)
• exabrial 4y ago
  Probably because people get significantly less work done remotely… CEOs know this, multiple studies have shown this, and it’s been a lot of people’s experience as well.
  • adql 4y ago
    I suspect most of that was due to company being forced to do remote coz of COVID and of course without change of way of working that didn't work very well. Some jobs are worse candidates for that too and if you force everyone to WFH of course that won't be positive.
  • hotpotamus 4y ago
    I feel like some sources might be in order. And I say that as a person who despises working from home.
    • guywithahat 4y ago
      I can't help but think you may not despise working from home, the only people who dispute wfh is less efficient are people who want to wfh or people selling article clicks to them
      • hotpotamus 4y ago
        Why would you think I may not despise working from home? I wouldn't recommend scanning back through my comment history because it's fairly dense and silly, but if you did, you'd find a recent comment where I believe I referred to it as "diet hell" because it only lasts 8 hours a day for 30 years as opposed to 24 hours a day for eternity.
• revskill 4y ago
  Because most of workers have not enough pro-ability to adapt a remote working environment. More details, to work remotely efficiently, you need to: - Have good writing skills, because communication is asynchronous most of the time. - Task description needs to be as clear as possible ! You don't want to spend most of time to explain what the specification means. - Self-management and time management: How to do things concurrently without less help as possible from others ?
  • adql 4y ago
    It's a skill you can train. Just that most corporations that got shifted to WFH coz of pandemic didn't bother to train or revisit their processes. That's partly (the other part is managers clinging to their jobs) why some yell for coming back to office, the required work for the shift was not done and now performance suffers.
  • Bilal_io 4y ago
    Sorry if I am reading this wrong, but this seems to suggest that the solution is micromanagement. Even if working from office, I'd expect any professional to know how to communicate effectively, and is able to manage their time and tasks efficiently. If they cannot do it remotely, then I'd worry about their performance in the office also.
  • jahewson 4y ago
    Actually those are just the skills you need to work efficiently in any knowledge-work environment. The people who lack those just suck up everyone else’s time.
• rybosworld 4y ago
  The initial covid lockdowns did result in a large drop in global emissions. Somewhere around ~2 Billion tons or about 5% drop for 2020. 2021 emissions were about equal to 2019 emissions. So there may be not much of an effect from remote work.
• tyingq 4y ago
  Because many large businesses with lobbying power don't want to be potentially called out as anti environment. They want the freedom to treat it like an employment perk if/when they choose to support it.
• balderdash 4y ago
  If I telecommuted: Pros: - my company wouldn’t need as much office space for me, but not none, so 80% space/energy savings, - also offset an 8 mile (x2 so 16mi) driving commute Cons: - I’d probably make up those 16mi of commuting in other ways (errands, driving to a lunch time hike, etc) - I’d need more space at home, and consume more energy (prob not fully offsetting the savings from work, but a meaningful part) - I’d probably work remotely from other locations more, increasing my air travel footprint meaningfully (which I think puts this in the red) - I’d probably cook more at home (while cheaper, is probably more energy intensive than a commercial kitchen per meal?) Doesn’t feel like a huge net savings
• deepGem 4y ago
  Two main problems 1. Middle and senior management who don't want to lose control or be rendered less effective. 2. Engineers who are not trained in written communication and largely cannot autonomously move a group towards a goal without a lot of supervision. If you solve for no 2, then that acts counter to no 1 - because middle management will be questioned - why do we need you ? If a group of engineers can function on their own towards a common goal, then the manager's role is more or less rendered redundant. Sure there may be a need for psychological support but you surely won't need the current ratio of engineers: managers. There is a deep rooted old school interest in staying physically connected. This won't go away anytime soon. I am not debating whether that is right or wrong, but the general notion that 'we are better if we are physically together' still persists. I don't know if this is a genuine feel-good-together feeling or just a made up emotion to mask point no 1 above. I am flummoxed by how executive leadership is simply blind to these facts in most companies. I mean the CEO can declare a fully remote constraint sort of like the exact opposite of what Musk did at Twitter and drive productivity higher. The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
  • beachtaxidriver 4y ago
    I also think that junior new engineers are less productive remote, because they can't absorb the context and experience of their more senior coworkers. Probably the only group made more productive are senior independent engineers.
    • sitkack 4y ago
      > can't absorb the context and experience of their more senior coworkers How so? What prevents that? I don't believe it, but people like saying it without evidence.
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        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 <thing> 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.
• Eric_WVGG 4y ago
  The majority of advertising on environmental initiatives ("hey go out there and recycle" and that kind of crap) is funded by polluters to shift the conversation from a manufacturer problem to a consumer problem. You need to ask "who is advertising" and "who is the market." So let's say Zoom wanted to run an initiative like this… the market wouldn't be workers, it's be the bosses. So already you're talking about a tiny sliver of the population. No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market. Okay, now that you've identified the target audience, what do they respond to? "This way of working that most of you hate, it's happy days and sunshine?" No, they respond to money. The campaign that would resonate with bosses is "your office lease costs too much money." Environmental concerns wouldn't even measure up. Having said all this, I suppose one could make the case that remote-work-apps could advertise to "shift the conversation" amongst workers to demand remote-work for the sake of the environment, but I personally don't think anyone in America at least believes in this kind of grass-roots influence in business, that's too socialist.
  • guywithahat 4y ago
    > is funded by polluters If only those polluters would stop pointlessly polluting! Gee I mean why would they even do it? It's almost as if you're paying them to pollute for you so you can have that new laptop and fast shipping!
  • w0de0 4y ago
    > No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market Neither the billboards for Brex on the drive to Mission from SFO, nor those for Boeing in the Washington, D.C. metro, nor those “for your consideration” on the Sunset Strip come Oscar season, are meant for a mass market. This doesn’t seem a sound premise. In being so physical, billboards are hardly mass media at all. More big brochures.
    • Eric_WVGG 4y ago
      :) I haven't been to any of those places, but I was in LA last summer and saw "for your consideration" billboards everywhere. One might argue that those billboards also drive up the marketing for rentals, streaming and DVD sales… but anyway, good point.
• myfavoritedog 4y ago
  needlessly requiring people to move themselves into offices I've been on multiple sides of this environment over my 3+ decades in the job market: managed people in office, managed people while I worked remotely, worked in an office, worked remotely (mostly for the last 13 years). I'm very sympathetic to remote work, but my experience tells me that your "needlessly" is not well-founded.
  • lezojeda 4y ago
    Why do you need people in the same physical space than you? What can't be achieved via remote tools?
• nunez 4y ago
  A lot of places _are_ advertising it as a benefit.
• Tade0 4y ago
  I actually don't know the answer to this question and what baffles me the most is hearing what urban/transport activists have to say about that - those I talked with either ignore it completely or argue that it's worse because it "induces sprawl". I have quite a few people in my social circle who moved out to the suburbs/countryside and remote work was by and large considered only after they moved and found that they underestimated what an issue their commute would be(especially when traffic increased over time as it usually does). Personally I live in the city and still work remotely because it's more convenient than travelling to work daily regardless how close to the workplace I might live.
  • naasking 4y ago
    > I talked with either ignore it completely or argue that it's worse because it "induces sprawl". But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes. If you had sprawl with lots of small, local commercial outlets, then that's just perfect. No long commutes to work and no long commutes to get life's necessities.
    • Tade0 4y ago
      > But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes. I agree to an extent. To be completely fair it is less efficient than densely packed cities in terms of energy and cost of providing services like sewage/garbage disposal. That being said I see it as a tradeoff like any other and believe people should have the right to choose how they live as long as they bear the costs of that.
      • naasking 4y ago
        Yes, there are some inefficiencies with sprawl. There are also mental health issues with dense cities.
        • Tade0 4y ago
          100% with you on that. I live 4km from the city centre, so essentially walking distance. I went there on the weekend. It's very lively, but I wouldn't want this sort of liveliness during the evening when the only thing I need is to wind down. I prefer living here, halfway from the centre to the city limits.
• eloff 4y ago
  Because people don't look at issues like climate change rationally. We're attacking the problem almost randomly based on what's politically expedient/ popular instead of what gives the biggest greenhouse gas reduction for the price. To phrase it another way, our governments are fucking stupid and it makes me sad. If we really care about this problem, we should attack it coldly, rationally, as an engineer or economist might.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • raxxorraxor 4y ago
    It is really stupid, and I hate that people tend to cut random liberties because they could maybe affect the environment ever so slightly. In reality this is so insignificant, it looks more like a panic than an attempt to a solution. You also loose political capital for serious undertakings. Truth is that composting your tea bags isn't that relevant. We have to look at the large picture and see if we can curb the largest emissions (from which everyone profits).
    • eloff 4y ago
      Even just encouraging fracking (cheap gas vs coal means 2x reduction in carbon), or stopping to subsidize fossil fuels would make a massive difference.
      • cableshaft 4y ago
        Fracking is not sustainable (you're not going to be able to frack forever, we've already tapped a lot of the 'cheap gas' wells, future wells will eventually get prohibitively expensive, it already is very expensive and not even that profitable[1], and got a lot more expensive this year thanks to it requiring a specific type of sand that's now 3x the cost[2]) and is harmful to freshwater, not only by using a ton of it (average of 45 millions of gallons of freshwater per fracking well) but also because it mixes tons of chemicals in with the water it uses, making the wastewater toxic[3]. It also leaks a lot of methane[4], which is 80x worse for warming than CO2 emissions in the short term (CO2 stays in the atmosphere longer). "To determine the potential impact of fracking in the U.K., a group of Manchester scientists ranked it and other energy sources, such as coal, wind, and solar, after considering environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Of the nine energy sources examined, the scientists found that fracking ranked seventh in sustainability. To make fracking as sustainable as energy sources higher up on the list, such as wind and solar, there would need to be a staggering 329-fold reduction in environmental impact, according to the researchers."[5] [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/why-are-natural-gas-prices-high-because-fracking-isnt-really-profitable-51635439006 https://www.barrons.com/articles/why-are-natural-gas-prices-... [2] https://sports.yahoo.com/sand-fracking-now-3-times-114500960.html https://sports.yahoo.com/sand-fracking-now-3-times-114500960... [3] https://cen.acs.org/environment/water/Wastewater-fracking-Growing-disposal-challenge/97/i45 https://cen.acs.org/environment/water/Wastewater-fracking-Gr... [4] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/fracking-boom-tied-to-methane-spike-in-earths-atmosphere https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/frack... [5] https://futurism.com/fracking-among-most-harmful-forms-energy-production-study-finds https://futurism.com/fracking-among-most-harmful-forms-energ...
• osigurdson 4y ago
  There is nothing more illogical in modern society than commuting to an office every day. Employees waste 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Employers waste time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms, etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself. The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
  • thedangler 4y ago
    Very true. And I did some rough estimations on why my employer wants us in the office. They make $115k a month of employees buying coffee. That is only coffee, and that was a very conservative estimate of only 40% of employees buying only a coffee on an average of $2. This doesn't take into account parking we have to pay for, or lunch, or snacks.
    • osigurdson 4y ago
      I can't imagine a dev shop not providing free coffee. The ROI has to be positive!
    • Jorengarenar 4y ago
      You have to pay for the coffee?!
      • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        In many countries yes.
    • chrisseaton 4y ago
      > They make $115k a month of employees buying coffee ... parking we have to pay for, or lunch, or snacks Lol what? Why are they making you pay for these things?
• leetcodesucks 4y ago
  Could it be climate change does not exist and was fabricated by mega corps and the politicians they control to drive social movements they find convenient and which make us poor but ignore social movements that could also help their made up problem but make us happier and wealthier perhaps ?
• cmonagle 4y ago
  While GHG emissions are not the only environmental metric, remote working (for most) likely results in a net increase of emissions.[0] 0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac3d3e/meta https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac3d3e/...
• lizknope 4y ago
  We used to spend $400 a month on gasoline because we both commuted 25 minutes each way. During the pandemic that was down to about $100 a month. And when we did have to go somewhere the traffic was so much lower so less wasting gas in stop and go traffic. I'm supposed to go in 3 days a week. In reality I go in once a week for a few hours and no one cares as 90% of the people on my project are in other offices. I told my manager "What is the point of driving in to put on my headset and disturb everyone with my meetings while trying to block out the noise of everyone else on their meetings?" He couldn't argue with that so he hasn't pushed the in office thing. When I had an office with a door and window I liked going in. It was a good mix of seeing people and privacy. I hate the 1 year of cubicle stuff after 15 years in an office with a door. Then the pandemic hit and I really hate cubicles even more.
  • MSFT_Edging 4y ago
    Could I ask what you were driving that ~50 minutes of commuting a day would lead to 200 dollars in fuel? When I was doing the same during the pandemic, similar commute time, my car making 21ish mpg was only needing about 100 dollars in gas a month. About 10 miles with more than a dozen stop lights.
    • mod 4y ago
      My full size 2015 GMC truck gets 22mpg on the highway. 18-19 around town.
      • bonniemuffin 4y ago
        That seems like an unfortunate choice of vehicle to commute many hours per week alone in, unless maybe you work in construction and need to haul things to the site (in which case spending more on transportation seems worthwhile as a core part of the job function.)
        • mod 4y ago
          I would agree, however that's not my use case. I don't leave my property except about once per week. I do plenty of "truck stuff" without being in construction, though. I don't think you've hit all the use cases with "work in construction."
• rchaud 4y ago
  Zoom's customers aren't the WFH people, but rather the IT and procurement managers that decide which tool to spend their 5-figure budgets on. Presumably their marketing efforts will be specific to that audience. It may be risky to throw up billboards talking about the evironmental benefit of WFH if your customer's CEO thinks that they should be back in the office.
• theknocker 4y ago
• dosco189 4y ago
  Because "Pro-Environment" messaging is neither about being preserving the environment, or about the environment. It's about co-opting the relevant ideal within the overton window to signal some form of ethically accepted form of compliance.
• petermcneeley 4y ago
  "The answer is out there, Neo, and it's looking for you, and it will find you if you want it to."
• taeric 4y ago
  Oddly, it isn't quite that straight forward, is it? Specifically, you get some scale efficiencies for cities and office parks by having folks there. Especially in regards to getting food capabilities centralized. A cafeteria, I would think, uses less to feed a lot of people, than each of them using their own kitchen to store and prepare food. That said, I do expect it is still ahead in most measures. Is a good question and I would love to see a comprehensive analysis.
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Great point. I'm going to start sourcing that as part of the reason I'm remote only.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  FWIW: I'm sure that heating and cooling my 3rd floor office negates some of my impact from telecommuting. I also have extra equipment in the office, and at home, that goes mostly unused. I've been working ~90% remote for about 8 years. It works for me, because I'm disciplined and honest, and because I have a job that can be performed remotely. It also works for me because I've been able to find good ways to have facetime with the people I work with; but I'm normally shy and prefer to work in isolation. Not every job can be performed remotely. Even jobs that can be performed remotely need facetime for helping people early in their careers start. Some people, unfortunately, aren't disciplined enough to work remotely. Other people are extreme extroverts and really, really need to be around a large group of people for most of their day. A good friend of mine, who works in a hospital, used to love his job until he was assigned work-at-home work. He hates it now, just because he's a major extrovert. There's another post in this thread from someone who lives in a small city apartment and commutes by train a few stops to their office. That's also environmentally friendly.
• yogthos 4y ago
  Back in 1964 Arthur C. Clarke predicted [1] that by the year 2000 cities as we know them would no longer exist. We would live in a world of instant communication where we could contact anyone on Earth without leaving our home. This technology would make it possible for many people to conduct business without having to be present at a specific physical location. Today, we know the technology Clarke was talking about as the Internet. And while his technological predictions could not have been more correct, he severely underestimated the pace of social progress. Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them. Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results. Office workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-pjuctM&t=294 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KT_8-pjuctM&t=294
  • saltcured 4y ago
    Did you mean that he overestimated social progress? Consider that he'd already moved to Sri Lanka in the 1950s, ostensibly out of his love for diving. He was primed to see the benefits of WFH and telecommunication, and certainly able to exploit the flexibility in his own life and career. Ironically, with his adventurism and individualism, perhaps his imagination was too limited to think that many people are self-limiting. The companies you speak of are not abstract entities forcing the poor humans to live unwanted lives. They are the people---identifying with the rituals of office life and demanding conformance from one another.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mikojan 4y ago
  Everybody preparing their own meal requires more energy. Everybody heating their own workplace requires more energy. In general: Anything you do alone is more resource intensive than a comparable group activity.
  • H1Supreme 4y ago
    > Everybody preparing their own meal requires more energy. This applies to both office and WFH. When I worked in offices, 90% of my meals were prepared at home.
• cameron_b 4y ago
  Sounds like you need to pitch a campaign or buy some billboards
• thecrumb 4y ago
  This one is still so relevant: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home https://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home
• foundajob 4y ago
  Yea, where's the "outrage"? Need more outrage. I mean, by golly, I have these *kiddos* who need their dad 24/7! What's with these young people who want to go into the office?
• tobr 4y ago
  I’m just sample size = 1. I switched to telecommuting during the pandemic, which let me move away from the city. Instead of taking public transportation to the office and walking to the store, I now walk to the (home) office and take the car to the store. So while I’m certainly spending a lot less time in total on transportation, the mode of transportation is much worse for the environment.
  • adamsmith143 4y ago
    Probably not accurate. Presumably you don't travel half an hour to the store 5 days a week?
• LAC-Tech 4y ago
  I've said it once, and I've said it again - learning nothing from COVID was a complete waste of a catastrophe.
• synergyS 4y ago
  Non remote business should pay more in taxes bc of damage done to the environment.
• brandmeyer 4y ago
  For my case, it was worse. When normalized to dollars, I spent nearly 2x more in HVAC expenses compared to driving's fuel costs, and that's with a modest commute (20 miles). Its much less energy intensive to air condition one large medium-density building than many smaller low-density buildings.
  • driverdan 4y ago
    That sounds like you're either running your HVAC at extreme temps or have very poor insulation.
    • throwthroyaboat 4y ago
      Could be, but it's also likely that 1x big HVAC is more efficient than 10x smaller units.
    • warkdarrior 4y ago
      Or that he is running HVAC for his 2000 sqft house, vs running HVAC for his 180 sqft office space (where 180 sqft are dedicated to him out of some large space shared with others).
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        Part of it is that he's comparing his work-from-home AC expenses to his work-from-office gas expenses. He's not factoring in the company's office AC bill, because he doesn't pay it. Also note that, at least in my case, I've got a cubicle farm at work. I can't just up the temperature for my 64 sqft cube; I have to up it for an entire quadrant of the floor.
    • brandmeyer 4y ago
      Big family house in the suburbs with aggressive demand scheduling (ie, we let the temp float a fair amount when nobody is home) versus high-efficiency car.
• coding123 4y ago
  The only downside to all of this remoteness is the non-programmer workforce going remote. I do think people that pick up the phone pre-pandemic should be picking up the phone post-pandemic. Whether that's from their home or not, I don't care. What we get instead though, is ringing, ringing ringing. Can't get my power ordered. I can't get roofing ordered. Can't get call backs. Things were more expedient pre-pandemic. I often do wonder too, is part of the reason company X is OUT of something isn't because the ship is late - or is it because the ordering person no longer sits in front of a giant pile of insulation and goes - oh crap, that is getting really low. I should order more. (And guess what happens if he calls to order more - ringing ringing ringing)
  • my_usernam3 4y ago
    > The only downside to all of this remoteness is the non-programmer workforce going remote. I'm sure you can think of many other downsides than that. This topic has been discussed adnaseum, and there are many pros and cons of remote vs in-office
• TheRealPomax 4y ago
  "No form of transport requires less energy than telecommuting" is quite the statement. If your work force bikes or walks to work, pretty sure that has far lower energy requirements than having all of them telecommute.
  • gadders 4y ago
    I don't think that's correct, unless I am missing something? Telecommuting: Turn on your PC in a room of your house and start work Biking/Walking to Work: Bike/walk to work and turn on a PC in an office. What's the extra telecommuting energy expenditure? Servers for a VPN?
    • TheRealPomax 4y ago
      People not all using their own computers and internet connections, during meetings because they're all in the same room (or in a room with a single computer and internet connection), as well as people not all needing to each have lights, heating, etc. on at home because they're all in a shared building with (almost certainly more efficient) HVAC.
    • postalrat 4y ago
      Lower productivity through telecommuting. What should take 2 weeks now takes 3. That's 50% more resources.
  • nickkell 4y ago
    Depends what the workers are eating to fuel themselves!
• Nickersf 4y ago
  Think about this from a business finance perspective. Companies have since the early 1900's built an economy around working in offices. Car manufacturers, car service and maintenance businesses, food service companies, commercial real-estate companies and oil and gas companies and many other sectors all have a stake in this game. Then you have internal forces at play too. HR managers, and department managers don't look so useful when the majority of people never interact in real life. No matter how optimistic we look at the human condition, people have the desire to exercise power and control over others. With people working remote exercising power and control is harder. Additionally, you still have gen-x and boomers working, especially in management who have a different idea of work culture than millennials and gen-z. To the older generations working on-site is the only justifiable way to work. To them the notion of being at home for work is not real work. There also appears to be a camp of management types who have seen evidence confirming that remote work doesn't work. They are going to stick to their position because they have evidence to support. I recently heard similar sentiments to Musk's take on remote work from Tim Pool, and a manager at my job. They are convinced that meaningful work can only happen in person. So between those three main factors: Money, power, and bias of evidence the pitch for remote work being an environmental initiative gets drowned out. Really, makes you wonder if environmentalism is really that important for the business leadership class. I personally believe work from home can be an amazing option for white collar work and for the right person. As a UI developer I love it. I don't get distracted by office stuff and get good flow often. I'm and expert at using online communication tools and desktop publishing tools so I can communicate my ideas and thoughts coherently remotely. However, I've seen some people not be able to manage themselves or have the skills to work from home.
• nottorp 4y ago
  To be slightly nasty: To be an environmental activist * requires a certain type of personality. The kind that thrives in groups and in public. Of course they wouldn't even think of working from home. * or any kind of activist for a cause actually. But that would decrease the nastiness.
• AntiRemoteWork 4y ago
• rompic 4y ago
  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-im-pendelverkehr/ 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).
  • rompic 4y ago
    For austria: https://www.umweltbundesamt.at/news201221-1 https://www.umweltbundesamt.at/news201221-1 The result is a share of 25.8% (short-term) to 39.3% (long-term) of all employed persons in Austria who could in principle work from home on a permanent or temporary basis. By overestimating the work-related passenger kilometers, this results in a savings potential of about 300 kilotons of CO2 equivalents per year, if about a quarter of all employed persons in Austria work from home for 40 % of the working time (or 2 out of 5 working days). Due to undesirable rebound effects, such as an increasing distance between home and work, induced traffic as a result of freed-up capacity, or increased capacities or increased leisure mobility, this potential can increase to 90 kilotons of CO2 equivalents per year.
• bacan 4y ago
  Corporate Mortgage Backed Securities
• josefresco 4y ago
  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"
• tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
  The environmental argument is sometimes used, but often (and often correctly) seen as someone who prefers remote work dishonestly slapping an environmental argument on it (dishonest, because the actual primary reason they're pushing for it doesn't match the stated primary reason). It isn't as clear-cut as you'd expect either - one argument I've heard is that in areas where air conditioning is a large contributor to energy use and homes are poorly insulated, someone staying home and cooling their home with an inefficient, small air conditioner may be worse than having that person commute to an office instead. This argument is often generalized and sometimes dishonestly used by people who prefer office work to argue that teleworking is actually bad for the environment. I found a meta-study https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab8a84/pdf https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab8a84/... that claims vehicle miles traveled increase (because people move further away) while the studies generally claimed a reduction in overall energy consumption. Several studies claim grossly exaggerated environmental impacts for streaming/data transfers. I don't remember seeing it misused to dismiss the environmental argument for teleworking, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it. The worst offender here is the Shift Project, which overstated the results of their already flawed study by another factor of 8 in an interview, and then used that huge mistake to argue that their other mistakes aren't that relevant because they're small (compared to the initial mistake, not compared to their claimed impact). https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/shift-project-really-overestimate-carbon-footprint-video-analysis/ https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/shift-project-really-...
  • twblalock 4y ago
    In the Bay Area in 2020 we had rolling blackouts in the summer because the electricity used by air conditioners put more stress on the grid than normal. It was not a particularly hot summer, we just had everyone working at home. Most of our housing stock is not particularly energy efficient. Whole-house AC and heat instead of systems with multiple zones, big tank water heaters, ok but not great insulation. I'd buy the idea that working from home lowers emissions and gasoline consumption but also increases the consumption of electricity and natural gas.
• anikom15 4y ago
  I’m skeptical that the reduction in transportation outweighs the lost efficiency in having large amounts of people concentrated in single buildings.
• braingenious 4y ago
  Because of the amount of money parked in commercial real estate. Organizations that own office buildings tend to be immensely influential in local politics. This is an answer to both “Why is remote work currently not advertised as a pro climate environment initiative?” and “Why won’t remote work ever be advertised as a pro climate environment initiative, ever, for the foreseeable future?” In a word: Rent.
• jfitzpa22 4y ago
  Some companies simply don't care about the environmental benefits of remote work; they want their employees located together in brick and mortar offices. Also, and while I agree that remote work seems the more environmentally friendly of the two options, I am unaware of any study that has compared the carbon footprint of telecommuting with that of the traditional commute. Does anyone know of such a study?
• frebord 4y ago
  Seriously. Not only do I only drive like 5 miles a week now I also only shower once a week!
• lamontcg 4y ago
  I keep arguing this. Also with distracted driving becoming so much more of a problem, and accidents increasing even though we've got driving assist technologies, the workers are running personal risk of debilitating injuries.
• Aldipower 4y ago
  Because it isn't necessarily pro env, at least not everywhere. This has to be subject of larger studies I guess. Some thoughts. 1. If I WFH I need to heat/cool my apartment/house my self. This is much more inefficient than heat office spaces, if you take the people inside an filled office space into account. 2. The public transport is going and consuming energy anyways. 3. Zoom, Teams, etc is consuming a lot of energy due to servers and videostreaming. 4. Walking a little bit does not harm yourself and maybe saves medical treatment, which in itself harms the environment.
  • orangepurple 4y ago
    You have to heat your house or apartment anyway or your pipes will burst
    • Aldipower 4y ago
      No, they won't. Not sure were you are living? :)
      • orangepurple 4y ago
        Somewhere where it gets below freezing outside in the winter time
• periheli0n 4y ago
  WFH is indeed advertised as pro environment. It just isn’t taking off very well for many. Change is hard and re-thinking work as an entirely online activity requires a lot of change. For some, their jobs which were fun before the pandemic now just suck because they don’t get to meet people face to face. Some dread the long boring days WFH and spending time in back-to-back Zoom meetings where 90% of those attending have their camera off and do something else. Some are frustrated because their coworkers are slacking off WFH. Others are frustrated because their productivity at home is a disaster. But there is also a pro-environment factor of working in an office: In countries where buildings need heating, heating one office compound is more efficient than heating a hundred homes at the same time.
• diebeforei485 4y ago
  I would be curious to know if remote work reduces overall VMT, or if commute VMT is replaced by higher VMT for daily tasks (if people move to Kansas or wherever, where things are spread out further).
• medion 4y ago
  Didn’t Buckminster Fuller talk of the holistic energy cost of going to work? Summarizing that it cost less energy if you factor externalities to just stay at home? I can’t remember exactly, but something along those lines…
• lemonberry 4y ago
  Not to mention saving lives!! If I remember correctly traffic fatalities dropped a lot after the bust in 2008 and many people got laid off.
• fancyfredbot 4y ago
  Can you give a properly researched article showing the environmental impact of commuting outweighs the environmental impact of working from home? My guess is that this won't always be true and will depend on the type and distance of commute as well as the additional heating/cooling demand required to keep multiple home offices habitable.
  • foundajob 4y ago
    Probably not, OP hasn't left a single reply. Just dropped trow in our brains and moved on, classic HN move.
• guywithahat 4y ago
  Never thought I'd see hacker news argue so forcefully for the metaverse yet here we are
• jmcphers 4y ago
  I used to have a job that required a daily commute, but didn't require any travel. I now have a remote job that I do at home, with an extremely modest amount of travel -- I see my teammates 2-3 times a year at conferences or meetups. It turns out that flying, even very occasionally, is worse for the environment than driving, and that my "eco-friendly" remote job leaves a bigger carbon footprint than my commuting job. A single person's share of a single cross-country flight once a year can emit more carbon than an ENTIRE YEAR of car commuting. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest-carbon-sin-air-travel.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...
• atlgator 4y ago
  When institutions are so clearly hypocritical on policies such as this, you have to ask yourself whether the entire premise is a fraud.
• shtopointo 4y ago
  Couldn't the opposite be argued as well? Everybody spending 8 more hours at home means so much more individual heating, whereas before, when you went into the office you'd turn the heating off. Also as someone else pointed, working remote leads to leaving small apartments in the city to move into larger spaces (houses) in the suburbs. Then you would need to use a car more to meet people, get groceries etc. Cities are much more carbon efficient.
  • aembleton 4y ago
    Maybe if you can get to the office via public transport or cycling it might make sense. But, if you drive then it's consuming more energy than heating the room you're in at home.
  • nightski 4y ago
    At least where I live you can't turn heating off. Pipes freeze. Appliances get damaged. We keep it about 62F during the day in the winter whether we are home or not. We only get groceries twice a month. I only drive a 2-3k miles a year which is far below average in the U.S. and I owe it all to the lack of commute. Most of those miles are due to the fact that we own a cabin in another state which we visit in the summer as well and has nothing to do with the day to day.
  • erinaceousjones 4y ago
    That to me feels like a very "US-centric" argument, although I'd still say it's a valid point. Over the pond here in the UK we're seeing an emergence more and more of Commuter-Town suburbia too, and personally I find it a worrying trend- new-build housing estates will cram a bunch of large, thin-walled, cheaply-insulated houses into a small area. Public transport links will be lacklustre. Large shops like supermarkets will probably be a walk away, but the design of the streets and roads will persuade many people that it's easier to drive 5 minutes instead. I don't think the solution to that is "commute to the office where it's more efficient to heat all of us", though. It's a long-term city-planning/suburb-planning, environmental architecture problem. What about buildings semi-recessed into the ground (bedrooms in basement, use the surrounding ground for heat storage, sky-lights to allow sunlight in)? What about further adoption of solar panels for water heating and supplemental electricity? What about "keeping the door shut so the heat doesn't escape"...? What about neighbourhoods using communal heat pumps? Then there's the fact that a helluva lot of us can't even afford these houses you mention because the housing market is in crisis so we continue to stay in our smaller city flats despite our ability to work remotely. Like, there's a helluva lot more white collar office workers out there in Western civilisation who _aren't_ following that "get enough money, get a car, have 2.5 kids, move out to the 'burbs" life - don't forget about us.
• nelsonenzo 4y ago
  Idk, I thought it was mentioned in almost every article that discusses the pros and cons of remote work. Not all jobs can be remote though, so i'm not sure why one would expect all of work to be remote. That makes as much sense as 'no remote work at all'.
  • AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > I thought it was mentioned in almost every article that discusses the pros and cons of remote work. But the point is, it's not mentioned in almost every article that discusses trying to stop climate change.
• enknamel 4y ago
  It needs more analysis to determine if it's actually a net positive on the environment. People may travel more in their day, live more remotely, houses (as far as I know) aren't as well built as offices and use more energy per sq ft during the day, etc. Technically if you want to optimize emissions reductions, you should eliminate homes, not offices. If everyone lived in the office we would all use less energy! Anyways, transportation for commuting is one of the smallest buckets of emissions. So if it is a net positive it's still not moving the needle in a meaningful way.
• sytse 4y ago
  With remote working you tend to have team-members more spread out. Bringing them together requires more travel. If this is by airplane it quickly cancels out the reduction in commute emissions.
• rc_mob 4y ago
  Because people with money are much much better at marketing and propaganda than a disjoint group of employees from 100s of different companies
• sheerun 4y ago
  Maybe because it might cause psychological issues for people who can't easily connect online and corporations are pricks. I agree that choice would be good thing, but I'm not sure about advertising one as superior to the other.
• black_13 4y ago
• martin82 4y ago
  What is more energy efficient? To heat or cool one 1000 people office or to heat or cool 1000 people's homes?
• Melatonic 4y ago
  I have actually heard it talked about a lot as a pro environment thing - just much earlier in the pandemic. I have not seen huge advertising about it but that does not mean it is not highly talked about. That being said you are totally right that Zoom should be advertising the crap out of this - Microsoft may have incentivize NOT to do this (if they want their own employees in the office) but for Zoom it seems like a no brainer.
• la64710 4y ago
  Because the power of environment is not greater than the power trips of management when they can see their direct reports bow and greet them in the hallways of their corpdoms.
• baka367 4y ago
  In general I feel that the remote work is still massively underrepped. I get depression every time I open any of those remote work sites and 99% of the job posts are tagged with "us only". There seem to be opportunities in other places (such as EU) around as well, but one has to search far and wide instead of just having them available in the easy-to-access sites.
• ra00l 4y ago
  Because it's not pro-environment, as you'd think. More CO2 is generated by remote employees than those that go to work. The CO2 emissions generated by an office (including heating / AC / water / employee transportation - in EU it's mostly by subway / bus) are smaller compared to each individual employee CO2 emissions. Don't have a source, but you can find CO2 calculators online.
• xnx 4y ago
  Is there an environmental benefit if the energy saved commuting is used on something else? Example: If I spend $300 less on gas each month and then use that extra $3,600 at the end of the year to take a trip to Tahiti.