
Ask HN: How much is working from home worth? - phlux
Assuming a company made you an offer less than you were hoping, but you can work from home 99% of the time (aside from quarterly meetings and visiting client sites for meetings) -- how much is this worth?<p>Given the obvious zero-commute-cost, how else have any of you HNers measured this benefit?
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staunch
Let's say your time is worth $75/hour. Not having to commute is worth 1.5
hours per day. Call it $110/day. Lunch/snack savings per day = $10/day.
Gas/car wear savings = $10/day.

$140/day * 200 days per year = $28k.

The way it can be _seriously_ beneficial is you can live/move to somewhere
really cheap and still get paid big-city rates.

I knew a guy living on his own small ranch in the middle of nowhere making
$150k/year. Living far better than the guy making $300k/year in Manhattan.

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pixeloution
The way you calculate it above is an odd way to look at it; sure you save 1.5
hours a day - but you certainly aren't getting paid for those hours. And
chances are you won't be doing side work that will pay you that $110/day with
your free 1.5 hours.

The value is increased freedom. The OP has to decide what value that has to
him - assigning it an arbitrary number based on what a person earns per hour
is silly.

Your second point was much more valid -- if you can live in a much more
inexpensive way, that's a benefit you can put an actual # on.

~~~
staunch
You certainly can put those saved hours to use in a side project or
consulting. They're hours of "work" time you get to keep for yourself. If you
just use them to watch more TV then you're right, it's not a useful way to
measure.

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PonyGumbo
I work from home full time, and my salary is about 20% lower than the market
rate for developers with my experience. It's worth it to me. You have to be
the kind of person who can separate work and home life, though.

If I were offered a 50% pay increase that required I commute an hour each way
and spend all day in an office, I wouldn't take it.

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pilom
Not only is there zero commute cost, there is zero commute time. If you
normally have a 30 minute commute, that extra hour a day of your life is like
a 12.5% bonus by itself.

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pasbesoin
I've had some miserable open-office experiences.

I've actually had better, and more productive, interaction with distant/remote
colleagues, in particular as a member of a "senior" team. People knew what
they were about and were no nonsense and largely "post-ego" -- whatever did
the job, and pointing out errors received a "thanks" rather than a bunch of
defensive politics.

Plus, real conversations could happen -- because they weren't constantly being
interrupted or joined in by passersby and those with an idle moment.

So... The value's more than commute time and gas money. But it's also
personally defined.

(You can argue about resultant productivity and the bottom line for the
business, but almost no business seems to measure this nor act on in in a
substantive manner. Therefore, it is "delegated" to the role of a personal
choice, if there's any choice at all.)

One concern: Is there a career path for you? Whether defined by the company,
or by you personally.

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bartonfink
Honestly, at this stage in my life it would not be worth a pay cut. I just had
a kid, and while I'd love to be able to spend more time with her and take some
of the load off my wife's back, it seems irresponsible to take a pay cut at
the exact moment when my expected expenses are going to go way up over the
next 18 years.

~~~
phlux
I am in a similar situation, and while this is not a pay cut - it is lower
than I wanted (I took a 30K pay cut for my current position, which I am
leaving).

I will be working from home, and the pay will be roughly the same - but I
wanted to see how others valued the working from home.

~~~
nickzoic
I was going to make a longer reply, but then I noticed this, and my reply
reduces to:

* Getting to actually see your kid: priceless.

If you're out of the house 7am - 7pm, all you're going to see of your kid are
asleep (cute but boring) or awake (go back to sleep!). If that's what you've
got to do, that's what you've got to do, but if there's an alternative that's
pretty cool.

Whereas if you're only gone 9 'til 5, you've got a couple of little windows
there where you actually get to have fun with them. Plus lunch.

The downside is that it is pretty easy to get distracted. You'll need to set
up some kind of office environment, and work out how to make it work for you.

Good luck!

~~~
HedgeMage
It's not just non-work time you get to share when you work at home! My 8yo has
a small work table in my office; he comes home from school, opens up the
backpack, and we work together (my job, his homework) for a while. He usually
checks up on what I'm working on -- I was lucky enough to have a mini-hacker
who not only comes to tech conferences with me, but spoke at his first one at
age 7. He has a play room just off my office, too, so even when we are doing
our own things, we're together-ish.

I find it decidedly suboptimal that our society insulates young people from
work until their late teens or early 20's, then expects them to suddenly and
magically become good workers. Raising my kid around my work is a huge plus,
in terms of his preparation for life, his understanding why mommy works even
though it takes time away from him, and increasing the time we get to spend
together.

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HedgeMage
Gas, wear and tear on my car, before and after school care, etc. would
probably add up to about 7k/year if I didn't work from home in the relatively
inexpensive city where I live (Indianapolis). I can't imagine what it would be
in Chicago or New York.

There are other benefits to working from home that are harder to measure:

* I cook more when I work from home because I can stick something in my oven during the work day and have it ready at dinner time, rather than getting take out or buying heat-and-eat foods during the week. This saves big bucks on food, and also improves our health.

* My son gets a better education when I work from home because I am there to see when he's struggling with something, and can work with his teachers to fix it (as opposed to delegating homework time to a nanny or daycare).

* I don't have to take off of work to let a plumber in, to care for my son when he's home sick from school, and so on.

* I don't take off when I'm sick, unless I'm falling-down can't-think-right sick -- there's no worry about infecting my coworkers, not being close enough to a restroom, how I'm going to drive home if I get worse while at work, etc..

* I save a lot of time I might have spent commuting, which can be spent instead on my family, a side project, recreation, whatever.

* I'll never lose 1-2 days of productivity to an allergy attack because Joe Blow from marketing who's a pack-a-day smoker keeps popping by my office reeking of the stuff.

All else being equal, I'd take a job with 20% lower pay in order to work from
home full time -- assuming, of course, it isn't one of those companies where
telecommuters are second-class citizens. Other related benefits (such as being
able to build my work schedule around my life to some degree) could knock it
down a bit further.

I see money simply as a tool to help me do things that matter -- money, in and
of itself, or as a matter of score keeping, isn't important to me.

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craigtheriac
the hardest part about working from home is the ability to switch modes from
work to family and back. i'm not sure how to quantify that, but it is
definitely in the pro column for going into the office.

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dripton
Last fall I had two roughly equal job offers, one for a telecommute, the other
for a job 12 miles away.

I took the one 12 miles away, partly to avoid losing my bike commute. I
figured losing 90 minutes per day of forced exercise would be bad for my
health. (Of course if I'd taken the telecommute gig I still _could_ have gone
for a bike ride every day -- but _would_ I have done it, when the weather was
bad?)

I won't take a job that requires a car commute. (Unless it's the only thing I
can find, which seems incredibly unlikely.)

