I believe this is a consideration of many Sili-valley based companies that are opening engineering centers in Seattle. It is less expensive than the Valley/SanFrancisco (although costs are soaring), but you can still get the benefit of having unified teams.

Also some ideas/conversations sparks during casual talking, if remote, those small things will be missed.

I'm sure that sometimes unexpected collaboration may happen that might have a small tangible benefit to a company but I can guarantee you that most companies do not need this and the benefits of a work from home culture on the whole city and America's general mental health will be better than whatever new feature you cooked up over your company provided lunch.

imagine the problems working from home would solve: housing costs, high density living, pollution, no commute time, improved communities, improved family life.

The odd piece of collaboration that may come out of lunch chat is really not worth the pain that our cities and resident workers are going through. Can't afford a decent sized house? Probably because everyone wants to be close to work so you're priced out. You'll feel the pain when you get married and want kids; very long commute or sub-standard living conditions, great choice...

Like you said, I'm sure small things will be missed but employees having a great standard of living is likely going to do the company more good than not. I do admit that we would need a cultural shift for this to really work though.

I've done a lot of - perhaps even most - learning from talking to people who are better than me, whether it's over lunch, a drink, or during work. You can't disentangle casual chats and official meetings; in most companies you're not going to be allowed to just book an hour or two of meetings to discuss random stuff in the hope you'll learn something you might be able to apply to this project.

When I was a fresh grad, I also learnt a tremendous amount from the people around me; I don't doubt our ability to get the same effect remotely.

The issues we have with everyone wanting to live in massive urban areas (near work) are not less important then you needing to figure out how to learn from home, that's the type of self centred thinking that gives us high density housing, pollution, unaffordable housing, long commutes, strained family lives, broken communities and mental health issues (also known as commuting / working from a central office).

Low density housing and sprawl are actually worse for the environment btw. You have a clear bias against urban living. That's your opinion and that's totally ok, but the cultural trend is definitely back towards higher density urban living.

I'm a fan of periodic, 1-2 days a week remote work. But I don't like working on fully remote teams, and I've worked with managers who are very experienced and enthusiastic about it. Yes, remote working CAN improve quality of life, but it harms collaboration and communication and shifts a lot of burden onto the managers. This isn't cultural, it's simply what happens when you put people further apart.

To be clear, I dream of a day where collaboration remotely works really well. I'd like to live in a smaller city one day where I don't always have to worry about finding a job.

Imagine if we moved from having large cities that people lived around to a series of smaller towns. The urban sprawl that we currently have would not be a problem.

You need to stop thinking in terms of how things currently are and look at how they could be. Your social centre could be your town, your work would mostly be remote, no more urban sprawl just so everyone can be as near as possible to one square mile of central business district.

If I didn't have to work in the city, I wouldn't be living anywhere near the city, I'd pick a nice town in the north near to some excellent surf breaks; why would I even be living within the urban sprawl if I didn't need to be in the city? We're killing our planet, destroying our families and ruining our mental health. Do you think the urban sprawl around london (known as greater london) would exist if people weren't forced to commute into London everyday?

London exists as it does today for historical factors, such as importing, manufacture etc. Only recently has it been possible for more than a tiny fraction of the population to work remotely, and even today that proportion is so low it would make no difference overall.

I was talking about the `ideas via casual chat` thing, though, which is obviously entirely separate from any discussion about work/travel etc. It's different if you're remote because talking face to face is a different dynamic to talking over the phone/skype/irc/email etc. I mean I could sit and drink by myself at home and talk to other people who are also drinking alone at home; perhaps that's an environmentally way of relaxing after work; it would reduce drink-driving deaths, wouldn't it. It would also be a horrifically depressing insulating way of living and it's not for me.

For my million dollars I get to hear upstairs go the bathroom, my child gets woken up in the early hours by upstairs walking around in high heels after a night out. Every building on the street has a minimum of 6 - 8 apartments within so there's never any peace and quiet. Sometimes the bus has so many people I have to stand for nearly an hour.

Sometimes someone will crash on the bridge which will make me an hour late home which means I miss my kids going to bed. Mental health issues here are through the roof, the stress of high density living is literally killing people through depression and hypertension.

My child doesn't even know what a back yard is, that's a foreign concept to her. The only saving grace is that we're near to two beautiful beaches, without that I think I would have had a mental breakdown.

The whole "it'll only take a minute" issue that you seem to suffer from goes back to my cultural changes, one the culture has moved to work from home, the current working from home complaints will mostly be addressed. Also, let's not compare being in an office to going out for a drink, you can still go out and drink in your town with your friends in your community, again, cultural changes required.

Not knowing who you live around is because that's not within the culture, if your life was based around where you live rather then where you work (and was the same for everyone) I'm sure that would change.

Your whole point about going for drinks or inviting people round is irrelevant; the point is people will be able to build local friend groups rather than work friend groups.

"Whatyagonna do? Shift your whole life around just to try and avoid that?"

Well, my whole life gets flipped around everytime I can't et home to my kids before they sleep because of an incident on the tube or the roads.

I think you mostly missed my point - you looked at your life today and decided that working from home won't work for you - you're completely ignoring all of the issues with central working locations.

Someone claiming these are my problems is nonsense; a lot of people feel the same; we are in a mental health crisis and families are under massive strain because fathers are away from their children for so long. Nobody is saying that you have to change but a lot of people are saying that the current system is causing serious issues to living standards.

Your comment about having to shift your whole life around is unreasonable and shows you haven;t thought about this outside of your situation. Every father I speak to, every couple that can't afford a house near work that I speak to, they all agree. Housing crisis, family crisis, mental health crisis; they are all heavily contributed to by this issue.

I used to be 22 and living in shoreditch, I didn't care about these issues back then either. When I don't get home in time to see my kids before bed tonight because some idiot crashes their car and delays thousands of people, I'll just say to my wife WHATYAGONNA DO!??? Can't be flipping my life around!!!

America is experiencing its worst mental health and depression crisis ever, I would not be surprised if working conditions were a massive factor.

Companies should not live and die by water cooler conversations (and mostly don't).

Merely, I just state remote has its drawbacks. There is a tradeoff. If remote is so superior, then everybody should already be doing it.

For me, what OP suggests feels like a myth, just too good to be true, by ignoring the potential frustration.

I guess, you are missing here something very important. Onsite-work got entrenched in the society because of the earlier industrial revolution, which mainly involved working at factories on machines producing tangible things. There the concept of remote work, even for the higher-ups, was not even thinkable much. This onsite-work trend, unfortunately, got carried forward in the knowledge industry too.

What your parent is saying has a very large potential and his/her point is very important in this regard. The modern industry should give a serious try to remote working, it solves many, many problems of the modern day capitalism. It's good for both the workers and the employers and for the society as well.

It's good for_some_ workers. I find the increased housing costs to accommodate an additional office a net drain. The lack of work/life separation does nothing good for my stress.

As for nothing happening during lunch: my cohorts frequently grab a bite and pair on non-critical, but job enhancing, functionality. This type of interaction with others in the same problem space doesn't happen when you're lone wolfing it at home.

Work from home is great for some but it's not everyone's answer.

I do say, it is good for many workers in today's knowledge based industry. I have mentioned it earlier also.

As far as cohorts informal interaction, there are ways to facilitate that too: maybe a actual meeting once a week/month and then you can have private conversation over phone/mail/chat/telegram/whatsapp etc.

By not adopting work from home, you really are making peoples lives worse, just because that;s not you today, doesn't mean it won't be you at some point - wait until you need to buy a house within a reasonable commute to the office; a whole lot of money for no space and living with people banging around above you!

And i wouldn't be surprised most VC investors don't care for that either.

The VCs don't care either, they want to keep their startups on a tight leash from Sand Hill Road.

For a bootstrapped startup that isn't tied to a Sand Hill VC, remote working is a viable option that gives them access to talent they wouldn't otherwise have.

Other than very long term costs savings (and nobody thinks really long term), there's no money to be made from a big cultural shift that makes workers lives better.

The maintenance costs associated with the spread-out infrastructure required to support everyone having their own personal 1/4 acre of land cannot be supported by the tax base available in such a low density population. Most US cities could be much denser than they are with a higher quality of life and lower pollution if people could be located within walking distance of most of the places they need to go.

If you're staying within the city proper and still have a "very long commute" (which to me is 1+ hours, I'm not sure what the means to you) it sounds like the city is still insufficiently dense.

In my experience, the vast majority of people with long commutes are commuting from suburbs/exurbs into a city center. I'm sure there are some cities that are so spread out that one could have a long commute while still staying within the city limits, but that would imply that there are people even further out with even longer commutes from the suburbs.

I commute through the city, if one person crashes their car it impacts thousands of people getting home on time to see their kids before bedtime, how is that a nice way to live?

As for mental health issues, some people like cities, some don't. Without the traffic it would probably be a lot more pleasant.

It's tough to have a successful small town without it growing into a city.

Me and colleague are talking about, back in last November, Paris attack thing. And we are working in the media sector, he just mentioned that we could use the user behavior stream to detect whether something big happens. Now it becomes a viral item detector, also providing real time metrics to other services.

It might not be significant, but it did evolve into something useful.

That's nice, but probably trying to generalise your personal experience to everyone as though it were an immutable law isn't a good one. I've certainly had the opposite experience.

Depends on your job really, roles where creativity is required this sort of interaction is essential.

Not sure if that's true - I work in a company that has a very flexible approach to remote working and pretty much every meeting we have has some people remote (or indeed I am remote) and I don't think it makes much difference to the quality of discussions.

I just don't buy remote is the remedy to cost-cutting, it brings new drawbacks. Personally, I don't feel the same level of collaboration with my remote 'colleagues' than onsite ones. But it could be personal.

As sibling commenters are saying, the terrible experience that off-site workers have today is because companies haven't invested in the infrastructure to allow off-site workers to collaborate in the same way as workers in the office. Slack can replace the hallway conversations. Shared Google Docs can replace white-boards. Skype can replace meeting rooms. You just have to invest in the infrastructure, both physical and cultural to make it happen. And, as a side benefit, it's a lot easier to record the outcomes of meetings with these new tools, which makes it much easier to go back and reference what people said.

That would affect the remotes as well and doesn't set anyone up for a good working environment. If your desk were all wobbly, lighting dim and office space generally just lousy, you'd say the same thing about the office space and how it isn't conducive to a positive work environment.

I work remotely for an SF company and, honestly, I dislike making trips to head office sometimes. Why? Because the entire place is a distraction. I observe (and get dragged into) multiple coffee walks/chats a day that take up 20/30 minutes at a time. The constant distractions of an open plan office are something that office workers don't notice, but remotes do. I can get more work done in 8 hours at home that I feel I can do in three days in that office. I've spent most of my career in an office and only became a remote worker a few years ago, but it's clear to me now just how much of a distraction an office is. I would argue that this is already a more than justifiable benefit of having a larger remote workforce.

A large % of my colleagues are also remote, and it works great. Almost every meeting happens with at least someone on VC, and it works. In-person meetings happen in the office, but Slack has become our primary method of sharing ideas and having conversation. Ideas have definitely formed over lunch, but more of them form when there's an active conversation in a Slack channel.

All of your reservations are justified, though, because that seems to be the default thinking of many people who either haven't been remote themselves or who have had a less than stellar experience of remote working. I can honestly say that the majority of our remote force across different teams (eng, support, sales) are the best in the company. But remote working isn't for everyone, and there have been people who thought it was be perfect way to work, only to crash and burn because they couldn't handle it.

We need a cultural shift.

VoIP exists. Video conferencing exists. Meetings are usually better when kept short, so the reduced/shortened meetings are a positive thing.

> And the communication is not as easy as you can do in person.

Remote working means you have to communicate via either text, audio, audio + video, or diagrams.. So the only thing you can't really do, is touch the other person. Im pretty sure most work places discourage that kind of "communication" anyway.

> Also some ideas/conversations sparks during casual talking, if remote, those small things will be missed.

Why, because you think remote workers don't have casual conversation? I worked for several years with a medium size company that had a couple of hundred staff all around the globe. I'd argue the amount of non project specific, but still technical discussion was higher than when I worked in an office.

And the good thing? When you're working remotely, you can tune out those conversations if you need to focus on something. Try that when people in your office decide to have a room-wide chat.

Inreresting that management decided to buy giant chrome idol and museum display before cutting back on employee transport and food.

I do some metal sculptural work myself as a hobby and try to follow other artists and foundries for inspiration. I would assume Dropbox used a local source and I'm not familiar with many in the Bay Area. I'm always looking for more to add to my list of shops worth following.

Apologies for the off topic question.

Now for a rant. I know perks are suppose to help make companies attractive to potential employees they are trying to woo and boost morale. But I think it's crazy when I see the perks we get, while at the same time have to go begging for a mobile device to test on.

Contrast this with perks. When Google starting giving all their employees free food, it only cost them $100/week/employee, but everyone talked about it, and how awesome Google's perks are. The amount of positive PR and word-of-mouth that they got out of it, far dwarfed any efficiency improvements they might have gotten by simply giving their employees a slightly higher salary.

So you get an open bar on Friday and massages. Wow. Awesome!

1. The company can depreciate capital expenditures and deduct their costs from income whereas the employees would not reduce their taxes by doing a kitchen upgrade or going grocery shopping

2. The employees will spend more time at work because the kitchen with free prepared food is there instead of at a restaurant or their house so it technically doesn't even need to break even to be advantageous for the company

2. In theory this is correct, are there any studies that actually show productivity gains for companies in this respect? (I think the real reason for this is because a lot of the valley companies are in the middle of nowhere and therefore it's not really feasible for employees to go looking for food). I recently visited the HQ of my company in Silicon Valley and I was not impressed by how far it was from everything else.

My guess is that for just about any tech software startup the only really meaningful cost is salaries. In a pie chart, it would dwarf everything else. Even lease costs for an extravagant office would be minuscule in comparison.

Also, I'm skeptical of the 25k/employee/year estimate.

Source: An acquaintance runs a large group over there.

I am constrained from giving exact details however snacks (at least at the time) ended up going through a number of distribution "hands" each adding a bit of mark up which was doubling or tripling the cost to the company. At the scale of their consumption direct connections to manufacturers would have cut a ton of expense out of the snacks.

Still, if we assume that the number does not include the wages for 11 paid days off and 2 weeks of vacation, (nominally "perks") 25,000 / 50 weeks is an even 500 a week or $100 a day in consumables. Paying for additional staff for massages etc adds up quickly but its tough to hit those numbers.

   $25 * 5 * 50 = $6,250

Edit: I can't fully tell this story, because I remain anonymous on HN after a prick / top 10 poster here threatened my employer over my opinions on software development. But the partial story is still funny.

A former employer had a cool toy in the office. It was something people noticed. There was a techcrunch story with wankers going on about wasted money, extravagant bullshit, the usual. The speculation on cost ranged from $25k to $100k.

I had to register to point out that actual cost was well under $1k. How do I know? Friends/coworkers and I built it over the course of a couple evenings with tools borrowed from an employee's father. Parts ran well under $1k on amazon, even including the couple of six packs of beers we drank during construction.

Which kinds of opinions were they?

There's an important distinction between benefits and perks, which is something you sometimes have to explain to startups looking to hire when you ask them about benefits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_benefit

Regardless, I'd still guess the $25k number includes both.

It mentioned unlimited guests to meals, with an open bar. As well as something like a gym washing service. It's clear in the article that there were more than meals, with these given as specific examples of cuts.

You'd have to average every employee having a guest for every meal to just double meal costs. Believe that? No? Even then the above math still leaves you well shy of $25k.

How much do you think gym laundry costs? The wash & fold near me costs a couple dollars per pound. Your gym shorts, shirt, and socks do not weigh much.

Seriously that's one dev's salary.