working from home isn't a good thing if your office serves you food and coffee 🥲

100% Agree

it is never a good thing : water, electricity, temperature...

You should have food and coffee at home too.

Working in the office is good if you like working in the office. Otherwise working from home is objectively and subjectively better for you (less time lost, more time flexibility), the environment (no travel, less extra space and air conditioning needed if your home isn't a refeugee camp) and the company (less costs for office space).

The absolut best obviously is working from home which also happens to be the workplace. It is a tested and true model since the most ancient times, but really doesn't scale well for any but the smallest companies.

@oiledwheels If you have self-management issues you just don't want to fix, the strict separation of work and private life by the change of location might actually be more healthy. You will probably still do a lot of afterhours as there is no idle time in IT and you will therefore always feel pressured by the work piling up (which it actually is, but working more or faster can't change that).

Most of the time, the homes are heated anyways as people in general like their home to be warm when coming home.

Btw, residential hirises profit from the same physics as office spaces: They too increase heating efficiency by having less outside-facing wall surface per person. So the metric tons of homes argument is really only valid for US suburbia (which is a pretty sad place to live at for completely different reasons anyways).

The next eco opportunity is not having to build the office space in the first place as construction also has a huge impact.

@oiledwheels Michelangelo, while obviously exactly the right person to compare oneself with, isn't your average craftsman who lived and worked in a small townhouse. He actually seems to have lived wherever his work was. In your case, i would strongly advise against moving into the office though...

@Oktokolo I don't really agree with this.

When you work at home, you use the toilet from home, you use more water, more energy (laptop/pc running, cooking using your own oven/stuff, after eating, cleaning the dishes)

Any extra you would have done in the office cost you way more in the end.

For the company, that is great, spend less on all that stuff, they may even rent a smaller building, or build a smaller one.

So yeah, of all those extra bits are at your disposal at the office, I prefer to use them.

@Grumm I am absolutely with you. A part of the savings of the company should be given to the employees working at home to offset the increased costs for electricity and tool use.

Some people just don't consider the lost time by traveling as a cost of working in the office. So they actually need another incentive to consider working from home. On the other hand, most companies still don't want their employees work from home anyways. So i guess, there is a perfect match to be found here...

@oiledwheels Hey, that is fine and fits well into "Working in the office is good if you like working in the office." - the disclaimer i included as first line in my first comment 😇

@oiledwheels wait, now you confused me. First you liked working from home, now you say that you missed working at the office because of reduced social opportunities.

Like @Oktokolo said, there is a choice to be made. But one isn't necessarily better than the other.

choice 1 : working from home, no travel times, you can sleep longer, more personal expenses, less social contact, more work done.

choice 2 : working at the office, travel time, have to wake up early, less personal expenses, free food, more social contact and opportunities, more bothered by others, less work done.

It's always the best when the employee has full freedom to choose where they work from. Different options suit different people.

@Grumm depends on the cost of commute

@Oktokolo I do wonder about the fiscal cost of commuting. Here in the UK east mids, there's few places you can work if you come by public transport