Previous company I worked with paid my Internet bill. Before I had anything better than dial-up they paid for a frame-relay connection at $500+ a month. They also supplied all hardware I needed and still have a lockable office in main office.
Current employer when I started working from home refused to pay anything as they looked at it as a concession to me to allow me to work from home. Although I made it plan to department head that if they said NO to working from home I was going to quite. They do provide laptop, docking station and 2 monitors. On rare occasions I go to office just take laptop and plug into other items at office. I am providing shared internet (they require use of VPN to link to office), office space, power, heat/ac. wireless keyboard & mouse, and speakers and headset for video calls. I also have office number routed to cell phone (no land line) for people outside that need to contact me. But all that is much cheaper than renting apartment near company office.
One down side of having office calls forwarded to my cell is I get calls even when on vacation and at night. Funniest reaction was someone that call me at what would have been 10pm at office. They said were was just going to leave a message but maybe I could help then anyway. I explained that reason they got me was because I setting in bar on a cruse down the Yangtze river and no I could not help them being my system was 12,000 miles away.
EDIT — Sorry for ramble it’s Friday and also going a little crazy not being able to get out of house to socialize.
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Agreed. I think maybe they will stop growing so fast. But they will still grow. Maybe a short term dip until a vaccine is readily available.
Everyone says more people will be working fine home more often. And I agree with that trend. The main benefit from that I see is considerably less traffic and congestion across the board.
Agreed. I live downtown for walkability. And not just to things necessarily but being able to walk a few miles on some sidewalks without having to get in my car to do so. And to get a drink. I think a bunch of people who live in DTR still commute to RTP or elsewhere but that doesn’t dissuade them from living in DTR for the reasons I stated. If you remove half the awful driving commuters from the walkable areas, the walkable areas become even that much more appealing. If anything, cities change to be even more populated but with people chilling in their home offices and getting a beer at lunch with no worry of driving home. The 'burbs still do not appeal to a lot of people and current city dwellers already made the choice to avoid them and won’t be fleeing downtowns right as they get better.
Still not buying any office is coming here anytime soon. Citrix just dumped their entire building and there are rumblings Red Hat is right behind them. Its about to get a lot uglier before it gets better.
Where are those rumblings coming from? They just renovated that entire lobby space in the last year, so that seems like it would have started pretty recently. Perhaps the rumblings are them trying to negotiate a better deal?
Lest we forget about the awesome brunch that used to be served at Hibernian. There was also a really decent one at Tír na nÓg. Any wonder why downtown is thirsty for some breakfast places as the population grows?
Red Hat is just consolidating employees to a few floors because everybody is still WFH. Its a ghost town on each floor currently. Consolidating for now at least can generate some life amongst the people who do go into the office.
I still don’t understand why Red Hat made the vaccine mandatory if they were just going to let everyone continue wfh indefinitely. Everything about their pandemic policy seems so backwards to me.
