Would You Take an 8% Pay Cut to Work from Home?
Absolutely not.  I&#x27;ve advised everyone looking for remote work to <i>never</i> undercut their salary or treat the remote job as a &quot;perk&quot;[0].<p>There are downsides to working at home -- disconnection from the team (if the team is not entirely remote), additional pressure to be deliberate about social behavior, the elimination of the lines between &quot;work&quot; and &quot;home&quot; and having to keep yourself in check to make sure you don&#x27;t end up just &quot;working all of the time&quot; and the perception that working from home <i>isn&#x27;t working at all</i> which is often the case when an employer thinks that they can reduce a person&#x27;s salary if they offer them the opportunity to work from home.<p>The problem with accepting a lower salary is that you&#x27;re opening yourself up to a working environment where the bosses <i>believe</i> they&#x27;re doing you a favor and will expect more in return than just that salary.  There&#x27;s a risk that they will respect the work you do <i>less</i> or assume you&#x27;re <i>on a perpetual vacation</i> because you&#x27;re working from a home office rather than a building they&#x27;ve paid for.  Your work and contribution should speak for itself and your management should understand that it takes a special skill (and valuable) skill set to work from home successfully.  By treating it as a perk, these facts are ignored.<p>After 7 years of working in an office, 4 of working split between home and office and 7 working exclusively from home, I can say from my own, anecdotal, experience that working from home makes me <i>far more effective</i> at the job I&#x27;m tasked with.  To start, switching to working at home eliminated a 2-hour round-trip commute.  That time didn&#x27;t all get shifted to work, but at least half of it did.  Because I work from home, I have the most effective tools for doing my job with me at all times.  When I was in the office, I had two workstations that I did most of my work on and a laptop that I rarely used except when at home.  Working in development, I tended to have moments of inspiration hit at non-work times (9:00 PM) and when that&#x27;d happen, I&#x27;d look at the laptop and run through in my mind all of the things I&#x27;d have to set up to be able to take advantage of that inspiration and would often think &quot;yeah, I&#x27;ll just wait until the morning&quot;.  And by morning, that inspiration had expired.  Because I do my entire job at home, I can take advantage of this inspiration without any friction, now.  I&#x27;m currently employed by a team that is entirely located in the UK.  One of the reasons I was hired was because I&#x27;m located in a time-zone that matches many of our customers.  This benefits my employer which makes a pay-cut inappropriate.<p>In the office, you&#x27;ve got an unofficial social pressure to keep the same schedule as your coworkers: 8-5 with a noonish lunch, usually.  There are several &quot;personal things&quot; that can&#x27;t be done over the internet still, today[1].  These places often have a day or two a week to accommodate day-job folks, but you&#x27;ll be waiting in line with <i>all of the others</i> about five times longer than you would if you picked a more ideal time[2].<p>All of this equates to <i>more time available to work</i> and I probably work an average of 50 hours&#x2F;week without even trying.  The difference is that at home it <i>feels</i> like a 40-hour work week and sometimes it feels like far less than that.  To my <i>family</i> it feels like a <i>much</i> shorter work-week because I&#x27;m home for them.  I can sit in the living room and work while my kids play. I can be there when the little things come up. My kids will tell you &quot;daddy&#x27;s always there&quot; because ... well ... I am!  They can even sit in on a conference call and get to know what it&#x27;s like to have a career.<p>This is not to say that there aren&#x27;t downsides for the employer.  There&#x27;s less collaboration[3] and collaboration intensive work may suffer as a result, especially if the work-from-home employees don&#x27;t have the required skill set.  It&#x27;s also too easy to focus on those downsides.  It&#x27;s better to look at it as a trade-off.  Less facilities costs, more work time, greater &quot;focused time&quot;, and (probably) happier employees.  Employee happiness can equate to better work product and there are few things that will have a bigger impact on employee happiness than work-time&#x2F;location flexibility provided it&#x27;s managed properly.  Management <i>has to be better</i>, too.  No longer can you rely on &quot;butts-in-chairs&quot; management where a person&#x27;s contribution is determined solely on how frequently you peer in and see that person working.  Effectiveness has to be measured by project completion and more concrete variables.<p>[0] There&#x27;s one case where this doesn&#x27;t fit - cost of living.  If you&#x27;re taking a job in New York and you live in South Dakota, I wouldn&#x27;t expect to be making the same amount of money as someone who is required to find a place to live in NYC and accept the accompanying expenses.  This is one of the biggest perks to <i>accepting</i> remote employees -- the ability to hire in a cheaper part of the country from where &quot;the office&quot; resides and comes with much of the same benefits (and fewer of the downsides) of off-shoring to a cheaper-labour country.  I also work in software development which I believe is one of the (many) jobs that can be done remotely with little sacrifice on the side of the employer and many benefits for both employer and employee.  It probably doesn&#x27;t fit similarly for many other jobs.<p>[1] Some driver&#x27;s license related things, dropping off equipment at Comcast&#x2F;Verizon&#x27;s hell-hole, almost anything to do with a mortgage, that missed package that needed to be signed for requiring you to go to the Post Office, UPS or FedEx, doctor&#x27;s office or lab work needing to be done and on and on.<p>[2] I&#x27;ve learned 1:45-2:30 is the sweet spot - the bank teller has no lines, the mortgage broker has nobody in their chairs, the salon will let you walk in without an appointment and see you immediately and even the DMV (Secretary of State in MI) will have about 5 people in front of you.  Service is also better (particularly at the DMV) because the staff isn&#x27;t stressed -- often having just returned from lunch.<p>[3] It&#x27;s hard to argue that you&#x27;d get the same level of collaboration having entirely remote staff than you do when there&#x27;s a shared, common, office.  But given the right tools, collaboration doesn&#x27;t have to be a problem.  There&#x27;s also the issue of over-collaboration.  There are times when <i>I need to keep my head down and be able to work on complex code without interruption</i>.  When you have a shared office -- especially some of these &quot;Agile-type&quot; offices where there&#x27;s no separation between employees -- the office culture can become one of interruptions.