That cover photo set an incredibly terrible tone for this article and set me against it from the get go. After reading this, I still think it is a bunch of bunk. Those who need an office will have one and those whose work is such that they can suffer through with just a laptop and with distractions in the background wont.
I could work from anywhere, but I don't and no WiFi is not my preferred connection mechanism in my house when I am working with NAS for video editing or some of the other work that I do in addition to writing code. The only time I may crack the laptop while in actual bed is if I was sick and on those days I'm not going to be committing a ton of code to any of my projects. The ergonomics would be all wrong.
The killer quote is “Most people I know end up sitting on the sofa, and half the time the TV is on when they’re working.” I could not concentrate in such an environment. Even if TV may be on upstairs but I have privacy in my office in the basement. On balance this article does a disservice and gives ammunition to organizations whose bosses want to point and show "see, this is why we need our employees to come into the office".
I don't think it was even a cover photo. Look closely, someone did a bad Photoshop job putting the whole image together. Adding even more to how contrived it all feels.
I hadn't noticed, and this image is just the gift that keeps on giving.
What do you mean it's Photoshop? Oh yeah, the box files. I hadn't noticed. The dude's leg looks a bit weir...WAIT, that's photoshop too! EVEN THE LAPTOP! Gosh, the whole thing is fake!
Agreed. I'm a college student and I absolutely miss having a nice working area for when I need to settle in and get stuff done. Some of my friends to all their homework sitting on their bed (like in that picture) but they're definitely the minority. I think we all appreciate the library which is usually quiet and allows you to get a nice open space with relatively few distractions.
> "The killer quote is “Most people I know end up sitting on the sofa, and half the time the TV is on when they’re working.” I could not concentrate in such an environment. "
if you can't do it it does not mean it's not true, I do most of my work sitting at a sofa with tv running and my kids running around, I guess it's just a matter of getting used to, I can just ignore tv sounds and do my work sitting there.
I do that as well. However, I started tracking how focused & productive I felt during each work session / pomodoro (using a program called Vitamin-R), and the preliminary results aren't good. I'm measurably more productive if I turn the TV off. I can improve productivity further by putting on noise-cancelling headphones & my programming-specific playlist.
Your mileage may vary of course, but sometimes it's worth testing & measuring these things.
I was not arguing about productivity , I was just saying that the original comment was bashing the quote based on his own personal anecdote, if he does not do it - it does not mean its not happening for other people.
Anecdotally, I'm younger and have gone through long periods working from home and I needed a home office. It's not a technology thing, my phone is plenty powerfull enough to do anything I need and so has every laptop I've owned since I was 10.
You have a dedicated workspace because when you start blending home and work things start unravling with both; Work is a time when you're very active mentally and sometimes It's difficult to keep that way. This is much harder when it blends with your needed relaxation time.
Agreed, also anecdotally. I'm a sub-30 with a dedicated workspace, and I find that it mentally partitions leisure from work--something I find important while working in a space that's usually devoted to leisure.
I would be interested to hear from others here who do not maintain this distinction yet also successfully work from home. What strategies do you employ for maintaining this separation despite the "death of the home office"?
>> and I find that it mentally partitions leisure from work
This is very important in my opinion. More employers are offering "flexibility" so employees are tempted to bring laptops home, use the VPN, and generally work outside of work. Even though I have a laptop, I leave it at work when I go home at the end of the day. I do not remotely access email or anything else. If you work at home it makes sense to have a firm boundary between your life and your job. A home office would seem to help with that.
> I find that it mentally partitions leisure from work--something I find important while working in a space that's usually devoted to leisure.
It's important not only for working well, but also for the leisure part: before my sleeping space and the working space got properly partitioned, I found it much harder to fall asleep, much harder to let go of work issues when trying to relax and rest.
Agreed, I've got an "open concept" apartment, where I have a separate bedroom and a joint room with a kitchen living room and "home office". I've been working at home for the last 3 months and it's gotten significantly more difficult to concentrate with the couch so close to my desk, even with books and computers spread out all over the apartment. Home life and work have not been going as well as when I had a real office.
I create a "work" space at home that signals to myself and everyone that I am at "work" and I am not available for anything small. It really helps to gain and maintain focus.
I used to be the blend of all, my life, my work, it was all a single thing, my self in a way. Then it splitted, there was leisure, passion me; and work me and organization became a sudden need. No more stack circle around laptops and pizzas. Dedicated shelves, drawers, rooms, space. Genius loci in a way.
Hah, try having kids. I'll work from home some days to avoid trying to make my way through the snow. Even a home office isn't enough to keep that blending from happening with a young kid who can't understand why they shouldn't come see you.
This is probably a lot harder when you don't work from home often. I've worked from home for my son's entire life so its ingrained in him that when I'm in the study I'm at work. He does occasionally come in to tell me about something but he understands that he'll have to leave me alone to do work after doing so.
When I was in that stage of life, half my room was my bedroom and the other half was an office. I was still single at the time and living with my parents. I ended up moving out when I bought my first house, but if that had not been a possibility I probably would have had to find a 2 bedroom apartment. Which would have presumably still been cheaper than renting an apartment and also an office - co-working spaces can be really expensive.
You're also pretty much asking to get audited if you claim a home office deduction, so make sure you have your ducks in a row if you are going to claim it.
No. Read through the IRS publication linked from several of the comments. It's pretty clear that if you're using your home office out of convenience for yourself it's not deductible.
> Additional tests for employee use. If you are an em- ployee and you use a part of your home for business, you may qualify for a deduction for its business use. You must meet the tests discussed earlier plus:
> Your business use must be for the convenience of your employer, and
If you have another place to do your work (i.e. your employer's office building) you also don't qualify.
> Your home office will qualify as your principal place of business if you meet the following requirements.
> ...
> You have no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative or management activities of your trade or business.
You can probably get away with taking the deduction but good luck if you get audited.
There pretty clearly isn't based on what the comment said. Part time work from home implies that it's for the convenience of the employee and also that the employee has another place that they also work, either of which is sufficient to make the deduction disallowed.
I was following the flow chart in the publication, I think there can be good cause to deduct a home office for an employee because "a few days a week" could very well be the majority of the hours worked, and having a dedicated space helps. You're assuming they work less than half the time at home, and that it is strictly for their convenience and not the employers. Those were not my assumptions. If an employer offers work from home they obviously derive benefit from it (perhaps better retention rates or easier recruiting).
Like I said, there is clearly the opportunity to deduct this expense. There are obvious pitfalls that you pointed out.
> I was following the flow chart in the publication
There are two questions on the flowchart that seem to clearly rule out toxican's home office from being deductible.
Do you work at home
for the convenience of
your employer?
Probably not. Working from home a few days a week is generally something done for the convenience of the employee.
Is it your principal place
of business?
Almost certainly not. Principal place of business is not defined to be where you do most of your work, according to the IRS. They clearly state that "You have no other fixed location where you conduct substantial administrative or management activities of
your trade or business."
Toxican stated that he does not work exclusively from home. Unless he basically does no work in his employer's provided office (even a day a week is certainly substantial), he's not eligible for the deduction.
> I think there can be good cause to deduct a home office for an employee because "a few days a week" could very well be the majority of the hours worked, and having a dedicated space helps. You're assuming they work less than half the time at home...
The IRS doesn't care about the "majority" except when it's "substantially all".
> ...and that it is strictly for their convenience and not the employers. Those were not my assumptions. If an employer offers work from home they obviously derive benefit from it (perhaps better retention rates or easier recruiting).
By that logic it's always for the employer's convenience and the question becomes pointless. I'm confident that's not the IRS's intent because then they wouldn't ask the question at all.
They confirm this with their Example 4, where Kathleen chooses to work from home and therefore does not meet the convenience-of-the-employer test. If your employer offers you the option, it's for your convenience.
> Like I said, there is clearly the opportunity to deduct this expense. There are obvious pitfalls that you pointed out.
Some people can take this deduction. It's pretty clear from the IRS's guidance that employees who telecommute part of the time cannot.
Interesting. What part of the document makes you think a part-time telecommuter can deduct their home office? The "Primary Place of Business" rules would seem to preclude that.
Either way, my initial response stands - check with your CPA.
> The relative importance of the activities performed at
each place where you conduct business, and
> The amount of time spent at each place where you
conduct business.
Part time can be 22 out of 40 hours. Or 30 out of 40. The next condition to satisfy is when do you set up meetings, appointments, whatever managerial tasks?
The opportunity exists for a part-time work from home worker to deduct the expense. In the tech industry working from home can be seen as a benefit to the employer because it may help their retention rate or help them recruit workers, plus lower office space costs by allowing them to share offices among many employees.
That's what I was implying by saying the opportunity exists.
That's not the only test. It must be exclusive use, but also must be for your employer's convenience (not your own) and more importantly it must be the only place that you perform significant administrative or management duties for the business. (There are other rules but these are the ones that exclude most part-time WFH arrangements.)
If you have an office at work, you're probably taking the deduction illegally.
Oh don't get me wrong, the android UI is absolutely horrible and the small screen makes it worse. I was just pointing out that technology wasn't the reason people have dedicated workspaces.
How does this kind of writing still make it to publication? This isn't about generational shifts, changing aesthetics, or trends in home layout. This is about falling wages, soaring costs of living in urban areas, and a decrease in QoL for the purportedly-mobile section of the working class that is the implicit subject of this article.
Portraying this as being a decision of taste rather than necessity is misleading. Very few people are willingly choosing to have less rooms in their house; our grand paring-down is the result of tight belts and empty wallets, not a nod to minimalist aesthetics.
How does this kind of writing still make it to publication?
The publisher doesn't have standards, they needed something to surround the ads. The author might have been more serious about the topic than trying to fill space to sell ads, but lacked the tools to bring that insight. The editor in chief should keep them on the bench learning, covering topics they can speak meaningfully on, or should have hired them in the first place. I doubt this publication has an editor in chief (though there is a distinct possibility that someone ineffectual might hold that title).
— When I was a student, I barely had room for the desk and the bed, said the 32-year-old German engineer,
– Well, when I was a student, we were two people in that room, 2 desks, a sink and a fridge; and our showers were shared between 4 people, I said, with my coarse French accent, recalling memories of water dripping off our roof in winter.
- Ahem, started the Russian, I was in a top engineering school in the countryside of Moscow. We were 3 in that room. We didn't have water, we had 18 shared taps downstairs for 300 people. Electricity was scarce with no ground plug, so in the heat of the winter, when the frozen wind blew on our windows, everyone used their secondary heating and electricity would go off for the night. The water dripping from the ceiling? It didn't drip. It was frozen.
Of course costs and wages need to be studied, but what I see all across those examples is desk. No-one in good engineering schools would seriously work on their bed, no matter how little room they had.
> our grand paring-down is the result of tight belts and empty wallets, not a nod to minimalist aesthetics.
Grand paring down? Since when? The typical US home has pretty consistently grown in size year over year for at least the last 4 decades, gaining about 250 sqft every decade.
I see a lot of numbers about 'new single-family houses.' What population do you think is living in a building that fits that description?
According to the 2010 U.S. census, ~80% of the population lives in an urban area, and all projections hold that share to have increased. That's 80+% of the US population that is living in non-single-family buildings, many of which are being remodeled to support greater population density and smaller individual units.
> That's 80+% of the US population that is living in non-single-family buildings
Urban doesn't include just multifamily units. I live in a single family home in Seattle. So do tens of thousands of others. Ditto for San Francisco and many other cities.
Multifamily units are also growing. The data only goes back 15 years but they're bigger now. Check page 448:
i would think that the author himself works from a laptop in 5 different part-time jobs , so he has no time to produce good articles , but no, he appears to be employed exclusively by bloomberg.
I, for one, would not be happy without a home office. One that I can shut the cats out of, if need be.
It's nice having a dedicated space for work. I prefer having a desk, a nice chair, monitor, keyboard, and mouse, rather than sitting cramped on a couch with my laptop.
In addition, like swiley mentioned, I like knowing that when I get to my couch, I'm not going to be working.
I live in two-bedroom apartment with my wife and two kids, and really miss having an office.
Don't get me wrong - my apartment is very nice and it's worth the compromise - but I'm posting this between CI runs, sitting on the floor of my bedroom. I'd love to have an office; I just don't have the space for it.
Maybe you can get your company to reimburse you for visits to a co-working space? I was in a similar situation for a while and worked out a similar arrangement with my manager. Even now, I have a dedicated office at home that I work from, but I still opt for the co-working space 2-3 times a week.
I actually went from a fully-remote position to an on-site one earlier this year. When I was remote, I rented an office for a while and worked from coffee shops and the library quite a bit. It worked out fine, but I changed jobs for other reasons.
And that's okay. You can work from where you are to where you want to be long term! Keep up the good work. A good pair of GOOD noise cancelling headphones can do wonders!
> Current home design tends toward open-floor plans, with an emphasis on flexible spaces and workspace nooks, says architect Paul Adamson, who operates out of the San Francisco Bay Area.
I've seen these workspace nooks before and personally find them terrible. It's like bringing all the negative parts of the open office home with none of the benefits.
I like open floor plans but don't want my office as part of that. The last thing I want to hear while trying to concentrate is the sound of pots and pans banging in the kitchen, the sound of the television, etc.
Agreed. Those nooks are fine for light "home" business (TurboTax, searching for recipes, etc). I would hate to use one for my day job.
I keep a proper home office. My house has a small dining room, which was too small for large family dinners (8+ guests), so the room was repurposed as an office. The current dining room used to be the family room (which is now in what would have been the formal living room).
Well call me old fashioned then :) I recently built a new home and I specifically wanted a dedicated & separated office and also ran Ethernet to all the rooms.
I will admit, when we were shopping it did seem hard to find homes listing a home office as feature even though several had them. I did also note that a popular thing now with new homes in AZ is a "mini" office that can barely fit a single PC and chair.
> I will admit, when we were shopping it did seem hard to find homes listing a home office as feature even though several had them.
Forgive my ignorance (I'm not a homeowner and am just starting to think about it), but wouldn't a home office just be a bedroom that you use as an office?
Ideally, there's a difference. I just got an offer accepted on a house (yay!) that has an actual office. There's a tiny little foyer leading from the door to the main office space, the office itself would be too narrow to comfortably fit a bed, plus a space to walk around the bed, and there are four large windows in the relatively small room, and the sills of the windows dip down below where a bed would meet the wall.
I mean, you walk into it, and it's clearly not a bedroom. But, hey, throw in some bookshelves and a desk and you have a stereotypical office!
My parents also had a "study" (the house was built pre-internet, when people had studies) I actually used it as a bedroom as a teenager, but there were a couple things that separated it from a "bedroom" There were floor to ceiling built in bookshelves all along a large wall, but there was no closet. There was also a phone jack, which was a feature none of the other bedrooms had. The room was also sort of oddly shaped, with no clear place to put a bed without it blocking some of the floor to ceiling bookshelves.
So, yeah, there are some things, but, in many cases, they could be used interchangeably. I'm using a second bedroom as an office right now, and it's basically just a big office with a closet!
Pretty much. Plus you can call rooms an office if they don't qualify as a bedroom (I believe they need to have a window to be called a BR). Also, I would think an extra bedroom sells better than calling it an office.
You definitely need a window to qualify as a bedroom. It has to meet certain requirements that basically boil down to "could a 10-year-old escape a fire through this window?" Although "not falling to death after climbing out" isn't a requirement.
I believe technically a bedroom in the US is also supposed to have a built-in closet of some sort and a door that closes the space off. Lack of either of these often means a room is marketed as an office.
Yep. But as other have stated there are requirements for a bedroom which I didn't really need for my office. I suppose what I prefer as an office is a closed study. This tends to have the room located away from the other (noisier) living areas and bedrooms.
This may be true. But I have a feeling a large percentage of HN are not part of this trend, as it seems there's quite a few people on here who still have real jobs that involve concentrating, which is not the going trend for most of the country.
As for me, and I admit this is weird, I have wanted a home office since I was kid. And now that I have one it's my favorite room in the house. I'm not married nor do I have kids. But a quiet, very functional room where one can sit and concentrate, for real work or for a hobby, where friends who come over aren't going to touch shit, where you can work on something you take seriously is really a gift. The bedroom might be the most fun room in the house, but a home office is where the magic can happen.
Good luck to these people with their Macbooks Air sitting and working in bed.
In my last flat I had a hallway wide enough to install home office. It was the central corridor hub where all the other rooms branched out of, so not exactly a long, traditional hallway. Instead, I opted to make our kitchen more like a coffee bar; wide countertops, barstools, plenty of outlets. Because in my single days those were the type of places I worked out of. So I modeled my "home office" after my "old office." And it's worked really well. Our son comes home and we work around the kitchen, together. Now, the kitchen has become our focal point, not the bedrooms, salon, etc.
I think the concepts of what I home needs has changed. They are more expensive than our parents generation so every part has to have a function. When I visit friends and see that they have 2 offices, one for each of them, I just think what a waste of valuable space. Like you have so many rooms you're inventing functions for them; what's next the gift wrapping room?
My office is about 80% office, 20% man cave but the idea that everyone now works solely on laptops and migrates around the house is flat on it's face silly.
Personally I can't stand working on a laptop in any serious capacity. During an emergency if I need to VPN into work quick and restart some problem child machine? Sure. Actually sitting and building something from scratch? God no. I mean with a gun to my head I could make it work but given any other options, be it a table, a desk, preferably with my Thunderbolt displays, I'd choose a real surface over lounging with a laptop any day.
When I do sit down to do some writing though my Surface shines, it's the only computer I've been able to use comfortably not sitting. Maybe this is just something the author and their co-workers experience also being writers. But yeah, any serious mental heavy lifting work happens in my office.
I've had enough trouble staying ergonomic at my desk. The couch would be horrible.
It's possible to teach yourself to ignore distractions. However, putting the body under that stress over time will have consequences. It takes longer than your 20s to evolve. Unfortunately, even with exercise, you will eventually have to correct those habits.
I'm curious to see what people born in the 90s do when they get to their 30s.
The point is, you used to have to have a separate office. You had a desktop PC with a CRT, a bookshelf, a filing cabinet, a landline, a printer, boxes of software on CD-ROM, and so on. Remember how much room that took up?!
Now that everything's digital and on your phone/laptop, most people don't need any of that anymore. It's kind of crazy when you realize it. You don't need a dedicated room -- you can use whatever room in the house is currently quiet and unoccupied.
Decent ergonomics still require a dedicated space. Or else carting a lot of crap around to whichever room is quiet, then adjusting it to fit that space, assuming it's even possible without unreasonable amounts of effort.
I used to work at the desk in my bedroom. I now work from a rented shared office 20 minute walk from where I live. The lure of a nap at 2.30pm was too much to resist.
I still work at home a lot of the time, but I prefer the strict divide between 'work' and 'home' that the office affords me. It is also a place to store all the extraneous hardware I seem to have accumulated - Anyone want a HP Compaq 9020 laptop? :)
My personal experience would suggest that this isn't a 60% allow workers telecommute whenever they want, but rather allow workers to telecommute sparingly when circumstances require.
While I'm a data point against the article (my home office: 27" 4K, Das Keyboard, Aeron, and other comforts) I think we're starting to see a generation of workers who have used laptops their entire life. (It wasn't that long ago that laptops were a challenge to use without peripherals, given the universal crappiness of trackpads on non-Apple hardware)
This may be true, but it's really a bad thing for ergonomics. While changing your position is vital, you still need a real work area. Having a proper adjustable height desk + large monitor + ergonomic seating is a good idea. Whether that goes in a corner or in a special home office, working a full day from the couch on a laptop is terrible for your health.
A few years ago this might have been dismissed as a first world problem, but I really hope the tech scene startups dedicating more time and effort into the ergonomics of working from coffee shops in the next few years. Everyone knows what we're doing [working for too long without breaks, in unergonomic positions on laptops where the screen height is far below eye level so craning our necks] isn't great, yet everyone does it.
Working on a laptop from bed or couch becomes a pain(literally) on long term. A big monitor and a good chair/recliner pays off big time if you are developer working at home. You don't have to use a desktop/tower computer though. A laptop or even a phone(ubuntu) may work just fine (connected to the monitor).
I agree with all the comments here and I'll add that being able to close the and explain to the kids that if the door is closed you can only come if there's an emergency.
Nothing worse than a kid, clearly old enough to understand the concept of a closed door, who constantly interrupt an audio/video conf.
I can't get over the thought that this is some sort of hit piece on work-from-home being published by Bloomberg. Does this narrative support HP, Yahoo, and other companies insist that employees commute in for culture and for productivity!?
When I have to read something, I can read it anywhere in my home. If I have to write down some notes, I begin to need a surface appropriate to writing. If I have to code, I go to my desk 99% of the time. The home office is still there.
“Most people I know end up sitting on the sofa, and half the time the TV is on when they’re working.”
I know I get easily distracted, but I can't imagine you're being very productive or focused in such an environment.
Probably depends on the work being done. Sometimes there's some relatively brainless slogging that needs to be done. I will sometimes do that kind of stuff at night while the TV is on.
Doesn't work well if you need your brain fully engaged.
That doesn't work for me, at all. I don't want "any space" to be a work area.
I have a "work area". And when I close the door, I've left the office. I'm not at work. I don't want my couch to be a work area, I don't want the bedroom to be a work area. I need to be able to leave work at the end of the day.
My laptop is my work area. When its open and doing work tasks, im at work. When its closed, im at home. Both of those times can be in the same physical location.
To me, sounds like home office is simply evolving. However, I personally need a desk and a comfortable chair. A space for keyboard and mouse pad. You can't replicate that on the couch.
I spent so long looking for a comfortable chair that I ended up getting used to working in my reclining chair with my notebook on my lap and a wireless mouse on the chair's arm. I don't really miss using a table anymore.
I'm a huge proponent of having separate physical spaces to relax and do work in, a big part of this for me is adding more space or effort between myself and possible distractions.
tl;dr People still work at home, they're just not creating a special room for working. Home builders, realtors are trying to figure out what to market, if not "an office."
I could work from anywhere, but I don't and no WiFi is not my preferred connection mechanism in my house when I am working with NAS for video editing or some of the other work that I do in addition to writing code. The only time I may crack the laptop while in actual bed is if I was sick and on those days I'm not going to be committing a ton of code to any of my projects. The ergonomics would be all wrong.
The killer quote is “Most people I know end up sitting on the sofa, and half the time the TV is on when they’re working.” I could not concentrate in such an environment. Even if TV may be on upstairs but I have privacy in my office in the basement. On balance this article does a disservice and gives ammunition to organizations whose bosses want to point and show "see, this is why we need our employees to come into the office".