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Ya know if a company is gonna have you work from home they should be paying for your whole office set up :| desk, chair, monitors etc. At least the materials you need.
For me it's the opposite, if they want me to come back into the office they should at least pay for some decent monitors at the workstations.
pay for some decent
ROFL my laptop at work was low-mid when it was built in 2017
My work gave me $1000 for office stuff to work from home. They also provided a KB/mouse, three 1080p 24" monitors, a UPS, brand new laptop, a dock for the laptop, cables, a headset, etc.
I already had my system set up for work from home including two 1080p displays, a 1440p display, mechanical keyboard, wireless mouse with charging mouse pad... Even a headset and KVM.
I spent the money on an additional battery for my homelab rack (which will extend the uptime of my firewall during a power outage.
I'm pretty happy with my setup, I combined everything, and decommissioned my oldest display, and bought myself a laptop stand, so when I'm on my PC (selected from the KVM), I have five displays, three wide, and two above. When I select my work laptop, the laptop screen becomes a sixth monitor, and the stand props it up to be one of the top displays, so I have a 3x2 grid of displays.
I'm usually fine with three for my personal use, but more are not unwelcome, at work I was pushing from three to four pretty consistently in the past few years.
Though, I find that having a 1920x1200 or 1440p display set up in portrait is usually pretty helpful for work. So I can see more of a page. I wouldn't recommend doing that with a 1080 display, since most sites that have a static width are optimized for screens that are at least 1280x768 (around 720p) and going down from 1280 px wide to 1080px wide, results in some horizontal scrolling.... Which is never fun.
Yeah my office paid for my new chair (old broke). Asked if I could have one of the Herman Miller's we all used at the office since no one was there anymore but they just bought me a new one lmao that was really cash money of them. The Embody is easily the best chair I've ever sat in, it's not even close.
You sure it's not 1000$ for equipment you have to give back if you leave? That's how it works for me
Well, if they want to come and unbolt an 80lb battery from my rack and take it away after I've gotten a few good years out of it, I'm okay with that. By that time I'll already be saving up for a replacement.
It's more likely that they would say "you owe us office equipment or the 1k", but again that's just if it works the same way it does where I work...
From what I know of my management (it's a fairly small company), unless I quit fairly soon after I claim the credit, maybe within a year, I don't think they'll bother making an issue of it.
There's an economic argument to be made, since most people would challenge such a demand, and the time and effort of the managerial team to pursue it, and the cost of hiring a lawyer to issue the correspondence to say that I should comply, among other associated costs would start to eat away at any benefit from getting the $1000 repaid they would end up spending more money chasing it down.
I think my employer is financially intelligent enough to know that. I also didn't see any such provisions or clauses in my employment contract. So it's borderline impossible to enforce to begin with, you can't really argue that it's breach of contract since it's not in a contract that I signed. So it needs to (legally) be pursued as damages, which is a bit harder to prove without a drawn out legal battle. The cost of the lawyers alone to get to that point makes it a triviality in terms of cost.
If they can threaten you with minimal cost to them, and you willingly pay it out of fear, that's on you.
Only people who penny pinch on principle would even bother doing anything more than issue a threatening letter demanding repayment.
I've known business owners that have that kind of mentality, and they are honestly some of the worst people to work for.
Do you get an electricity allowance?
I get a stipend every month for home office costs, it's a modest amount, IMO, but it's to partially cover everything I need to pay for to work from home, electricity, internet, even my cellphone, since I occasionally will need to use my personal phone while working (no company issued phones at this place). So if I need to tether to my cell to work because my ISP is down, the stipend covers any costs associated with doing so.
The expectations are significant because of that stipend, but not unreasonable IMO.
The amount is separate from my pay, and untaxed. It's basically a reimbursement for expenses.
Vehicle costs are separate, if I need to drive anywhere for my job, I can submit the distance driven and I'm reimbursed separately, a set amount per unit of distance.
It hasn't happened for me yet but there's a nontrivial chance I may get deployed to another area of the country, in that case, I get airfare, hotel and a meal allotment daily, as well as a rental car to travel to customers sites for the duration I'm there, all at the company's cost. I'm reimbursed 100% for travel in those cases. Anything local is just by distance travelled.
About 80% of our client base is local enough that I can drive myself to their location when needed. It's rare that it is needed. I have not needed to go to a customer's location in the 6-7 months I've been at the job. Others have, and for the most part, they're closer to the customers that they traveled to, compared to me, but I should be ready in case I'm ever needed to travel, whether local or nationally.
Due to the work we do, and our relative size, we're only (currently) servicing clients in our country, nothing international right now, as far as I know. Our business model allows for it, but our specialty, which is our main marketing point, is pretty specialized to our country, so I don't think that will change anytime soon.
The last couple of jobs I held, had similar, but not as generous rules. Talking to the management, they're primarily interested in ensuring that we, the workers, are happy and healthy so we can work efficiently. IMO, it's the best management team that I've worked under so far. If things continue the way they have been so far, I don't see myself leaving anytime soon.