The location flexibility is big too. I live in Austin, and my parents live in Kansas. I drove up to Kansas this past Saturday and will work from up here and drive back next Saturday.
I've worked from home for a few years now, and before that I would have to take vacation time to go visit them.
For real. My wife picked up travel nursing and it's been a huge life improvement. Just check the taxes in the states you are working in. I have 25 work days in Illinois without income taxes, but all states are different.
There have been some efforts to rationalize this at the federal level but AFAIK they haven't gone anywhere. And some states seem to basically have zero thresholds for this and enforcement for business travel seems to be ratcheting up. Some people are probably going to find that they need to file more state tax returns.
This is gonna be the real challenge for the WFH movement. NYC is trying to get income taxes out of me because I worked for a NYC based company in 2020... even tho I never stepped foot in their state.
Obviously, people are different. Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone). Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things). We all live in the same city, the longest commute in our team is ~30 minutes, but we all feel like it's worth it to go to the same physical space and work together instead.
Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
> Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space
I've found it the complete opposite in software. Zoom screen sharing is so much easier than peering over someone's shoulder at their dark-mode IDE. Copy-and-pasting a command in the chat window - what an improvement! How many times have I said this to someone?
> "s c p space s v 0 1 colon forward-slash t m p"
Ug.
Design meetings are so much easier when I can see the UI on my screen, instead of halfway across the conference room.
We also do a lot of work with a team at another location and again - when we are all on zoom together now we can all see each other, we can all interreact when each other. It used to be 6 of us on one conference room and six of them in another conference room trying to talk to each other over a tinny speaker.
I hope I never have to go through any of that ever again.
It is surprising how antisocial is the new generation. The dynamic between colleagues is something that comes naturally when the team has great cohesion. Half the time I didn't have to finish the sentence of what you describe and they are on it. I can't remember how many great ideas have come up during the "hey let's get a cup of coffee" break. Now we look less like humans and more like avatars.
It is surprising how social is the old generation. So many face to face interactions could have been taken care of by a 1 line email.
Like, a couple weeks ago I had to waste half my day to go into the office and sit in a 3 hour meeting. I got some useful information out of that, but there was SO. MUCH. OVERHEAD. I could've watched the webex from home and saved so much time because the relevant parts were 2 10 minute sections spaced out by like 2 hours.
Plus I hate sitting close to people who had onions for lunch. And alcohol. And it's always that dude you've gotta pair program with that smells like a gorilla and has bad breath. xD
All of those things are also possible in person. Of course I just send an instant message to my coworker across the hall. And I don’t clutter Slack when I want to make lunch plans.
I don't know what "all those things are possible" means aside from "all those things are possible as long as we zoom together while in the office". You can screen-share in the office - as long as you are both on zoom ( or equivalent ) at which point why is it better to be at the office?
It would be harder in the office - too many people talking over each other in separate meetings. I can't imagine. So we all end up fighting for few conference rooms, or we squeeze once again into each others cubicles, losing the advantage of multiple screens and trying not to talk to loud and disturbing everyone around us.
I've spend decades developing in offices with other engineers, collaboration is always difficult when what you are collaborating on is always tiny text on a small screen. Zoom is better.
The places I’ve worked had lots of elegant and obvious solutions to shoulder surfing. Mirroring to a big TV was something we did all the time.
I find Zoom in particular to be a crude place to get this type of work done. Why do I have to send a huge video stream that roasts my laptop just to share a few kilobytes of text? I can’t scroll around or select text to point something out.
If the streamer’s text is too small, I’m shit out of luck there too.
Visual Studio Code has great collaborative coding tools that I have found work really well in a local network setting sitting near coworkers. Zoom is a total cudgel in comparison for this task.
I don't know if it's just our org, but we do local + slack + conference sharing (ie, you have multiple ways of viewing the content). This, like for every meeting.
How do you manage when different people in the same area are in different meetings? That's where I see the problems occur - there'd be 4 people in my immediate vicinity having 4 completely separate conversations. That would never work.
That seems like a different problem - I'd assume you have a meeting room for each conversation. In your case we'd have headsets at desks - we do that too. The previous question was how meetings are handled (in a conf room). Regardless, chat+conf for everything even if it's in-person in the same room (audio off if local).
This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives. It's understandable, people are lonely and work is the only social interaction for many. If I didn't have a family and lived alone, I would definitely want to return the office. I'm curious if you're the minority or majority? Most people I talk to never want to return to the office. My company (major corp) basically had a revolt during a company wide all hands meeting. It was so bad that they basically said people will be only required to come in 1 day a week and they can pick the day.
I am a father of four (though they're here less now that they're leaving the nest), happily married, active in a committed church community and love outdoor things like water skiing, flying planes, snow skiing, biking, etc. I build things like legos, stand up paddle boards, Ford ranger engines, and the 1000 ft addition we added to our home. I enjoy my work--sometimes I love it even, and other days I'm ready to rage quit, because I'm one of those difficult to manage dramatic people--it is hardly my whole life though.
I have spent nearly 10 years (2 different gigs) of my 30 working years working from a home office. In both instances, it was awesome at first, and then I came to hate it. I totally concur with the GP. I'm just not as productive at home. I know that most of us in all 3 teams where we've done some remote work are generally more productive when gathered. No amount of technology solutions has improved that.
My suspicion is that there are other factors at play here. In my case, I've worked in companies where the software development components of the company are relatively small (anywhere from 2 up to at most 18 people). My commutes have all been (relatively) short (15 minutes or less). I've always had flexible schedule available to me--come go when you need, get the work done. And at times, I do actually choose to sequester myself at home to write a mountain of code that just needs a mountain of direct writing.
I'm curious if perhaps it's not so much work at home, as it is some degree of autonomy that needs to be given to people to manage their own work load. That kind of autonomy tends to go down as company size goes up. If corporate overhead burns up a lot of ones time, then it may indeed be that people feel they are getting more creative work down at home.
What I'd like to see is more flexibility, less middle management (because I think this is the real source of most of these issues) and more of the "teach the employees correct principles and allow them to govern themselves" gestalt.
If I could go back to a campus where I had an office and we sat around watching the coordinated people do bean bag tricks and talking about whether we needed a formal state machine for something or just a few flags and also did you see the cool library X did for something, sure, I'd go there. But to go to a crowded place where people take stand up meetings seriously and there's so much noise and I'm cold all day and the coffee sucks, eh, not so compelling. I went into the office park with offices even when my creeping environmentalism had be taking 90 minutes of subways and a bus (tho not 5 days a week). My take is always if you have a lot of work to, it's better to do it from home. If you need more work, go into the office and find it.
This is how I see it as well. If I had a private office in Bell Labs with plenty of co-working space I would prefer to go into the office to WFH. The reality is that the majority of office environments are loud, cramped, stressful, distracting sweat shops. If I had to choose between that and WFH I will choose WFH every time. If my work provided me with a nice private office with plenty of coworking space I would probably prefer the office to WFH.
> This seems to be the general consensus for folks like yourself where work is the primary focus in their lives.
Big incorrect assumption here, my primary focus is not my work but my hobbies, family and friends. I don't like working in the office mainly because it's social but because we all are more productive. I like to be efficient at my job, even though I don't think it's my primary focus in life.
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone).
You can't just write something like that and then accuse someone of a "big incorrect assumption". Work is work, I work to do my job, if you want to go to the office to be with people because otherwise you live alone that's okay, but you can't just turn around an say "I have plenty of friends, it's about being more productive".
I've found that too, I'm more efficient working in an office, but you know what, I don't care as much anymore. Being at home, in my community, with my family more often and for longer time throughout the day, taking breaks to do whatever around the house of go for a walk. That's what matters now. If I'm less productive, I think that's fine because my overall happiness increases. Companies should just factor that in from now on and many do.
Subjectively, commutes are bad in the US and getting worse, because housing is getting more expensive relative to wages. On top of that, we live in a car culture, and it's much easier to build more freeways and housing developments than figure out how people can sustainably work and live in employment centers.
The pandemic has done some of that figuring out for us.
Housing is a huge issue in Europe as well, yeah we have shorter commutes, but that comes at the cost of higher population densities which often means living in high/medium-rise flats.
These flats would be considered tiny by American standards and you have a lot less privacy/independence from your neighbours.
That little kid that was shot due to road rage recently. That’s how bad commutes are. People who insist we go back to the office have blood on their hands.
That wife that was shot due to domestic violence recently. That’s how bad working from home is. People who insist we stay home have blood on their hands.
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone).
And/or (like me) you like work being somewhere different to home, and don't have room for a dedicated home office. In fact even if I have the room I'd prefer for work to not be in the house. Being able to work from home is useful to me on occasion, for both work and personal reasons, but I did not like it nor feel myself to be productive when I was there all the time. If I had no choice but to work remotely I'd probably rent an office space and have to factor that into my costs and benefits analysis of the job.
Then again I currently work a 15 minute slow-ish walk from home (or less than a 10 minute run back) if I take the most direct route, and can get home to entertain the cat at lunch many days, so the commute isn't a significant factor like it will be for many.
I live in a big city not the suburbs. No traffic it’s twenty minutes to the office but during 7-1030 am and 2-7 pm it’s 45 minutes to an hour and 5. I listen to a lot of podcasts and happen to be learning Italian as well. Podcasts are not popular at all in Italy and I can only assume it’s becUse of what you describe with the lack of commute. I’m glad to be fully remote now.
I used to listen to a bunch of podcasts on my commute to and from work, and thought I was a big podcast person. As soon as we went to remote work, I stopped listening because I realized that I only "like" podcasts when there is literally nothing else to do while sitting in my car. I would listen to at least 1 podcast episode a day pre-pandemic to not having listened to a full podcast episode once in the last year.
I used to listen to a mix of audiobooks and podcasts on my drive to work, but not 1 podcast since last spring. I still have listened to a few audiobooks though.
I live in a big city and while I don’t have a car, I’ve stopped using Uber/Lyft during rush hour because walking or bicycling is faster. Boosted Boards (et al) offer similar gains.
Your top speed is less and your average speed is more. Cars never seem to get past 15mph in that kind of traffic.
Motorcycles are nice too. Good top speed, lane filtering to avoid traffic, plus real brakes, rear-view mirrors etc. Feels a lot safer than my electric skateboard used to.
> Some people prefer to work from an office (like me) just because you get to spend time with people (I live alone).
I live alone too and I hate for me when people at the office became an erzats social circle. It is not. It is not a social circle but a workgroup you have little control over; you might end up with really difficult people, great teammates you love might leave, project might get cancelled and that group might get disbanded altogether.
Even if you had the best workgroup, most of the time those people will not be in your life for long or deep. They won't help you move, drive you to and from an outpatient procedure, won't play with your kids or even be by your deathbed. And you do need people who would do those things in your life. For this reason, I liked the social lack WFH created because it was closer to the state of reality, and forced me to invest in my real, non-workplace relationships.
To be clear, I am not saying you can't make lifelong friends in a workplace, I am saying you shouldn't satisfice your social needs with a workplace. Just like hunger is a signal to point you towards nutrition, loneliness is a signal to point you towards nourishing allies. And workplaces are not places to procure that.
I only have superficial social needs for the most part, anything more is somewhat exhausting, I think the work place interactions fit that quite well.
Any deep social needs are satisfied by my long time close friends who I see every few months or my partner if I'm dating.
I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place.
I feel perfectly topped off just by being in the room at a coffee shop with people for a few hours for instance.
> I don't think you can make that call what someone should and shouldn't do to satisfy their social needs because everyone has very widely ranging needs in the first place.
That is why I said satisfice.
Good on you that you know exactly what you need. I thought I did too, and it took a burnout and extended time off work to realize how I was mostly deceiving myself. Most people are not that transparent to themselves, that is why they have to be careful with the stimuli that seem to fulfill a need in the short term but create serious deficiencies in the long run.
A bag of potato chips will curb your hunger but you'd be severely malnourished if it was the only thing you ate for a year. Cocaine, amphetamines even caffeine will give you an elevated sense of agency but you'll quickly spiral down to addiction with little corresponding real-world, long-term gains. A workplace, a coffee shop or even binging netflix alone might create a sense of a peopled life, but none will be real allies that can have your back in a time of need.
Well for a one hour commute, you lose 2 hours of your day. That's massive and equals around 1/8 to 1/9 of your time awake depending on your sleeping habits.
8 hours of sleep plus 8 hours of work leaves 8 voluntary hours. You could make a case then that 2 hours of commute is giving up on a fourth of your weekday free time. Factor in the prep for commute or time needed afterwards to decompress and perhaps a third is more accurate.
Also, I'm not following your calculations. If we establish that your 'free time' is 72 hours per week (8h/weekday and 16h/weekends), and the commute time per week is 10h (2h round trip x 5), it would be 10/72 or roughly 13.9%.
I used to read books during commute. No time was wasted. In fact, now I seem to have a lot less time for reading, because there is always something more pressing at home.
I guess the same can be said about doing laundry, sitting and watching the machine while it does its job would lose you an hour or two. Luckily both of these activities can be done while doing other things like reading/listening to audio books or catching up on other things.
The same thing can't be said about doing laundry. If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing.
And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
> If they are doing the laundry at home like they said, you are sitting and watching the machine, you are starting it and letting it do its thing
You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things.
> And besides that, laundry is going to have to be done regardless, so its not like they would be saving time by commuting to work instead. The laundry will still be waiting when they get home.
You could have someone else do the laundry for you.
Maybe it was a bad example. I wanted to compare activities that we usually do where you can perform multiple things at the same time. Commuting is generally a passive activity while we wait to arrive to our destination, just like laundry is a passive activity until the machine is done.
> You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things.
In my pre-covid life, I often couldn't even hold a book on the subway as it was too crowded for that. There were times (near daily) I couldn't even reach into my pocket to take my phone out to put on a podcast due to the crush of people (and oh my god the stress when your headphone's cord would get hooked on an exiting passenger).
My commute, while long enough to do something useful, was never useful. Crowded platforms, crowded trains, and transfers down long crowded corridors made it impossible to do anything else. And I'll be damned if I'm going to do more work on the way to and from work!
> You can do the same way with commuting, enter the bus/subway/train and then do other thing while there, you don't have to wait until you arrive to start doing other things.
This works but only in very specific types of commutes. I used to take the train which took 30 minutes each way and I always got a seat, perfect for reading, maybe even light work. Now after almost 2 decades I know that that's the exception and almost always my commute was pretty much wasted (I don't consider listening to music or podcasts productive, it's nice but not productive).
Yes, you can make the most of your commute by listening to audiobooks, etc. But that's so limited in utility compared to having 2 hours of extra free time at home where you can do so much more. It's almost an apples to orange comparison.
> Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things)
What do you do?
Constant talk and interruption are not conducive to the work of a software engineer.
If anything, I'm collaborating more as a senior than I did as a junior. Junior dev work often means getting a work assignment and working on that by yourself. Senior dev work often means getting together with different stakeholders to work on a design.
(Although obviously those statements aren't absolutes, hence the use of the word "often".)
at my company the seniors are mainly responsible for driving projects/design and leading teams of juniors who do the implementation. working independently is not really an option
LOL. I feel for you. It's the same way in a lot of places.
Your seniors should definitely be thought leaders, but when they get "too senior" or "too important" to write code, the company is done innovating. That's a major organizational smell.
If your design is so detailed that any code monkey can implement it without screwing it up, then you've probably spent more time writing design documents than you would have spent just building it.
And if your code isn't expressive enough that the design can be extracted without major effort, then the two will inevitably diverge at some point. Many bugs will appear.
If you're really working totally independently, then you're running a 1-person company. As soon as you get two "seniors" on the same project, if they're working independently, then you're just going to two different, unrelated outputs, by your definition.
More seriously though, it's part of skilled project management to organize work in such a way that seniors don't need to constantly collaborate to stay in sync.
It's skilled software architecture. Some layerings of the problem into decomposable pieces allow for less communications and some layerings of the problem require more communication. The emergent but desirable property of more parallelizable is dependent on details that are small and subtle. Project management cannot possible guarantee this. The outcome of the architecture, how much do people need to communicate, is an input to the project management.
Your “skilled project management” is my “unnecessarily complex process.” There’s a reason collaboration of this sort is used in real engineering disciplines: it’s because it’s more efficient than having some middleman (and/or process) mediating all the communication.
I didn't mean middleman/process mediating communication. By "skilled project management", I meant structuring tasks and setting priorities in such a way as to minimize the required amount of communication - particularly, synchronous communication between the workers. An hour (on average) or two per day replying to messages and doing code review, an occasional meeting every other week - sure. But if your senior devs are spending most of their time each day in meetings, then either you're running a bootcamp, or something is very wrong.
We are not microservices. People in a team have a lot in common, they do systematically the same type of work albeit in a different context and they can be a lot more useful to each other when they communicate seamlessly instead of at scheduled time slots.
I don’t live outside a big city. I live in a Canadian city of only 1 million people.
Thanks to the incredibly bad city planning (which is common all across North America) and complete joke of local transit options (also common in NA), you regularly see folks with 45 minute to 2 hour commutes one way.
Folks are losing as much as 4 hours out of their day even though they live in a small city that should be easier to commute but isn’t due to corruption and laziness of the city.
To be clear, we’re not talking Seattle or Portland, we’re talking obscure cities like Ogden, Calgary, Edmonton, etc.
North America is a massive turd compared to practically anything in Europe. Some of your far flung towns have better transit than some of our metropolises.
tldr; it is drastically worse for commutes in any non-major American cities. You have no idea how good you have it in Europe.
>Me and my teammates also become more efficient when we work together in the same physical space than remotely (we've tried bunch of things like perpetual video calls, among other things).
I tend to agree with this, and I've worked remote (hybrid) for over 12 years now. For me, a hybrid is the best. Most tasks and problems can be solved well asynchronously and for those, give me a WFH option. It's great for all the reasons this thread creator mentioned and time cannot be understated. The commute alone typically requires a vehicle and the much of maintenence time I spend in my free time comes from wear and tear of commute driving as do expenses to expedite repairs for necessity of a car for work. This stuff all adds up.
Once every now and then, in person meetings and problem solving synchronously is good where virtual just fails. Usually this involved external clients and so forth or some physical, hardware related aspect of work. Software alone I can typically do fully remote as it's assumed everyone is competent and can easily share needed information and visuals with one another.
>Unless you live outside big cities, I'm not sure if 2 hours of commute is that common (at least with my South West European perspective, maybe is different in the US/elsewhere?).
I lived in rural US and my experience is that commutes tend to be longer, both in distance and time, in rural areas. While traffic related commute times tend to melt away, with less density, people tend to drive further for better employment opportunities. Sometimes this involves living near but not in a large metro area and driving hours daily to pull in high income with low COL at the sacrifice of great commute times. I know a surgeon in Texas who commutes around 4-6 hours each trip (nearly doubles his income), someone near NY/NJ who commutes 6 hours daily to drive in, and people in small areas that would drive 2-hours to a nearby plant that pays more. One of my peers used to work 3 positions and one required driving an hour each way to. One of my older directors actually lived 2 hours away and purchased a condo near his job where he worked and stayed throughout the week then returned home on weekends. I presume his wife who didn't work would sometimes stay at his condo but never felt comfortable breaching that discussion.
For them, the time they lose can't be spent working elsewhere and average out to the same higher rates and they're willing to sacrifice that time to pull more in and provide for their families. This is ultimately because good paying opportunities are often few and far between in low COL areas and highly competitive as well. For me, living in a metro area makes more sense these days. You pay more for property but recover that in terms of commute time and TC. You also have more security depending on the area by there being more opportunities to transfer to should you want/need, without changing commute times too drastically. If you live in a rural area and the diamond in the rough position you found disappears, you have to consider significant lifestyle changes for you and your family or even consider uprooting and moving. There are trade-offs either way you go.
Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.
Do you pay the quite significant rent increase to reduce the commute, or do you pocket that money & try to deal with the lost time as best as possible?
At some point, I'm going to want to buy a house (so money now can be saved), the total cost of which is >$1M in not just the Bay Area (which I've now left, for these very reasons); even where I am now, housing remains that pricy … unless you give up having a sub 2h commute.
> A 2-hour round trip commute is insane.
My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.
> My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.
There has to be a name for the logical fallacy of treating the market as some kind of oracle, as if it was a global optimizer, instead of a greedy optimizer that will happily ignore the costs it can externalize.
"The Bay Area" doesn't "believe" the housing crisis needs to be addressed because for most interested actors, it's in their personal interest to further the crisis. You paid a lot for your house, and you want it to appreciate in value. You paid a lot for your house, because others who bought before you wanted theirs to appreciate in value. Someone else will pay a lot for their house, because you want yours to appreciate in value.
That's a good one. I propose "Efficient Market Fallacy". The Efficient Market is such a tempting idea with simple explanations for complex human behavior. The reality can be very broken, very inefficient, wasting many human lifetimes and with tons of horrific externalities in situations that basically amount to a kind of organized crime.
Potential solutions to that: prohibit ownership of residential property (whether small scale, like single family up to 4-unit properties, or large scale, e.g. apartment complexes) except as a primary residence by foreign individuals or businesses that have foreign individuals as their true beneficial owners, and have additional taxes on properties that are not owner-occupied a substantial fraction of the year (say, 9 months).
And it's often not just more expensive living near a big city, it's also a different lifestyle. The type of housing near in to the city where I work is different than the housing further away. For example you may have to live in a smaller apartment/condo in a more urban neighborhood vs. living in a SFH in a more green neighborhood. Some people like the former, others like the latter.
While this "enumerate all the costs and benefits" calculus is really appealing, the "how much is the land (de)appreciating?" factor dominates everything. This is why most people can buy homes without much serious thought and still come out very happy and ahead, because the land appreciation (or depreciation) sort of bakes in all your complex considerations for you.
Equivalent housing on overground commuter lines to London in the UK, compared that of inside London, is basically <rail fare> per month cheaper to mortgage.
For many people it comes down to whether they can afford to deposit or get the income multiple loan to buy in the city, not monthly expense.
The difference being that the UK's rail infrastructure (especially around London) is orders (plural) of magnitude better than that in the Bay Area.
I lived and worked in London (South Kensington/Pimlico at college, Streatham, Walthamstow, Acton Town, Notting Hill - all over, really) for about 16 years. I've been in the Bay Area for ~17 years. There really isn't any comparison. Londoners have it made, even if it doesn't feel it when the train is packed/a few mins late/cancelled.
I see the light-rail here going by on occasion. It's empty. BART is inadequate (there are 270 stations on the tube, there are 50 on BART covering a larger area), and it runs with a 10-20 minute cadence, not the 2-5 minute cadence of the tube. As far as real trains go, Caltrain is pretty good if you're on the track (really, the train itself is nicer than most in the UK) but it's coverage is very limited.
Just like the NHS, you don't know what you have until it's gone.
I know people who had 4-5 hour RT commutes in the Bay. (Tracy <-> SF) It's ludicrous, but I suppose it's a bit of a boiled frog scenario. People just got used to having to commute from further and further away as housing has gotten less affordable.
I'm in Livermore, so not as far out as Tracy, but depending on traffic, the one-way commute can be 1 hour 45 minutes (best case) up to 4 hours (worst-case Friday 4:00PM before a holiday weekend). Usual case is a little over 2 hours each way. The real soul killer is the unpredictability of it all. Every morning there's at least one jackass on each interstate highway leg that manages to crash their car into something, slowing everything down in a random, unpredictable way.
If you're not having to drive then commutes can be easily optimised. You can read a book, chat to your commuter buddies on the train/boat/coach (in some instances over a beer so it's little different than being down the pub). I've even used my commuter time to catch up of pending PRs on open source projects I maintain.
This obviously depends on your city / county / state having good public transport infrastructure but if the option is there and its practical then I'd take the train over driving to work any day of the week.
I had one of those--typically by train--for about 18 months though I didn't go in every day. I had to get up by about 6am to drive to the train station and it was just a big chunk of the day. I don't think I'd have found it sustainable over the long-term.
But it makes equal chores split with partner regarding kids literally impossible. Practically, you barely ever see them and your dad role amounts to being wallet.
Fortunately, they aren't the boss of me, and also fortunately, the job market means my skills gives me enough power to push back against this idea all on my own, with no support from a union or strong laws or anything. A family isn't just a responsibility, it's a delight, a fulfilling life, human connection, everything you need wrapped up into a big ball of inconvenience and imperfection.
That may sometimes be the case, but it's definitely not the case with my post and nor am I a "pro-office" person. I don't miss the office. I miss the beers, the commute and city centre eateries. But I don't miss the office.
People on HN often love to get on their high horse about parenting responsibilities but the fact remains that even the best parents need some "me" time occasionally. We do our best parenting when we're not mentally and physically exhausted. Much like a good company shouldn't allow their employees to burn out -- a good family shouldn't let either.
So my point about the commute was about how that time can be optimised for relaxation so you can better serve your family once you are home.
I'm not talking about offloading everything to the partner either.
It sounds like you've only worked in organisations that force a really shitty work/life balance on their staff but I assure you that you can have your proverbial cake and eat it. Maybe it's a US vs Europe culture but here companies are generally (not always, there's a fair share of shitty companies here too) accepting of employees working from home when they need it. I've never once had a job that hasn't allowed me to work flexible hours to accommodate school runs and other family commitments, nor take time away when my child is ill.
In fact because my wife is a school teacher (and thus has less flexibility in her job), she is the one who depends on me most of the time. The commute was the one little block of the day (and it wasn't every day) when I wasn't running around for a wife and two small children.
So you can absolutely have a commute and still be dedicated to your family. You just can't work for c*nts who thinks a working relationship should be one way.
No it doesn't. You can still flexible working even if you have a long commute. eg you might work from home 2 days a week. Your employer might allow flexible hours so you can do school duties. Your employer might even offer fewer hours or not mandate overtime.
This isn't a theoretical argument either: I spend more time with the kids and help out with more duties since taking up a job with a 3 hour round trip of a commute than I did when I had a previous job in the same town.
The distance will obviously have an impact on your day, but what matters far more is the employer. Plenty of employers enforce an unhealthy culture of > 40hr weeks. Whereas my current employer is very family focused and offers a lot of incentives to enable parents to balance work and home life.
Getting down voted for this despite saying I have first hand experience of this being true.
I suggest people open their minds a little. IT is a broad industry and there are plenty of good jobs around doing interesting things that pay well and also offer a good work life balance. Again, I know this from first hand experience :)
I had a 2h round trip daily commute from downtown Sunnyvale (about 10 minutes walk to Caltrain) to downtown SF (2nd and Folsom). It was pretty normal.
Basically an hour each way, of which 20m fast walking, if you timed it right. Hit a slow train, try for the 10 bus and miss, get rained on, train late, miss the train, train runs over someone — sometimes it took longer.
I moved up to the city and had about 40 minutes each way by bus, and if you haven’t tried it let me tell you: an hour on Caltrain is much nicer, not to mention safer, than half an hour on a MUNI bus.
On Caltrain I could at least read the news, on the bus it was pretty much watch your back.
I haven’t commuted at all in the last 12 years but I accept that if I ever work onsite in the USA again I probably will need to, and the trick is to try and find a form of commute that isn’t a complete waste of time.
When my commute was biking 30 minutes from the inner sunset to SoMa a few years ago I found that I really enjoyed that. Honestly a 30 minute bike ride is my ideal commute I think.
It's just someone prioritizing things differently. I would never commute more than 20-30 minutes (one way) pre-COVID. I will only work remotely from now on, maybe a scheduled day in the office every week for a killer opportunity with a resume-changing company.
But if you live in a HCOL area, and you want a yard, you're pretty much locked in to hour+ one-way commutes.
Back between 1990 and 2005, I lived in Austin before moving to north Alabama. My commute when I was working on Redstone Arsenal was exactly an hour each way. I didn't really mind for several reasons.
One of which was that my 6 mile commute in Austin took between 45 minutes to an hour.
I think it's very common (I'm in Europe/UK). Things add up extremely quickly to reach ~1h door-to-door between home and office.
Saving that time does make a huge difference, indeed.
It's exactly my case, actually. My commute was just under an hour each way, walk and train, so I have been saving a lot of time and money since WFH. I go for a walk at lunchtime, though, in order to do some exercise but it's much nicer than walking on busy roads to train stations.
It's not insane. It's what people do to feed their families and keep their kids in the same school. It would be better not to, but it is far from insane.
I wouldn't like a 1-hour commute either... but it's not time 'lost' - you can use that time to read, work on your hobbies, listen to music, have a drink or supper, or just sleep if you want. Doesn't have to be wasted if you don't want to.
You ever try standing on a NYC subway, surrounded by strangers, at least a few of which are playing video games or listening to music videos / TV out loud on their phones, having to move every 6 minutes as the doors open and close, and having to keep tabs on who's around you since there are sometimes shady and angry individuals -- for a 45 minute stretch mornings and night? I have, and I can assure you, it's no way to start your day - or end it. Reading is extremely difficult with a bag on one arm and a phone or kindle on the other, if you need to hold onto a pole to not fall over.
I commuted 45 minutes each way to a prior job for a couple of years. Yes, I ate my breakfast in the car on the way there.
No, I didn't sleep, read, or do anything distracting on my drive because when you're in deer country, dawn and dusk are times to be vigilant and ready to brake or swerve if horribly necessary.
Still had $4100 of damage one January.
Commutes can be anywhere from 0 - ? percent multitaskable.
You conjure up the idea of a Victorian train carriage with plenty of space and waiters to serve you dinner etc.
Most people are experiencing a noisy packed out train car lit by bright fluorescence lamps, full of tired, irritated people, where they could easily be standing for half the trip.
Not exactly the ideal environment to dine or work on your hobbies…
Personally, I'm looking forward to going back to the office. I am an extremely introverted person and during the pandemic, I've gone upwards of 5 months without saying another word to a person face-to-face. I personally prefer that and don't feel lonely or anything; I just don't need social interaction in my day-to-day life. But I know that in the long term, it's going to have negative consequences for me in terms of networking and just friendships in general. These are basic things that you need that I am completely incapable of achieving without it being forced upon me in an office environment.
Yes, I hate driving. But I'll move closer to the office (which we're relocating to a much further location currently) and I'll get it to <20 minutes each way, which is acceptable.
Just because you can't find arguments for it in your life doesn't mean others can't. I need that environment and if my job went remote-only, I'd quit without any hesitation just as employees are quitting after being asked to return to the office. We shouldn't go from one extreme (everyone has to be in an office) to the other (there is no office at all).
We need to accept hybrid solutions where an office exists and maybe you're expected to be there once every week or two or something. We need to accept that some people work better remote and others work better in an office. We're trying to build the most efficient working environment for the team in general, not just one or two people one way or the other.
If everybody's only there once every week or two you're looking at something like 10-20% attendance on any given day. Some teams or individuals might coordinate being on-site the same day but so far our experience is that you basically sit in the office talking to the same people as always on Zoom all day.
Unless you're in an industry that requires actual physical presence I don't think you're going to see the same office experience any more. Companies aren't going to keep an office big enough for 100% attendance when there's only a need for a smallish fraction of that.
I'd start looking for other ways to scratch that socialization itch.
I suspect that will be pretty common even if there's more people than that. Which means that people who want to get back to the office of the before times (as opposed to just some office outside of the house) aren't going to like the ghost town very much.
I'm not an extrovert but like the office because I live in a one bedroom apartment and I don't like working from my living room, and at the end of the day, being in my living room.
I do like the social interaction and joking, or venting, with co-workers, even as an introvert.
I don’t think we need to do anything of the sort. Companies will sort themselves into all remote/all office/hybrid before “lets make everyone moderately miserable equally” becomes the mandated approach for everyone.
I'm a software engineer like 90% of HN. I have plenty of online meetings (I'm actually on a team call right now listening to someone discuss a solution to a problem). It doesn't fill the needs, though. Without the in-person and more frequent interaction, I can feel my social skills slipping even further. And I rarely interact with non-developers and non-managers now. It's not ideal for me. It 100% does not work and I need to go back to an office. I fear if I don't, my already-limited social abilities will zero out and I'll have to rebuild them. I now know I can go months without speaking to anyone and be okay with it; that itself is a problem in my mind that I need to address and an office environment fulfills those needs.
As a compromise it'd be nice once things are opened up for companies without fixed offices to subsidize passes into coworking spaces, so people can work in public areas more quiet and professional than cafes around others, but not necessarily the actual office.
When interviewing with a company who demands commuting say, "I value my time as I'm sure you do. I will commute if required but I charge a premium for my commuting time. My rate is $x/hr and since I will be commuting 2 hours a day, 5 days a week, an estimated 48 weeks (accounting for holidays, vacation, sick, etc...) a year then I request you increase my salary by $x * 2 * 5 * 48."
I say that partially in jest because, of course, no employer is going to increase your salary by $48K simply because you value your commuting time at $100/hr (a reasonable rate if you're in tech). Still, I think it's a useful way to gain a perspective on just how valuable one's time really is to them.
Rail too. You can easily spend £3-5K/yr on a season ticket + another £2k/yr for tube travel, so once you factor back in tax you could easily be talking £10-15k of salary
The commute isn't always dead time though. For me, the 3hr round trip was spent playing computer games on my Nintendo Switch, or reading a book, or just letting my mind wander while listening to music. All of these are activities I don't get time to do at home because of the thousand other commitments I have at home.
You'd think working from home would give people more free time, but that's not always the case, for example if you have small children. Don't get me wrong, I love spending time with my family, but the commute was the only "me time" I had in a given day and I miss that dearly.
The pre-WFH work 10-15 minutes away from home routine had, for me, the same hidden benefit.
Now that I've been 100% WFH for 14 months, I've realized how easy it is to just get caught up even deeper in the assumption that "you're home, can you do _?" and wind up devoting more and more time to the house and projects and the pets and realize that the last time I was in a space by myself, at least briefly not 'monitoring' or 'on deck', was how many days/weeks ago?
That time where I'm not on call every second to potentially deal with a pet or household or any other 'now' thing, is way more precious than I realized. I've survived with very little of it this past year.
But this sounds like a personal boundaries matter that's helped by having a work commute, but not dependent upon it. Perhaps the commute could be replaced with a dedicated time for oneself for a walk, fitness, meditation, etc. That time shouldn't be (indirectly) provided by one's employer.
In theory yes. But you have to be disciplined to do this yourself (it's so easy not to bother when we have a world of distractions and comfort at home). Ultimately though, I'm not suggesting people take up long commutes for the sake of meditation, I'm just saying long commutes aren't necessarily dead time.
It saves me even more time than that because of tasks like laundry that are mostly hands off and waiting become easy to intersperse with my work. I can also throw one of my pre-prepped meals into the Instant Pot at 11am and have it ready when I start lunch at noon. Those who work at a desk all day should get up to move around at least once an hour anyway. These small tasks the start hands-off processes are a good way of making that happen.
covid gave us a lot of data, and things are not as obvious as imagined, many people said they just couldn't operate at home, but it seems the majority was utterly happy
It does depend on the type of commute. If you walk or ride a bicycle to work that is at least somewhat personal time, and I personally enjoy the structure. If you use a train or bus or something similar and don’t have too much rigmarole around transferring etc, that also can be personal or work time or a combination. The only real lost time is driving, and even then some people enjoy podcasts etc.
In the Bay Area the train and bus system is a crammed, stressful experience where you have to worry about being robbed, harassed, or being annoyed by loud music, homeless _smells_, or inebriated people trying to smoke in a packed car. Regarding cars: don't forget the increase of risk of accident and death from driving, as well as the constant stress of avoiding collisions; I can barely retain podcasts while driving.
Agreed, and the resources that a commute consumes (time, wear and tear on a vehicle, fuel, mental reserves either sitting in traffic or dealing with other people on public transportation, etc) are not considered in compensation...
Your most valuable resource, time, which can be neither replenished nor its true quantity known, is being wasted for very little gain.
Often it isn't much of a choice at all. American cities are such that living near a workplace simply isn't feasible for many. It is common to be financially intractable, and American cities are actively hostile to families/children. So the people who get to "choose" to prioritize living near their workplace is generally restricted to relatively high-income earners who are single with roommates or perhaps are dual-income with no children.
With that standard 8h work 8h personal time 8h sleep. Commute eats up 1/4 of your personal time.