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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

> if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot.

Employers have been eating up to 10 hours (2 hours per day) of unpaid commute time of employees for ages. Is it then really surprising that no one wants to waste time coming to work. If that time was paid, if commute time was paid, then maybe you would consider it. But it's a very simple economic calculation. It's like why am I paying for that time. I don't have to, so I won't. That 10 hours is 20% extra salary that is not paid.

And if your argument is that you could live closer, then the counter argument is that employers should have their offices in affordable areas where any employee can afford to easily live because rent is cheap. Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect.

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Everything in the valley back in the day was 15 min away.

Now that same 15 min takes 1.5 hrs. Because everyone's now here.

Who pays for that?

You can move Google out of Mountain View to Bumfuck, Idaho. Then you lose the centralization and plugging into the network.

Who pays for that?

But to be honest, most prefer it this way. This crazy doo-dad lifestyle of fighting that 3 hour traffic. Because the thing is, if you work hard to win (or more likely you're just fortunate enough to win), then you get to enjoy central networking, get to enjoy the year over year growth of your property, get to enjoy the convenience of job hopping, get to enjoy that the smartest and the brightest all want in on this action.

So I don't know. I paid for my own uniforms in the marine corps. Someone should be sending me checks!

Well the company gets to enjoy having employees, because they tolerate them working from home. They get to make all the sweet sweet profit. They see their revenues increase, etc. Your whole perspective can be framed the exact other way as well. At the end it's a negotiation. Who wins that is a matter of perspective. It's a privilege to have talented employees just as it's a privilege to work for a good company.

Right. And every time one hits up hackerne.ws it's wage theft as well. Cuts both ways.

I'm doing that in the office right now, has nothing to do with location.

Measure productivity, don't police time.

If you as an employer are getting less results from telecommuting (while also not being able to attract better talent, which you should) then of course it's a loss, but I would like to see those numbers. I for one produce better results at home, even if I were to spend 2 hours on hn.

Usually it's more like free training and networking and sales opportunities, but whatever helps you lick boots better I guess...

That's not wage theft?

You paid for your own uniform but you were provided a uniform allowance unless you were an officer, correct? Well line employees are like enlisted except no ones getting an allowance here

The job of line employees, especially developers at companies in Silicon Valley, are in no way, shape, or form comparable to the job of enlisted soldiers/marines. Don't even try.

Try and go against your managers orders and see how well it goes. Developers like to imagine we are in the upper class of society now because of how we are treated and the intellectual effort our work takes, but that's not the case. We happen to be in demand now but we have more in common with blue collar workers a hundred years ago than we would with the professional class of the same time

Way deep in the thread here but is this being down-voted because of the comparison of tech employees to enlisted? If so, cool.

But - if it's downvoted for the allowance part, somebody is sending checks... eventually. I totally got the OP's intention with the phrase - well taken - but for folks that are interested:

$1900 initial for the Marines (following actual activation so you'd have to do the initial out of pocket) then ~$633 / yr after. http://www.military.com/benefits/military-pay/allowances/clo...

Not sure where the heck you're living in the Bay Area, but I haven't had a 3 hour commute here...ever. I've lived in areas with true traffic nightmares (NY & DC), Bay Area doesn't compare at all in my experience here the past 3 years.

I know multiple colleagues who have 1.5 hour commutes each way. For example live in San Francisco and commute to Mountain View, or live in Oakland and commute to Mountain View.

I did the SF -> Google commute from 2011 through 2014, and it was usually 1.5 hours each way, up to 2 hours on a bad day. I assume it has only gotten worse.

My commute (Livermore to south bay) is 2+ hours each way. From the folks I know/work with, this seems like a fairly average commute, maybe a little on the high side.

If commute time was paid you'd be incentivizing people to live further from work.

The onus is on the employee to optimizing getting to point X by time Y. Whether that means living closer or leaving earlier, they make that call.

In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay?

I suspect if commute time was indistinguishable from work time as far as pay goes, employers would still want to encourage employees to live closer to work in various ways.

I've seen it first hand. At one large financial services company employees who came in early (before 7am) or stayed late (after 9pm) had access to free black cars for commuting.

That had a direct impact on at least one person I know's decision to move further from the office.

This sounds like the old conservative canard about some folks not wanting to earn more income because it will put them in the next tax bracket.

"In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay?"

Look at it in another way -- you're basically penalizing the employees that don't spend time commuting by paying them less money. In practice I've seen this kind of phenomenon with smoking. Many years ago, in the army, the smokers got smoking breaks whereas the non-smokers did not. Soon almost all soldiers were smokers!

I knew a guy a long time ago who pretended to be a smoker so he could get periodic "smoke breaks" from the office.

although most believe the cost of commuting falls to the employee, in reality, the cost is shared. a long commute means the employee will demand more money, quit sooner, not accept the job in the first place, etc.

Well if your goal here is to make sure people continue to waste 2 hours of their day on commuting then look no further than making that time paid.

It's a perverse incentive for the whole destructive car lifestyle that has you sitting utterly depressed in some metal death box surrounded by millions of your peers in more death boxes as you slowly trample through cities (picking up a few of the locals on the way and leaving them dead by the roadside) to your job.

It's interesting to view commute time as the employer's time rather than employee's time, and therefore as time that should be compensated. I'd always thought of it as the employee's time, and the employee's decision about where to live and how to commute, etc. As an employee I'd factor in the commute when making decisions about a job.

Playing with this idea a bit: do you view the clothes that someone (only) wears to a traditional in-person office as rightfully the responsibility of the employer? Lunch?

Everyone has to eat at all times regardless. Everyone has to wear clothes. I bought steel toed boots that I only needed for work, company had a $150 allowance for that.

Many workplaces require a certain attire. You probably already own dress clothes, but someone who doesn't might have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to obtain clothes for their job. But I'm not just talking about just white collar positions either; construction workers, photographers, waiters, retail workers, telemarketers, etc. all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables". If I can expense my ergonomic keyboard, a dock worker better be able to expense their steel-toed boots.

> all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables".

In Germany if some safety clothes are compulsory by law, the employer has to pay for them: http://www.business-netz.com/Arbeitsschutz-und-Arbeitssicher...

Interesting related court case from a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_...: "a unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court, ruling that time spent by workers waiting to undergo anti-employee theft security screenings is not "integral and indispensable" to their work, and thus not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Court delivered their ruling on December 9, 2014."

I found this because I had a vague memory about a case about time spent "closing down stores" but maybe it was this or something else.

I was really shocked at that ruling, and especially at the court's unanimity regarding it.

Perhaps there's some deeply technical reason that it makes sense, but the conclusion seems absurd to me based on common sense.

From the actual ruling:

Finally, respondents’ claim that the screenings are compensable because Integrity Staffing could have reduced the time to a de minimis amount is properly presented at the bargaining table, not to a court in an FLSA claim.[0]

The petitioner brought the claim under FLSA. It sounds really bad on face that the workers have to do this as a condition of employment, but imagine if instead of this pat-down, the complex property was really big, and employees had to walk an extra 25 minutes to their station because public transit could not access those roads, no employee cars were allowed, and no shuttles were provided. It boils down to a worker/employer bargaining dispute, not a labor violation.

[0]https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-433_5h26.pdf (page 2 as numbered)

Seems like a sensible application of the Portal-to-Portal Act, which specifically says that "activities which are preliminary to or postliminar" to the main job activity are not compensable.

I.e., blame Congress.

I guess it is not really that different than the parking area being really far away and you have to spend time either waiting for/taking the shuttle or walking.

It's about free market at work. You can choose to work for another company that pays you more, or pays you for that time.

To some extent, yes on all counts.

> As an employee I'd factor in the commute when making decisions about a job.

Meaning you make concessions to either where you live or where you work. Isn't that a sign that it's not completely your choice? If all jobs could be done from home you would have all choices of housing available.

> do you view the clothes that someone (only) wears to a traditional in-person office as rightfully the responsibility of the employer? Lunch?

Same reasoning here: The only way you're not making concessions is if you happen to like the clothes that fit within the dress code of the company (if any).

And as for lunch, I've done IF for a few years (stopped a while back), and it's really difficult if you don't tailor it around work when it comes to work lunches, fitting meetings, available restaurants around work if you don't bring your own lunch, etc.

I don't have much problems with either of it, as I've accepted it as status quo, but it's obviously not a free choice.

> Meaning you make concessions to either where you live or where you work. Isn't that a sign that it's not completely your choice?

Well yes, I mean there are many things about my job and my life that aren't completely my choice if by that we mean I have to make prioritization decisions and tradeoffs. Not being forced to work from any specific location eliminates one of the constraints, sure.

The point was more about the idea that commute time should be compensated for those whose employers to require them to come to an office. That's not obvious to me. Suppose, for example, I chose to live 2 hours away from my office. Should I be compensated for the 4 hours per day I spend commuting?

> The point was more about the idea that commute time should be compensated for those whose employers to require them to come to an office. That's not obvious to me. Suppose, for example, I chose to live 2 hours away from my office. Should I be compensated for the 4 hours per day I spend commuting?

Yes, you're right. I wasn't arguing for a mandate, but merely questioning the status quo. But if I could change it, I guess I would say;

Not if you have the choice to work from home instead. Otherwise, I don't know, maybe? Obviously no one wants to pay wage to someone who chooses to live hours from work, but likewise if my employer forces me to be somewhere far away when I can get the same work done remotely, that's equally bad.

Of course both parties has the choice of switching employer/employee, but I digress.

Your choice of where to live (therefore, commute time) is inextricably linked to your job/compensation. In theory I could move closer to work--but to do so, I would need to make more money, which, if it were possible, I'd already be doing. Similarly, I could change jobs to one closer to my home, but that would likely mean making less money, which may price me out of my current home, forcing me to move even farther away...

> Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect.

Clients expecting you to be there is a perfectly valid reason. Peers isn't.

Those places that are affordable are affordable because not many people want to live there. Those places where people do want to live are quickly becoming less affordable.

who pays employees commute time? is this an american thing?

Employees eat commute time, at least in most white collar salary positions in the US.

What's interesting is that we can get paid for travel to other customer sites of our employers when using personal vehicles (up to $.535/mile per IRS guidelines[0]), but not to go to our actual workplaces.

[0]https://www.irs.gov/uac/2017-standard-mileage-rates-for-busi...

If you have a home office and commute to a client site you can claim it as a deduction at tax time. Outside of that I do know of some employers who do reimburse mileage as long as it is filed and more than 20 miles but that is rare.

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