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Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and shared context.

No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time. We invent bigger and better sewage pipes, some people get paid to build them, and everything's fine. Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day.

It really is a minority of people who think otherwise. I run a heavily asynchronous, remote company, with fully remote customers, and mostly remote employees. I bias toward hiring locally just so I have someone to talk to.

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> No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time.

People care that they sit in two hours of rush hour traffic per day. There is zero synchronicity when you're staring at the license plates in front of you.

This is a problem of a car centric society. I’ve been in places where public transport is the norm and travel was a lot easier and more efficient, regardless the time of the day. Yes, obviously during “rush hour”, the public transport would be a lot more full, but often frequency is increased to compensate.

(Sure, there’s places where even that isn’t enough and the public transport pipe is congested. We’ve all seen those videos of trains in some places in asia, for example)

> Yes, obviously during “rush hour”, the public transport would be a lot more full, but often frequency is increased to compensate.

And during rush hour, the highways are a lot more full, and often capacity (number of lanes) is increased to compensate. If people didn't typically commute at the same time, then busses, trains, and car transport would all benefit from a reduction in required peak capacity. This is not in any way specific to cars.

The difference is that those extra lanes take up physical space, which goes unused outside of rush hour, while increasing frequency of eg trains or trams does not. For example, I was recently in the US and during the day the 6-lane-each-way highways were completely empty, almost like a ghost town, but during rush hour, they were at a complete standstill.

> If people didn't typically commute at the same time...

Absolutely! That would be ideal.

> The difference is that those extra lanes take up physical space, which goes unused outside of rush hour, while increasing frequency of eg trains or trams does not.

To increase the capacity of trains and busses, you need more trains/busses, larger trains/busses, more train/bus operators, more electricity/gas usage, more storage, more maintenance, and so on. And those same huge trains and busses also become near-empty late at night.

Yes, the baseline efficiency of a train or bus is potentially better, making all the standard tradeoffs. But everyone commuting at the same time causes similar problems with both. I'm not arguing against public transit, here, I'm arguing against the claim upthread that "This is a problem of a car centric society", which is orthogonal to a staggered commute.

But walking with thousands of other people is nice, except in places where large sidewalks were turned over to cars. Old photos of ranhattan show shockingly large walkways which were later turned in to asphalt.

See also the video "A Trip Down Market Street" (1906), recently discussed [1] at HN. Though it arguably weren't "thousands" of walking people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15944621

> This is classic antisocial engineer thinking. The principal benefits of synchronicity are all social: it enables human contact, live conversations and shared context.

That's post hoc reasoning. Individuals don't globally optimize to synchronize everything. In fact, most individuals have good reasons for things to be desynced socially - so that they e.g. don't have to take a day off to visit a doctor or submit paperwork to a bank.

I suspect though that there is a process through which society tends to keep itself in sync. Not sure what it was, though.

> Lots of people like to watch the new Game of Thrones episode at the same time and then talk about it with their coworkers at the office the next day.

Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming, and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time? (Maybe it does, I'm an antisocial engineer, so I might have missed it.)

It does happen. For example, Game of Thrones.

If there were no set hours how would you be able to depend on the weekday being when you could go to the bank or the doctor? What you're talking about is being the beneficiary of the very thing you're decrying.

I would expect that one of the hundred thousand of local bank branches (I have no idea why banks keep opening on every other street these days) would have opening hours that would align with my time off. As it is now, they all are perfectly synchronized to be open during regular working ours, i.e. when most people are at work.

I don't know about you, but I rarely want to go to any old bank as opposed to a specific one.

I usually care about a specific bank company; any of its physical offices will do.

I guess you live in a denser area than I do. If I wanted to go talk to the guys who have my auto loan, for instance, and the closest office is closed, it's a pretty significant difference if I have to go to the next-closest one.

I live in Kraków, Poland. It's a major city of this country, with population around 1M. Maybe it's a Polish phenomenon, but literally every major street has multiple bank branches on it. Of the bank I'm a customer of, I have 3 branches within 10 minutes from my home, on foot. I keep wondering what's the point in having so many branches everywhere, all of which have synced opening hours anyway.

One suspects you've never lived in a place where all the grocery stores have bankers' hours. This arrangement makes it difficult for a working single person to obtain groceries.

I never understood that. It drove me especially nuts when I lived in Germany where opening house were much more limited.

I'd love to see what happens if certain stores radically change their hours. Opening hours from 6am-9am & 5am-11am always seemed much more sensible to me. Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

If I had enough money to an experiment like this not endangering my future, I'd own a store just to see what would happen.

> Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

People who don't have dayjobs or people who are stepping out of their office to shop on break? Tourists? The stores are rarely empty.

When I was in Berlin I was surprised grocery stores were open so short on Sunday. However, regardless of religion, it has a side effect that horeca workers (which -I kid you not- is tough labour) can have a guaranteed half day off on that one day. That's a disadvantage of the 24/7 economy: workers who do certain tough labour jobs who are replaceable (a relatively non-unique skillset) have less rights.

> Who goes and buys a TV for example at 11am on a weekday?

What happens at say grocery stores is they have less workers at the non-peak times, and workers do different tasks at different times of the day. Instead of being clerk, they for example replenish from the warehouse or throw away items which are past their due date. You'd have only 1 or even 0 clerks, but there's also hardly any customers. Meantime, all these workers can still be productive elsewhere.

In your specific example I can imagine a clerk doing inventory or online orders during downtime. Though it depends also on the size of the store.

As for who buys that, grandpa & grandma, the guy who took a day off to buy a new TV (tho nowadays one can buy TVs online just as well, and why not [1]), or the mom who's a housewife or has a part-time job (latter being very common for females here in The Netherlands).

[1] I'm getting on a tangent here geez but if I'd buy the TV online here in the Netherlands I'd also have 2 weeks to send it back for whatever reason other than warranty. I don't have that right if I buy it in brick & mortar store other than warranty. A good reason to shop online indeed!

That's true as far as it goes but I don't see the relevancy. For one thing, I think most of us buy groceries more than we need to interact with a bank clerk or a doctor. But beyond that, if we waved a wand and declared grocery stores were now open between 5:00 and 10:00 PM, we'd just be replacing one tyranny with another (and it would after all be dependent on most customers keeping 9-5 hours). If we just started randomly distributing working days and hours there's no particular guarantee my day off doesn't align with the supermarket's (and anyway the idea that a supermarket isn't time-dependent seems questionable since the whole thing revolves around somewhat time-sensitive deliveries).

Relevance? You appeared to be in favor of "synchronicity"? I'm against it, because for me it meant going grocery shopping on my lunch break, which was inconvenient. I expect most humans would also find that inconvenient.

Lots of people still watch regular TV. I can't imagine it either, but apparently it's true.

For super popular stuff like GoT our big sporting events like Superbowl or even bigger like World Cup finale you'll always have it. So maybe we will always need that max toilet fishing capacity of we don't want to not be able to flush once every year or so?

I suppose you're right; for super-popular, nation-scale things like Superbowl or World Cup, for which there is a strong value in seeing it live, there's no going around peak flushing :).

Well the World Cup is really international except US ;)

It wouldn't be that hard to skew different regions plus or minus one minute; that'd still be close enough to "live" that it wouldn't matter.

Given we have things like Twitter it would matter a lot. I also vividly texting with friends and family on different continents during the last world cup's Germany-Brazil game. A friend actually did have a slight delay and he received my text saying that it's 5-0 before he saw the goal. That was without intentional delay and already was a spoiler although it didn't matter much on that case.

> Does this still happen, given the rise of the torrents, on-demand streaming, and the way TV shows distribution tend to be spread out over time?

Those are all near instant. They compete with cable TV.

One reason it happens is that right after the broadcast, Facebook will be full with jokes and spoilers. Whether you see that depends on your bubble, and whether you use/visit Facebook. Same could be true with school & work.

Exactly my thinking. Who care's if Friday is a social construction. It allows people to meet up, talk, and relax before they all have two days off together. How beautiful is that? If people were all working at different times and on different schedules, how would friends and family ever meet up in groups larger than two on any regular basis?

> No one cares that a million toilets have to flush at the same time.

I care about not being stuck in the traffic, not having to wait for a machine at the gym, not having to wait at long checkout lines at costco.

I think you can look a bit beyond just that though.

Think about tourist locations. Intense seasonality means we have to build up huge infrastructure for a peak ... Month? Per year. Mainly because kids are off at a certain time of year. Hotels are emptier during the week. Dentist appointments are impossible to get on lunch breaks.

I agree that synchronicity is valuable because a phone call is 10x more information dense than an email sent 3 hours ago. But wouldn't it be interesting to add a bit of flexibility to everyone's work schedule and see what happens?

Aside: lots of industries are shift workers, and most low-income people work off of the Mon-Fri 9-5. It's oddly a pretty solved problem but we decided against adopting that for office work in most cases. I bet kids and school don't help things

Tourism can be weather dependent too. Visiting Ireland in january isn't quite the same as May.

> Aside: lots of industries are shift workers, and most low-income people work off of the Mon-Fri 9-5. It's oddly a pretty solved problem but we decided against adopting that for office work in most cases. I bet kids and school don't help things

But I mean, really, if you're obligated to keep a schedule anyway, don't you want to keep one that allows you to be awake during the day and sleep at night, and to generally be available for other commitments? I've done both and I'd take the 9:00-5:00 over the irregular schedule every time. Convenience scheduling a doctor's appointment or job interview doesn't make up for all the inconveniences.

This article describes exactly why the NS (Dutch Railways) provide a cheap card (which is even on sale like half the year) allowing one to get 40% off the fare provided they travel during off hours. The off hours are: mo - fr between 9 AM and 4 PM & from 6.30 PM till 6.30 AM, weekends, and holidays. If you check in, it counts from that time (even if you swap trains or travel for 3 hrs straight into peak hours).

There's a few more versions of the card which are essentially trying to achieve the same, just assume you travel in higher volume. For example, there's a more expensive version of the card which makes travel completely free in the weekends.

Thing is, people who work get the travel costs reimbursed from their employer so they generally don't care. Its up to the employer to adapt. And given you can game the logging in time I am not sure how effective it is to decrease congestion/pressure.

I've also noticed the effect on my partner's job. She works 4 days a week, and wants one day off. Well, the most popular days to take off are Wednesday (because it is in the middle of the week) and Friday. Same with taking days off. Some days and dates are popular, for social reasons. Someone who is antisocial won't have much understanding for that, just like you put.

The power system is another example. At times, the German electricity grid is operating on a surplus!

Yet another example is getting paid 150% of 200% during holidays such as Christmas (which is how it works in horeca).

Fascinating discussion, but just being against social behaviour won't change these situations. There needs to be incentive. Being antisocial or being OK with that with the benefit of receiving a discount seems like a great way to achieve this in situations where it makes sense. Does anyone know examples where it'd make sense, but where it isn't currently applied? Or where it has been tried locally, but isn't implemented world-wide? If you take the toilet flush example: we're not paying for toilet usage in our households (right..?) but we are paying for water. If the price of water would be dynamic based on current demand, and the current demand is transparent, that could decrease demand during peak times just like the other examples do. At the very least, those who cause the congestion pay for it, and pay for the extra costs attached to the peak's effect. On a side note, the thought of highly fluctuating water prices sends shills down my spine.

As a fully remote employee, I bias toward avoiding employers that have a bias toward hiring local.

Why? Because it tells me that something isn't right. That the company does not fully embrace remote work to it's logical end.

The company I work for has about 40 employees.... no office, many time zones and what appears to be no geographical bias. I fucking love it and would shudder if they started concentrating more employees near each other.

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