Its hard to come up with arguments for working from office when you can save 2 hours of commute. Time alone is huge.
With that standard 8h work 8h personal time 8h sleep. Commute eats up 1/4 of your personal time.
With that standard 8h work 8h personal time 8h sleep. Commute eats up 1/4 of your personal time.
Don't forget that could also be more time with your loved ones, like your partner, your children or even your pets.
That's a big deal for lots of people and very understandable.
edit: It's also more time for _everything else_.
Personally, I really enjoy cooking lunch and sitting on my balcony for half an hour, something I can't do when working from the office.
I've worked from home for a few years now, and before that I would have to take vacation time to go visit them.
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?).
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 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.
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!
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).
Even listening to an audiobook or podcast is such a passive thing it's hard to call it "doing" something.
If you count weekends, you have 5 * 8 + 2 * 16 = 72 hours of "free time". so 5 hrs commute / 32 hrs = 6.94% or 1/14.4 of your time awake.
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%.
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.
The pandemic has done some of that figuring out for us.
Yep, that sounds as ridiculous as your statement.
These flats would be considered tiny by American standards and you have a lot less privacy/independence from your neighbours.
What do you do?
Constant talk and interruption are not conducive to the work of a software engineer.
During the times you are coding, yes. But a software engineer is more than a coder, so there are times when collaboration is very useful.
But nothing distinguishes a junior and a senior more than the ability to work independently.
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.
(Although obviously those statements aren't absolutes, hence the use of the word "often".)
We are talking Months and Months" by stopping other teams going of at a tangent or flat out just not doing what they are told.
The seniors used to be called "architects," and the "driving projects/design" used to be called RUP.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Do you have data to back up your suspicion?
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.
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'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 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are not talking about beer with friends once in a while either. We are talking about regular very time consuming activity.
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.
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.
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 :)
My solution was to figure out how to afford to live in the city. I am privileged in that sense, however.
And in case you think Canada is wildly different than the US, not only is it not, but it's actually even better: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190225/dq190...
"3 hours is the norm" is just not true for any area of the US or Canada.
But if you live in a HCOL area, and you want a yard, you're pretty much locked in to hour+ one-way commutes.
One of which was that my 6 mile commute in Austin took between 45 minutes to an hour.
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.
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.
Pollution is the clear example. Unless forced externally, producers will just ignore negative externalities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Also, having a social aspect outside of work makes job changes way less scary and stressful.
I do like the social interaction and joking, or venting, with co-workers, even as an introvert.
The best approach is a hybrid model.
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.
I reckoned that it would be £10k post tax just for the additional cost of commute (65 miles)
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.
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.
Your most valuable resource, time, which can be neither replenished nor its true quantity known, is being wasted for very little gain.
For people who chose to not prioritise living remotely near their workplace.
That's a relatively small slice of workers.