Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

I takes me 20 minutes to cycle in to work, pretty much, from home desk to office desk.

I can commute when I want and certainly I don’t ever commute when I have to — we have no mandated office attendance. I do a core set of “days” where I’m guaranteed to come in for lunch, at the very least.

I also come home early — dodging traffic — if the afternoon is looking like I won’t need to talk with anyone. Bunking off for the whole afternoon and doing a night shift of post-dinner to bedtime is also ultra productive, if the family let me, because of the laser focus I seem to get when there are very few people to distract me.

A short amount of light exercise away from the computer is so useful for the thought process that I’ve even commuted twice in the same day, though this is very rare.

Many of my colleagues have the same quality of life but a lot of them have also committed to fully- or mostly-remote, and you feel sorry for them being left behind. Too many decisions happen because they are either discussed in person, or ratified based on the relationships between people who see each other regularly.

Thinking back to my days of spending 2x 90 minutes on the 101 (the main highway in the Bay Area) makes me feel quite unwell.

Being individually very productive is not necessarily good for a company. Just wanted to point that out as a lot of HN (and offline) commenters say - well, I get so much more done when I’m not at work. But that misses the point: what matters is the team’s overall progress, which is (1) certainly not equal to the sum of each individual’s perceived productivity and (2) heavily a function of personal relationships and communication. that is why remote might seem like a great idea for the individual coder yet have managers stressed out of their minds.

I’ve spoken to so many managers about remote. Off the record, all of them have said it is a nightmare for them to coordinate the team.

It's understandable that managers are worried if they're not fit for the new realities of their jobs.

But I have to wonder what the hell they were doing. What is coordination other than talking to each other and showing each other things? In my opinion this is much easier via calls.

I think it largely depends on what the work actually involves. For me - I personally don't like working from home. I need the separation between my place of work and my place of rest, but I fully appreciat that this is my own personal view and not everybody shares it.

However, my actual job requires a lot of communication - some of it is perfectly ok to do remotely via calls etc, but a significant portion of my job involves ad-hoc discussions, whiteboarding, throwing ideas around and coming up with a solution to a problem that is highly specific to our domain. This is the problem area, for me - I've found no combination of tools that adequately plugs the gaps that remote working has left in our ability to have those kinds of conversations / design sessions - and certainly no combination that everyone 'gels' with.

For me, it's a major issue. Productivity in those area has absolutely tanked. Pre-planned, pre-determined work is generally ok, but the more informal side of things - which is actually probably around 50% of what we actually need to do in order to keep things moving, has gone to hell, which now means we ask people to come in at least a few days a week to try to plug the gaps.

My team has ad-hoc meetings all the time while working remote. We've been throwing ideas around, having design discussions, the whole shebang. Yes, the first six months were difficult - it took us a while to figure out a new way to work. But now it's been 2.5 years since we've been in the office and we've been hiring people who live several hundred miles away or more from what used to be our office. C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

> C'mon - if we can make it work then you can make it work.

If this was a reasonable argument, nobody would ever have any issues!

It's the law of averages. We're just an average, ordinary dev team producing extraordinary results because we scrutinize every aspect of how we work.

We also scrutinise every aspect of how we work; it doesn't mean that there's a viable remote-only replacement for everything a team might need to do.

Your anecdote is not data - it's just an anecdote.

I'm a manager. My team, and most of the other teams we work with, have been working remotely for over a decade and coordination has never been a problem for us.

We have a 10 minute meeting every morning to catch up on what was done yesterday and what we're going to work on today. Then I can ping individuals after that meeting for followup discussions. On average, I have one of these followups each day. Then I have 1 weekly meeting with the other managers to coordinate our team efforts (and some DMs through the week to adjust/align as things change).

We work on software and hardware. We can operate and run our software against hundreds of remote hardware devices (in our data center). There is no need to be in the office if you have (or develop) remote tooling for your team to work well remotely. At this point, I would consider it very risky for any company to not be working toward at least the capability for full remote in the future. Who knows what lies ahead.

The OP was talking about incompetent managers, which seem to be numerous. A competent manager has no problem managing a remote team and have been doing so very successfully for decades. Remote work and remote teams have existed since the early 90's. The only difference now is so many teams went remote in response to the pandemic and managers are discovering they'e incompetent in managing remote work. Their real fear is getting fired for their new-found incompetence.

The last part - missing out on important decisions - is it a geographical one - it's a hierarchy issue. Decisions about you will get made "above you" that you suddenly have no input into.

Until we chnage the decision making process (ie more democracy) in companies we won't have input into the truly important decisions

I've been in a place where it felt like important decisions were made not only without my input (actually fine, being a good software dev don't mean I'm a businessperson), but also where this decision wasn't subsequently communicated with me (bad, because that meant I was still working towards the previous goal).

That was well before remote work became a norm. But it is easy to fall into habits, including communication habits, that better suit one style of work than the other.

Exactly this; people who chose to live in a suburban hell with a 2 hour driving commute chose that path for themselves. I have no sympathy if they are reluctant to come back to the office.

Those who view the world through $500 000 salary lenses are the one’s who deserve our scorn. Not the grunt office worker who can barely scrape by enough money for co-renting something in the suburbs.

I know its generally a faux pas to talk about this, but its extremely funny to me how the above response hovers between ~+7 and ~0 depending on if Europeans or Americans are the predominant logged in crowd.

Some sympathy is in order because house pricing can definitely have a big impact on the amount of “choice” you have.

That's fair, but specifically we're talking about Apple's headquarters here -- most of the people involved are likely high earning engineers.

Not enough to buy the 3 million dollar homes in Cupertino

I'm pretty sure that their headquarters needs janitors, a landscape crew, and folks to fix small things. They probably have a cafeteria, too. They might be a lot of high earning engineers, but I'm guessing these folks are a sizable portion of the people working there.

They likely don't get paid well.

Heck, I'd be surprised if they are employed by apple instead of some contractor - meaning they likely get far poorer benefits than the folks that have a chance of affording stuff around there.

> I'm pretty sure that their headquarters needs janitors, a landscape crew, and folks to fix small things

This is an article about requiring in person attendance for people that are currently WFH -- which almost certainly does not include janitors or landscape crew, who cannot do their jobs remotely.

You can buy a townhome in the east bay with more than an hour commute each way for over a million dollars. That ought to tell you something about the housing prices. Unless you are rich, or you AND your spouse bring in the big bucks, it will be hard to find a decent and affordable house near Cupertino.

I no longer even live close to a big city anymore. Companies that require office time, especially tech companies, don't pay anywhere enough to dictate my life. Not even Apple.

Not everyone is you.

Nor you. There's a lot of people sharing the sentiment in the GP.

The village where I live has almost a hundred more inhabitants post-Covid, and none of the ones I've spoken to want to move back to urban or suburban areas. It's not for everyone, but working remote allows for a completely different lifestyle.

Personally, I'd rather leave the tech sector behind me and drive a forklift or something, than going back to commuting.

The main gripe I've heard so far is "commuting".

If you drove a forklift, you'd commute, if you're a farmer, you'd commute, if you pretty much did anything out of sitting in your underpants on zoom, you'd commute.

The village where I live has almost a hundred more inhabitants post-Covid, and none of the ones I've spoken to want to move back to urban or suburban areas. It's not for everyone, but working remote allows for a completely different lifestyle.

I dunno, I live in a village which probably has about a thousand people in it, a lot of people have to leave because they want their kids to go to better schools etc. Of course 1-2 years in most of the village life is a novelty. Some will thrive, some won't.

If I drove a forklift or a tractor, I'd get a job within walking distance. If I'd keep my current job I'd have a two-hour commute by car since there's no public transport around here apart from school buses.

1000 people villages here are often their own administrative districts with most services and goods available, as well as access to public transport. I expect it's also a matter of where the village is. :)

EDIT: The point being that in suburban areas there's rarely _any_ jobs, and that you simply cannot get away from commutes if you live in one. Urban areas obviously also offers occasional jobs within walking distance, but I'd assume that people moving to the countryside already dismissed the idea of living in a city either for financial or personal reasons.

> if you're a farmer, you'd commute

Most farmers work from home don’t they? All the ones I know do.

Farmers' employees usually live rather close as well.

I hate to be rude, but you sound extremely out of touch. I grew up in Sydney, Australia, which is so horizontally large that there have been suggestions to [break it up into three separate cities](https://www.architectureanddesign.com.au/news/breaking-sydne...).

I lived in a bad area, roughly 1.5 hours from the CBD (downtown) and the most run-down, cramped houses are selling for $900k USD. Much more if you want somewhere near public transport or in an area that is actually nice (read: not terrible) to live in. These days it's barely affordable to live 3 hours commute away from the city.

I realise that HN attracts people who are Silicon Valley engineers, but please try to not be so blinded by your financial privilege.

This is an article about Apple's corporate headquarters -- those complaining about this are Silicon Valley engineers with financial privilege.

Many of the people who work at Apple HQ are not engineers pulling in six figure salaries and can't afford to live close to the office.

lol. an Apple salary will get you renting a crappy apartment in a 1970s complex in SV

We need to make young people aware of the perils of urban sprawl. People in their 20s are flexible enough to consider alternative cities and regions to live in when building their career. Having friends and close family makes it more difficult to move.

I chose to study, work and build my life in the most expensive and most spread out city in my country, without actually considering the cost of living and typical commuting distances beforehand. I can now afford living within 40-50 minute public transport ride from the office hot spots, and I think I would be happier in cities having realistic 15-20 minute commuting options even if they had a less dynamic job market. Also, studying without risks of starving and homelessness would have been nice. But the facts that smaller cities are more affordable and less spread out were rarely discussed at that time.

I believe this kind of advice would be applicable to the US too, since urban sprawl is more amplified there and there are career options outside the Bay area, as well.

> Exactly this; people who chose to live in a suburban hell with a 2 hour driving commute chose that path for themselves.

If you had to commute to the Cupertino HQ, where are you going to find affordable housing within a 1 hour (one-way) drive?

Much of this is the fault of Cupertino's extreme NIMBY policies that prevent building any amount of density.

Perhaps, but that just demonstrates that people commuting to the Apple HQ don't get to choose to live an hour away, they are mostly forced to do so.

Oh, I live in, ahem, suburban hell to be sure. I’m just in a much smaller and less strained part of the world now, in Europe.

Same talent, same capital partners, same Internet, different regulations, and much better bike lanes.

they have also chosen to make life awful for everyone between their home and work, due to the pollution and noise from their car suffered by those on their commuter route

I had a 1-1.5 hour commute in the city only borders until Covid, same time both in car and on public transport. And that's WITHOUT crossing any of the highly congested bridges. I have no sympathy for the arrogant assholes who can't even imagine how other people live.

What about changing jobs? Let's say you had a job that was 10 minutes by car from you home. You change jobs 2 years later and, while the new job is in the same metro area, now the commute is 90 minutes. Lack of remote discourages job hopping, which is bad for employees and good for employers.

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