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Comment by warning26 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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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