I'm a Supercommuter. Here's What It's Like | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Supercommuter. Here's What It's Like

wsj.com

30 pointssentientslug61 comments

I just skimmed it, I'd say what makes this atypical is he's trying to do it on a budget. A "normal" supercommuter would be working as a consultant or something and have travel baked in to their pay, so they would not have to skimp in the same way. It's actually (unsurprisingly) pretty easy to commute if you don't worry about your budget. Buy a flight pass, find a regular hotel, and expense your meals. Maybe some people also enjoy playing budget traveller, I think that would make it unbearable.

I don't see how you've come to the conclusion that what you've described is normal and not an outlier (though perhaps common in a particular elite field).

Isn't it the standard for basically the entire consulting industry? No consulting firm I've ever heard of is flying their people around (or feeding them) on their own dime when they're assigned to a project.

Especially since the company has to pay for it one way or another, so they might as well have it as a line item in their budget so they can control and expect the costs instead of just building it into salary.

I'm saying that I'm not convinced that consultants are appropriately representative of supercommuting as a practice.

Lots of friends of mine have worked as consultants where they get sent to distant cities for weeks or months at a time. Their lodging, meals, and travel back home every weekend were covered by their employers. At least once for someone straight out of college, so nothing particularly "elite" about his skills.

It's not normal to be a supercommuter, but if you are one, it's pretty typical to be doing it on someone else's dime. It's not your own bed at home, but it's a lot more pleasant that doing all that moving around and having to pay your own way.

Is it typical? How do you know?

My dad and all of his coworkers (well, independent contractors in the same line of work in the same general area, they all knew each other) worked this way, as have all the people I know who have done this. Not as McKinsey consultants, just people with specific skills that were easier to contract for on a per-job basis. Work M-F up to six hours’ drive from home (need a car at remote sites, so not much flying), home for weekends, reimbursed for mileage, hotel, meals on the road. One month to one year per job, depending.

The only one who ever paid his own way was when he relocated for family but kept the old job for about a year. Inheriting a family-owned apartment in a relatively lower cost of living area while keeping a high-income job in HCOL area made it financially work for him — no rent, no mortgage, family to help care for young kids. But he got tired of not seeing them, so he didn’t keep it up.

Well, we've established that HN posters consider their experience with supercommuting consultants to be the norm. However, knowing that HN posters are also likely to name some multiple of the median income as "middle class" because of their experience living lives of relative privilege in HCOL cities, I'm inclined to suspect that your dad and all his coworkers and all the people you know are less representative of the average supercommuter than, say, your last example. Because my understanding is that the typical person with 2hr+ commutes is someone who is forced to take inefficient public transit, or who has to live far from their jobs in HCOL cities.

Thank your for your perspective; I am now asking you to be intellectually honest in questioning if it's correct.

I’m not averse to continuing this conversation but bedtime calls. Check again tomorrow, late, this is an interesting topic and I would very much like to talk more.

Also, as a side issue: I am not in computing or technology at all; I am a physician, an anesthesiologist, in the USA. I like and use computers, but I’m a hanger-on, at best, around here. Some of us like tech, and there are some (not me) who are brilliant programmers.

My father was a petroleum landman, and based on what I knew about our income growing up (which was not extensive, but I'm not blind), we were dead middle of the band for US household income (like, almost exactly at the median). My mother went to work as soon as my younger sister started kindergarten, and had had side hustles for years before that. So we were definitely middle class, and not in the same way that I'm upper middle class (i.e., I am UMC because I don't have fuck-you money, but I make a lot more than even most UMC people).

And I grew up in Mississippi. So, you know, not exactly a rich area.

However, I don't have any data on what public transit looks like in terms of commuting. So... who knows? But I'm not some scion of a posh suburb who thinks that having gone to public school makes them oh-so-middle-class. And the guy who commuted LCOL to HCOL for a year? He lived with his mother and grandmother in a small house in a rough neighborhood (i.e., you could expect to hear gunfire nightly) growing up. He just had a goal and some luck.

Dead middle-of-the-band for US household income, in Mississippi (particularly historically) makes you the scion of a posh suburb indeed. Note that a common characteristic of people of unusual means relative to their locality is that they insist that they're average; in-and-of-itself, it's not convincing.

I think my point still stands, regardless. No one has yet explained how they know that consultants make up the bulk of supercommuters.

Fair enough point, but that’s not posh suburb material. It’s “we owned a house”.

I knew an eng manager who lived in a flight focused community (each house had parking for an airplane!) like this one [1] way outside of town. They'd fly in each morning for their commute.

I always thought that sounded like it would provide maximum flexibility since there are so many tiny airfields in the US you'd be hard pressed to work somewhere too far from one.

Seemed pretty incredible overall... at the time I remember looking it up and the cost working out to a bit cheaper than bay area housing all-in, but I didn't really know how to calculate the airplane costs accurately.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/cameron-airpark-estates-cali...

look up the wet hourly rental cost for the plane youd be considering and use that as a guideline.

rental costs (wet) will include allowances for maintence and fuel variability and be "over" enough to cover additional costs that yiu may not be able to avoid if your not at scale.

People who fly light airplanes for commuting are not doing it to save on housing cost (homes in Cameron Park go for pretty close to what homes are going for on the outskirts of the Bay Area, think Gilroy or Livermore). And they are not doing it to save on airfare or transportation costs. Your cost per mile from somewhere like that to the Bay Area is going to be much greater than a typical car commute from East Bay. Airplane ownership typically measures cost per hour, and includes very large annual inspection and maintenance costs.

You also would need to be instrument rated and remain current if you're planning on commuting every day rain or shine. A pretty significant investment.

I've been to one of those communities recently to pick up some auction items, and the way it worked for this guy is he had a business flying people up to do stuff like survey photography and stuff, but that he was retired so he mainly went between this house-on-a-runway in Arkansas to his other house-on-a-runway outside Sedona AZ.

Yeah I don't think they were doing it to save money. I think they just loved planes and also kind of hated driving & traffic, which from a place like Gilroy to the south bay tech campuses back then would have been absolutely brutal.

Sounds like a miserable life but he also seems like the kind of person who gets off on it. I do feel sorry for his family, though. I agree it's ridiculous for the WSJ to force folks to work from the office if it's not actually a requirement 5 days a week. I also wonder if they're properly accounting for state income taxes from this setup (he should owe state income tax to the state he's working from on any particular day).

His boast about getting $2,000 in cash for accepting the offers to put off your flight till later reminded me of the time my family went to Hawaii over Christmas. We were flying from Honolulu back to Chicago in early January and the flight was severely oversold. Unfortunately there was a huge snowstorm predicted for 18 hours later in Chicago, promising 18+ inches of snow. So no one was taking the offers. They eventually got down to offering to rebook you for a flight the next day in exchange for a suite at the Waikiki Hilton overnight, $2,000 in cash, and an upgrade to first class for the rebooked flight. I was so tempted to accept the offer, but we really wanted to beat the snowstorm (as did everyone else of course).

Everybody preferred to be in the snowstorm rather than Hawaii?

As Obelix said, "These humans are crazy!"[1]

Yes, I get it, work, etc, commitments... is Obelix any more wrong?

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/295/458/1a9...

Obelix hasn't been stuck away from home for days to a week waiting for a storm to blow over

We preferred to get home before the snowstorm rather than arriving at the airport just after it.

Years ago I worked with a guy that was a flight attendant and a systems engineer. He lived in Phoenix, Arizona, woke up early every morning, worked the same flight to San Diego, California, then took a taxi (this was before Uber) from the airport to the office, worked his engineering job (government contract work; the hours were very predictable), then took a taxi back to the airport and worked a flight home to Phoenix. He said his day was usually about 12 hours, which isn't too bad. I always respected that way of 'supercommuting'.

This is some next level masochism. They should allow people to just work remote.

Or just get a job nearer where you live, even if it’s worse, lol. No amount of money any job would be willing to pay me could make regular hotel-hopping worth it.

I guess some people figure that if pilots can do it, they can too.

I don't understand why he wouldn't just live in OH, save money for a house, and in the mean time commute to NYC for, let's say, one week a month. This seems cheaper and more pleasant, and easier to plan, and less physically exhausting, and more obvious. Does his work as a journalist require him to be physically located at the company, but on an irregular schedule? I'm trying to figure out the series of requirements and constraints that make this behavior seem like the best choice. Interesting article, but just not enough details in it for me to understand it to my admittedly naive satisfaction.

He addresses this:

> The Wall Street Journal requires office attendance at least three days a week

Looks like WSJ has another dumb RTO policy that makes life miserable for everyone, likely without actually any real benefit to the company.

Missed that, thanks.

So they(WSJ) forced him to write a piece defending their need for butts in seats? comes off inhuman. Cant think of a logical reason to allow this other then absurd laziness and apathy from the WSJ leadership.

> Entering my supercommuter era, I had visions of flying to New York on a weekday morning (8,500 points one way on American Airlines), spending the day meeting sources and filing stories

Not everyone can or will meet with you on a Zoom call. Often, journalists need to go to their sources.

Thats not what this about. Go play with your blocks now.

Not sure why you'd say that, bud. Hope the rest of your day is better.

Too spicy for you? Im fine. Get mad more, lots to be mad at and fight for.

They aren't alone - here's a college student who also commute by commercial flights to avoid high local rents:

https://onemileatatime.com/news/college-student-flies-classe...

I did something similar, moved rural in 2014, two hour drive away from contract gigs in big city. Rather than rent and then have to break lease on next contract or commute a long ways, I just did the van life thing for weeknights and had zero commute aside to and from home once a week. Then pandemic and haven't been back since with all the remote jobs.

The issue I have with van life is cops knocking on my van. Any tips for that?

Don't park residential.

I haven't done it much since 2018 though. I assume there's a lot more awareness than a few years ago.

When I was briefly homeless and living out of my car, I didn't have any trouble parking at a highway rest stop for the night (where all the truckers did the same thing).

What a nightmare. This guy needs to get a remote job or at least move to someplace like Stamford

I had a family member do a similar commute, iirc it was from the Bay Area to NM. Luckily the real estate was a lot cheaper in NM, so he was able to lock down a month-to-month very cheaply there. He would live and commute near work in NM, then return home to his wife on the weekends. I'd imagine it was stressful in multiple ways.

Strange as hell. No job is worth this - I would rather cleaning toilets in some shithole than spend all my time commuting

Particularly if that commute required going through TSA, sitting in an economy seat. Even with pre-check it sounds unpleasant.

I have heard stories of people supercommuting via train, which at least is not totally dead time and is more comfortable.

I commuted once per month by train (meaning I took the train once per month to work in office for a week) and it was fine - most of the time wifi works and it’s reasonably comfortable. It’s kinda bad if wifi doesn’t work and the train is super full.

Doing that twice every day would also be torture, spending 8 hours in the train daily. I can’t fathom what would a human compel to do this.

I do this... work in NC, commute to DC each week. Grab a hotel a couple nights and drive back. I was a remote worker pre-pandemic then my company recently mandated RTO with no exceptions. Sucks but not going to find a higher paying job locally so I deal with it for now.

> The Wall Street Journal requires office attendance at least three days a week

This is the problem. WSJ needs to stop being dicks about this. What a waste of the author's money, time, and carbon footprint.

"I'm a Supercommuter. Here's What It's Like" or "I'm Slowly Going Broke So I Can Live In An Apartment In Columbus, Ohio"

More like "I'm slowly going broke because my employer has a crappy RTO policy and I don't want to get a different job".

Some call it "supercommuter", some may call it "carbon tax can't come soon enough".

Well then be consistent and apply the carbon tax to all forms of powered transportation, not just air travel, so that way we can reverse the unnecessary RTO for jobs that don’t really need it.

That's fine, emissions from trains or buses are order of magnitude smaller than that of air travel

And with the money you save by not using a car, you can easily save enough to go on an overseas holiday.

Don't worry... this year fuel is gonna get expensive.

Pfft Ohio to New York, that is playing on easy mode!

After selling a business, I did this for a while between Sydney, Australia and Boulder Co.

I did this craziness because we had a toddler, and newborn.

The key to making this work was to just stay on Mountain Time when getting back to Sydney.

Whilst it is an easy way to get airline status, I do not recommend it.

I read “supercomputer” and was ready to hear the inner monologue of a machine.

Didn’t get that but also wasn’t disappointed!

That would be 10001000 10101000 on repeat.

I misread the title as "I'm a Supercomputer".

Stop all the superdownloadin'.

You Wouldn't Steal A Reporter

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