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Comment by thelastgallon | Hacker News Reader

> This, IMO, is why WFH is a bad thing and should be avoided.

yes WFH bad. Drive 3 hours to sit in a cube instead with 1/6th the space of your room at home.

I agree, but only because the office is a 25 minute walk away. If I was driving an hour I’d feel different.

Because you have common sense; so many of these commenters seem to think that it’s somehow everyone else’s fault they chose to live in a place where everything is a 3 hour drive away.

Yeah, that works at best only as long as you're single; once you live together with a partner, it's highly likely one of you will be getting a long commute.

In a proper metro area, where jobs and housing are concentrated, this isn't such an issue, as there’s a high probability both your and your partner’s jobs would be quickly commutable.

Sadly, America’s backwards zoning policies have led to a situation where nothing is typically near anything else. But hey, at least people can have huge front yards that they never ever, use for anything! That’s something!

There's another problem, that's hitting Europe right now: approximately no one can actually afford to move to "a proper metro area", at least not when it comes to larger cities. Even on a dev salary, when you move to a place you can afford that offers basic comforts to family (i.e. not renting out single rooms shared with others), your commute is now back to ~1h each way. But at least you and your partner are traveling in the same direction, so there's that.

It's much easier for people who already own a place in the city.

I have no real opinion on whether or not WFH is better, but I feel compelled to point out that only a very small minority of people are working that far away from home.

In LA where I live, it’s the opposite. There are 14 million people in metro LA area. A 2h daily commute is on the average side. Some of my colleagues would drive north of 3h. Per day. 5 days a week. About 660 hours per year. Spent in a car, constantly endangered, paying for gas, polluting their own biosphere to the point of guaranteed impact on lifespan.

No thank you.

It would blow my mind to see people in Bentleys on my commute. Hard for me to imagine having enough money for such a car and not deciding to avoid the inhumane agony of forced commute.

Ok, 3 is not typical. There is a behavioral reason for this. Like in most economic considerations, there's a tradeoff, where humans will tolerate a certain amount of time travel, for the money. So this tends to be stretched out to the maxima, over time.

Given driving time and train time, it's easily 2 hours of a commute in any of the top 20 metros for the majority of the population. From personal experience: Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Orange County (just Santa Ana to Irvine!), or the rest of the inland empire was all 1.5 or more, each way. Ofc there will be less general cases around the nation, where you might characterize a "very small minority" opposed to what I would believe was 1/3 of the nation doing 2 hours total before WFH was popularized. Some people (including people we each know) still make these commutes.

Also very few people are so lucky as to have a cubicle at work. Most work in open space halls of horrors.

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