There is nothing more illogical in modern society than commuting to an office every day. Employees waste 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity. Employers waste time and energy negotiating leases, re-arranging offices, purchasing AV equipment for meeting rooms, etc., in addition to paying the likely enormously expensive lease itself. The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful. Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
> Employees waste 2 of their 16 available waking hours in the non-productive commute while incurring significant financial costs (lease/insurance/fuel/energy) in order to support this patently absurd activity.
It's not patently absurd, it obviously bring some benefit to their life to chose this, you're just ignoring those benefits to focus solely on the time and energy costs; which people gladly trade away in order to achieve these other benefits.
> The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful.
This view is solely focused on the "information economy," and really doesn't make any sense once you start adding in light commercial or industrial activity. We built this infrastructure for a reason, and it wasn't solely to create a trap for white collar workers.
> Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
This is probably because most people do not view their lives as part of some giant "min-max" game designed to provide maximum benefit to everyone other than themselves.
"It's not patently absurd, it obviously bring some benefit to their life to chose this"
For the vast majority of people in the last four decades working out of an office was not a decision up to the employees so I don't know where this is coming from.
I think it is more out of habit than anything else. Office work has always been information based but it wasn't possible to get the information (aka paper) out of the office easily. For this reason, people had to be brought to the information.
I don't think we would have many office buildings if information work and telecommuting would have started at exactly the same time. No serious business person would invest in something that is plainly unnecessary.
New York has one of the worst commute situations in the country, with an average of 36 minutes each way. The US average is 27 minutes. People commuting two hours a day are extreme outliers.
Census says 10% of people have 1-way commutes over 60 mins. Not typical but certainly not "extreme outliers" either.
And that's just commute time, which doesn't include getting dressed for work, gassing up the car, etc. (sure, WFH doesn't completely eliminate those, but the difference adds up across the population)
I had a 60-70 minute door-to-door commute for several years. Fortunately about 45 minutes of it was on a train, with about a 10 minute walk on either end.
... Maybe? This might be a case where an average doesn't tell the whole story.
45-minute to hour-long commutes each way have been the norm for me pretty much the entirety of my 20-odd year career in Silicon Valley. For me the outliers were the folk who opted to live 2+hrs away to afford a single family home, and were still commuting in - some did it daily; some did it weekly, and couch surfed during the week.
(The other outlier was the fellow who parked his Airstream in the back of the company lot until they told him he had to move.)
I think discussions about remote work and commuting bring out people with unusually bad commutes. And probably people with unusually bad commutes are in social bubbles where they think it’s normal, otherwise they wouldn’t sign up for it. But statistically, they are unusual!
It's fair to say that according to your own sources that the average commuter according to census.gov loses between 250-520 hours per year commuting if we don't count the 125 they spent getting ready for work. I think pointing out that most people are closer to 250 is quibbling over less than meaningful details.
2 hour round trip * 5 days/week * 48 working weeks/year * 20 years = 9,600 hours commuting. Assuming 16 hours awake per day, that's 600 days of your life over two decades.
One might observe that if that's not an outlier, it ought to be.
You gain time not spent preparing for work as well and its important to note that public transit is another thing entirely.According to the same census.gov report sourced by that article public transit riders consumed 47 minutes on average and that doesn't even tell the whole story because transit schedules NEVER align perfectly with your work schedule meaning if you don't want to be late you are always going to waiting 7-8 minutes for a bus and then arriving 15 minutes early.
An hour each way including waiting time is perfectly normal for anyone who has relied on public transit.
That 27 minutes of commute is most likely calculated from door to door.
It doesn't include the fact that when you're working remotely, you can just plop your ass on the work chair wearing whatever you slept in. Log in, check your messages and go make some coffee, prep the kids for school and maybe change into something smarter before the first meetings of the day.
You can also do chores while listening to meandering presentations on wireless headphones. If you're brave and cameras on isn't a culture in your company, you can do interactive ones by lugging your laptop or phone next to the dishwasher :D
I love when people point out wrong info just so someone can make a stronger claim that is essentially the same point. 1 hour a day wasted is still a lot of time.
Depending on how you make the journey, it isn't necessarily wasted.
For about a year I commuted around 30 minutes by train, from a station <5 minutes walk from home, and <5 minutes walk from the office. I liked reading books or the newspaper in the morning, and the same or staring out of the window on the way back.
It was a good transition between work and not-work. Driving requires too much concentration, cycling is somewhere in between, and working from home doesn't have any of this.
Every few months, generally if I feel I've been really unproductive, I'll walk home from the office (~50 minutes) just to enjoy the walk.
>Surely, all of this could only be justified if physical presence had a dramatic impact on productivity. Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
You can flip that around too - If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it? There really isn't any point arguing over it, because it doesn't change the current state of affairs.
My belief is that for remote work to gain mainstream adoption, you'll need a few trailblazer companies who establish a model of remote work where you can get everything done remotely - team building, motivating people, etc, etc.
Except we have studies that show companies continue to adopt patently absurd and destructive behaviors? Prior to the pandemic, it was the open-office floorplan, and study after study said it was a failure on basically any metric: productivity, spreading of disease, stress…
Now we have remote work, and we're starting to get studies that show the impact it has on productivity… (and thus far, the ones I've seen show favorable results!)
Someday, scientists will finally reach the ultimate conclusion: that many companies routinely make poor short-term tradeoffs to their long-term detriment.
>Prior to the pandemic, it was the open-office floorplan, and study after study said it was a failure on basically any metric: productivity, spreading of disease, stress…
Certainly, I would respect a study that has been replicated multiple times and shown the same result. Links are welcome!
>Someday, scientists will finally reach the ultimate conclusion: that many companies routinely make poor short-term tradeoffs to their long-term detriment.
I don't believe you can make any "ultimate conclusion". When it comes to human psychology, group behavior, and other complicated topics, there is no 'optimal for everyone'. You have to find what works for you in your environment.
You can't hand-wave science into everything. Science is observational. It's about proposing a model/argument/position, and then collecting data to see if the model holds up. You don't fit data to the model. Changing what you do just so you can fit a model is wrong and bad science.
I can't imagine many startups opting to rent expensive office space when they don't have to. It's quite a tax on talent, especially if top talent doesn't want to be there anyway. Furthermore the prestige associated with having an office is kind of subdued at this point. Actually, I think most investors would probably think it is a mistake unless the physical space is truly needed for working with matter (not only information).
>If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it?
My belief is that a lot of the people who get to make these decision like the office, because they don't suffer from the same externalities. In other words, many of the things that make commuting to the office suck ass don't necessarily pertain to the boss.
>My belief is that a lot of the people who get to make these decision like the office, because they don't suffer from the same externalities. In other words, many of the things that make commuting to the office suck ass don't necessarily pertain to the boss.
You have a valid point, but if one way is clearly superior, your competition is going to adopt it and start producing results faster/better. I don't really have a strong opinion on this - I work in manufacturing so remote work is not even an option for me and my team.
> You can flip that around too - If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it?
When you’re flipping this pancake please remember that real estate prices and tax write offs weigh into the reasoning some companies employ when deciding their wfh policies
Sure, but it also may be true that remote work is not necessarily better in every situation. I don't assume every manager is a fraud when they're wanting people to work from the office. I don't know their situation, so I would much rather grant them the decision.
Ideally, you will have companies that are remote, non-remote, and hybrid - so a candidate can choose which company they want to join.
> If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it?
It's not just about gains in productivity (profit/surplus value) for companies*. It would be enough for remote work to be a net benefit for the whole society. Take the reduction in car traffic, the time savings, the pollution avoided, etc, and subtract an hypotetical loss in profit for capitalists. Still worth it? Then we're doing it!
> My belief is that for remote work to gain mainstream adoption, you'll need a few trailblazer companies who establish a model of remote work
Sure, but we can't wait for a handful of capitalists to take the lead on this. If it's important and necessary, governments should act and enforce it. The same way as we did for work safety rules, the 40h work week, the abolition of child labor and so on.
All of the labor rights we now give for granted, when enforced caused a reduction in the productivity of labor. Still, nowadays it would sound insane to advocate for a return to child labor in order to increase profits.
* Companies are abstract concepts without a will, so we can't really expect a company to take decisions. What we really mean here is capitalists. Capitalists are people, they have a will and the decisional power required to change things. We'll just refer to them as capitalists from now on.
I don't have anything to counter your points, we're in agreement :)
My argument had apriori assumptions for the general audience on HN (VC funded startups, FAANG/MAAMA folks, etc). We can start off with different assumptions, I have no problem with that. Ultimately, I agree that we should change laws as we see fit so everyone can flourish.
Nothing against you, I just think it's important to present a different set of assumptions since, as you noted, the general audience of HN tends to see things through specific lens.
When we all just give for discounted that there is only one valid point of view, we lose all the benefits of the discussion and just play reinforcement.
Very true.
And I did some rough estimations on why my employer wants us in the office.
They make $115k a month of employees buying coffee. That is only coffee, and that was a very conservative estimate of only 40% of employees buying only a coffee on an average of $2.
This doesn't take into account parking we have to pay for, or lunch, or snacks.
If your employer makes you pay for coffee, you need a new employer. I know companies with terrible reputations on HN that nevertheless have free coffee and tea.
What we really need is a more flexible time to leave.
I come in at 8am and leave at 2pm, when my commute is about 1/4 what it is during rush hour. Then I hope on for another couple of hours after dinner.
This type of flexibility gives me the best of both worlds, I get to go into the office because I LOVE it, and HATE work-from-home, and I skip the commute.
In most cases, yes, but for me it’s a 20-minute bike ride that arguably increases my health, and it enables face-to-face conversation with coworkers that video meetings aren’t a real substitute for — I say that after two years of having those. I wouldn’t want to miss that.
What we, as a society, should do, is to increase the possibility of working in walking or biking distance.
In the same boat. 15 minute walk to work. I miss having coworkers around, but I also understand that their commutes are much worse in many cases. I still prefer the office, even without the coworkers, because I don't want to turn my home into my office.
I really miss my 2x20 minutes bike ride to wake up and decompress. Also lunches with coworkers.
The problem I would have to live near where I would work (likely in the city center). Which means higher rents and smaller places. Also if I change jobs my options would be limited.
It really depends on where you live. My (fortune 100 high tech) job has a 10 minute commute if I hit the lights right.
Maybe the "illogical" issue is people living in high density massive population centers.
To add, I live on a nice tree-lined street within walking distance of local schools and shopping. I don't live in some apartment near my place of employment.
You know how some people are "40 years with the same company" kind of people? I'm that with the place I live. Over the last 40 years, I've managed to have a strangely broad and deep career, ranging from being an oceanography marine technician to a game developer. Sure, it's not the life of FAANG with golden perks, but maybe that's not what life's all about in high tech?
I commute from a large-ish city to its suburb, my commute is 15-18 minutes. Anecdotes are not data... average commute in the US is like 20-30mins. I suspect most people who can be fully remote (i.e. are not in service industry) can afford to move instead of commuting 3 hours one way.
So actually not a large city at all? Hard to believe there's there's actually a commute from Suburb to Downtown in under 20 minutes during rush hour for any of the 20 largest cities in the US.
Seattle is #18. At peak rush hour it is 30-40mins, the main reason being that it's across a giant bottleneck of a bridge that also has ongoing construction; driving to suburbs that are not directly across the bridge would be faster. But, I don't drive at rush hour. "Start an 1-1.5 hours later" is much easier to grant than "WFH" :)
1) There are statistics that show the same is true for most workers. Commutes are 20-40 minutes. Most of those for whom this is not true either have uncommon priorities and trade-offs, are poor, are actively planning to move, or are just stupid. The uncommon priorities are uncommon; low-paying jobs mostly cannot be done from home; the temporary location mismatch is temporary; and avoiding people who are not poor but cannot figure out their living situation seems like a good reason to not offer WFH :D
2) I provided a number for peak rush hour, worst possible commute (bridge + construction), that I've actually done a couple times. FWIW I can drive to downtown in 25 minutes during rush hour, 10-12 minutes without, and that also would involve a bridge so a bottleneck.
3) An hour after rush hour is very different than 3am.
They tend to ignore things like the laws of physics.
When you live 40 miles away from your destination, there's no way that you'll get there in 37.7 minutes, unless you can do over the state speed limit, the entire time. And that doesn't even count things like congestion, traffic lights, and whatnot.
Frankly, I'm kind of amazed at the nasty reception that my post got. I do apologize for my choice of words, questioning where the person lives, but folks seem to have some kind of stake, in commutes being unnaturally short.
People live in the suburbs, so they can do things like raise families, send their kids to good schools, and enjoy the kinds of leisure pursuits that are only available to wealthy people, close to the city.
There's a lot of people, living out here. I know of several people that live in Wading River, and commute daily, to Manhattan.
This is a scientific community. Feel free to get your maps out, and figure it out.
Well, statistically most of people don't live "out there". To live out there is a choice... like, I know people who live in a mountain town because hiking/climbing is walking distance, or people who live in the country cause they want to keep a horse for regular riding (I think that was the primary reason?). Sure, their commute sucks, but for most people the only reason I can think of for living that far out is not being able to afford housing, and that is not typical for people who can WFH full time.
So, most people don't mind their commute. Also if I was hypothetically an employer, all other things being equal, wouldn't I rather hire people who don't have hobbies/things they are so committed to that they justify living "out there"? ;)
> Well, statistically most of people don't live "out there".
That depends.
HN seems to be a whole bunch of folks that are actually against the idea of living "out here" (not "there," to me). I find that interesting. I'm sure some demographic research would suggest why that is. I can tell you, from simply stepping out of my front door, that there are a lot of people, "out here," and I suspect that most of them work, somewhere.
> Also if I was hypothetically an employer, all other things being equal, wouldn't I rather hire people who don't have hobbies/things
Yeah, that's a pretty common mindset. "But why can't they all be slaves?" is what most corporate owners lament.
But if you want experienced, accomplished folks, you may find the pickings are a bit slim, in the immediate metro area. Might have to cast a wider net.
I lived in a city for a few years, and it was extremely convenient, but I was also unmarried, and ran a baseline stress level just below "squirrel on meth."
It seems that young people like being in the noise and bustle of a city, or close to it. Since tech has a real bad ageism problem, I guess that I shouldn't be surprised at the reactions.
But I am. I never thought of having a commute as something that defines an "old."
I have no idea where you got the impression I had age in mind. Most people commute between suburbs and cities, and this commute data is averages (and broken down by state, too - some states don't have many hip cities) - not people taking a lime bike from apodment to office.
What hustle and bustle? Campuses of the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are surrounded by layers of suburbs, populated (purely due to prices, both current and over time, considering who could purchase when) by "experiences, accomplished folks". They probably live the closest to office and have the shortest commutes.
Probably an East Coast/West Coast thing, then. We'll just leave it at that, eh?
I've lived on the East Coast for my entire adult life, and have experienced three metropolitan areas, and Not. One. Of. Them. had a 37-minute commute between an affordable suburb, and the center of the city.
Not. One.
I have managed to find jobs in the suburbs, which means they are probably not as high-paying as they could have been, in the city, but they worked out OK. Even then, I had ridiculous commutes (like 45 minutes to go 6 miles, in MD). My daily commute here, on Long Island, was 35 minutes to go 10 miles (for 27 years). That was from North Shore Long Island, to the center of the island. If I wanted to go to the city from here, it would have been at least 90 minutes, if I left at about 4AM (which many people around here do). 2-3 hours, in rush hour.
The thing about most companies on the East Coast, is they ain't real big on flexible hours. You need to travel during rush hour. The companies in the city can be a bit more flexible (I know of many people that work from 6AM-3PM), but the drive still sucks.
It's really weird to see people saying that this isn't happening, when it definitely is happening, and has been happening for decades, and I see it, every day. Miserable commutes have been a regular topic for discussion amongst my peers for as long as I can remember.
I have to assume there's some kind of cultural gulf. I definitely know that the tech industry is pretty sick with ageism, so that's a good bet. The people that live around me, are actually fairly well-off. The ones further East are likely to be lower on the food chain, and have much worse commutes.
NYC was fun in my 20s, but I could not believe the older people I was working with spent ~3 hours per day commuting to and from Manhattan and NJ/CT/NY.
Their entire life, Mon to Fri, was wake up, go to work, maybe spend an hour with kids or watch TV, go to sleep, and repeat.
And they did not get paid enough to do it from age 30 to 55 or even 65. The only amount of pay that would be enough would be an amount that allows you to quit that nonsense life after a few years.
Nope - he was quite a family man, great dad, gave every minute that he was at home to his family.
The money was good - I'm pretty sure that was the motivation. Also part of his personality - he grew up in serious poverty and was driven to climb the ladder. And climb he did.
Average I don't know about, but my commute into Manhattan from Jersey was 2 hours, one way door to door. You have to count driving to the train station and the time it takes to get from the station to the actual office.
That said, the actual train ride was approx 75 minutes.
Even worse, I drove to Westchester for a number of years and that was 120 miles a day (60 one way) including a trip over the Tappan Zee! At least on the train ride I could read.
I no longer live in the NYC area and certainly don't miss those commutes.
In Montreal, QC however, it easily takes 1.5-2 hours to go downtown and another 1.5-2h to come back.. especially during winter time. A lawyer friend of mine would leave his house at 6 AM to be at court by 9..
One starts to lose his sanity somewhere between the potholes, broken roads, construction, crazy drivers, freezing rain and no parking..
Maybe not the average, but millions of people commute to a city like Atlanta every day. From the middle of Forsyth County in GA, where there are many exurbs of Atlanta that feed workers into the city, the drive is slated to be 1-2 hours over 44 miles to downtown as we speak even now. And nothing is 'wrong,' currently - this is not some outlier.
Many people that I know make this kind of drive in the Atlanta area, and that's not due to them all being in particular industries either. 1-2 hours to get across the city and into the suburbs/exurbs is a fact of life, and millions do it.
No, most people in NYC are not commuting 2-3 hours each way. That's insane to say.
I know a couple people who have done it -- living in deep Brooklyn far from the subway and teaching in the Bronx, or living deep in Staten Island and commuting to the Upper East Side -- but it is extremely uncommon.
The average NYC commute is 40 minutes. And only 10% of NYC workers have a commute longer than 60 minutes. [1]
When I worked in NYC a few years ago, I was living in an apartment on Long Island, the LIRR was 1h30m on average, plus 10 minute drive to get to the train station, plus another 20 minute walk from Penn to 3rd ave where I worked. On rainy days I'd take the subway but there isn't a direct route so I'd have to change at times square so it always ended up taking longer than walking.
Easily 2+ hours each way from door to door. And let me tell you, the LIRR is vastly overfilled during peak. You're lucky to get a seat for that 90 minute leg of your trip, and if you didn't, you were probably sardine packed in the aisle.
I assert that most of the folks that claim insane large commutes have been bitten by what happens if you don't adjust how you commute to a place. This particularly bites people that move to a city, as they want to keep their car commute all too often. Similarly, it bites folks that move out of the city, as they want to stay on transit, but that drops in effectiveness as you leave the density.
I knew someone who commuted from Philadelphia to Manhattan every day. Worked in a museum, so it was her dream job but didn't pay much. Longest commute I've know someone to do daily.
I'm in NJ- my commute into the city is an hour. Most people that I know of have commutes in the 30-90 minute range, throughout NJ, NYC, and Connecticut
I live in Western Suffolk County. I never commuted to the City, but many of my friends do.
Driving is 90 minutes, if you leave at 5AM. Train is 2 hours (including in-city time).
Many folks commute from even farther East.
Please don’t tell me that I’m “insane.” I would never have done that commute, myself, but have lived here for over 30 years, and have seen (with my own little eyes), people doing this every day.
I did not call you insane- that was another commenter.
I also don't doubt there are long commutes. However, I will assert that that is not the typical experience in New York, or elsewhere. No one in my at-work peer group has a commute that long, and no one in my outside-of-work friend group has a commute that long.
Does your peer group have kids and earns enough to buy a house in a suburb of NYC?
Without kids, there is no reason for the commute. But putting kids in an upscale suburban neighborhood with other kids of similar earning parents is the reason that I saw people put up with that commute.
Average commute time in NYC MSA is 37.7 minutes, longest of any major MSA in the country. DC MSA is 35.6 minutes. Only ~23% of NYC have commutes longer than hour, and ~18% in DC.
(Note: statistics are using 2019 data, so doesn't account for anything COVID related, and people who don't commute are excluded from the statistics.)
Must be nice to own a place in Dumbo or Nassau County.
Out here, in the affordable section, it's not as easy.
When I lived in the DC suburbs, 32 years ago, I lived in Gaithersburg, MD. I worked in Rockville (1 exit south, on I-270). Six miles, as the crow flies.
My daily commute was 45 minutes.
I-270 is a charming bit of tarmac. It's a 12-lane parking lot, that stretches from Frederick, to the Beltway.
I have no idea where those stats come from, but they sure as hell don't reflect the reality, around here.
Reality has a nasty way of not caring what the stats say.
I grew up in the DC suburbs (VA side). There's definitely a lot of people who have 40-minute commutes or the like... but 20 and 30 minute commutes are not reasonably uncommon. When I had to cross the river on the Woodrow Wilson (in the era they were building the new one, no less, so perma-construction), my commute was regularly about 20-30 minutes long, although morning was routinely shorter than afternoon (295 just crawls trying to get back onto 495).
For a while in Los Angeles I had a commute of around an hour each way. Even in that sprawling eternal traffic jam of a city, my friends and coworkers considered my commute to be notably long.
An interesting implication of this is that there's probably a lot of money to be made in the long run in shorting present-day valuable city real estate.
