7 ms·

Commuting Kills

65 points by mmaunder 11y ago

ggchappell 11y ago
Long commutes are of course a problem. However, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number. The problem is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a problem. An hour or more is a serious problem. 90 minutes or more is, for most jobs, ridiculous. Actually, I see rather more good news than bad news in the referenced statistics. According to the source ([1], see the table on page 2) only 2.3% of Americans have a one-way commute of 90 or more minutes. Only 7.5% have an hour or more. But 33.5% -- more than a third -- have 30 minutes or more; that is troubling. By the way, the statistics in the source[1] strike me as a little suspect. In particular, the big bump at "30 to 34 minutes" suggests that a lot of people were thinking, "Oh, about 30 minutes." That kind of estimation is not mentioned among the possible sources of error. Someone was not thinking clearly enough when that Census Bureau report was written. [1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf
- mmaunder 11y ago
  Hi. I'm the author of the post. The Census report you mention is cited by a lot of other posts out there re work habits. That definitely doesn't make it more credible - just wanted to mention that it's often cited.
  - ggchappell 11y ago
    I don't think there's any problem with citing an official Census Bureau report. Certainly they are the definitive source for statistics on the U.S. population. And I imagine the numbers in the report give a correct overall impression of commute times. However, I suspect the conclusions in the report as to the accuracy of the data are a bit overblown.
- melling 11y ago
  "30 minutes or more is a problem" I live 4 miles from midtown Manhattan. That's about a 30 minute bus ride during rush hour. An hour commute is probably the average commute from the suburbs to NYC.
  - cm2012 11y ago
    Cool fact: The average NYC commute is 79 minutes a day, 40 minutes each way.
    - melling 11y ago
      Are you sure about that? I'm seeing 48 minutes. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-commute-times-article-1.1426047 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-... This includes people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens, which is most likely less than 10 miles to work.
      - cm2012 11y ago
        That could be right too.
  - lbaskin 11y ago
    Which suburbs? An hour sounds rather optimistic. It's at least an hour to midtown from Westchester, Long Island, and the NJ suburbs that aren't on the PATH.
- pekk 11y ago
  Multiplying minutes by millions of people does give a first approximation to how much energy use, pollution, and congestion you are causing. Commute times matter even if you don't care that people are sitting for 15 minutes (or 45, or 90).
- codva 11y ago
  When I said I wanted to be in the 1% I wasn't talking about commuting times. 90 minutes in, 2 hours coming home most days. Only saving grace is that I'm not driving for most of it.
dupe576 11y ago
That's why I think everyone should bike to work if possible. It has little to no environmental impact and a positive health impact. And because you are killing two birds with one stone by exercising during your commute, you really aren't wasting any time.
- douche 11y ago
  Unfortunately, where I'm at, four or five months out of the year, it's below freezing and even if you could brave the cold, you'd be taking your life in your hands with the narrowed roads, drivers that cannot navigate snowy/icy conditions, and snowplows.
  - upofadown 11y ago
    Fortunately more than one transportation mode exists. When I used to bike commute in Winnipeg I would just take the bus in the winter (4-5 months). Also, fortunately, few people live in such extreme climates as us.
    - douche 11y ago
      That's a good alternative, in places where buses exist. In New England, at least, outside the very core of the urban areas, public transit of any kind is uncertain at best, and mostly completely unavailable.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  Biking is fine if you are a prof at a college campus, or the boss of some hip startup, but I cannot arrive at work sweating through a horribly wrinkled suit. We don't have showers. I have yet to meet anyone who has communized by bike in my city (Vancouver BC) for more than a few years without a major altercation with a motorvehicle. It might be healthy, but it is also physically dangerous.
  - ocb 11y ago
    Some places have lots of off-road bike trails. I live in Minneapolis and bike to work most days in the spring, summer, and fall (on a bike trail). The ground is flat, so it's easy to go 12+ mph without breaking a sweat.
ryandrake 11y ago
My commute is a solid 2+ hours each way. I thought it would make me crazy, but acceptance has sort of seeped in after a couple of years. On one hand, it would be nice to have free time and/or see my family, but on the other hand, my family simply won't fit into a 900 square foot box in South Bay or a hammock in SF, which is what I could afford in those locales.
- cm2012 11y ago
  Mine has been an hour and a half by bus each way for 2 years or so, it's not all the bad to me. I do hate it when I'm delayed though - even ten minutes extra seems soul killing.
- protomyth 11y ago
  Mine is a little over 30 minutes in good weather[1] (28 miles of mostly highway), Sirius XM and Audible have been great investments. Its about the right length to get the days work sorted out in my mind, but I would live closer if I could. The reservation suffers from a serious housing shortage never mind not being a member of the local tribe, and eastern ND has a lot of families of folks working in western ND, so housing is a bit hard to find. 1) 2 hours in crappy, why the heck didn't I go home sooner weather
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    satellite radio is awesome. the best thing about it is it's the same channels and programs everywhere you go in the country.
trjordan 11y ago
"...strong, rational and tangible reasons why an employee needs to be based on-site, rather than intangibles like culture, narrative or norms." What. This sentiment is exactly what's wrong with trying to push for more remote work. I don't think we have the tools, either technical or managerial, to build fully-remote companies that are as effective as in-person companies. There are niches where this is true, but they're not particularly fun places to work: call centers come to mind. Companies are living, breathing, organic organizations. The fundamental assumption that I'd challenge is that productivity towards a goal is what's hold back most organizations (or divisions / teams). I think productivity can be a bottleneck, but most of what makes companies successful is doing the right thing, not the most things. (Otherwise, startups could never compete.) As of 2015, I don't believe we have ways to get everybody in a company aligned in ways to make that happen. One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other. Sitting next to each other, getting coffee with each other, BSing with each other before / after meetings, etc. There's a lot of unstructured communication that's simply lost, even with tools like Slack. If that direction is there, then you can start to complain about things like lost productivity and commutes. But if there's isn't a strong sense of direction and consensus on where we're going, it doesn't matter how fast everybody is running. (FWIW, I put my money where my mouth is on this one. I did a 3.5 hour daily commute for 2.5 years, in spite of an office 5 minutes away, because it made things better for me team.)
- chuckcode 11y ago
  I would love to see better tools to help people collaborate remotely, or even just from a different building on the same campus. Certainly the rise of applications like slack and github show that the demand is there. Personally I'm surprised that most businesses haven't invested more time in collaboration tools since labor is such a big portion of the service economy's expenses. I do think that remote work requires some culture and managerial changes as well but the success of many popular open source projects with remote teams shows that it certainly is possible.
- BjoernKW 11y ago
  > One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other There are blatant examples to the contrary: Just look at most large organizations. Getting people to work on the right things isn't a matter of spending time together, it's a matter of company culture! In a company that's constrained by processes and pointless bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake hardly anything ever will get done, much less so the right things. Long commutes are not a sustainable way of living and working. If we don't have the tools for making remote work a realistic option for most companies we simply need better tools.
frequent 11y ago
I started to walk to work more than a year ago (5km one way, about 45mins). Makes a world of a difference, as it gives me more or less two hours of exercise per day, time to get my mind on/off of work, call family/friends and other stuff. Bottom line for me - it's less the time spent commuting, than whether you can spend it in a useful way.
- mmaunder 11y ago
  Good point. I have a standing desk, so always looking for ways to turn work into some health benefits. Also reminds me of my commute in London via tube from Putney to Canary Wharf which was over an hour each way. I learned two new programming languages while doing that commute.
- justindz 11y ago
  I ride the metro for about 1:30 a day (part of which is walking to and fro), which I prefer to my prior driving commute of 25-30 minutes. I have had to increase my fantasy and sci-fi novel budget, however.
- habosa 11y ago
  I agree completely. I take the shuttle from SF to Mountain View every day (I work at Google). It's about 70m door to door each way. For the first 6 months of work I was miserable, 70 minutes is way more time than I wanted to check my RSS and Email so I was bored. Boredom kept my mind on the commute, and thinking about the time made me angry. I decided to use the time to read books as a new years resolution. Having at least 2h a day, 5 days a week to read books has made me fly through books faster than any other time in my life. I've already read 21 books since January and I actually look forward to my reading time now! I think if I had this time at home I would not be using it so peacefully/productively, I'd probably waste it on Netflix. That said, 70m each way is more than I need. I think 30m each way would be the ideal balance of forced mind-clearing and reasonable work-life balance.
  - completefudd 11y ago
    Why not do actual work on the shuttle ride?
rayiner 11y ago
The article argues for telecommuting to reduce commutes. I think a far less radical approach would be to open multiple offices and put teams in more affordable secondary cities. Modern technology has made it pretty easy to spread your organization across multiple offices. I work at an organization of less than 35 people that has offices in three cities. Outsourcing IT/HR/building administration makes it pretty low-cost to have additional offices, to the point where it might actually be cheaper when you weigh the fixed overhead of each location against the cheaper office space outside NYC/SF. I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.
- munificent 11y ago
  That works OK, but it increases the costs of reorganizing teams and projects. If your project structure changes frequently, it really helps if that just involves moving people from one room to another and not having to tell them to find a new home.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    The other way to do this is basically a 100% remote company that owns coworking offices, and only lets employees cowork from there. To rephrase, think if WeWork closed their doors to non-WeWork employees, and let their employees work from any WeWork, or from home.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    I guess that depends on what you think the value-add is of offices versus remote working. In our organization, the value-add is forcing everyone to be on the same work schedule, promulgating organizational culture, giving managers an idea of peoples' workload so they can load-balance, and meeting the need of people to socialize. We cross-staff on a per-matter basis, and we'll generally conduct inter-team communication over email and phone whether even when the team is within a few doors of each other. Email is efficient and asynchronous. We get together in person at milestone events, where, e.g., the whole team will fly in and take over a conference room for a day or two to prepare for a big upcoming event. If you think the value-add of offices is facilitating informal, day-to-day inter-team communication, than obviously having people in different offices makes reorganization harder. And admittedly, its been years since I was on a software team. That said, even at that time, I found people dropping by my cube, instead of emailing, to ask a question about an API I restructured to be annoying rather than productive. It's PIO instead of DMA--a waste of clock cycles. YMMV.
munificent 11y ago
> The way I see it, remote-workers are like work-place superconductivity: Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost. I think that's a weak analogy. I think a better one is that you have a core that's off the motherboard but starts up fast. Sure, there's no wake up time, but your communication with the chip is limited by the bus. We work together to communicate. Being physically remote, even with email, chat, phone, VC, etc. is still lower bandwidth that physical presence. You can certainly make remote work successful, but I think you're lying to yourself if you don't acknowledge that being together in space matters. This article really isn't an argument for remote work any more than it is an argument for living closer to work.
DannyBee 11y ago
" Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost." Except, it doesn't, because achieving productivity usually requires remote workers to be able to collaborate effectively, and whether they can or not varies wildly. The author doesn't seem to get this - if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more. Companies do not want the expense of real estate, amenities, etc Maybe the author should stop to wonder about "hmmm, i'm clearly not the only one to think of this idea, maybe this hasn't happened because there aren't a lot of huge success stories".
- kctess5 11y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034883
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- OrwellianChild 11y ago
  > If remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more. This kind of thinking forgets the fact that the standard office arrangement has been the same since long before modern technologies became the standard way of communicating and planning. We're dealing with a huge legacy of "how it's been done" that is slow to change, despite the fact that I talk to my colleagues by chat and e-mail the vast majority of the time and reliable voice, video, and collab techs are now widely available. Add to this the fact that the remote office has been shown to work for companies that start out that way and work towards that ethos (e.g. Basecamp, others).
- erispoe 11y ago
  If telecommuting was giving a significant advantage to companies, at least some companies would have implemented it successfully. Apart from specific cases, that's not happening. The author's hypothesis is that telecommuting is at least as efficient, consumes less resources and makes people happy. A bold claim, but many have written that before. In light of the evidence, nobody's really doing it, what's the most likely, that the author is right and every company with brick and mortar offices is wrong, or the reverse? Telecommuting is to work what VR sex is to sex. Will some people be content with VR sex only? I'm sure some people will. A majority of them? Not so sure.
OrwellianChild 11y ago
Mark Maunder is being generous with his statistics... With his average 50 min/day commute time, and assuming a 16 hour waking day, you're actually losing a full 2 weeks of waking days each year to commuting. And I think that average belies the large number of people in tech working in dense cities like San Francisco or Seattle where the commute is much worse... We're talking 1-2 hours/day in the Seattle area if you have to cross the bridges. Commuting is truly costly for time, health, and lifestyle in ways that neither the employers nor the employees usually account for. It's a serious externality that I wish we had a better mechanism for capturing, since people more or less take it for granted that they'll be locked in their cars for a large part of their day.
gcb0 11y ago
i love how i moved to be closer to my office, then the office moved some 10miles away to be in a hype place that doesn't even have chairs. only standing desks. and the CEO boasted that sitting kill BS. and here i am, having to drive 20min instead of walking 30min. with an expensive rent next to the old place...
- ap3 11y ago
  At least you are renting and can pick up and leave
utuxia 11y ago
Checkout http://offsite.careers http://offsite.careers -- a professional networking site for remote workers.

65 points by mmaunder 11y ago

Long commutes are of course a problem. However, I am not sure the analysis method used in this article is really the way to look at this issue. The fact that lots of people spend 15 minutes sitting on their rear is not a serious problem, despite the fact that you can multiply that 15 minutes by millions of people to get a large number. The problem is that some people have very long commutes. 30 minutes or more is a problem. An hour or more is a serious problem. 90 minutes or more is, for most jobs, ridiculous. Actually, I see rather more good news than bad news in the referenced statistics. According to the source ([1], see the table on page 2) only 2.3% of Americans have a one-way commute of 90 or more minutes. Only 7.5% have an hour or more. But 33.5% -- more than a third -- have 30 minutes or more; that is troubling. By the way, the statistics in the source[1] strike me as a little suspect. In particular, the big bump at "30 to 34 minutes" suggests that a lot of people were thinking, "Oh, about 30 minutes." That kind of estimation is not mentioned among the possible sources of error. Someone was not thinking clearly enough when that Census Bureau report was written. [1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf

mmaunder 11y ago
Hi. I'm the author of the post. The Census report you mention is cited by a lot of other posts out there re work habits. That definitely doesn't make it more credible - just wanted to mention that it's often cited.
- ggchappell 11y ago
  I don't think there's any problem with citing an official Census Bureau report. Certainly they are the definitive source for statistics on the U.S. population. And I imagine the numbers in the report give a correct overall impression of commute times. However, I suspect the conclusions in the report as to the accuracy of the data are a bit overblown.
melling 11y ago
"30 minutes or more is a problem" I live 4 miles from midtown Manhattan. That's about a 30 minute bus ride during rush hour. An hour commute is probably the average commute from the suburbs to NYC.
- cm2012 11y ago
  Cool fact: The average NYC commute is 79 minutes a day, 40 minutes each way.
  - melling 11y ago
    Are you sure about that? I'm seeing 48 minutes. http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-commute-times-article-1.1426047 http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-... This includes people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens, which is most likely less than 10 miles to work.
    - cm2012 11y ago
      That could be right too.
- lbaskin 11y ago
  Which suburbs? An hour sounds rather optimistic. It's at least an hour to midtown from Westchester, Long Island, and the NJ suburbs that aren't on the PATH.
pekk 11y ago
Multiplying minutes by millions of people does give a first approximation to how much energy use, pollution, and congestion you are causing. Commute times matter even if you don't care that people are sitting for 15 minutes (or 45, or 90).
codva 11y ago
When I said I wanted to be in the 1% I wasn't talking about commuting times. 90 minutes in, 2 hours coming home most days. Only saving grace is that I'm not driving for most of it.

dupe576 11y ago

That's why I think everyone should bike to work if possible. It has little to no environmental impact and a positive health impact. And because you are killing two birds with one stone by exercising during your commute, you really aren't wasting any time.

douche 11y ago
Unfortunately, where I'm at, four or five months out of the year, it's below freezing and even if you could brave the cold, you'd be taking your life in your hands with the narrowed roads, drivers that cannot navigate snowy/icy conditions, and snowplows.
- upofadown 11y ago
  Fortunately more than one transportation mode exists. When I used to bike commute in Winnipeg I would just take the bus in the winter (4-5 months). Also, fortunately, few people live in such extreme climates as us.
  - douche 11y ago
    That's a good alternative, in places where buses exist. In New England, at least, outside the very core of the urban areas, public transit of any kind is uncertain at best, and mostly completely unavailable.
sandworm101 11y ago
Biking is fine if you are a prof at a college campus, or the boss of some hip startup, but I cannot arrive at work sweating through a horribly wrinkled suit. We don't have showers. I have yet to meet anyone who has communized by bike in my city (Vancouver BC) for more than a few years without a major altercation with a motorvehicle. It might be healthy, but it is also physically dangerous.
- ocb 11y ago
  Some places have lots of off-road bike trails. I live in Minneapolis and bike to work most days in the spring, summer, and fall (on a bike trail). The ground is flat, so it's easy to go 12+ mph without breaking a sweat.

ryandrake 11y ago

My commute is a solid 2+ hours each way. I thought it would make me crazy, but acceptance has sort of seeped in after a couple of years. On one hand, it would be nice to have free time and/or see my family, but on the other hand, my family simply won't fit into a 900 square foot box in South Bay or a hammock in SF, which is what I could afford in those locales.

cm2012 11y ago
Mine has been an hour and a half by bus each way for 2 years or so, it's not all the bad to me. I do hate it when I'm delayed though - even ten minutes extra seems soul killing.
protomyth 11y ago
Mine is a little over 30 minutes in good weather[1] (28 miles of mostly highway), Sirius XM and Audible have been great investments. Its about the right length to get the days work sorted out in my mind, but I would live closer if I could. The reservation suffers from a serious housing shortage never mind not being a member of the local tribe, and eastern ND has a lot of families of folks working in western ND, so housing is a bit hard to find. 1) 2 hours in crappy, why the heck didn't I go home sooner weather
- beachstartup 11y ago
  satellite radio is awesome. the best thing about it is it's the same channels and programs everywhere you go in the country.

trjordan 11y ago

"...strong, rational and tangible reasons why an employee needs to be based on-site, rather than intangibles like culture, narrative or norms." What. This sentiment is exactly what's wrong with trying to push for more remote work. I don't think we have the tools, either technical or managerial, to build fully-remote companies that are as effective as in-person companies. There are niches where this is true, but they're not particularly fun places to work: call centers come to mind. Companies are living, breathing, organic organizations. The fundamental assumption that I'd challenge is that productivity towards a goal is what's hold back most organizations (or divisions / teams). I think productivity can be a bottleneck, but most of what makes companies successful is doing the right thing, not the most things. (Otherwise, startups could never compete.) As of 2015, I don't believe we have ways to get everybody in a company aligned in ways to make that happen. One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other. Sitting next to each other, getting coffee with each other, BSing with each other before / after meetings, etc. There's a lot of unstructured communication that's simply lost, even with tools like Slack. If that direction is there, then you can start to complain about things like lost productivity and commutes. But if there's isn't a strong sense of direction and consensus on where we're going, it doesn't matter how fast everybody is running. (FWIW, I put my money where my mouth is on this one. I did a 3.5 hour daily commute for 2.5 years, in spite of an office 5 minutes away, because it made things better for me team.)

chuckcode 11y ago
I would love to see better tools to help people collaborate remotely, or even just from a different building on the same campus. Certainly the rise of applications like slack and github show that the demand is there. Personally I'm surprised that most businesses haven't invested more time in collaboration tools since labor is such a big portion of the service economy's expenses. I do think that remote work requires some culture and managerial changes as well but the success of many popular open source projects with remote teams shows that it certainly is possible.
BjoernKW 11y ago
> One of the most powerful ways of getting people working on the right things is to have them hang out with each other There are blatant examples to the contrary: Just look at most large organizations. Getting people to work on the right things isn't a matter of spending time together, it's a matter of company culture! In a company that's constrained by processes and pointless bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake hardly anything ever will get done, much less so the right things. Long commutes are not a sustainable way of living and working. If we don't have the tools for making remote work a realistic option for most companies we simply need better tools.

frequent 11y ago

I started to walk to work more than a year ago (5km one way, about 45mins). Makes a world of a difference, as it gives me more or less two hours of exercise per day, time to get my mind on/off of work, call family/friends and other stuff. Bottom line for me - it's less the time spent commuting, than whether you can spend it in a useful way.

mmaunder 11y ago
Good point. I have a standing desk, so always looking for ways to turn work into some health benefits. Also reminds me of my commute in London via tube from Putney to Canary Wharf which was over an hour each way. I learned two new programming languages while doing that commute.
justindz 11y ago
I ride the metro for about 1:30 a day (part of which is walking to and fro), which I prefer to my prior driving commute of 25-30 minutes. I have had to increase my fantasy and sci-fi novel budget, however.
habosa 11y ago
I agree completely. I take the shuttle from SF to Mountain View every day (I work at Google). It's about 70m door to door each way. For the first 6 months of work I was miserable, 70 minutes is way more time than I wanted to check my RSS and Email so I was bored. Boredom kept my mind on the commute, and thinking about the time made me angry. I decided to use the time to read books as a new years resolution. Having at least 2h a day, 5 days a week to read books has made me fly through books faster than any other time in my life. I've already read 21 books since January and I actually look forward to my reading time now! I think if I had this time at home I would not be using it so peacefully/productively, I'd probably waste it on Netflix. That said, 70m each way is more than I need. I think 30m each way would be the ideal balance of forced mind-clearing and reasonable work-life balance.
- completefudd 11y ago
  Why not do actual work on the shuttle ride?

rayiner 11y ago

The article argues for telecommuting to reduce commutes. I think a far less radical approach would be to open multiple offices and put teams in more affordable secondary cities. Modern technology has made it pretty easy to spread your organization across multiple offices. I work at an organization of less than 35 people that has offices in three cities. Outsourcing IT/HR/building administration makes it pretty low-cost to have additional offices, to the point where it might actually be cheaper when you weigh the fixed overhead of each location against the cheaper office space outside NYC/SF. I live in Baltimore now, and before that in Wilmington, and I'm astonished that more companies don't have offices in those cities. Both cities have a lot less traffic than D.C. and Philadelphia, respectively, and are well-served by rail. I'd imagine there would be a lot of talented people who would sign up at offices in those cities so long as they weren't backoffice locations and they could still do frontline work.

munificent 11y ago
That works OK, but it increases the costs of reorganizing teams and projects. If your project structure changes frequently, it really helps if that just involves moving people from one room to another and not having to tell them to find a new home.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  The other way to do this is basically a 100% remote company that owns coworking offices, and only lets employees cowork from there. To rephrase, think if WeWork closed their doors to non-WeWork employees, and let their employees work from any WeWork, or from home.
- rayiner 11y ago
  I guess that depends on what you think the value-add is of offices versus remote working. In our organization, the value-add is forcing everyone to be on the same work schedule, promulgating organizational culture, giving managers an idea of peoples' workload so they can load-balance, and meeting the need of people to socialize. We cross-staff on a per-matter basis, and we'll generally conduct inter-team communication over email and phone whether even when the team is within a few doors of each other. Email is efficient and asynchronous. We get together in person at milestone events, where, e.g., the whole team will fly in and take over a conference room for a day or two to prepare for a big upcoming event. If you think the value-add of offices is facilitating informal, day-to-day inter-team communication, than obviously having people in different offices makes reorganization harder. And admittedly, its been years since I was on a software team. That said, even at that time, I found people dropping by my cube, instead of emailing, to ask a question about an API I restructured to be annoying rather than productive. It's PIO instead of DMA--a waste of clock cycles. YMMV.

munificent 11y ago

> The way I see it, remote-workers are like work-place superconductivity: Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost. I think that's a weak analogy. I think a better one is that you have a core that's off the motherboard but starts up fast. Sure, there's no wake up time, but your communication with the chip is limited by the bus. We work together to communicate. Being physically remote, even with email, chat, phone, VC, etc. is still lower bandwidth that physical presence. You can certainly make remote work successful, but I think you're lying to yourself if you don't acknowledge that being together in space matters. This article really isn't an argument for remote work any more than it is an argument for living closer to work.

DannyBee 11y ago

" Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero transmission cost." Except, it doesn't, because achieving productivity usually requires remote workers to be able to collaborate effectively, and whether they can or not varies wildly. The author doesn't seem to get this - if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more. Companies do not want the expense of real estate, amenities, etc Maybe the author should stop to wonder about "hmmm, i'm clearly not the only one to think of this idea, maybe this hasn't happened because there aren't a lot of huge success stories".

kctess5 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10034883
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
OrwellianChild 11y ago
> If remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice, companies would use them more. This kind of thinking forgets the fact that the standard office arrangement has been the same since long before modern technologies became the standard way of communicating and planning. We're dealing with a huge legacy of "how it's been done" that is slow to change, despite the fact that I talk to my colleagues by chat and e-mail the vast majority of the time and reliable voice, video, and collab techs are now widely available. Add to this the fact that the remote office has been shown to work for companies that start out that way and work towards that ethos (e.g. Basecamp, others).
erispoe 11y ago
If telecommuting was giving a significant advantage to companies, at least some companies would have implemented it successfully. Apart from specific cases, that's not happening. The author's hypothesis is that telecommuting is at least as efficient, consumes less resources and makes people happy. A bold claim, but many have written that before. In light of the evidence, nobody's really doing it, what's the most likely, that the author is right and every company with brick and mortar offices is wrong, or the reverse? Telecommuting is to work what VR sex is to sex. Will some people be content with VR sex only? I'm sure some people will. A majority of them? Not so sure.

OrwellianChild 11y ago

Mark Maunder is being generous with his statistics... With his average 50 min/day commute time, and assuming a 16 hour waking day, you're actually losing a full 2 weeks of waking days each year to commuting. And I think that average belies the large number of people in tech working in dense cities like San Francisco or Seattle where the commute is much worse... We're talking 1-2 hours/day in the Seattle area if you have to cross the bridges. Commuting is truly costly for time, health, and lifestyle in ways that neither the employers nor the employees usually account for. It's a serious externality that I wish we had a better mechanism for capturing, since people more or less take it for granted that they'll be locked in their cars for a large part of their day.

gcb0 11y ago

i love how i moved to be closer to my office, then the office moved some 10miles away to be in a hype place that doesn't even have chairs. only standing desks. and the CEO boasted that sitting kill BS. and here i am, having to drive 20min instead of walking 30min. with an expensive rent next to the old place...

ap3 11y ago
At least you are renting and can pick up and leave

utuxia 11y ago

Checkout http://offsite.careers http://offsite.careers -- a professional networking site for remote workers.