7 ms·

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-product

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.

thedangler 4y ago
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.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  I can't imagine a dev shop not providing free coffee. The ROI has to be positive!
- Jorengarenar 4y ago
  You have to pay for the coffee?!
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    In many countries yes.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > They make $115k a month of employees buying coffee ... parking we have to pay for, or lunch, or snacks Lol what? Why are they making you pay for these things?
  - gman2093 4y ago
    Some places make money selling software, some places make money selling out their employees!
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      It is back to the coal mining days it seems.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    It's a profit center.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Or is it a cost-centre because most people wouldn’t work under those conditions and so you don’t get the best people to make profit with?
      - UncleOxidant 4y ago
        In the interviewing process they try to determine which potential employees will drink the most coffee.
- triceratops 4y ago
  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.
- fbdab103 4y ago
  Do you know what office space costs? Incredibly difficult to imagine the coffee scheme is netting an observable dent to the balance sheet.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> Employees waste 2 of their 16 I suspect that you don't commute to a large city (either via car or mass transit). It's more like 4-6 hours. Crazy.
- elijaht 4y ago
  The average commute in a large city is definitely not 2-3 hours one way.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    Come to New York, then. I have sad news for you. DC was even worse.
    - elijaht 4y ago
      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
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
        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.
        elijaht 4y ago
        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.
closeparen 4y ago
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. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best-worst-cities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best...
- srveale 4y ago
  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) https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-travel-time-to-work-rises.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    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.
- zhengyi13 4y ago
  ... 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.)
  - closeparen 4y ago
    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!
purpleblue 4y ago
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.
- Eupraxias 4y ago
  I also followed this model for a few years, and in retrospect, it was the ideal. I recommend this to anyone looking for a perfect 'hybrid'.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
We just ran a giant 2 year WFH experiment. It didn't hurt productivity.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
>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.
- deathanatos 4y ago
  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.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    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).
  - trap_goes_hot 4y ago
    >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.
pugworthy 4y ago
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.
- ProZsolt 4y ago
  How easy would be for you to change employer with similar commute?
  - pugworthy 4y ago
    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?
hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago
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.
akira2501 4y ago
> 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.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  "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.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    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.
layer8 4y ago
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.
- ProZsolt 4y ago
  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.
- extragood 4y ago
  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.
Chinjut 4y ago
"The idea of an office is almost offensively stupid. The business place. You come here to get on the computer." —InternetHippo, https://twitter.com/internethippo/status/1292842056008704000 https://twitter.com/internethippo/status/1292842056008704000

thedangler 4y ago

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.

osigurdson 4y ago
I can't imagine a dev shop not providing free coffee. The ROI has to be positive!
Jorengarenar 4y ago
You have to pay for the coffee?!
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  In many countries yes.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> They make $115k a month of employees buying coffee ... parking we have to pay for, or lunch, or snacks Lol what? Why are they making you pay for these things?
- gman2093 4y ago
  Some places make money selling software, some places make money selling out their employees!
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    It is back to the coal mining days it seems.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  It's a profit center.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Or is it a cost-centre because most people wouldn’t work under those conditions and so you don’t get the best people to make profit with?
    - UncleOxidant 4y ago
      In the interviewing process they try to determine which potential employees will drink the most coffee.
triceratops 4y ago
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.
fbdab103 4y ago
Do you know what office space costs? Incredibly difficult to imagine the coffee scheme is netting an observable dent to the balance sheet.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> Employees waste 2 of their 16 I suspect that you don't commute to a large city (either via car or mass transit). It's more like 4-6 hours. Crazy.

elijaht 4y ago
The average commute in a large city is definitely not 2-3 hours one way.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  Come to New York, then. I have sad news for you. DC was even worse.
  - elijaht 4y ago
    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
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
      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.
      - elijaht 4y ago
        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.

closeparen 4y ago

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. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best-worst-cities.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best...

srveale 4y ago
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) https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-travel-time-to-work-rises.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  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.
zhengyi13 4y ago
... 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.)
- closeparen 4y ago
  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!

purpleblue 4y ago

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.

Eupraxias 4y ago
I also followed this model for a few years, and in retrospect, it was the ideal. I recommend this to anyone looking for a perfect 'hybrid'.

UncleOxidant 4y ago

We just ran a giant 2 year WFH experiment. It didn't hurt productivity.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

>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.

deathanatos 4y ago
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.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  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).
- trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  >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.

pugworthy 4y ago

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.

ProZsolt 4y ago
How easy would be for you to change employer with similar commute?
- pugworthy 4y ago
  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?

hiAndrewQuinn 4y ago

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.

akira2501 4y ago

> 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.

throwaway675309 4y ago
"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.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  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.

layer8 4y ago

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.

ProZsolt 4y ago
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.
extragood 4y ago
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.

Chinjut 4y ago

"The idea of an office is almost offensively stupid. The business place. You come here to get on the computer." —InternetHippo, https://twitter.com/internethippo/status/1292842056008704000 https://twitter.com/internethippo/status/1292842056008704000