Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work. Hard to draw the line between your work time and your personal time Not just that, but there's also the other side: Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. I know these issues from remote workers I worked with, but also know this personally while working on my Diploma theses. Whi…
> Not just that, but there's also the other side: Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. That doesn't seem a problem unique to remote work. It's more about when tangible outputs are required from you.
Why Do We Still Commute?
231–240 of 400 posts
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've thought about this in the past. What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work. On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would…
Or at least encourage you to 'start at 10am' and other times, so that 7:30am-9am is not a single solid rush hour.. Spread the traffic over 3-4 hours, and its much nicer for everyone..
In the bay area the morning crush is anywhere between 6:45 and 11:45. I've sometimes tried the "man traffic looks really bad right now and I don't have any meetings in the morning, I'll wait until later to start my commute" and then check again at 10:30 and it's the same _or worse_.
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Too bad just paying poor people not to use the bridge isn't politically correct. Why does nobody ever try free public transportation? Paying the poor brings a lot of practical issues, but at a minimum you can make them not pay for taking the long route.
> free public transportation Because someone has to pay for it.
And yet, here we are, paying it through the nose by losing time in transit, and contemplating wether it would be a moral thing to pay poor people into taking a longer route.
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#234There is some value to commuting for work. I attribute it to hippocampal remaps when moving to the workplace, which helps you get into "work mode", associate your workplace with actually working and also give your "home" cells a rest. The solution to this would be "work centers" in every neighborhood where you can go to feel like working. I think some psychologists should do some research on the subject , remote work…
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What if companies had to pay for the time you spend commuting? They'd have an incentive to hire people as close as possible, and support local policies that make it easier to live closer to work. I don't know. I worry that would immediately become a major form of discrimination -- it would inherently put anyone who was poor/middle-class or anyone with any sort of family/children at a huge employment disadvantage. L…
I don't think we should take it for granted that it's prohibitively expensive to live in cities. That may be the state of metro areas in North America right now (SF, NYC, Vancouver) but historically this isn't a constant. Obviously enough economic incentive exists to convince people to spend the time and effort to commute, but if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far awa…
> if city centers were more affordable to live in, many fewer would choose to live so far away from work. Myself included.
I agree, and would personally do the same too if possible. But I've watched us artificially inflate property values for literally my entire life. Even in my tiny US Midwest city in the middle of nowhere, city center prices have never been remotely affordable.
We should take it for granted that it's too expensive to live in US/CA/AUS/NZ cities -- because that's the honest truth. That's been the current state for decades, and there's very little chance that any major city center ever becomes affordable again in our lifetimes.
Obviously, we should still try to fix this. I fully support trying. But every facet of our society is wholly dedicated to preventing city centers from ever becoming affordable. Affordable city centers just are not likely to happen. We should not assume regular people live in a situation that doesn't exist, and likely never will.
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that is not professional. If there is anything work related, you book a meeting and then discuss. For this reason I know few people are on the look out when to go get the water without stumbling upon a boss or a manager, because they take it as a harassment. This adds huge amount of stress and knocks the productivity. Workplaces with "we are big family" approach are the worse. This should be illegal.
This seems like a very restrictive and unproductive way to do things. Does no work-related discussion take place without someone booking a formal meeting?
Why would you discuss things that are not work related? Some people don't have boundaries apparently.
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#237Seems to me that this has a pretty intimate relation to the question of the "nature of the firm." Why do we work in firms rather than as independent contractors making contracts with each other? Why do we gather in rooms every day instead of working independently and emailing each other with low frequency asynchronous requests? I don't really understand firms, to be honest... I suspect it has way more to do with inst…
That's a great point, and the nature of the firm is something worth thinking about especially in this context. However, the "firm" structure creates lots of efficiencies. Individual contracts are costly to enforce and having one type of contract (the employee contract) allows hiring to scale a lot better. Employees (and usually not contractors) are exclusive to an employer which is also desirable for employers. Emplo…
My intuition is that people like to start firms because they enjoy the feeling of being tribal leaders, and people like to participate in firms because of ordinary tribal hierarchical belonging...
And the subtle near-mystical benefits to being in the same room, the "high bandwidth communication" of "body language" and all those things, all seem to me to have a great deal to do with the ancient structure of the primate dominance hierarchy!
You notice when you bring up the topic of remote work in an organization that isn't fully remote already (i.e., isn't operated by introverted shamanic nomads) that it's totally not a decision about rational economic benefits. It seems to be much more about family, tribe, smelling each other's sweat, etc.
Benefit calculations are tricky because you could find just as many benefits to working separately, although it might lead to you to think of work in a different way, a less tribal way.
You don't argue that professors, poets, and carpenters need to huddle up in a boiler room to get their work done, because we know that some modes of working more require privacy, relaxation, autonomy, etc.
I think tribalism is really powerful and like a core force in our evolutionary heritage. As it happens, I personally tend to inhabit the fringes of the tribe, and I do better work in a solitary or remote situation.
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#238I think that the 'importance of face-to-face interaction' argument is a helplessly contrived one, an attempt to avoid the elephant in the room. There are plenty of examples that show that working remotely without daily face-to-face interaction can work very well. What's markedly different about environments that successfully adopted remote work are aspects like: - a lack of cargo cult work organisation and office pol…
Another huge problem is the transition path from "everyone in the same office" to "everyone working remote". If you have 60% of your team sitting in the office, and 40% remote, you can be absolutely certain that those 40% will be out of touch on all those important decisions that just emerge during a watercooler conversation. (The watercooler also provides a way for different teams to get to know each other, even if…
I've worked on distributed teams that had an always-on video conference that everyone joined all day, every day. This facilitated much of the communication you are describing. The team still used instant message and email, but if someone needed to have a conversation, it was just a matter of looking at them to see if they looked they were busy and just saying "Hey!" If other people were interested they would listen in. If they had something to add, it was just a matter of speaking up.
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a very restrictive and unproductive way to do things. Does no work-related discussion take place without someone booking a formal meeting?
Why would you discuss things that are not work related? Some people don't have boundaries apparently.
I'm having trouble understanding you. Are you saying that:
1. All work-related discussion should take place in formal meetings.
and
2. No non-work-related discussions should ever happen in the workplace.
?
Re: Why Do We Still Commute?
#240Blown away by how many people on here can walk to work. If you live in the South, most of our cities just aren't built that way. Most people have a 1/2 hour commute morning and night. Living downtown usually means ancient houses in an area I wouldn't consider very safe. Suburbs are terrible in other ways though.
The article was posted during the middle of the European working day.