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Why Do We Still Commute?

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Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#351

Post by enraged_camel »

happypanda wrote: post #333
codingdave wrote: post #81

I worked from home for five years, and just this week started back into a job where I commute to an office. I don't love the commute, but I also don't agree that working from home is a universally better answer for me on a personal level. Everyone knows the benefits of working from home, but there are downsides as well. Fixable downsides, but they exist nonetheless -- it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work.…

I've been working from home for 6 years and am currently looking for a job I can commute to. I am productive at home but I miss the camaraderie that an office setting provides. Human interaction is important to me and it took 6 years of working from home, feeling isolated, to figure that out.

I used to feel this way, until I realized that the real problem was my lack of a good social life outside of work. Once I took care of that (meetup.com is great) I stopped yearning for office camaraderie. In fact I find it a bit annoying now - everyone I work with has kids so that's all they talk about, whereas my social circle is full of people with similar interests as me.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#352

Post by agumonkey »

codingdave wrote: post #81

I worked from home for five years, and just this week started back into a job where I commute to an office. I don't love the commute, but I also don't agree that working from home is a universally better answer for me on a personal level. Everyone knows the benefits of working from home, but there are downsides as well. Fixable downsides, but they exist nonetheless -- it is easy to become a hermit. Easy to over-work.…

What amazes me is how with age, places mean emotions. Before I enjoyed having everything at hand in one place. Context switching happened for free. Now I enjoy having a place where I can go deep into a thing, then a place where I can relax, etc etc

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#353

Post by 20years »

ransom1538 wrote: post #82
BjoernKW wrote: post #14

I 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…

"Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen. " Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time . If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a respo…

I would not consider working for a company that required a 2 minute slack response time, especially for a role that required uninterrupted focus. Different story if you are in a "put out fires" role

Is it more important to actually get stuff done or to be available for every distracting slack message that comes through?

If you need people to respond within 2 minutes to every message, that is lack of organization imo unless it is an emergency.

Good remote teams are very organized, prioritize documentation, have weekly and sometimes daily kick off meetings and then for the most part get out of the way for their team to get stuff done.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#354

Post by Ascetik »

wambotron wrote: post #241
vog wrote: post #133

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…

> Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline. This isn't a remote problem. I see this _all_ the time with people at work now and I don't work remotely. This is more of a personal issue -- some people do it consistently, others don't. I never had that problem working remotely, and I don't pretend to be somewhere else in my regular repo…

I 100% agree. Being disciplined at work is a personal issue. I find I work much more efficiently at home than in an office. People who are lazy are lazy because they haven't developed the rights habits and motivation to work properly and efficiently. I saw more slacking off in offices than anywhere else in my entire life.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#355

Post by user15672 »

BjoernKW wrote: post #14

I 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…

Calling the argument contrived is really rather immature. It's not contrived, it's very real and important. Please stop being so quick to dismiss those that you disagree with as it's childish at best.

You speak of cargo cult, but your entire comment reeks of it. Ok, we understand, you like being able to isolate yourself. That's nice, and I'm glad you found a niche, but it's not the same for the vast majority of jobs and people. You call other people lazy, but I think perhaps that's just you. Social interaction and moving above an intermediate level where you can isolate yourself is hard work. Don't be so dismissive of others that strive for more.

Working remotely is great for the unambitious and the antisocial. Please stop trying to put those who do more down though.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#356

Post by [deleted] »

burntsushi wrote: post #250
briffle wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

That's what I do. I commute to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA. I get into the office at 6:30AM every day and leave by 2:30PM. It's still not a lovely commute---maybe 40 to 50 minutes each way---but it's half the time if I were forced to work 9-5. I pay for this with sleep. It's hard for me to get to sleep before 10PM. :-)

[deleted]

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#357

Post by ptero »

j_s wrote: post #156
ptero wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office While this can work for some people, such "interruptible anytime" mentality may not be good for many workers. For example, when I am most productive I need to minimize, and ideally eliminate, disruptions. Such periods are short (2 hours at most for me), but I could do 90% of day's technical work in those 2 hours. If someone wa…

Schedule some time, maybe call it a meeting on your work-wide-visible calendar.

This is exactly what I am talking about: a set of infrequent, mandatory meetings with most/all other comms on a high latency async channel.

It takes significantly more discipline for a PM to run things this way, but the reward is often better productivity and happier, less frazzled developers.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#358

Post by humanrebar »

sokoloff wrote: post #281
humanrebar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you would also be incentivized to locate your office in a more commutable location. In some cases, a slightly higher rent would even make sense to offset the costs of paying people to commute.

Maybe. (In fact, we already care quite a bit about commuting time and ease because we want to retain our developers in a very competitive employment market.) I think it's more likely that the interview process would just have another step to suss out how much commuting time I'd be paying you for, and then figuring out how to divide up your day rate of $400 (higher in reality, of course) across the buckets. So Laura L…

> So Laura Long Commute gets $40/hr * 10 hrs/day and Sally Short Commute gets $50/hr * 8 hours/day.

You'd have to be careful about that. Employers might end up, in data, showing a negative impact against some protected class (married people, certain races) if they weigh hiring or compensation decisions based on proximity to the office.

It's my understanding that current jurisprudence doesn't require proof of intention to discriminate, just evidence of disparate impact. Single and married people live in different neighborhoods. Different races do as well, depending on the city. Non-heterosexual people tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods, too, for that matter. If a class action suit can show that married people are paid 10% less than single people for equivalent roles, it could be problematic.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#359

Post by pasbesoin »

Why don't we build high-speed transport for commuting, as opposed to long distance travel which, in the U.S., doesn't sell or even often fit well?

In Chicago, electric train service used to run a lot faster. Not just within the city, but also within the greater Chicagoland area. Way back when, the service that's been supplanted by the Metra diesel trains used to be able to punch well above 60 MPH. And with smaller trains, it could get to that more rapidly and provide more frequent service.

And the Green Line used to move. Lack of maintenance had it down to a fast crawl, in places, I understand, although some much-belated renovation may have improved that somewhat -- I'm not up-to-date.

Bay Area housing prices are simply ridiculous. If the region is going to keep growing (so far, no stopping it), then put housing further out while providing fast access to the core(s).

That would move a lot more people, and solve a lot more problems, than an LA - Frisco Hyperloop.

But, we don't have real urban, metropolitan planning, here. And, "taxes are bad".

So, we sit in our cars, and pay half our earnings to the ponzi scheme and rentiers.

P.S. Once a robot can do everything currently requiring physical presence, your tele-presence, where still needed, is going to become a fungible commodity; no job security, there.

P.P.S. Another major approach is a denser core. But NIMBY. A NYMBY I'm not entirely unsympathetic towards. If you don't solve noise and pollution, among other things, forgetaboutit. In my case, I would have been happy closer in in an apartment/condo, but the prospect of dealing with ever-noisier neighbors ruled that out. And wiping black "dust" (vehicle emissions soot, mostly) from my window sills. After years of allergies and whatnot, that stuff will kill you; more articles on this, every year.

Re: Why Do We Still Commute?

#360

Post by mruniverse »

blunte wrote: post #34
mruniverse wrote: post #25

We have open offices because we need to be close. We have remote workers because we don't need them close.

Nope. Nope. We have open offices because some genius did the simple math and realized that you can cram more people into a smaller space if you remove the walls. Then somewhere along the way, some marketing guy came up with the spin, "It fosters communication!". Open office does indeed make people close in proximity, but it's not a necessity.

I think the open office started with Chiat/Day (ad/design firm). It was back when laptops were first introduced and it was seen as a cool way to work. People would get to be mobile, sit anywhere they want, etc.

Found this: https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3

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