
Commuting Kills - mmaunder
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2015/08/commuting-kills/
======
rayiner
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.

~~~
diogenescynic
I know this probably sounds crazy to folks from the Bay Area, but I would
gladly move offices if my company had remote offices in Boise, Minneapolis,
Milwaukee, Chicago, or Denver. I would even take a small pay-cut as long as I
came out ahead when you adjust for cost of living. I don't know why no
companies seem to offer this.

~~~
lbaskin
I feel the same way about NYC. I can see why early-stage companies want to be
in the city, but all these Fortune 500 companies, big law firms, and banks
wouldn't even have to move very far. Instead, I'm stuck on the subway every
day for over an hour (each way) with a few thousand of my nearest and dearest.

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trjordan
"...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.)

~~~
BjoernKW
> 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.

~~~
ladzoppelin
You cant have people drive 2.5 hours to work however that does not make the
parent comment incorrect. Working together is the better option and we need
better tools for remote workers.

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DannyBee
" 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".

~~~
mmaunder
You're looking at this from a founder/company perspective. When I wrote that,
and most of this post I was thinking of three things: The employee, the
greater good (all of us, environment, etc - 'community' for lack of a better
word) and the company.

So you could change that first sentence to read:

"Brain power and productivity arrive instantly where they’re needed with zero
transmission cost [to the employee]"

Employee, company and community aren't mutually exclusive. Reducing commuting
cost for employee makes for someone who's happier, healthier and has more time
available which benefits company and community.

I'd say only considering cost-to-company is less effective and a narrow way to
measure how well your work environment and policies are doing.

"if remote workers were so amazing, and had been so amazing in practice,
companies would use them more..."

An argument that can be used against any innovation with a legacy alternative.

------
ggchappell
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)

~~~
melling
"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
Cool fact: The average NYC commute is 79 minutes a day, 40 minutes each way.

~~~
melling
Are you sure about that? I'm seeing 48 minutes.

[http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-
havelongest-...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/new-yorkers-havelongest-
commute-times-article-1.1426047)

This includes people commuting from Brooklyn and Queens, which is most likely
less than 10 miles to work.

~~~
cm2012
That could be right too.

------
frequent
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.

~~~
habosa
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
Why not do actual work on the shuttle ride?

~~~
habosa
I do enough work at work. Plus I am not very productive on a 13" computer
SSHing over flaky highway WiFi while bumping down the highway compared to
sitting at a workstation with two 24" monitors, gigabit internet, 12cores, and
64GB RAM.

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dupe576
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.

~~~
sandworm101
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.

~~~
fuzzywalrus
There's a double standard for women in many jobs, even in the most bike
friendly city in the US, as a biker I've observed most of my fellow commuters
are men. Its easier for me as there's less expectations placed on my
appearance. I put on a fresh set of clothes, a hat and I'm good to go. I'm
lucky I live where biking is easy, working a non-client facing job, as male
and a company with an indoor bike rack and shower.

------
ryandrake
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.

~~~
protomyth
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
satellite radio is awesome. the best thing about it is it's the same channels
and programs everywhere you go in the country.

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OrwellianChild
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.

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munificent
> 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.

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utuxia
Checkout [http://offsite.careers](http://offsite.careers) \-- a professional
networking site for remote workers.

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gcb0
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
At least you are renting and can pick up and leave

