No form of transport requires less energy than telecommuting. Why aren't there Zoom/MS Teams/Slack bill-boards on 101 and 880? Where is everyone's outrage at needlessly requiring people to move themselves into offices and the congestsion, waste, and environmental damage it causes?
Because corporations are doing the majority of that pro-environmental advertising. I mean that both in terms of companies making changes (both real and greenwashing) and the News/Media corporations reporting on it.
Telecommuting could be absolutely massive for reduced emissions, could bring down urban house prices, improve inter-family relationships, and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas). Plus increase wealth to relatively poor rural areas.
Even some corporations are starting to realize that telecommuting isn't their enemy, but large ships move slowly, and recently we've been seeing a lot of "return to work" used as a way to conduct layoffs with lower negative PR/stock tanking. This isn't a byproduct but a goal of return-to-work (e.g. see Musk's text message conversation during Twitter-lawsuit discovery).
It's actually kind of incredible how it all seems to work. The cringe too of the fawning is a good indicator why Musk feels he can do whatever he likes, including attempting to troll everyone on his board. It seems so juvenile.
I don't think it's that weird, there not a lot of differences between people at the top or at the bottom.
It's the fact that they were idealized that makes this dip into their intimacy so strange.
But basically, those communications look a lot like ones that I would have with my own friends. And when I was a students, we were careful about spending 10 euros. Now, we have casual chats about buying a sauna for the garden, and if you think about it, it would sound crazy to someone making minimum wage.
If I had billions, I would talk as casually about huge amounts for actions with big consequences, because I'm still ...me. And I would still make jokes like "you have my sword" since we quote LOTR for fun, not because of social status. What? You thougth billionaires were taking all their texts seriously?
Also, calling people out for making mistake that cost you is kinda what everybody sane does. And apologizing to people when you made a mistake is not being submissive, it's being decent. Again, it reads like text I would send myself.
All in all, it seems pretty standard human behavior to me.
Now you may feel shocked that regular humans have so much power, but remember:
- a lot of luck is involved
- some skills like managing stress or being persistent may matter more than a lot others and those people may have much more than the average person
- this is by design in our system, the problem therefore is not that humans are humans, but that our system promote profiles that you don't think deserve it
- nevertheless, managing tesla or spacex is not something most people would succeed at, so there is probably some human traits those texts are not showing that make them capable of doing billions of dollars of operations
While it's fair to point out so many of the similarities between the people at the top and the bottom ... there are also differences. Notably, Musk is an outlier in many ways. The vast, vast majority of CEO's are highly conscientious at least in civil terms. They are 'restrained' if anything.
Again, even if they have some qualities that make them different in order to achieve big things, I would expect a Gauss curve to represent most traits distribution at the top like at the bottom. While most people show restrain, a few will be exhuberant, no matter the sample.
It's interesting that you start your post by demythifying these people only to close it by rebuilding the myth again. It's like we can't accept they are just like us posting on HN.
There is nothing mythical as having qualities that others don't have, and any context or system have a local maximum, which optimize for a certain kind of outcome.
My qualities would have me dead 200 years ago, but make me earn money and social status in 2022. It's not that I'm amazing, it's just the current context is very favorable to those qualities. So it's just a lot of luck, and being fit for certains things that happen to be advantagious in your environnement.
The myth is that the process is just and fair, according to some people moral standard. The universe doesn't care.
> not because of social status. What? You thougth billionaires were taking all their texts seriously?
And it’s mind blowing to me that money can’t buy a better iPhone, they all have to deal with fiddling with the cursor on HN, even princes in the Middle-East, no matter the height of the tower they’re at the top of, they use the same apps as us.
It's also incredibly lonely at times - despite being constantly surrounded by people - which I figure can warp your mind much like too much solitary confinement can. I don't say this from personal experience (un)fortunately, I say this as someone who has a family member that is a confidant of a billionaire from the middle-east (whom I'll refer to as Bob.) The family member is one of their close staff - travels with them everywhere and is in close proximity, daily - and possibly their most intimate friend as a result of this close proximity for the better part of 40 years, and the below.
In Bob's life he is surrounded by sycophants waiting for handouts, never wanting to be seen to annoy Bob nor lose his favour. Bob does not know who to trust. He has had those that he considered real friends and deeply trustworthy turn out to be thiefs and liars. A former school friend was secretly living in one of Bob's holiday homes _for years_, successfully evading detection by Bob by using his friendship to know where and when Bob will be. He was using his ties to Bob (and Bob's success) to gain favour in his own business and was using some of this money to bribe Bob's staff into silence. Apparently the friend went full "villain in disguise reveals his secret vendetta" when Bob asked if the friend needs help. Bob was heartbroken.
Maids, servers, and other staff are stealing things all the time - Bob maintains and reviews an inventory of stolen property with his security detail, with monthly targets... theft of his belongings is an ever present cost to Bob.
e
Bob's own family live an excessively sheltered life. His young children's best friends are their personal body guards - former military personnel that must be present around the clock as a stipulation of their kidknap/ransom insurance. This isn't a perceived threat, either. Bob's eldest son was abducted on at least one occassion, by a policeman no less.
Bob's life is managed for him. His staff manage his diet, his wardrobe(s), his social diary, of course his work engagenments take him all over the world often with little notice. He is never entirely certain where he will be and when. He is a slave to his diaries.
Bob spends the majority of his birthdays alone, on the phone to my family member, often crying about how lonely he is.
All that for money seems like a lot to sacrifice. There's also a fascinating effect that happens when the cost of things are literally of no consequence. Sentimentality is the only measure of value and material objects are just.. nothing but utilities.
Anyway, I would safely assume being a billionaire is not all doom and gloom, but it certainly has a different set of life-problems.
>Maids, servers, and other staff are stealing things all the time - Bob maintains and reviews an inventory of stolen property with his security detail, with monthly targets... theft of his belongings is an ever present cost to Bob.
I can solve this problem for Bob.
Live a more modest life and not have 10 homes with a million things in them. Maybe stick to first class flights, or even charter private flights when desired instead of owning a plane.
Yep. I'd say the solution is: Live a modest life, and don't advertise your wealth.
I doubt there is any law anywhere prohibiting a millionaire or billionaire from moving themselves and their families to a new place and living a middle class lifestyle under a new name.
Advertising one's wealth is a signal for "I seek validation" and "Please appreciate me"/"Be my friend because I am wealthy"
I doubt anyone is actually stopping Bob from quitting his job, moving to a new country, and living a quaint lifestyle.
Personally, I've up and moved and gone to live in a tent, just to see what it was like and essentially test myself and test the lifestyle of a vagabond.
It really showed me that, as a man, for the most part: you have no worth outside of what you provide for others. Men are expected to provide something for their community-- that is the basis of their social status: competencies (i.e. capable of productive things) and contributions.
It's not bobs wealth the want though. It's his connections. You can't just quit and move somewhere and expect your connections to be severed. Others will seek you out for your previous connections. Billionaires "know" you now. You have influence over them whether you like it or not.
For starters, the security issue won't go away by moving to a new place and living a middle class lifestyle under a new name, so they still would need to maintain that security staff which would make them obviously not middle class.
> For starters, the security issue won't go away by moving to a new place and living a middle class lifestyle under a new name, so they still would need to maintain that security staff which would make them obviously not middle class.
There are plenty of rich people who are completely unknown.
The inside of their house is a bit better decorated, and if they fly first class to a private resort, how are the neighbors going to know?
I dare say Bob has thought of this. But hey, it's easier to just armchair a complex problem away with a simple solution, than it is to acknowledge that complexity, amirite?
How is this a complex problem? Having to secure one’s assets is a problem to even non human species.
The thing that makes it simple is that all the things Bob has are purely unnecessary. So if Bob feels overburdened by the task of securing them, then the simple solution is to jettison them.
in other words, don't be a billionaire. However Bob has evidently decided to keep being a billionaire which means he has to maintain and review stolen property etc.
E: parent edited their post from "I wonder if Warren Buffet has any of these problems" in case anyone is wondering why this post looks out of place.
His wikipedia page documents how he and his family have disowned his granddaughter for revealing family secrets in an interview. So.. yeah, he probably does.
You can bet he has kidnapping insurance on his family, too.
Half these problems stem from massive income inequalities in society.
The president of the Netherlands famously bikes to work, vs the US president who travels around with a security detail at all times.
> His young children's best friends are their personal body guards - former military personnel that must be present around the clock as a stipulation of their kidknap/ransom insurance.
A problem stemming from income inequality. Organized crimes, such as kidnappings, start to occur in societies so unfair that being part of a crime syndicate seems like a good life choice for people.
If someone with 10 billion wants to feel safer, spend 9 billion improving the QoL in their chosen city. In an society of stark inequality, no amount of money can buy peace of mind, as you point out, money just buys physical security, and being protected from bad things happening is very different than not having to worry about bad things happening at all.
> Bob spends the majority of his birthdays alone, on the phone to my family member, often crying about how lonely he is.
I've had a few "wealthy", not rich, but 8 figure, friends and acquaintances. Perfectly normal house parties. The house is nicer, and the works of art on the wall are real, but nothing crazy. They also didn't flash their wealth around, very low key, nothing special until you opened the door and looked around carefully.
That said, I'm sure another couple 0's on the end of the bank account balance complicate things.
The increase of wealth and fame leads to an increase of isolation and decrease of safety and trust.
Beyond a certain point, as a “known wealthy person”, you will never know if a romantic partner cares about you or your wealth. Same for your friends. Relatives. Anybody.
You will not be able to do things you’ve taken for granted - like go to the pub or to a restaurant or on a hike or ride your bike on the bike path - without additional effort and people.
This level of fame paranoia is commonly talked about, but is also extremely hard to reach without actually trying and spending resources in regularly keeping your name in people's mouths. You can achieve a great level of wealth without anybody caring: see extremely wealthy families in most countries who 99% of people won't even recognize even if you show them a picture with their name under.
This phenomenon is extremely interesting. I other words, the billionaires we know of may be almost drama queens, who might (might!) have paid marketing agencies to capitalize on their personal name and image. They fell into the LinkedIn trap, which is certainly a side effect of having to climb the social ladder yourself. You could be Facebook’s anonymous CEO if you had attracted attention on the board’s characters instead of yourself, but you would have dissolved your power; Unless, of course, your family were already in the business and you had been able to rise collectively.
There's plenty of wealthy stealthy people around, who put a lot of effort into their business and not necessarily into themselves.
They'd fly right under the radar.
The following may not be a perfect example of the above, but just read up on the late Thomas Murphy and Daniel Burke ("Tom & Dan") of ABC. I find their no-nonsense no-bullshit down-to-earth frugal approach to business inspiring.
Excessive money brings lack of trust, the only way to solve this is give away the money - whittle it down to the 10s of millions and watch all the sycophants disappear.
Imagine the world’s tiniest violin playing a sad song for the billionaire who alienated himself from the world.
Someone living in one of his many houses when he’s not around! Scandalous!
How about have one house and live in it.
You can have money and not be an asshole about things.
Warren buffet was once targeted by an armed gunman. The gunman burst into buffet’s kitchen where buffet, his wife (I suppose she’s also buffet) and another man were eating lunch. Little did the gunman know, the other man turned out to be buffet’s hired security. The bodyguard being good at his job quickly disarmed and restrained the attacker.
Why were they sitting and eating together? Because even though buffet was the richest man in the world at the time he behaves like a normal person and if there’s a guy who’s always around you invite him to lunch.
I assure you, I need to know nothing more about the relationship to tell you that Warren Buffet trusts and respects this man. And the feeling is mutual.
In conclusion: I recommend that Bob climb down off the high horse he thinks his billions require him to ride and join the rest of us in normal life. Connection is all around you, you have only to reach back out for it.
As for sycophants, if you want people to be candid you have to give them a safe place to do it. Musk will soon learn that the people who criticized him were right and he shouldn’t have driven them away.
As for people wanting a handout. If your money is a burden to you there’s an obvious solution.
Evidently you missed the entirety of the post where I have said my family member is Bob's confidant and intimate friend. And the example of his close, childhood friend betraying his trust. And you just said it yourself.. a literal gunman broke into the kitchen of the Buffet's residence whilst they were eating lunch, but it's the wealthy individual's fault for not trusting enough!?
Did you get lost on the way to reddit, or something?
If you are a billionaire you can choose to become a boring old millionaire with $5m net worth, and not have those problems, so the additional benefits must be worthwhile.
Lord Acton's maxim is "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The dumbed down paraphrases lose most of the insight. It's a little masterpiece of the English language, and as you note, who or what exactly is being corrupted, absolutely or otherwise, is intentionally underspecified.
I don't intend to de-rail the convo, but this is an important one.
> improve inter-family relationships
It could, maybe, but it can also be a significant source of strife. It's tough spending all day, every day with someone. Because of that, you find that people are either looking for larger homes in order to have private work spaces or renting office space. Both of those shift the cost burden from the company to the individual.
> It's tough spending all day, every day with someone
You literally do this with coworkers in an office. Except, you didn't get to pick those people and you have to be even physically closer to them. The last office I worked in was an open floor plan and the guy three feet next to me typed so hard I thought he would break his keyboard. And he was on a rubber dome!! It was louder than the loudest mechanical keyboard. Before that I sat next to the sales department. They would talk loudly on the phone for 8 straight hours. One time my desk was next to the break room. You like hearing people talk all day long?
> in order to have private work spaces
With open floor plans the only privacy you get is when you put on your headphones. Anyone walking by still sees your screen and wearing headphones all day is not great for your health.
You are very right - I am very lucky to have a shed/office I can hide away in and get some great work done in. I'd say it is a far better and more comfortable space than any office I've worked in. But when I had to work at the kitchen table with my wife and family in other rooms in the house it was so much harder.
For those with room, especially if you have a good sized commute, remote working is great (I really really value being able to eat with my kids and hang out in the evening), but you are right that if you are two people in a small 1 bed flat, or a few people in a house share, or just a family in a standard family house, then yes remote working is not always going to be a bonus.
I can't imagine living in a home where every member doesn't have their own quiet/study/work space. I say this as someone who has lived most of his life in apartment buildings where that was a bit challenging, but definitely not impossible. I guess maybe if you are used to living your life outside of the house an just visit to eat and sleep you feel differently, but that's the beauty of WFH - you get to pick what best works for you.
Very much this, but I've been lucky and riden the house price increases well to end up in a largeish place - but even then if I didn't have a garden office it would be hard.
Two friends if mine move to the nearest city and got a small one bed as they both do a lot out of the flat - theatre, movies, bars, sports etc - so the house was really a place to sleep and shower, plus eat and relax a little.
Home working for them meant losing space in their kitchen/livingroom/dining room - and having one of them work from the bed room.
Inner city UK flats are often very small, and still relatively expensive.
This. FFS who wants to stay home to live and work!?!?
I don’t understand WFH.
the right way is to have better public transport and cheaper housing, not secluded lives.
I agree with you that better public transportation and cheaper housing would be a respectable path towards a better society in general.
However, please don't state that "the right way is to have... not secluded lives." Some of us absolutely enjoy the seclusion, especially this WFH Alaskan.
“You do enjoy it…just like alcoholics enjoy alcohol.” I mean, assuming I’m reading this correctly, seriously? Let people enjoy their choices, and without pulling questionable comparisons out of thin air. Especially when we aren’t given complete context, as with parent. Don’t take one sentence and then turn around and say, “doesn’t sound healthy”.
The entire zeitgeist is that people are more and more isolated and lack a support network.
We can put 2 and 2 together and figure out that physical isolation in environment where people live far apart from each other and drive everywhere is... isolating?
And by the way, there are studies that show that even for introverts, socialization (even forced!) is ultimately good.
We're not made to sit alone in a room in the middle of nowhere. We were born in caves filled with our tribesfolk, dozens and dozens of people living together in small spaces.
Also, who said anything about alcoholics? Alcohol is just bad for you. Anything except for very small amounts has a ton of bad side effects. It's just "grandfathered in" (just like tobacco) and seen as socially acceptable.
> We're not made to sit alone in a room in the middle of nowhere.
You seem to be implying that people's social lives revolve around work. A lot of us prefer to spend that effort on family, friends, and community during the other 72 hours of the week we are free instead.
I'm 43. Doing things with coworkers isn't even remotely appealing as it was 20 years ago, because at the end of the day they are coworkers and not friends (usually).
Who says remote work means you have to stay home all the time? Stay home to work and make sure you leave at least once, ideally two or three times a day!
In the morning for a walk or workout or coffee break.
At lunch just to breath some air.
At 5PM[1] sharp laptops closed to reconnect with some of your favorite humans, not necessarily the same ones you live with.
[1]: or whatever hard stop you craft for yourself.
Remember that "pandemic remote work" is not at all normal remote work. I have a social life outside of my coworkers. I can work from places that aren't my home office - a cafe, a coworking space, whatever - even if it's just a couple hours to get out of the house.
This. Even before the pandemic, when I had to waste two hours a day, every day, to go sit my butt in my employer's chair, all my "social life" was strictly with people other than my coworkers.
So being able to get those two hours back, even if not all of them but every other day, is a net gain for me. I can go for a walk, lift some weights, space out on the couch, whatever. It's also much easier to not always eat the same plastic lunch every day, or have to prepare things that are easy to reheat in a microwave.
If you compare the economic costs of public transport and “cheaper” housing to WFH’s requirement of an internet connection, it’s much more cost effective to work from home. Now we could say that face-to-face interaction outweighs these costs economically, but you’d need the data, and at least in terms of commuting you’ll never beat the ecological footprint of not going anywhere.
Because "home", for me, while I've been working remotely since 1994, has been Indiana, to Puerto Rico, to Budapest. I go when I want, do a little schedule juggling maybe. And now I live in the tropics in the jungle on a mountain coffee farm - the best place to spend a global pandemic - and I still have an income.
People aren't going to get better public transport or cheaper housing in the USA. I want to stay home and live and work. I've done it once before over a decade ago and doing it now as a result of the pandemic and I love it.
This only makes sense if you were born and raised in San Francisco, Seattle, Milan, London, Dublin, Munchen, Berlin, Amsterdam or some other big tech city.
In my current house, my commute would be 1 hour each way if I wasn't working from home. I'd be leaving early and getting home late. I'd have no time with my wife, son, pets. No time for housework/extra projects. I did this commute prior to having a kid and it worked then, but it wouldn't work now.
Is the term "improve relationships" even appropriate as a "goal" when children are involved? As a 12-17 year old, there was nothing more awesome than having the house to myself, no parents. Relationships were better, as lower contact hours means less harassment and less use of each other as an emotional punching bag.
However, contact hours are desirable for actual child rearing outcomes. Lingusitic development in the early years = has a huge impact on vocabulary development with college-educated parents and for older kids discipline... two brothers grew up being watched like a hawk by my mom. Two younger ones grew up as latchkey kids once she went back to work. Outcomes were quite different.
> Is the term "improve relationships" even appropriate as a "goal" when children are involved? … lower contact hours means less harassment and less use of each other as an emotional punching bag.
I’m really sorry this was your childhood. I can heavily relate, as I grew up feeling the same way.
Now, 20+ years and two adult children later, I can say that the best thing I ever did as a parent was make building and improving my relationship with my children my top goal and priority from day one.
They’ve never been my emotional punching bags, or my emotional support animals. I’ve always had my eye on where we are now—them being adults. This is the period I have been intentionally building toward since I was changing diapers.
It means I focused on treating and considering them as their own unique and independent people since before they knew it. My childhood modeled what I absolutely did not want to repeat with my children. This meant I was responsible for modeling how to truly listen, respect, and support their thoughts and decisions; for creating a safe environment; for explaining myself clearly when necessary so they could understand me as a person, without resorting to “because I’m the parent”; and, most importantly, for apologizing when I was the one in the wrong.
I’ve done a lot differently than I experienced growing up, and unless my sons are lying to me (which they don’t do), it’s made all the difference compared to the relationships they see among my parents and extended family.
For most of their childhood, I worked from home. I believe it is part of why I built such a good and healthy relationship that’s now the foundation of all three of us being adults—not least of all because when I screwed up, I could apologize and use all that time to improve the relationship by resolving my mistakes, modeling the respect and love they deserved, and building a better future.
Alternatively, because of the expectation that partners will not be around 24/7, people may have been selecting sub-optimal partners. If remote work becomes the norm your standards for a long term partner may become higher as you need to ensure you do not get tired of being around them.
Interesting point. Would it reduce the "individualism" present in the US? I've always found it interesting how much companies market individualism (specially fashion companies). More intense individualism also makes it harder to find another person who can be tolerated due to their individualism.
Exactly this is the reason, but I'll go even further and say that no corporation will advertise something "green" that might require actual effort on their part. The clear fact is that environmental impact is almost entirely the fault of corporations. Advertising for consumers to do anything to impact this is distracting them from the real issue: the corporations advertising to them.
It is for this reason that you will never find anything that makes sense advertised as green or efficient. Corporations are things that exist solely to exploit: nothing in their core impulses moves them to be kind or understanding. Anything that makes it seem otherwise must be regarded with suspicion.
In my experiencing greenwashing is just as likely to be used to shame normal consumer behavior into reducing costs for businesses (do you really want those plastic utensils with your takeout? Do you really need to use that much water in your hotel room? Do you really need fresh towels every day?) as it is to actually help the environment.
Most of the time corporations claim to be doing something in a carbon-neutral way it's because they are purchasing offsets where you just have to believe that they are actually computing the carbon costs appropriately and the offsets are "real" anyway.
At its core, "reduce" generally benefits both the environment and the bottom line. Additionally, many employees wish their company was more environmental, but cannot make their case unless it aligns with the business.
A slight rewording of your point highlights the opportunity: change happens when business and environmental needs align. This means, the people's best (only) play is to craft policies and institutions that align business incentives with environmental goals (e.g. emission cap 'n trade, grants, etc.). For example, a central repository of public holistic impact assessments could force PR teams to focus on real impact over trivial greenwashing campaigns.
While the national level gets the most focus, local/state governments can move move faster and serve as models for larger change.
This is it right here. There’s been an enormous amount of blame shifting onto consumers, who have almost nothing to do with environmental impacts, as if not using plastic straws could have any impact whatsoever. This is intentional on the part of government as it confuses voters into thinking the problem has been solved or is a moral failing.
Our leaders know full well that consumers and corporations have no power to act on this themselves. They will suck up any resources presented to them in the lowest energy configuration. Capitalism demands it. Regulation and governance is the only solution to tragedy of the commons. All else is noise being created by leaders who have been bought and paid for.
You only have to look at the relative scarcity of EV L2 chargers at Disney properties to see this first hand. How many Earth Day commercials have they run over the years? But a few bucks to support their own customers is too much?
> and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas)
Without other changes, this would not happen (in the US at least). The default would be every more cookie-cutter suburban sprawl, with the cul-de-sac-y construction of these neighborhoods creating a more labrynthian, difficult-to-walk place to live.
Until there is more mixed-use zoning in the US, with high enough density to justify frequent public transit arrival times, WFH would only save the car and infra wear-and-tear (and pollution level) from commuting, but it would not necessarily create a "third place" automatically.
I disagree, yes zoning changes could be needed, but the presence of more daytime workers at home in suburban areas creates new opportunities for restaurants, coffee shops, and other conveniences that cater to those workers.
I mean yes and. There's an entire industry of restaurants that cater to providing food to workers in business districts. They move to where the people are. I don't think suburban neighborhoods having hyperlocal businesses would ever be considered a bad thing.
The restaurants are there and successful because of the density, though. The falafel shop around the corner from three multi-storey office buildings can't afford to have a location in every suburb that formerly sent workers to the business district.
There's existing evidence for this: how many restaurants do you see in standalone office parks? A few perhaps, but nothing like what's downtown.
If you have a parking lot you don't have to have a location in every suburb. People will just drive over from neighboring suburbs when they want falafel.
This is also why you don't see restaurants by office parks - if you want to serve the business lunch crowd, it's better to be by something like a Costco with a big parking lot that's mostly empty on weekdays instead of an office park that's all parked-up at lunchtime. Even absent parking-lot efficiencies, it's probably just optimal to be equidistant from all the office parks instead of next to one.
That's the challenge you face, really - out in the suburbs most people would rather drive 12 minutes than walk 7. I think people just see walking as a way to be cold and struggle to carry heavy things, so fuck it.
So more small businesses by people living in the area would be encouraged (think small mom-and-pop shops) rather than multinational chain restaurants. It’s a good thing.
Modern "mixed use" visions are sterile garbage born out of a well to do upper middle class filter bubble. The kind of hubris it takes to make these people think they can have just the parts of the economy they like would make a soviet central planner blush. It's like thinking steak "just shows up" in a supermarket but for macroeconomics.
You will need all of those "unsightly" B2B businesses to underpin the restaurants, consumer retail, etc, etc, that you do want. And unless we invent teleportation the cost of distance is going to put a cap on how far the B2B businesses are from the customers they serve so they are going to need to be somewhat local too.
I'm okay with the current suburban model in many ways. For me it would make a difference is dedicated bike lanes. I walk for exercise my neighborhood and the labyrinth is a welcome pattern to reduce boredom.
Public transit will never work for me except under very rare circumstances. For what it's worth, I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough make going anywhere vaguely tolerable. Amazon lets me avoid a lot of driving.
I get that you want to change things in the world but the only way to do it is not to say "it should be…" But find out what public office you need to hold, run the campaign, win the seat and then start trying to change from there. Then I can tell you from experience that you have to start local like planning board or zoning Board of appeals. Gain the trust of the people on the board listen to what people want. Once they feel heard they will hear you. If you go in guns blazing, everyone including potential allies will dig in their heels and say fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Yes I've served on municipal boards and I have been told FU. Learned my lesson and then had my ideas heard. I didn't live there long enough to affect change but I learned a lot about local politics
I don't want to discount that you're largely content with the the suburbs as they're built today - that's fine and there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. I do want to point out that from my point of view living in a really dense area, some of the reasoning is contradictory.
> I walk for exercise in my neighborhood
> Public transit will never work for me ... I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough to make going anywhere vaguely tolerable
The suburban model doesn't allow people to live close to any of the places they go. I too dislike wasting my time traveling, but I don't have to: I can walk five or ten minutes to the grocery store, dentist, park, restaurants, etc. I end up walking a lot over the course of a week, and personally I also bike to further destinations (a lot more people would here too if there were protected bike lanes like you mentioned you want). My travel time _is_ my exercise time - no need to spend time on extra walks to accomplish that, and there's interesting things around me when I go from place to place. The subway or commuter rail can take me further away faster than a car when I need to go somewhere distant.
But I'm lucky I can afford to live in a part of Chicago that hasn't been totally disinvested in over the last half century, like a lot of the city has. The state didn't pave a highway through the middle of it like they did to other - mostly black and brown - parts of the city to convenience suburban drivers.
The suburban model that works just fine for you comes at a cost to society. We need to reckon with that and build more places where people aren't forced to drive for their day-to-day necessities and desires.
You assume that the places I go are close to where I could live. Work from home so no travel there, supermarket is a mile away but I can't bike there because the roads are shit and the only time I go is usually after hours before the store closes and biking the dark is even more dangerous. Everything else I go to in my life is not very often and at least a 20 minute drive away.
My walking is to get me away from urban noise and people. My recreation takes me to places like get away from urban noise and people.
I find your travel time report interesting. I believe it that for where you go, it works. But I did a test with places I would go to in the Chicago area and none of them accessible by public transit and are typically an hour to an hour and 1/2 drive away (state parks). I test travel time by Google maps and driving is almost always significantly faster.
Yes I am glad that parts of Chicago were spared the insanity of interstate highways into urban spaces. It makes no sense doing that. Interstates should bypass urban centers. Although we should probably look at history as to what might happen. I suggest looking at what happened to urban centers that lost the competition for rail lines back in the late 1800s.
Another interesting experiment would be to map out the impact of replacing highways with train lines and full switching yards etc. that carry the same load of passengers and freight in the same timeframe.
I agree with you that we do need to work out a way to minimize costs of human existence both suburban and urban. We also need to fully account for all the externalities for both living spaces. We also need to reckon with there are country mice and city mice. We have very different values and very different physical tolerances in our living space.
We also need to look beyond the dichotomy of driving or walking but instead consider neighborhood delivery services for food and other ordered goods. see: https://www.businessinsider.com/lifvs-grocery-store-sweden-u.... I found this article interesting because I got a chance to see firsthand urban and rural Sweden and Finland this summer. Both places have food deserts of a sort. I don't fully grok it yet but it looks like people are comfortable with having only one or two vendors for a given item in a small store with a relatively small selection. There didn't seem to be the same "obsession" we have with getting a better price.
You're correct, people generally aren't too bothered if there are only a couple of choices, either of shops (e.g. two supermarkets) or products (two types of cereal bar).
I wouldn't in any way call it a food desert though. All the normal food for the region is available, the rest is just luxuries.
(And to the general point, people owning cars but mostly using them for recreation would still be a huge reduction in traffic, noise and pollution. That's not unusual for European city-dwellers, who often own one car and use it once or twice a week.)
Aren't suburban neighborhoods actually bad for the environment though. Also the lack population density makes it hard to support the infrastructure costs for a large area with fewer people.
It's complicated, so yes because the reasons you state but in a world where significantly fewer people commute it becomes less of an issue and so it's a matter of changing the things we can change.
So yes, wouldn't it be great people lived in denser environments? Oh yeah, but that's not the choice we're making today. The choice we're making is given that lots of people live a 20-60 minute drive from their jobs would we rather they commute into work or work remotely?
The incentive for living in a dense environment is that you get to use common infrastructure for power, water, sewage, health care etc, rather than running your own septic tank and so on.
Even suburbia isn't dense enough to support those things
I’ve lived in both the city and suburbia and suburbia not only had those things, but those things were better in suburbia.
Now eventually you do get into that problem in rural areas or areas that can’t be densely inhabited (like the mountains), but there’s no fundamental reason people can’t live in five-bedroom mansions and have access to services.
septic tanks?? You're talking about rural America. Not suburbs. The only suburbs I've seen with septic tanks were in neighborhoods sitting below the main sewer line. Because shit can't run uphill. Power and water? Do you know a single suburb not connected to the power grid or doesn't have running water? Do you live in the 1800s?
I think the GP's implication is that maintaining these things at low density is unaffordable, although I haven't looked for any figures to see if there's any truth in this.
Fortunately with modern technology, you can run your own composting waste disposal, water from rainwater or aquifer, electricity via solar panels and batteries and the entire package is surprising affordable. That is to say cheaper than in urban 2000 square-foot condo.
That is an incentive for somebody else who likes to tell other people how to live. Not for me. I bought a house in suburbia. My basement is filled with home lab, workshop (wood and 3D printing), indoor garden (wintertime leafy greens and starters for the spring), my partner's art studio in place to store telescopes.
Our yard has rhubarb, asparagus, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, apple trees. We are re-wilding the lawn to help encourage local insects and birds. I am working on my neighbors to shield their outdoor lights so that nocturnal creatures aren't messed up as much by nighttime lighting.
I figured out once that for me to live comfortably with all of my hobbies/WFH, my partner and her son, I need approximately 2500 ft.² of living/working space. I have lived in shit-a-brick 1500 square-foot urban apartments and it means isolation, earplugs so I can't hear my neighbors, and high blood pressure. I dropped all my hobbies and did nothing but work because the urban space, was for me, the embodiment of depression.
Our neighborhood is dense enough for public infrastructure. Many rooftops around here have solar which is great for distributed power. Sadly my house is circa 1920 with the slate roof and there is no way on cover up that beautiful structure with solar panels.
There are ways to build suburbia they give people room to live where they live. You just need a different perspective.
I have come to terms with the fact that any form of human civilization is not sustainable. We take more then we return to the Gaia ecosystem. At best we can be in balance once human existence returned to a pre-technological, nasty, brutish, and short lifestyle.
Boomers are blamed because of younger generation ignorance. There is an almost a willful lack of understanding of historical events that boomers lived through that shaped their lives and their finances. Looking from a point of older age to younger generations, anyone with half a brain can see the stressors and forces making their lives difficult. Yet we also see the the same forces that shaped boomers doubling down on shaping you. While there are some bright spots of Gen Z pushing back on power structures and winning, those wins are skirmishes because those in power were caught by surprise. In the next conflict, history of social change over the past hundred and 20 years shows that the next conflict will not be won so easily.
From my perspective, the generational you need to take control of politics in your future and stop putting your hands over your eyes and saying you have no control. Get out there, run for office, learn how your constituents live in what's important to them.
Remember, if you do not get elected and take your seat at the table, you will be ignored and nothing will change in your favor. Don't count on others to fight your battles for you.
A dense environment also has a lot of daily destinations within walking distance. That's also very nice when one works from home— either working from home in my Brooklyn apartment, or working from home at my parents' house in a Midwestern streetcar suburb where restaurants/coffeeshops/grocery stores/parks/bars are also a pleasant walk away.
There is plenty of dense housing in prewar sections of Midwestern cities. Not as much as there used to be, unfortunately, but quite a bit, and available very affordably.
We need to learn that corporations care even less about the environment than they care about remote work. Invoking the environment to gain their support of remote work is just misunderstanding their priorities. The game is to make remote work attractive to them.
You think Elon Musk wants to hear your spiel about the environment? Or does he want you to get back into your office and work a 16 hour day?
If we want to get corporate america on the side of remote work, then we need to do it with dollars and cents. Not "indirect savings", not "improved morale", but concrete examples of how remote work is increasing their profit. (Even better, would be if it could increase their revenue as well. That would be a slam dunk.) We almost got there with the idea of lowering rent costs after the pandemic, but now it just seems that the idea of getting rid of office space in favor of remote work is getting a lot of push back. Maybe even backlash would be a better term.
>> Or does he want you to get back into your office and work a 16 hour day?
I'm OK with working 16 hour days on something that matters (obviously burn out needs to be kept in check - it can't be done forever). I realize that I might be "wired" differently than others as I care a bit less about work life balance and more about accomplishment (not proud of it). I see no reason why this can't be done at the beach house however. In fact, I'm convinced it would be better as commuting is a burnout accelerator.
Not sure how a 16 hour workday fits if you also need to sleep, shop, cook, clean, take care of the kids, keep in contact with your friends and family, and exercise.
I had a crunch delivery before we had kids, and it was hell. In the office by 9, leaving around 3 or even 4am. 'Luckily' the office paid for cabs and food and tried to make it as good as they good for us, but I didn't see friends, barely saw my wife and felt rotten at the weekends.
BUT, we delivered some amazing work, was well compensated, and otherwise rewarded by the company. Many of those who did the work are still there and still rate it as a place to be. It was a one off that we all swore off repeating, but I don't regret it or the work we delivered.
It's kind of depressing that greenwashing is so effective: see companies like ConocoPhillips getting stellar ESG ratings despite their business models.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
... 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.)
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!
It's fair to say that according to your own sources that the average commuter according to census.gov loses between 250-520 hours per year commuting if we don't count the 125 they spent getting ready for work. I think pointing out that most people are closer to 250 is quibbling over less than meaningful details.
2 hour round trip * 5 days/week * 48 working weeks/year * 20 years = 9,600 hours commuting. Assuming 16 hours awake per day, that's 600 days of your life over two decades.
One might observe that if that's not an outlier, it ought to be.
You gain time not spent preparing for work as well and its important to note that public transit is another thing entirely.According to the same census.gov report sourced by that article public transit riders consumed 47 minutes on average and that doesn't even tell the whole story because transit schedules NEVER align perfectly with your work schedule meaning if you don't want to be late you are always going to waiting 7-8 minutes for a bus and then arriving 15 minutes early.
An hour each way including waiting time is perfectly normal for anyone who has relied on public transit.
That 27 minutes of commute is most likely calculated from door to door.
It doesn't include the fact that when you're working remotely, you can just plop your ass on the work chair wearing whatever you slept in. Log in, check your messages and go make some coffee, prep the kids for school and maybe change into something smarter before the first meetings of the day.
You can also do chores while listening to meandering presentations on wireless headphones. If you're brave and cameras on isn't a culture in your company, you can do interactive ones by lugging your laptop or phone next to the dishwasher :D
I love when people point out wrong info just so someone can make a stronger claim that is essentially the same point. 1 hour a day wasted is still a lot of time.
Depending on how you make the journey, it isn't necessarily wasted.
For about a year I commuted around 30 minutes by train, from a station <5 minutes walk from home, and <5 minutes walk from the office. I liked reading books or the newspaper in the morning, and the same or staring out of the window on the way back.
It was a good transition between work and not-work. Driving requires too much concentration, cycling is somewhere in between, and working from home doesn't have any of this.
Every few months, generally if I feel I've been really unproductive, I'll walk home from the office (~50 minutes) just to enjoy the walk.
>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.
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.
>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.
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).
>If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it?
My belief is that a lot of the people who get to make these decision like the office, because they don't suffer from the same externalities. In other words, many of the things that make commuting to the office suck ass don't necessarily pertain to the boss.
>My belief is that a lot of the people who get to make these decision like the office, because they don't suffer from the same externalities. In other words, many of the things that make commuting to the office suck ass don't necessarily pertain to the boss.
You have a valid point, but if one way is clearly superior, your competition is going to adopt it and start producing results faster/better. I don't really have a strong opinion on this - I work in manufacturing so remote work is not even an option for me and my team.
> You can flip that around too - If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it?
When you’re flipping this pancake please remember that real estate prices and tax write offs weigh into the reasoning some companies employ when deciding their wfh policies
Sure, but it also may be true that remote work is not necessarily better in every situation. I don't assume every manager is a fraud when they're wanting people to work from the office. I don't know their situation, so I would much rather grant them the decision.
Ideally, you will have companies that are remote, non-remote, and hybrid - so a candidate can choose which company they want to join.
> If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it?
It's not just about gains in productivity (profit/surplus value) for companies*. It would be enough for remote work to be a net benefit for the whole society. Take the reduction in car traffic, the time savings, the pollution avoided, etc, and subtract an hypotetical loss in profit for capitalists. Still worth it? Then we're doing it!
> 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
Sure, but we can't wait for a handful of capitalists to take the lead on this. If it's important and necessary, governments should act and enforce it. The same way as we did for work safety rules, the 40h work week, the abolition of child labor and so on.
All of the labor rights we now give for granted, when enforced caused a reduction in the productivity of labor. Still, nowadays it would sound insane to advocate for a return to child labor in order to increase profits.
* Companies are abstract concepts without a will, so we can't really expect a company to take decisions. What we really mean here is capitalists. Capitalists are people, they have a will and the decisional power required to change things. We'll just refer to them as capitalists from now on.
I don't have anything to counter your points, we're in agreement :)
My argument had apriori assumptions for the general audience on HN (VC funded startups, FAANG/MAAMA folks, etc). We can start off with different assumptions, I have no problem with that. Ultimately, I agree that we should change laws as we see fit so everyone can flourish.
Nothing against you, I just think it's important to present a different set of assumptions since, as you noted, the general audience of HN tends to see things through specific lens.
When we all just give for discounted that there is only one valid point of view, we lose all the benefits of the discussion and just play reinforcement.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I commute from a large-ish city to its suburb, my commute is 15-18 minutes. Anecdotes are not data... average commute in the US is like 20-30mins. I suspect most people who can be fully remote (i.e. are not in service industry) can afford to move instead of commuting 3 hours one way.
So actually not a large city at all? Hard to believe there's there's actually a commute from Suburb to Downtown in under 20 minutes during rush hour for any of the 20 largest cities in the US.
Seattle is #18. At peak rush hour it is 30-40mins, the main reason being that it's across a giant bottleneck of a bridge that also has ongoing construction; driving to suburbs that are not directly across the bridge would be faster. But, I don't drive at rush hour. "Start an 1-1.5 hours later" is much easier to grant than "WFH" :)
1) There are statistics that show the same is true for most workers. Commutes are 20-40 minutes. Most of those for whom this is not true either have uncommon priorities and trade-offs, are poor, are actively planning to move, or are just stupid. The uncommon priorities are uncommon; low-paying jobs mostly cannot be done from home; the temporary location mismatch is temporary; and avoiding people who are not poor but cannot figure out their living situation seems like a good reason to not offer WFH :D
2) I provided a number for peak rush hour, worst possible commute (bridge + construction), that I've actually done a couple times. FWIW I can drive to downtown in 25 minutes during rush hour, 10-12 minutes without, and that also would involve a bridge so a bottleneck.
3) An hour after rush hour is very different than 3am.
They tend to ignore things like the laws of physics.
When you live 40 miles away from your destination, there's no way that you'll get there in 37.7 minutes, unless you can do over the state speed limit, the entire time. And that doesn't even count things like congestion, traffic lights, and whatnot.
Frankly, I'm kind of amazed at the nasty reception that my post got. I do apologize for my choice of words, questioning where the person lives, but folks seem to have some kind of stake, in commutes being unnaturally short.
People live in the suburbs, so they can do things like raise families, send their kids to good schools, and enjoy the kinds of leisure pursuits that are only available to wealthy people, close to the city.
There's a lot of people, living out here. I know of several people that live in Wading River, and commute daily, to Manhattan.
This is a scientific community. Feel free to get your maps out, and figure it out.
Well, statistically most of people don't live "out there". To live out there is a choice... like, I know people who live in a mountain town because hiking/climbing is walking distance, or people who live in the country cause they want to keep a horse for regular riding (I think that was the primary reason?). Sure, their commute sucks, but for most people the only reason I can think of for living that far out is not being able to afford housing, and that is not typical for people who can WFH full time.
So, most people don't mind their commute. Also if I was hypothetically an employer, all other things being equal, wouldn't I rather hire people who don't have hobbies/things they are so committed to that they justify living "out there"? ;)
> Well, statistically most of people don't live "out there".
That depends.
HN seems to be a whole bunch of folks that are actually against the idea of living "out here" (not "there," to me). I find that interesting. I'm sure some demographic research would suggest why that is. I can tell you, from simply stepping out of my front door, that there are a lot of people, "out here," and I suspect that most of them work, somewhere.
> Also if I was hypothetically an employer, all other things being equal, wouldn't I rather hire people who don't have hobbies/things
Yeah, that's a pretty common mindset. "But why can't they all be slaves?" is what most corporate owners lament.
But if you want experienced, accomplished folks, you may find the pickings are a bit slim, in the immediate metro area. Might have to cast a wider net.
I lived in a city for a few years, and it was extremely convenient, but I was also unmarried, and ran a baseline stress level just below "squirrel on meth."
It seems that young people like being in the noise and bustle of a city, or close to it. Since tech has a real bad ageism problem, I guess that I shouldn't be surprised at the reactions.
But I am. I never thought of having a commute as something that defines an "old."
I have no idea where you got the impression I had age in mind. Most people commute between suburbs and cities, and this commute data is averages (and broken down by state, too - some states don't have many hip cities) - not people taking a lime bike from apodment to office.
What hustle and bustle? Campuses of the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are surrounded by layers of suburbs, populated (purely due to prices, both current and over time, considering who could purchase when) by "experiences, accomplished folks". They probably live the closest to office and have the shortest commutes.
Probably an East Coast/West Coast thing, then. We'll just leave it at that, eh?
I've lived on the East Coast for my entire adult life, and have experienced three metropolitan areas, and Not. One. Of. Them. had a 37-minute commute between an affordable suburb, and the center of the city.
Not. One.
I have managed to find jobs in the suburbs, which means they are probably not as high-paying as they could have been, in the city, but they worked out OK. Even then, I had ridiculous commutes (like 45 minutes to go 6 miles, in MD). My daily commute here, on Long Island, was 35 minutes to go 10 miles (for 27 years). That was from North Shore Long Island, to the center of the island. If I wanted to go to the city from here, it would have been at least 90 minutes, if I left at about 4AM (which many people around here do). 2-3 hours, in rush hour.
The thing about most companies on the East Coast, is they ain't real big on flexible hours. You need to travel during rush hour. The companies in the city can be a bit more flexible (I know of many people that work from 6AM-3PM), but the drive still sucks.
It's really weird to see people saying that this isn't happening, when it definitely is happening, and has been happening for decades, and I see it, every day. Miserable commutes have been a regular topic for discussion amongst my peers for as long as I can remember.
I have to assume there's some kind of cultural gulf. I definitely know that the tech industry is pretty sick with ageism, so that's a good bet. The people that live around me, are actually fairly well-off. The ones further East are likely to be lower on the food chain, and have much worse commutes.
NYC was fun in my 20s, but I could not believe the older people I was working with spent ~3 hours per day commuting to and from Manhattan and NJ/CT/NY.
Their entire life, Mon to Fri, was wake up, go to work, maybe spend an hour with kids or watch TV, go to sleep, and repeat.
And they did not get paid enough to do it from age 30 to 55 or even 65. The only amount of pay that would be enough would be an amount that allows you to quit that nonsense life after a few years.
Nope - he was quite a family man, great dad, gave every minute that he was at home to his family.
The money was good - I'm pretty sure that was the motivation. Also part of his personality - he grew up in serious poverty and was driven to climb the ladder. And climb he did.
Average I don't know about, but my commute into Manhattan from Jersey was 2 hours, one way door to door. You have to count driving to the train station and the time it takes to get from the station to the actual office.
That said, the actual train ride was approx 75 minutes.
Even worse, I drove to Westchester for a number of years and that was 120 miles a day (60 one way) including a trip over the Tappan Zee! At least on the train ride I could read.
I no longer live in the NYC area and certainly don't miss those commutes.
In Montreal, QC however, it easily takes 1.5-2 hours to go downtown and another 1.5-2h to come back.. especially during winter time. A lawyer friend of mine would leave his house at 6 AM to be at court by 9..
One starts to lose his sanity somewhere between the potholes, broken roads, construction, crazy drivers, freezing rain and no parking..
Maybe not the average, but millions of people commute to a city like Atlanta every day. From the middle of Forsyth County in GA, where there are many exurbs of Atlanta that feed workers into the city, the drive is slated to be 1-2 hours over 44 miles to downtown as we speak even now. And nothing is 'wrong,' currently - this is not some outlier.
Many people that I know make this kind of drive in the Atlanta area, and that's not due to them all being in particular industries either. 1-2 hours to get across the city and into the suburbs/exurbs is a fact of life, and millions do it.
No, most people in NYC are not commuting 2-3 hours each way. That's insane to say.
I know a couple people who have done it -- living in deep Brooklyn far from the subway and teaching in the Bronx, or living deep in Staten Island and commuting to the Upper East Side -- but it is extremely uncommon.
The average NYC commute is 40 minutes. And only 10% of NYC workers have a commute longer than 60 minutes. [1]
When I worked in NYC a few years ago, I was living in an apartment on Long Island, the LIRR was 1h30m on average, plus 10 minute drive to get to the train station, plus another 20 minute walk from Penn to 3rd ave where I worked. On rainy days I'd take the subway but there isn't a direct route so I'd have to change at times square so it always ended up taking longer than walking.
Easily 2+ hours each way from door to door. And let me tell you, the LIRR is vastly overfilled during peak. You're lucky to get a seat for that 90 minute leg of your trip, and if you didn't, you were probably sardine packed in the aisle.
I assert that most of the folks that claim insane large commutes have been bitten by what happens if you don't adjust how you commute to a place. This particularly bites people that move to a city, as they want to keep their car commute all too often. Similarly, it bites folks that move out of the city, as they want to stay on transit, but that drops in effectiveness as you leave the density.
I knew someone who commuted from Philadelphia to Manhattan every day. Worked in a museum, so it was her dream job but didn't pay much. Longest commute I've know someone to do daily.
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
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.
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.
Does your peer group have kids and earns enough to buy a house in a suburb of NYC?
Without kids, there is no reason for the commute. But putting kids in an upscale suburban neighborhood with other kids of similar earning parents is the reason that I saw people put up with that commute.
Average commute time in NYC MSA is 37.7 minutes, longest of any major MSA in the country. DC MSA is 35.6 minutes. Only ~23% of NYC have commutes longer than hour, and ~18% in DC.
(Note: statistics are using 2019 data, so doesn't account for anything COVID related, and people who don't commute are excluded from the statistics.)
Must be nice to own a place in Dumbo or Nassau County.
Out here, in the affordable section, it's not as easy.
When I lived in the DC suburbs, 32 years ago, I lived in Gaithersburg, MD. I worked in Rockville (1 exit south, on I-270). Six miles, as the crow flies.
My daily commute was 45 minutes.
I-270 is a charming bit of tarmac. It's a 12-lane parking lot, that stretches from Frederick, to the Beltway.
I have no idea where those stats come from, but they sure as hell don't reflect the reality, around here.
Reality has a nasty way of not caring what the stats say.
I grew up in the DC suburbs (VA side). There's definitely a lot of people who have 40-minute commutes or the like... but 20 and 30 minute commutes are not reasonably uncommon. When I had to cross the river on the Woodrow Wilson (in the era they were building the new one, no less, so perma-construction), my commute was regularly about 20-30 minutes long, although morning was routinely shorter than afternoon (295 just crawls trying to get back onto 495).
For a while in Los Angeles I had a commute of around an hour each way. Even in that sprawling eternal traffic jam of a city, my friends and coworkers considered my commute to be notably long.
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.
1. Middle and senior management who don't want to lose control or be rendered less effective.
2. Engineers who are not trained in written communication and largely cannot autonomously move a group towards a goal without a lot of supervision.
If you solve for no 2, then that acts counter to no 1 - because middle management will be questioned - why do we need you ? If a group of engineers can function on their own towards a common goal, then the manager's role is more or less rendered redundant. Sure there may be a need for psychological support but you surely won't need the current ratio of engineers: managers.
There is a deep rooted old school interest in staying physically connected. This won't go away anytime soon. I am not debating whether that is right or wrong, but the general notion that 'we are better if we are physically together' still persists. I don't know if this is a genuine feel-good-together feeling or just a made up emotion to mask point no 1 above.
I am flummoxed by how executive leadership is simply blind to these facts in most companies. I mean the CEO can declare a fully remote constraint sort of like the exact opposite of what Musk did at Twitter and drive productivity higher. The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
It think this is mostly right. Within your point number (1), I see the problem as more to do with senior management.
Specifically I think the major disconnect is not so much between middle managers and IC's, it's between executives and the rest of the org.
Unfortunately I'm beginning to think that this is truly a case of misaligned incentives that may prove hard to fix. What I mean is that executives are directly incentivized to be in the office. Almost all of their career capital is tied up in relationships and patterns of decision making with other executives.
Good day for a manager or IC - 'Wow, I really got a lot done today and I'm moving the team goals forward.'
Good day for an executive - 'That conversation with Dan and Steve went really well.'
I also think that junior new engineers are less productive remote, because they can't absorb the context and experience of their more senior coworkers.
Probably the only group made more productive are senior independent engineers.
Over the pandemic I could closely observe three junior developers.
One was hybrid remote / on-prem with on-prem menotring and sadly they turned up not to meet our standards. I don't think the work arrangement impacted them.
One was fully remote with their mentor fully remote as well and we hired them full-time.
One was fully on-prem as much as they could, with a mentor who was almost fully remote. They were also hired full-time.
So my experience is that there is no correlation between bringing junior developers up to speed and exactly where they work from. Communicating face to face and communicating remotely are different and require different skill sets, but that is down to the abilities of the individual mentors assigned to the individual juniors. Or put another way - every combination works best for some people
My own experience as a junior during the forced WFH transition of the pandemic is, albeit anecdotal, proof for me.
It sucked. If the company doesn't shift and completely overhaul its entire culture from the ground up to full remote including junior mentoring, it's difficult to see, especially from the managers and senior perspective who already know the "games" of the organization and the know-how to get their work done and be productive while advancing their career, just how much knowledge and development potential I missed out on as a remote junior.
When I was in the office, I would pass by a coworkers and see some new development environment or tool on their monitor and I would ask them "Hey, sorry, what's that <thing> you use", "Oh yeah, it's a tool for doing X, it's very useful, you should try it.", "Oh neat, thanks". When we switched to remote I would have no way of seeing the tools others use that later help me also be more productive.
Or when two of the most senior colleagues who sat next to me would be discussing some very high level technical stuff together, I would sometimes listen in and learn something new and sometimes ask them questions later about it and even volunteer to work on that if they need help. With the switch to remote, I have no chance of hearing 1:1 technical discussion calls between the seniors and find out new things or challenges they face.
Basically, I was missing out on a lot of ideas, challenges, solution, technical development know-how, and became this anonymous avatar that needs to takes Jira issues as input and produce Gitlab merge requests as output, pigeonholing myself and stagnating my growth both as an engineer and inside the organization.
I suspect these issues might be less common in startups and companies that have been built from the start as distributed remote, but are probably very present for older organizations that have always ben in the office, and switched to hybrid or remote because of the pandemic.
I can completely understand your position, but it shouldn't be like that.
I started my carrier as a remote employee before the pandemic.
Pairing helped a lot to learn how others are working.
Most of the technical discussions where public. Usually on slack or on GitHub (via RFC PRs). If somebody scheduled a meeting usually included the whole team as optional and encouraged juniors to listen even if they can't contribute.
We planned our sprints together so everybody know what the team is working on.
On the other hand I joined a new company during the pandemic which had similar issues. I wanted to help solve it, but they didn't even acknowledged it.
Many things in life and in the world shouldn't be the way they are, but the reality in the field is very different and most of the time there's not much we can do about it.
Pairing was never a thing in any company I worked (in Europe).
This kind of a comment where middle and senior management will be rendered useless (and therefore feel threatened) by communication-competent engineers is both prevalent on HN and absurdly wrong from a business organization perspective. Joel Spolsky’s writing on this subject should be mandatory reading before people spout nonsense.
If this is a website supposedly for startups, the audience missed that mark by a wide margin.
From my experiences (everywhere from full office to full WFH), even in heavily technical low management environments it still feels more productive to do any of the planning stuff in person.
In my case small percentage of total time and making the 5% more effective to make the remaining 95% less effective doesn't seem like good tradeoff, just not having co-workers interrupt me because I'm near and know the answer is a blessing.
But from manager position I can see that, my 5-10% spent on meetings & related stuff is what they do maybe 80% of the time. Then again bringing 20 people to office just to keep one or two managers happy is also a waste.
> The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
Remote work does require shift of habits, training can help (maybe a niche here for company doing the training?) but it still takes time and effort if you did it in person for last 10-20 years
One key role for a manager is being able to detect who's feeling unmotivated or trying to bullshit you or has something going on in their life that's affecting their work, so that you can dig in to understand more and address the issues proactively. When you casually see people in person every day throughout the day, it's easier to notice when someone's demeanor changes, vs. mostly talking on slack and having a couple of zoom meetings per week.
I didn't catch the question but I will attempt to answer based on what I understand.
Role of a manager that will change significantly based on where the team is sitting - The ability to convey meaning and emotion over written comms and over video calls, to drive the team forward without being too mechanical about it.
We used to spend $400 a month on gasoline because we both commuted 25 minutes each way. During the pandemic that was down to about $100 a month. And when we did have to go somewhere the traffic was so much lower so less wasting gas in stop and go traffic. I'm supposed to go in 3 days a week. In reality I go in once a week for a few hours and no one cares as 90% of the people on my project are in other offices. I told my manager "What is the point of driving in to put on my headset and disturb everyone with my meetings while trying to block out the noise of everyone else on their meetings?" He couldn't argue with that so he hasn't pushed the in office thing.
When I had an office with a door and window I liked going in. It was a good mix of seeing people and privacy. I hate the 1 year of cubicle stuff after 15 years in an office with a door. Then the pandemic hit and I really hate cubicles even more.
Go into the office for enhanced collaboration they say. Everyone I work with is in different countries, so being in the office gains nothing. Being at home is much nicer.
Could I ask what you were driving that ~50 minutes of commuting a day would lead to 200 dollars in fuel?
When I was doing the same during the pandemic, similar commute time, my car making 21ish mpg was only needing about 100 dollars in gas a month. About 10 miles with more than a dozen stop lights.
That seems like an unfortunate choice of vehicle to commute many hours per week alone in, unless maybe you work in construction and need to haul things to the site (in which case spending more on transportation seems worthwhile as a core part of the job function.)
I would agree, however that's not my use case. I don't leave my property except about once per week. I do plenty of "truck stuff" without being in construction, though. I don't think you've hit all the use cases with "work in construction."
So.. if we gave you your office back and ripped out all the cubicles, maybe even had a nice view, would you be happy spending the $400 again? I'm honestly curious where you think the value/cost split is in this equation for you.
I live in a small apartment a short train ride from the office. It isn't big enough to work from home. If I worked from home I'd get a big house in the suburbs, and buy a car to get around. My environmental footprint would be much bigger.
Edit - if I didn't have kids I'd totally have a beach house and a mountain house to live in. Maybe in different countries too.
If I'm reading this correctly, you choose to live in a small apartment, suffer the commute on a train, and work in an office you'd prefer not to be in, just so you don't have to move to a big house in the suburbs with your kids.
You are reading a lot into the OP's statement. A dense city has a much smaller environmental footprint than a sprawling suburb. The statement is just about the relative environmental impact of the two options nothing more.
I doubt the footprint difference would be in any way significant. Depends on the city layout maybe, even with the additional logistical difficulties. For many it is well worth it to escape the noise of high-density residential areas, especially with kids or for people that just like nature.
Your footprint is probably > 95% consumption anyway. I don't understand how high-density living seems to be so attractive to many here.
Consumption goes up when things are more spaced out. Electricity needs to travel farther on lossy lines. Water needs to be pumped over longer distances. Deliveries need to be sent to farther and farther points. Heating needs to cover a wider surface area. Unfortunately all of these relationship grow as a power law of density so your consumption must increase by a substantial amount with a more and more spacious development plan. A quick look at the CO2 emissions per capita of high standard of living countries quickly shows that expansive countries like Canada, Australia or the United States have much higher energy consumption than dense ones like the United Kingdom, Sweden or Japan.
Because the land use is that much more productive. High density cities pay for suburbs which are a net-drain on city finances and are terrible for the environment. The numbers in North America are pretty staggering.
There are plenty of examples around the world where dense urban living can be rather pleasant. You can walk to get your food, kids can cycle around town, and you can sit and gather in public places that are designed for people instead of moving traffic.
That can always be an argument. You could place all humans in Great Britain easily. Would perhaps be more productive as well. Imagine all the biotopes that could strive again. But it isn't a question about productivity and I believe the vast majority live in high density setups for utility. At least I do. It is nice enough but it remains a compromise.
Not from the US, but expect this story about high density areas paying for the others is a stupendous political argument to get people angry at those suburbians and not too much else. The distribution of funds is probably unjust, but the solution is certainly not to bring everyone into high density living.
The solution is to enable more mixed-use zoning and enable more dense development. The situation in North America is that we can only build low-productivity, high-cost, environmentally damaging suburbs. Which, in turn, leads to noisy, polluted cities with high levels of traffic congestion, collisions, and massive amounts of unproductive parking lots.
Plenty of European and Asian cities are good examples of how one can transform modern cities to be better balanced and pleasant for humans to live in.
US cities don’t do well without the suburbs, it’s a symbiotic relationship, you can’t separate the suburb cost from cities, suburban residents go to the cities to work where they register their economic value.
It absolutely is not, it's a parasitic relationship. Enough suburbs are aware of this dynamic that their local leadership tries really hard to annex their suburb into the city so that suburbanites can vote to change policies in the urban area. Suburbs strong arming cities into annexation is a common theme in the US and Canada.
How is it symbiotic? The developed, urban areas generate enough revenue to subsidize suburbs. Without those urban zones suburbs cannot generate enough revenue to provide the infrastructure and services they use.
If the suburbs were to be re-zoned for more dense development and mix-use zoning I don't think the urban areas would see any drop in revenue. They would probably see an increase.
Yes I like my apartment. The commute is just a few stops. I like the office, prefer to WFH. I like the suburbs but wife would rather be in the city, I'm happy here too. The main point is that living in a city and commuting probably has a smaller environmental impact than WFH, which is the opposite of what OP is saying.
There are very few 3-4 bedroom apartments around but a townhouse or similar could work. Maybe I'm just stuck in a rut, I like my lifestyle right now and happy to continue. If I was WFH every day it just feels like it is artificially expensive to live in a big city and I should move. It opens a lot of alternatives which could be very good but I automatically ignore them because I'm happy right now. And the wife probably doesn't want that log cabin in the woods - so its easier not to think about it. :)
The message of the original post appears to be that all other things being equal the poster would rather live in the suburbs in a larger home with a more carbon-intensive lifestyle. However, the misery of the commute from the suburbs to the office overwhelms that preference resulting in the decision to live in the city.
i.e. the assumption that the reduction in commuting would not be offset by changes in other areas is unjustified.
No, you're reading it wrong. They choose to live in a smaller apartment in the city, it's a *short commute* to office and don't have to drive 20-30 minutes for basic errands. Also, not every has/wants kids.
You are interpreting a lot into a very short comment, presumably based on your own preferences. Some people don't mind commuting or even enjoy it, some people prefer living in a decently sized apartment in a city instead of a single family home in the suburbs. It is a matter of preference and personally, I can see the appeal in the approach posted by OP
I used to live in a small apartment and walk to work. Then when my wife and I both had to work from home, we ended up renting a big house because we still needed offices to work. Maybe there are some jobs & personal situations that allow one to wfh without additional space and costs - really though it's just shifting space around, often very inefficiently.
I mean, just bigger apartment is also solution that doesn't have that much of an environmental impact (the space "wasted" is saved by less office buildings).
Additional space in a city is significantly more expensive than the same space in the suburbs because each square foot is in much higher demand.
Some people like the suburban lifestyle, but the reason even people who prefer the amenities of cities move out is that it's the only affordable way to get a lot of space.
The solution is vastly more urban construction to meet demand, but development and regulatory changes have been slow.
I completely agree. Ever since WFH started I'm feeling this gravitational pull away from the city center because of cost of living and space considerations. If salary takes a nosedive this will become untenable for many.
Mountains of research show that this will increase total emissions. It would be one thing if the U.S. was developing medium density suburban cores, but that seems to be on the table in very, very few places.
That seems more a US thing though because of how things are laid out? I picked my multiple places of living (EU) to have everything walking distance and I managed that for the past 30 years with wfh, city or not. We don't touch the car (or anything else) for weeks on end.
Definitely USA and Europe are built differently. I'd class most European city centers are medium-high density where smaller towns are still quite dense. Compare this to NYC where I am and Manhattan is higher density, but 2 hours drive away its normal to have a 4+ bedroom house on a big piece of land with bears and deer roaming around for a quarter of the price.
Walkable places are the exception in the US. Most old small towns were walkable at some point, and a handful of them have a walkable core preserved or restored, but otherwise it's something you'd only find in the downtown area of a major city. The overwhelming majority of housing is car dependent.
And that's fantastic for you, and I'm happy for you, but your WFH footprint will remain small and on average the total environmental footprint will go down because you aren't the average person. You happen to be an anomaly and we can't throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak.
Also, working from home would reduce the demand for the train routes. This in turn would mean that the route would be scheduled more sparsely, or even discontinued*. Which would force more people to use a car.
*And this is why management and operation of public utilities should be policy-driven rather than profit-driven.
FWIW, commuter demand has sort of a complicated effect on train routes.
Commuters generally want heavy rail to get them from where their housing dollar goes farthest to where the highest wage is, and back, riding twice a day, usually over a significant distance. Fast trains, stops widely-spaced so they can hit top speed.
This is at odds with local service for residents, who want trains with tightly-spaced stops and care more about frequency than speed. I live in a dense city with largely non-functional rail transit (Baltimore), and IMO part of the problem is that our public transit options can't decide if they want to be commuter rail or local service and wind up being terrible for both (too slow for commuters because it's light rail, too infrequent for local traffic because of the cost of running a bunch of trains out to the burbs).
Yes, but those who can't WFH and used to commute by train may find themselves having to use a car again. Not to mention that this will force the use of cars for everything else, in addition to work commute.
The amount of productivity I lose when trying to work this way, hunched over my laptop screen in a public place, is immense. An office, downtown or at home, is absolutely necessary. Are you a software engineer?
I am SWE and Engineering Manager. I find open offices to be way more distracting b/c people discuss topics relevant to me (project work or even good morning hellos).
Public libraries are quieter than my office and coffee shop noise is background noise.
Lack of external monitors is a fair concern, but I found external monitors to be too distracting. I only need to look at one thing at a time. I don't want random things popping up on the screen next to me.
It's not the external monitor I'm looking for. It's single monitor larger than a laptop screen and a usable keyboard. I fold my laptop screen closed.
Also, I want to be around for relevant conversations. Context switching is not an issue for me as long it's not unrelated to work (or something unobtrusive like "hello").
Perhaps it doesn't apply to you, but it's natural for many (most?) to require larger or smaller places as needs of immediate family evolve. I don't know that larger places are necessarily optional or environmentally worse.
> I don't know that larger places are necessarily optional
Dogs are optional, and I hear people cite them as a reason to move to a bigger place all the time. It also seems like "get a dog" is the first thing a lot of people do when they get into a WFH situation.
Don't you simply need an apartment with an extra room? That's what I am doing and it works very well. WFH wouldn't even be in my list of reasons as to why I should move to a house.
Your alternative sounds a little bit weird, given that you only need 5-8 sq.m. of extra space to work from home, maybe one more room. It doesn’t sound like a small apartment vs big house plus car alternative, instead it sounds like „WFH is a privilege and I want to live like privileged class then“.
It does not seem that weird. He is saying the bigger home away from the hustle and bustle is his preference, but accepts a smaller home in the city because he is prioritizing his career in that location. If the career was mobile, there would be no reason to make that tradeoff.
There was no suggestion of it being the only alternative, just the choice he would choose if his career was no longer location bound. Someone else in the same situation may choose differently, but there was also no attempt to speak on behalf of others, only himself. There is nothing weird about people having preferences.
Note the edit "if I didn't have kids" - being able to go to work can be an advantage there, because even if the kids are mostly at school or well behaved, you still are home and they'd know it.
Similarly, I often wonder why cities don’t promote local telecommuting over building expensive public transportation infrastructure. Building one kilometre of subway costs anywhere from around $100 million to $1.6 billion (https://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/events/how-much-does-it-cost...), and then requires subsidies to run. Why not use this money to provide incentives for people to telecommute?
And while some might say, “but then people who rely on public transit for things other than commuting to work would be hurt,” note that most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns. Example: https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/01/public-transit-service....
I wish we used the same logic for roads/streets as well. Except for toll roads, which only get a partial subsidy, roads are fully subsidized by the taxpayer.
Since others get fully subsidized roads for their private vehicles, I argue public transit should be fully subsidized as well.
If people are mainly working from home then we can redirect public transit from business parks or whatever towards places people still want to go (e.g. shopping, nightlife, events) but without a car. Starving already often underfunded public transit is not the answer.
Why not use the hundreds of millions spent on highways to subsidize people to work from home instead? Most commuters in North America are not using public transit but highways.
Subsidizing people in affluent, remote-work jobs is not a good allocation of resources. By all means, work from home, but subsidies should mostly help the people in the bottom two thirds of the income ladder.
nah, imho tax should go towards quality of life and stability. Working from home might not be good for promotions it will allow hiring competent people who cant [atm] afford living nearby. Dumb short term gigs gives one a chance to show ones performance.
I do manual labor but i could/should/might be a software developer. Not sure, im definitely not going to give up what i have to relocate. Give me work/tasks and we will see i havent got what it takes or do and if the pay and stability is there to give up what i have for it. They already cant find people. Reduce it further and salaries will have to change.
Bc local telecommuting means there’s no city center, no commercial traffic there, no business tax base. Look at what’s happening to downtown SF. You can debate whether it’s taking the city in a good direction or not, but few elected officials are going to endorse their city becoming smaller or having less income.
Not all jobs can be done by telecommuting. It's a great solution for office work, but it doesn't work so well for manufacturing, retail or the service industry.
> most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns.
Does it? Work-related travel is mostly during morning and late afternoon, but public transit also runs outside those hours. In my experience public transit works quite well for non-commuting travel. Of course this can vary wildly by country, but the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.
I don’t know about universally true, so you may be right that there are exceptions, but as one example, such as linked above, public transit tends to underserve the needs of female caregivers who often need to make multiple short trips rather than two long trips each day.
> the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.
It is always partially true, but each city is different. People who travel in the very early hours (like 2:30am) always have problems, (even the best cities run reduced and thus inconvenient service for maintenance reasons, most give up on transit completely). While those hours are not common it is safe to bet everyone reading this has had reason to travel at those times at least one night in their life.
In far too many cities, (and not just in the US) additional service is run during the peaks. By additional service I mean they run more buses/trains as opposed something with more seats (that is longer). This means people who travel at non-peak hours have to be careful about when they travel to ensure there is service without waiting. Of course if the wait is still less than 5 minutes nobody cares, but as waits get longer - humans don't have time for that.
>> Similarly, I often wonder why cities don’t promote local telecommuting over building expensive public transportation infrastructure.
Because if they promote it too much, they people move far away and the city loses the tax base. One extreme example is New York City -- they have a 3.5% income tax. If you move into next-door NJ or CT, the city loses that 3.5% income.
This is part of it - once you're telecommuting then one of the main things holding you to a particular area is gone.
And once telecommuting is common in a given company, the workers begin to disperse, first to "driving distance" and then to "anywhere in a reasonable timezone".
We already saw how badly Covid hit city centers, perpetual work-from-home would be worse; causing a mini-Detroit in many cities.
I don't think expensive public transport is the problem. It can be crucial for some people. The fact that the article says some people need "short stops on trips to and from work, short-distance trips and a higher frequency of trips" just means the public transport needs to be tweaked, not completely scrapped.
This would appear to go into a much more fundamental questions about our society.
Currently, when we see recession, we can increase government spending. This is usually done in infrastructure – we give people a job, and in return we get infrastructure, nice!
But if we agree that infrastructure does not provide that amount of value we either need to figure other large scale projects that 1) provide value and 2) requires a lot of manual labor or we need to not found money distribution in work (an alternative could be UBI here).
And at least Moore is planning to work with Scott in order to expand the public transit footprint Baltimore has (such as more than one light rail/metro line each and more BRT)
Because employers do not really care about the environment. They’re pretending to because they think supporting the cause positively impacts their revenue. When they have a choice to make an impact, like now, they pass.
Yep. You have to make the environmental goal correspond to a money goal of some sort.
And this can be exceptionally difficult because it can be almost impossible to actually work out the long-term effects of things like "more people should work from home". It's easy to say "shutting down a coal power plant will reduce emissions" because they're so bad, but more remote workers could result in MORE pollution if it enabled more "working holidays" and therefore more flying. And that's only one tiny aspect of all the long-term changes that could occur.
The best part is when they deflect blame onto the individual and tell us to "do our part" while they guiltlessly continue their polluting practices. Just like they do with mental health.
The environmental argument is sometimes used, but often (and often correctly) seen as someone who prefers remote work dishonestly slapping an environmental argument on it (dishonest, because the actual primary reason they're pushing for it doesn't match the stated primary reason).
It isn't as clear-cut as you'd expect either - one argument I've heard is that in areas where air conditioning is a large contributor to energy use and homes are poorly insulated, someone staying home and cooling their home with an inefficient, small air conditioner may be worse than having that person commute to an office instead. This argument is often generalized and sometimes dishonestly used by people who prefer office work to argue that teleworking is actually bad for the environment.
Several studies claim grossly exaggerated environmental impacts for streaming/data transfers. I don't remember seeing it misused to dismiss the environmental argument for teleworking, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it. The worst offender here is the Shift Project, which overstated the results of their already flawed study by another factor of 8 in an interview, and then used that huge mistake to argue that their other mistakes aren't that relevant because they're small (compared to the initial mistake, not compared to their claimed impact). https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/shift-project-really-...
In the Bay Area in 2020 we had rolling blackouts in the summer because the electricity used by air conditioners put more stress on the grid than normal. It was not a particularly hot summer, we just had everyone working at home.
Most of our housing stock is not particularly energy efficient. Whole-house AC and heat instead of systems with multiple zones, big tank water heaters, ok but not great insulation.
I'd buy the idea that working from home lowers emissions and gasoline consumption but also increases the consumption of electricity and natural gas.
Everybody spending 8 more hours at home means so much more individual heating, whereas before, when you went into the office you'd turn the heating off.
Also as someone else pointed, working remote leads to leaving small apartments in the city to move into larger spaces (houses) in the suburbs. Then you would need to use a car more to meet people, get groceries etc. Cities are much more carbon efficient.
Okay, on a personal level this can be tricky to calculate and it is highly individualistic.
Example for Heating
A German price comparison site has done the calculation and for their model – 20m² home office and a yearly usage of ~2000 litres heating oil for the whole apartment) – you would end up with ~4% higher usage [0]. That means that you have 80 litres more heating oil which is equivalent to roughly 80 days of commuting 20 km / day via car. The German average commuter does ~32 km / day [1].
The savings from turning household heat down during the day aren't trivial, but they aren't very large either. You can keep your heat ~10-20°F lower during the day when you're not home and save energy, but then additional energy is needed later in the day to get the temperature back up. Typical estimates are that this lowers gas or oil consumption by 10-15%, and only in the colder months. Certainly dwarfed by energy spent commuting, on average.
Your comment on the second+ order effects is much more interesting, but also much more uncertain.
At least where I live you can't turn heating off. Pipes freeze. Appliances get damaged. We keep it about 62F during the day in the winter whether we are home or not.
We only get groceries twice a month. I only drive a 2-3k miles a year which is far below average in the U.S. and I owe it all to the lack of commute. Most of those miles are due to the fact that we own a cabin in another state which we visit in the summer as well and has nothing to do with the day to day.
That to me feels like a very "US-centric" argument, although I'd still say it's a valid point. Over the pond here in the UK we're seeing an emergence more and more of Commuter-Town suburbia too, and personally I find it a worrying trend- new-build housing estates will cram a bunch of large, thin-walled, cheaply-insulated houses into a small area. Public transport links will be lacklustre. Large shops like supermarkets will probably be a walk away, but the design of the streets and roads will persuade many people that it's easier to drive 5 minutes instead.
I don't think the solution to that is "commute to the office where it's more efficient to heat all of us", though.
It's a long-term city-planning/suburb-planning, environmental architecture problem.
What about buildings semi-recessed into the ground (bedrooms in basement, use the surrounding ground for heat storage, sky-lights to allow sunlight in)? What about further adoption of solar panels for water heating and supplemental electricity? What about "keeping the door shut so the heat doesn't escape"...? What about neighbourhoods using communal heat pumps?
Then there's the fact that a helluva lot of us can't even afford these houses you mention because the housing market is in crisis so we continue to stay in our smaller city flats despite our ability to work remotely.
Like, there's a helluva lot more white collar office workers out there in Western civilisation who _aren't_ following that "get enough money, get a car, have 2.5 kids, move out to the 'burbs" life - don't forget about us.
Maybe if you can get to the office via public transport or cycling it might make sense. But, if you drive then it's consuming more energy than heating the room you're in at home.
I assume you are in an apartment complex and not a free standing home? That is, you are a vampire, stealing your neighbor's heat. Otherwise, I do not see how that is possible.
I'm not convinced it is a net positive in the end. Especially for big companies, heating an office space with 500+ people is probably much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses for example
Most houses stay heated during the day anyway, remote work or not, it doesn't change the situation that much. And offices will remain heated whether there are full or only half of the employees actually in the building.
Do you turn off the heating in every room in your house when you go out to work?
Even if you did have some "smart" appliance that would make it easier, you'd have to "over-heat" when you come back to get again the desired temperature (or pre-heat a few hours before coming back), which would mostly make the effort's result insignificant...
It would make sense to drop heating when leaving for a few days though, week-ends/holidays. Offices are not heated on week-ends for example.
I will note that I am in a warm country, so we much more rarely have the heat on. But if I'm out of the house for 8 hours, I'll definitely turn off the AC. It might take time to get the house cold again, but c'mon, no way we'd pay for a day's worth of electricity for no reason.
I wonder how much this changes if it's heating vs cooling, and based on how much you have to heat/cool a place.
>heating an office space with 500+ people is much more efficient than heating 500 individual houses
Citation needed.
I would argue its very hard to make any general statement about this.
In my case the office is much more wasteful than the space I use for remote work for a multitude of reasons.
I said I'm not convinced, it obviously isn't a general thing.
A friend of mine spends 500+ euros per month on gas for heating since he works from home, no way on earth his office uses 500 per person and per month on heat
A 2kW electric heater can heat up any reasonable size office room up to a temperature where you are going to have to strip to your underwear (or turn it off) in under an hour in my experience.
Even if it's on 8 hours a day constantly, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month that's 320kWh or just over £100 a month at UK energy prices.
In comparison, we have a 1600 sq ft home and only have $50 USD gas bills lately. It's definitely been higher (at least double), but we've been learning to live with a colder thermostat.
Granted this is the US, and natural gas is considerably cheaper here than in a lot of countries in Europe right now, so you probably need to at least double what I said anyway for Europe.
Is that € 500 for just the working hours? Because homes are also generally heated for other uses than work. Those reasons don't go away if you work at the office. If you've got a spouse working from home, or kids coming from school, that house is going to be heated anyway.
The norms are different in different locations. Where I live (Sweden), I'd say pretty much everybody sets a comfortable temperature and keeps it at that.
OTOH, our houses are generally heavily insulated, so while heating a house is expensive, keeping it heated is relatively cheap. I'm always amazed at the lack of insulation when I travel abroad. I never freeze as much as when I leave Scandinavia (no joke).
For those of us who live in a place that reaches freezing temperatures for months on end, there's no choice. If I don't heat my house, my pipes will freeze and I'll be out thousands of dollars in repair work and damage.
I turn the heat down to 55 or so (the lowest the thermostat will go) when I'm away for a few days. But I've never heard of anyone not leaving their heat on some setting for this reason. Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
> Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
Grew up in a place that reaches -25c pretty often and never heard of that. It's in europe though so we probably have better insulation. I could leave my house 3 days and no pipe would burst, I've never heard of anyone having burst pipes now that I think about it. When I went to school and my parents were at work we'd shut down the heating completely, we were pretty poor so there is that, but I don't remember being cold
When I was in california we'd have to run heating full blast 24/7 to maintain 16c indoor so that my explain a few things
Woah, that's wild! I've lived in mostly wooden houses in the Northeast for most of my life, and it seems to happen to one or two people in every community per year.
It's mostly a problem where I come from during power outages -- if you don't have power for 2-3 days, you might not be able to run even a propane-based heating system. But maybe the prevalance of water baseboard heating systems contributes; I imagine they're the most vulnerable pipes in the house to freezing, since they by nature sit closest to cold exterior temperatures.
One more thing I assumed was a worldwide problem, that it turns out is just a result of shoddy American building quality. Sigh.
We lower the heat if nobody is home. But, that's the difference between 70* and 65*. With no heat, the house would eventually be 32* in the dead or winter.
And we only do that because smart thermostats exist and use our phones as presence sensors. Without that, we'd have to manually lower the heat and I doubt we'd bother/remember.
I certainly wouldn't heat your home when nobody is home, but most people do return home after a day at the office, and many people don't live alone. That's what I'm referring to.
Or do you demand that they live in the cold while you're at the office?
> The most common way of heating here is that you have radiators set up
Most people here would need to actively tweak it every time the leave the house and every time they come in. And do it separately for each room. Just from the way how heating works - you have valve in each room that you turn in order to adjust heating.
I do. I turn up the heat in the morning and turn it down again in the evening. Smart thermostats can do that automatically, but my home office doesn't have a smart thermostat.
I work from home full time, my gas bill is a fraction of that (~GBP100/month), and that's even accounting for the crazy energy cost increases we've seen in the UK.
Anecdotally I see many people traveling more enabled by remote work (and a single flight can equal a full year of car commuting). And I feel many people use telework days to run errands or go to lunch more frequently often nearly matching commute miles in a day.
When else are you supposed to run errands? Here's my anecdotal driving activity after taking a remote position:
I used to drive every day of the week. Now, it's 3 days, on average. If I could walk or cycle to the gym (roads are 0% accessible for pedestrians), I could easily drop that to one or two days.
In terms of running errands, I've moved that to a "before work" activity. It's honestly amazing how smooth it all goes at 8:00am vs 5:30pm. Plus, I consider this a net positive for the community since I'm one less person clogging up the grocery store at their busiest time.
Yeah, but many offices are likely to be converted to other uses, rather than persist with partial occupation. Hotel, residential etc
People often say it’s cost prohibitive, but it’s been done many times before, and valuations of Offices will get so depressed that conversions begin to look very lucrative
Large office buildings do not convert into hotels or residential all that well. Most of them have all of their plumbing and utilities in the central core. That's not easy to retrofit.
They may also not be up to code for residential use.
And plumbing and wiring a building is vastly cheaper than building a new one from scratch.
Most modern office buildings are already designed so their tenants can orient the space however they like, Including adding/removing walls and plumbing/electric
If you can buy office buildings at half the valuation of a similar square footage residential building, converting it will obviously be profitable. It was already profitable in many cases pre Covid before office became severely depressed. The valuation gap between residential and office has probably never been wider
Also if you have pets you can't really turn off the heat (or AC in the summer for desert areas), and children usually get home in the afternoon while people are still working.
Pets. Other family members. Plus the fact that you're "daytime" heating/cooling a home from 6:30-8:30 am and 3:30-10 pm anyway, and that modern or updated homes keep their temperature for several hours. So the debate is really over a few degrees for a couple of extra hours (Vs. heating an entire other building that may not otherwise exist).
I know at our workplace heating on Monday mornings has to start several hours earlier than on Tuesday because the office lost almost all of its built-up heat from the previous Friday. I also know that they continue to run the heating on holiday-Fridays/Mondays because if they don't by the following Monday/Tuesday, the temperature will drop too low and could damage equipment.
Well, you may live with other people who are in it when you're not, causing it to be heated anyway.
But I guess the answer would be that people can't abide the thought of one uncomfortable minute in their own home, and don't bother figuring out how to program the thermostat.
Typical American house uses a heat pump (basically an AC run "backwards") with a single thermostat (bigger houses might have multiple complete systems).
If you turned the heat off at 7am as you left for work, the house would probably be below 60 when you got home, and take most of the evening to reheat, only to be turned back down again at bed time. I don't know anybody who manually does any of this - at best, they have a smart thermostat that lets them schedule home/away time or uses cell phones as presence sensors. And even then, they'll lower the heat 5-8 degrees, not turn it off completely.
That might be typical for new builds, but it varies a lot by region. Much of the northern half of the country is still burning propane, pellets/wood, or fuel oil for heat.
Yes it follows from first principles, a well-insulated house has a structure that is being heated and retains heat (like a pizza stone) as well as the air itself. Heating air inside a cold structure is quite different from heating air inside a warm structure. So your evening heating will have to work harder to warm the structure back up that was allowed to cool in the day. The air in the evening will cool faster and the heating will have to kick back on again, dumping heat into the structure.
If you leave the heat on during the day (and that can be a few degrees lower) then you can keep the structure warm and avoid all that evening heat loss and cycling. But only if you have good insulation. Otherwise you’re just dumping heat out into the environment. The other factor is how cold it is outside, if the temperature gradient is steep then it’s harder to contain hot air.
You can think about this at the limits. You could turn off the system for days, weeks, months, or whole seasons and allow the house to drift with the ambient environment. Then, you turn it on and recover to the conditioned mode. This certainly uses less energy than if you maintained it for that whole duration. This is because the loss to environment tapers off. It does not keep losing and reach some absurd extreme beyond that of the environment. Reducing the interval for the drift does not fundamentally change this equation. At the other extreme, you can do what a normal thermostat does now. The system is turned off for minutes and allowed to drift until it is called back into action. All other time intervals in between exist on a continuum. The maximal losses are when you try to keep the constant comfort level.
As far as thermodynamics, you're always exchanging heat with the environment. Only the coefficients change with different insulation levels. And these losses correlate with the gradient between the inside and outside. When the gradient is zero, equilibrium means zero net heat transfer. When the house is allowed to drift towards the outside temperature, the total losses will be lower than if comfort were maintained through those same hours. The integral (sum) of these loss rates over time is your total energy loss and a good proxy for the total energy needed from the heating system to condition the space.
The whole tradeoff is about comfort and convenience to have the space conditioned when you want it and to have an appropriately sized system for the needed load. Whether oversized or undersized, equipment may not operate efficiently if asked to operate outside its designed load level and duty cycle. It can also become unreliable with the wrong duty cycle, i.e. a small unit asked to run too long and too frequently or a large unit asked to run too infrequently and for too short a duration each time.
That the equipment has to operate at a higher load during recovery does not imply that it actually uses more total energy in the daily cycle. That would only be true if the equipment is inefficient at the recovery load. An example where this is true would be a heatpump system with an auxiliary resistive heating element that engages in recovery. But, a gas furnace or a sufficiently large heatpump is likely more efficient in recovery since it is also working with a larger gradient until recovery is complete.
It is common for basic clock-based, programmable or smart thermostats to allow for daily drift to save energy. They use a more comfortable set point during morning and evening hours when occupants are most sensitive and then allow some drift towards ambient during midday and nighttime hours when occupants are less likely to notice. This is precisely to leverage this tradeoff to have less total energy losses per day. They don't completely turn off but vary the set point so that the building is kept within a range where the comfortable and efficient recovery is possible. Depending on the day, this might be equivalent to turning off or it might just reduce the duty cycle slightly.
It depends on what you mean by "let it get cold" and how good your insulation is and a number of other factors.
But thermal mass can be a big thing. My house isn't even all that well insulated, and when it is 0º F outside, it only drops about 10 degrees if the furnace is off all day.
Back in 1964 Arthur C. Clarke predicted [1] that by the year 2000 cities as we know them would no longer exist. We would live in a world of instant communication where we could contact anyone on Earth without leaving our home. This technology would make it possible for many people to conduct business without having to be present at a specific physical location. Today, we know the technology Clarke was talking about as the Internet. And while his technological predictions could not have been more correct, he severely underestimated the pace of social progress.
Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them.
Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results. Office workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute.
Did you mean that he overestimated social progress?
Consider that he'd already moved to Sri Lanka in the 1950s, ostensibly out of his love for diving. He was primed to see the benefits of WFH and telecommunication, and certainly able to exploit the flexibility in his own life and career.
Ironically, with his adventurism and individualism, perhaps his imagination was too limited to think that many people are self-limiting. The companies you speak of are not abstract entities forcing the poor humans to live unwanted lives. They are the people---identifying with the rituals of office life and demanding conformance from one another.
I'm saying that he overestimated how quickly our society would adapt to the possibilities created by technology. Companies are not abstract entities, but the rituals aren't decided upon democratically. Companies are run like medieval fiefdoms where a small group of people at the top rules by fiat over the company. This problem would be much easier to solve under cooperative ownership model where such decisions can be made collectively be the people doing the work.
I actually don't know the answer to this question and what baffles me the most is hearing what urban/transport activists have to say about that - those I talked with either ignore it completely or argue that it's worse because it "induces sprawl".
I have quite a few people in my social circle who moved out to the suburbs/countryside and remote work was by and large considered only after they moved and found that they underestimated what an issue their commute would be(especially when traffic increased over time as it usually does).
Personally I live in the city and still work remotely because it's more convenient than travelling to work daily regardless how close to the workplace I might live.
> I talked with either ignore it completely or argue that it's worse because it "induces sprawl".
But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes. If you had sprawl with lots of small, local commercial outlets, then that's just perfect. No long commutes to work and no long commutes to get life's necessities.
> But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes.
I agree to an extent.
To be completely fair it is less efficient than densely packed cities in terms of energy and cost of providing services like sewage/garbage disposal.
That being said I see it as a tradeoff like any other and believe people should have the right to choose how they live as long as they bear the costs of that.
100% with you on that. I live 4km from the city centre, so essentially walking distance.
I went there on the weekend. It's very lively, but I wouldn't want this sort of liveliness during the evening when the only thing I need is to wind down. I prefer living here, halfway from the centre to the city limits.
Even if you stop moving people, you still have to move goods (and electricity, and sewage) which is less efficient if the people are spread over a larger area.
> Even if you stop moving people, you still have to move goods (and electricity, and sewage) which is less efficient if the people are spread over a larger area
That's not necessarily true. Centralizing leads to congestion, for instance, to say nothing of the other failure modes of centralizing (single point of failure being the big one). I expect there is an optimal density for each of those, and it's not clear that "large city" is in that region.
Losses in distributing electricity are fairly negligible, and distributed generation should be encouraged for some of the same reasons.
The goal of remote work is not to drive everyone out of the city. It's a success if we allow enough people to move to the suburbs. Everyone benefits, including people that love the city life.
Plus, remote work is still not the norm in every company, so it's difficult for someone like you and me to move to the suburbs even if we wanted to, because we can't be 100% certain our next jobs will be remote.
> Everyone benefits, including people that love the city life.
That's what I've been saying, but I'm met with an attitude that doesn't accept anything short of what I see as a human pile-up with only the very rich owning real estate.
For my case, it was worse. When normalized to dollars, I spent nearly 2x more in HVAC expenses compared to driving's fuel costs, and that's with a modest commute (20 miles). Its much less energy intensive to air condition one large medium-density building than many smaller low-density buildings.
Or that he is running HVAC for his 2000 sqft house, vs running HVAC for his 180 sqft office space (where 180 sqft are dedicated to him out of some large space shared with others).
Part of it is that he's comparing his work-from-home AC expenses to his work-from-office gas expenses. He's not factoring in the company's office AC bill, because he doesn't pay it.
Also note that, at least in my case, I've got a cubicle farm at work. I can't just up the temperature for my 64 sqft cube; I have to up it for an entire quadrant of the floor.
Big family house in the suburbs with aggressive demand scheduling (ie, we let the temp float a fair amount when nobody is home) versus high-efficiency car.
Sorry if I am reading this wrong, but this seems to suggest that the solution is micromanagement.
Even if working from office, I'd expect any professional to know how to communicate effectively, and is able to manage their time and tasks efficiently. If they cannot do it remotely, then I'd worry about their performance in the office also.
It's a skill you can train. Just that most corporations that got shifted to WFH coz of pandemic didn't bother to train or revisit their processes. That's partly (the other part is managers clinging to their jobs) why some yell for coming back to office, the required work for the shift was not done and now performance suffers.
Actually those are just the skills you need to work efficiently in any knowledge-work environment. The people who lack those just suck up everyone else’s time.
Because it isn't necessarily pro env, at least not everywhere. This has to be subject of larger studies I guess.
Some thoughts.
1. If I WFH I need to heat/cool my apartment/house my self. This is much more inefficient than heat office spaces, if you take the people inside an filled office space into account.
2. The public transport is going and consuming energy anyways.
3. Zoom, Teams, etc is consuming a lot of energy due to servers and videostreaming.
4. Walking a little bit does not harm yourself and maybe saves medical treatment, which in itself harms the environment.
FWIW: I'm sure that heating and cooling my 3rd floor office negates some of my impact from telecommuting. I also have extra equipment in the office, and at home, that goes mostly unused.
I've been working ~90% remote for about 8 years. It works for me, because I'm disciplined and honest, and because I have a job that can be performed remotely. It also works for me because I've been able to find good ways to have facetime with the people I work with; but I'm normally shy and prefer to work in isolation.
Not every job can be performed remotely. Even jobs that can be performed remotely need facetime for helping people early in their careers start. Some people, unfortunately, aren't disciplined enough to work remotely.
Other people are extreme extroverts and really, really need to be around a large group of people for most of their day. A good friend of mine, who works in a hospital, used to love his job until he was assigned work-at-home work. He hates it now, just because he's a major extrovert.
There's another post in this thread from someone who lives in a small city apartment and commutes by train a few stops to their office. That's also environmentally friendly.
Because people don't look at issues like climate change rationally. We're attacking the problem almost randomly based on what's politically expedient/ popular instead of what gives the biggest greenhouse gas reduction for the price.
To phrase it another way, our governments are fucking stupid and it makes me sad.
If we really care about this problem, we should attack it coldly, rationally, as an engineer or economist might.
It is really stupid, and I hate that people tend to cut random liberties because they could maybe affect the environment ever so slightly. In reality this is so insignificant, it looks more like a panic than an attempt to a solution. You also loose political capital for serious undertakings.
Truth is that composting your tea bags isn't that relevant. We have to look at the large picture and see if we can curb the largest emissions (from which everyone profits).
Even just encouraging fracking (cheap gas vs coal means 2x reduction in carbon), or stopping to subsidize fossil fuels would make a massive difference.
Fracking is not sustainable (you're not going to be able to frack forever, we've already tapped a lot of the 'cheap gas' wells, future wells will eventually get prohibitively expensive, it already is very expensive and not even that profitable[1], and got a lot more expensive this year thanks to it requiring a specific type of sand that's now 3x the cost[2]) and is harmful to freshwater, not only by using a ton of it (average of 45 millions of gallons of freshwater per fracking well) but also because it mixes tons of chemicals in with the water it uses, making the wastewater toxic[3]. It also leaks a lot of methane[4], which is 80x worse for warming than CO2 emissions in the short term (CO2 stays in the atmosphere longer).
"To determine the potential impact of fracking in the U.K., a group of Manchester scientists ranked it and other energy sources, such as coal, wind, and solar, after considering environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Of the nine energy sources examined, the scientists found that fracking ranked seventh in sustainability.
To make fracking as sustainable as energy sources higher up on the list, such as wind and solar, there would need to be a staggering 329-fold reduction in environmental impact, according to the researchers."[5]
It doesn't need to be sustainable, a short-term reduction in emissions it's also helpful and buys more time to go carbon free. It's a complete lie that we have to transition directly from our current state to zero carbon with no stops in between. Fracking is something really only done in the US. Doing more fracking internationally could really bring emissions down. Fracking has done more to reduce US emissions than all the climate change policy combined.
The point you bring up about methane leaks is salient though, if you can't do it without leaking too much methane, it doesn't make sense. However, I don't think that's impossible. Taxing methane leakage and monitoring it from satellites, as one idea of how to do that, seems quite possible.
Obviously it's also good to mitigate damage to the environment via waste products, etc, but that also seems to be possible with the right regulation and enforcement.
Zoom's customers aren't the WFH people, but rather the IT and procurement managers that decide which tool to spend their 5-figure budgets on. Presumably their marketing efforts will be specific to that audience.
It may be risky to throw up billboards talking about the evironmental benefit of WFH if your customer's CEO thinks that they should be back in the office.
The majority of advertising on environmental initiatives ("hey go out there and recycle" and that kind of crap) is funded by polluters to shift the conversation from a manufacturer problem to a consumer problem. You need to ask "who is advertising" and "who is the market."
So let's say Zoom wanted to run an initiative like this… the market wouldn't be workers, it's be the bosses. So already you're talking about a tiny sliver of the population. No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market.
Okay, now that you've identified the target audience, what do they respond to? "This way of working that most of you hate, it's happy days and sunshine?" No, they respond to money. The campaign that would resonate with bosses is "your office lease costs too much money." Environmental concerns wouldn't even measure up.
Having said all this, I suppose one could make the case that remote-work-apps could advertise to "shift the conversation" amongst workers to demand remote-work for the sake of the environment, but I personally don't think anyone in America at least believes in this kind of grass-roots influence in business, that's too socialist.
> No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market
Neither the billboards for Brex on the drive to Mission from SFO, nor those for Boeing in the Washington, D.C. metro, nor those “for your consideration” on the Sunset Strip come Oscar season, are meant for a mass market. This doesn’t seem a sound premise.
In being so physical, billboards are hardly mass media at all. More big brochures.
:) I haven't been to any of those places, but I was in LA last summer and saw "for your consideration" billboards everywhere. One might argue that those billboards also drive up the marketing for rentals, streaming and DVD sales… but anyway, good point.
If only those polluters would stop pointlessly polluting! Gee I mean why would they even do it? It's almost as if you're paying them to pollute for you so you can have that new laptop and fast shipping!
There was a big "Slack is where work happens" campaign, on billboards and expensive full page newspaper ads etc. By the same token that would also seem to have little purpose.
Maybe these kinds of ads are made as memes to be repeated uncritically by decision makers with little specific expertise, or something like that
The “EVs are good for the environment” ads are for the consumers, many of whom haven’t made their minds up about which car to buy next. People have made their minds up about whether they like remote work or not — see every HN thread ever.
It needs more analysis to determine if it's actually a net positive on the environment. People may travel more in their day, live more remotely, houses (as far as I know) aren't as well built as offices and use more energy per sq ft during the day, etc.
Technically if you want to optimize emissions reductions, you should eliminate homes, not offices. If everyone lived in the office we would all use less energy!
Anyways, transportation for commuting is one of the smallest buckets of emissions. So if it is a net positive it's still not moving the needle in a meaningful way.
Oddly, it isn't quite that straight forward, is it? Specifically, you get some scale efficiencies for cities and office parks by having folks there. Especially in regards to getting food capabilities centralized. A cafeteria, I would think, uses less to feed a lot of people, than each of them using their own kitchen to store and prepare food.
That said, I do expect it is still ahead in most measures. Is a good question and I would love to see a comprehensive analysis.
Some companies simply don't care about the environmental benefits of remote work; they want their employees located together in brick and mortar offices. Also, and while I agree that remote work seems the more environmentally friendly of the two options, I am unaware of any study that has compared the carbon footprint of telecommuting with that of the traditional commute. Does anyone know of such a study?
Because of the amount of money parked in commercial real estate. Organizations that own office buildings tend to be immensely influential in local politics.
This is an answer to both “Why is remote work currently not advertised as a pro climate environment initiative?” and “Why won’t remote work ever be advertised as a pro climate environment initiative, ever, for the foreseeable future?”
I’m just sample size = 1. I switched to telecommuting during the pandemic, which let me move away from the city. Instead of taking public transportation to the office and walking to the store, I now walk to the (home) office and take the car to the store.
So while I’m certainly spending a lot less time in total on transportation, the mode of transportation is much worse for the environment.
Can you give a properly researched article showing the environmental impact of commuting outweighs the environmental impact of working from home? My guess is that this won't always be true and will depend on the type and distance of commute as well as the additional heating/cooling demand required to keep multiple home offices habitable.
I used to have a job that required a daily commute, but didn't require any travel.
I now have a remote job that I do at home, with an extremely modest amount of travel -- I see my teammates 2-3 times a year at conferences or meetups.
It turns out that flying, even very occasionally, is worse for the environment than driving, and that my "eco-friendly" remote job leaves a bigger carbon footprint than my commuting job. A single person's share of a single cross-country flight once a year can emit more carbon than an ENTIRE YEAR of car commuting.
The only downside to all of this remoteness is the non-programmer workforce going remote. I do think people that pick up the phone pre-pandemic should be picking up the phone post-pandemic. Whether that's from their home or not, I don't care.
What we get instead though, is ringing, ringing ringing. Can't get my power ordered. I can't get roofing ordered. Can't get call backs.
Things were more expedient pre-pandemic. I often do wonder too, is part of the reason company X is OUT of something isn't because the ship is late - or is it because the ordering person no longer sits in front of a giant pile of insulation and goes - oh crap, that is getting really low. I should order more. (And guess what happens if he calls to order more - ringing ringing ringing)
> The only downside to all of this remoteness is the non-programmer workforce going remote.
I'm sure you can think of many other downsides than that. This topic has been discussed adnaseum, and there are many pros and cons of remote vs in-office
To be an environmental activist * requires a certain type of personality. The kind that thrives in groups and in public. Of course they wouldn't even think of working from home.
* or any kind of activist for a cause actually. But that would decrease the nastiness.
Because "Pro-Environment" messaging is neither about being preserving the environment, or about the environment. It's about co-opting the relevant ideal within the overton window to signal some form of ethically accepted form of compliance.
The climate effects of home office were estimated for 40 percent of the
workers, each with two home office days per week, were estimated to save 5.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
This corresponds to 18 percent of
percent of the emissions from commuting to work or 4 percent of the
of total passenger transport emissions (Büttner and Breitkreuz 2020).
The result is a share of 25.8% (short-term) to 39.3% (long-term) of all employed persons in
Austria who could in principle work from home on a permanent or temporary basis.
By overestimating the work-related passenger kilometers, this results in a
savings potential of about 300 kilotons of CO2 equivalents per year, if about a quarter of all employed persons in Austria work from home for 40 % of the working time (or 2 out of 5 working days).
Due to undesirable rebound effects, such as an increasing distance
between home and work, induced traffic as a result of freed-up capacity, or increased
capacities or increased leisure mobility, this potential can increase to 90 kilotons of
CO2 equivalents per year.
Because many large businesses with lobbying power don't want to be potentially called out as anti environment. They want the freedom to treat it like an employment perk if/when they choose to support it.
I have actually heard it talked about a lot as a pro environment thing - just much earlier in the pandemic. I have not seen huge advertising about it but that does not mean it is not highly talked about.
That being said you are totally right that Zoom should be advertising the crap out of this - Microsoft may have incentivize NOT to do this (if they want their own employees in the office) but for Zoom it seems like a no brainer.
More CO2 is generated by remote employees than those that go to work. The CO2 emissions generated by an office (including heating / AC / water / employee transportation - in EU it's mostly by subway / bus) are smaller compared to each individual employee CO2 emissions.
Don't have a source, but you can find CO2 calculators online.
In general I feel that the remote work is still massively underrepped. I get depression every time I open any of those remote work sites and 99% of the job posts are tagged with "us only".
There seem to be opportunities in other places (such as EU) around as well, but one has to search far and wide instead of just having them available in the easy-to-access sites.
Maybe because it might cause psychological issues for people who can't easily connect online and corporations are pricks. I agree that choice would be good thing, but I'm not sure about advertising one as superior to the other.
Is there an environmental benefit if the energy saved commuting is used on something else? Example: If I spend $300 less on gas each month and then use that extra $3,600 at the end of the year to take a trip to Tahiti.
"No form of transport requires less energy than telecommuting" is quite the statement. If your work force bikes or walks to work, pretty sure that has far lower energy requirements than having all of them telecommute.
People not all using their own computers and internet connections, during meetings because they're all in the same room (or in a room with a single computer and internet connection), as well as people not all needing to each have lights, heating, etc. on at home because they're all in a shared building with (almost certainly more efficient) HVAC.
Didn’t Buckminster Fuller talk of the holistic energy cost of going to work? Summarizing that it cost less energy if you factor externalities to just stay at home? I can’t remember exactly, but something along those lines…
Also with distracted driving becoming so much more of a problem, and accidents increasing even though we've got driving assist technologies, the workers are running personal risk of debilitating injuries.
I would be curious to know if remote work reduces overall VMT, or if commute VMT is replaced by higher VMT for daily tasks (if people move to Kansas or wherever, where things are spread out further).
With remote working you tend to have team-members more spread out. Bringing them together requires more travel. If this is by airplane it quickly cancels out the reduction in commute emissions.
What we are being told at my company is that the corporate building has all of these green technologies, so it’s more environmentally friendly to work there even taking into account commuting.
If I telecommuted:
Pros:
- my company wouldn’t need as much office space for me, but not none, so 80% space/energy savings,
- also offset an 8 mile (x2 so 16mi) driving commute
Cons:
- I’d probably make up those 16mi of commuting in other ways (errands, driving to a lunch time hike, etc)
- I’d need more space at home, and consume more energy (prob not fully offsetting the savings from work, but a meaningful part)
- I’d probably work remotely from other locations more, increasing my air travel footprint meaningfully (which I think puts this in the red)
- I’d probably cook more at home (while cheaper, is probably more energy intensive than a commercial kitchen per meal?)
Because the power of environment is not greater than the power trips of management when they can see their direct reports bow and greet them in the hallways of their corpdoms.
Probably because people get significantly less work done remotely… CEOs know this, multiple studies have shown this, and it’s been a lot of people’s experience as well.
I can't help but think you may not despise working from home, the only people who dispute wfh is less efficient are people who want to wfh or people selling article clicks to them
Why would you think I may not despise working from home? I wouldn't recommend scanning back through my comment history because it's fairly dense and silly, but if you did, you'd find a recent comment where I believe I referred to it as "diet hell" because it only lasts 8 hours a day for 30 years as opposed to 24 hours a day for eternity.
I suspect most of that was due to company being forced to do remote coz of COVID and of course without change of way of working that didn't work very well.
Some jobs are worse candidates for that too and if you force everyone to WFH of course that won't be positive.
Think about this from a business finance perspective. Companies have since the early 1900's built an economy around working in offices. Car manufacturers, car service and maintenance businesses, food service companies, commercial real-estate companies and oil and gas companies and many other sectors all have a stake in this game.
Then you have internal forces at play too. HR managers, and department managers don't look so useful when the majority of people never interact in real life. No matter how optimistic we look at the human condition, people have the desire to exercise power and control over others. With people working remote exercising power and control is harder. Additionally, you still have gen-x and boomers working, especially in management who have a different idea of work culture than millennials and gen-z. To the older generations working on-site is the only justifiable way to work. To them the notion of being at home for work is not real work.
There also appears to be a camp of management types who have seen evidence confirming that remote work doesn't work. They are going to stick to their position because they have evidence to support. I recently heard similar sentiments to Musk's take on remote work from Tim Pool, and a manager at my job. They are convinced that meaningful work can only happen in person.
So between those three main factors: Money, power, and bias of evidence the pitch for remote work being an environmental initiative gets drowned out. Really, makes you wonder if environmentalism is really that important for the business leadership class.
I personally believe work from home can be an amazing option for white collar work and for the right person. As a UI developer I love it. I don't get distracted by office stuff and get good flow often. I'm and expert at using online communication tools and desktop publishing tools so I can communicate my ideas and thoughts coherently remotely. However, I've seen some people not be able to manage themselves or have the skills to work from home.
needlessly requiring people to move themselves into offices
I've been on multiple sides of this environment over my 3+ decades in the job market: managed people in office, managed people while I worked remotely, worked in an office, worked remotely (mostly for the last 13 years).
I'm very sympathetic to remote work, but my experience tells me that your "needlessly" is not well-founded.
Could it be climate change does not exist and was fabricated by mega corps and the politicians they control to drive social movements they find convenient and which make us poor but ignore social movements that could also help their made up problem but make us happier and wealthier perhaps ?
Yea, where's the "outrage"? Need more outrage. I mean, by golly, I have these *kiddos* who need their dad 24/7! What's with these young people who want to go into the office?
There can be parties exaggerating the severity of an issue to lend credence to their proposed solution. Bonus points if the proposed solution won’t solve the root cause, but will give more power and control over people to government.
Kind of like Republicans on the southern border. The issue can exist, the extent of the issue can be exaggerated, and the proposed solution would do nothing to solve the root cause.
China and India seem to disagree seeing that they will be firing up new coal plants for the next 3 decades, at least. That’s a pretty big chunk of the global population.
The elite sure do disagree with me publicly but still fly privately, buy up ocean frontage, ignore lower hanging fruit in favour of schemes that enrich them. And we all vote them in again and again.
I don’t remember anyone voting to triple their electricity bills. I for one don’t believe all the mega Corps advertising and social movements like cancer cell fake meat being better for the environment
WFH is indeed advertised as pro environment. It just isn’t taking off very well for many.
Change is hard and re-thinking work as an entirely online activity requires a lot of change.
For some, their jobs which were fun before the pandemic now just suck because they don’t get to meet people face to face.
Some dread the long boring days WFH and spending time in back-to-back Zoom meetings where 90% of those attending have their camera off and do something else.
Some are frustrated because their coworkers are slacking off WFH. Others are frustrated because their productivity at home is a disaster.
But there is also a pro-environment factor of working in an office: In countries where buildings need heating, heating one office compound is more efficient than heating a hundred homes at the same time.
What makes you so sure that commuting is more environmentally harmful than datacenters full of hardware and the construction and transport of said hardware and mining of raw materials for the hardware?
Additionally, lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl.
I am not saying that's the case, but I don't buy that it's a strictly pro-environment win a-priori.
If anything commuting is the daily theft of an hour of everyone's life, more so for drivers. "Get an hour of your life back every day" should be all the marketing that's ever needed.
Sure zoom is still used, but I would be surprised if it's on the same order of magnitude.
I'm not trying to argue that commuting is more environmentally friendly, it's very likely not, only that I need a bit more substantiation than "it's obviously true," and I particularly would want substantiation on the long term. I also would want to understand if electric cars are being accounted for.
The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl.
Definitely a USA problem. Cars are poison, literally and metaphorically. I don't think the average American has experienced what car-less living is like and how much better it is.
My critique of your original post is that there are many reason's remote work might be better, but environmentalism probably isn't the strongest.
> The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl.
Not anymore. Most jobs in a city are not in the center, they are in the suburbs as well. If you want a short commute you have to live in the suburbs.
Note that in most cases (US - other countries are different!) there are zero places to live within walking distance of the office. Suburbs don't have mixed use zoning so it is illegal to live near where you work. While city centers might allow it (not all do) in theory, in practice rent is so high in the city center that common people cannot afford to live within walking distance of a job there. At least the city center has a form that supports transit, but you still can't walk there from home.
Note that I said form not not density. Suburbs have plenty of density to support transit, but the way things are built mean a transit can't get to enough people.
My team is located in 3 different timezones. Using zoom/meet is a requirement for absolutely every single one of our meetings, whether we are in office or at home.
Situations like this are extremely common in the industry, at least common enough to justify almost every company I've ever word equipping their meeting rooms with video-conferencing hardware.
This may not be universally true, but voice-only makes a difference, too.
Audio is very low bandwidth, but for work it is usually more than adequate. Screenshare, where important, is mostly just a matter of providing small diffs over time, it's usually much cheaper both to encode/decode than normal video streaming. You can also run it point to point in smaller calls, which means fewer hops and datacenters (more routers, perhaps, but you were going to need them anyway)
That's a nice excuse for when I want to just do what I want instead of staring at stupid camera just so someone can see me looking at them in the square on their screen.
Because if you don't have to drive to work in the city every day you're not going to care if your house is a 3 hour drive away. So you buy that new giant single family home with the large lot instead of the two bedroom condo that's in walking distance or the older townhome that has a sub-45 min driving commute. This might be a very North America problem but with the pandemic and the rise of WFH it's something that's been observed. The prices of homes outside the city have risen faster than those inside the city at least in Canada [0].
Oh yeah sprawl is induced. If you only have to drive 2x week — you may tolerate a 50 mile commute vs before you aimed for 10 mi. In that scenario no reduction in miles driven (maybe even more if you run errands during telework days) and greater incursion of development beyond the city.
Telecommuting could be absolutely massive for reduced emissions, could bring down urban house prices, improve inter-family relationships, and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas). Plus increase wealth to relatively poor rural areas.
Even some corporations are starting to realize that telecommuting isn't their enemy, but large ships move slowly, and recently we've been seeing a lot of "return to work" used as a way to conduct layoffs with lower negative PR/stock tanking. This isn't a byproduct but a goal of return-to-work (e.g. see Musk's text message conversation during Twitter-lawsuit discovery).