I'm technically working longer because I'm not spending 70-120 additional minutes of each day commuting 14 miles to/from the office. Despite working longer, I still end up having more free time.
It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.
I’m hopeful many people will wake up to the misery that cars and commuting inflicts on themselves.
The United States has been consumed with car culture which has bled time and resources from individuals like yourself. But it also is responsible for endless tragedy in the form of accidents and financial overextension.
Car culture, partly driven by commuting, has inflated the need for some systems and created entire rent-seeking businesses that could be any number of more useful and interesting investments of human time and capital.
I believe a silver lining of the Coronavirus and the actions of political representatives and appointees that have allowed covid to foster will ultimately result in progression in many outdated norms we experienced up through 2020.
I feel the same. The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me. As someone who grew up pretty poor it always fascinated me that my family and neighbors would buy cars worth 20k - 30k which would be enough to provide a very basic/safe way of living for the foreseeable future. I would take the peace of mind I would of had over having a status symbol that random people on the highway could look at for a few seconds on a trip.
Also driving is such a waste of human potential, I don't think the amount of attention needed to drive safely is worth the monotony/tediousness of driving. It's wasted time on a large scale.
> The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me
I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!
I think that's fair but I think the amount of people that think they're into cars is far more than the amount of people that are actually into cars.
Not trying to be a gatekeeper but if I think about myself I know I "felt social pressure" (grew up in a culture that glorifies this material item and sets an expect ion of success/fulfillment) to get a car. I guess you could argue that social pressures like this can grow naturally and I suppose I agree that they can but I don't think this one grew naturally and for some people promotes values that they may not hold.
Cars as status symbols, I think, is troubling at the scale they're at. If you enjoy to ride around or appreciate their engineering then by all means.
Even as I type this I think if you want to splurge on a Car that you will just take social media pictures with to make you feel good and show others then I think you should, more power to you, do what makes you happy.
I guess my problem is that "what makes you happy" .. "is a fancy car" (you can go in debt to get) is a message that is "loud" and unlike a house (arguably the other functional yet status symbol) is within reach of people who it isn't in their best interest to get.
I think it's a nuanced subject because as most things in life it's mixed up in all aspects of human life like financial education and personal responsibility but what I'm saying is that current "car culture" (to sweep away all the nuance) doesn't feel right to me right now and I think causes a lot of harm.
I agree. It's not just cars, it's also smart phones, expensive watches, clothes, and so on. At the same time, it is what provides a fake boost of the ponzi-scheme economy. Without all of this wasteful consumption there would be no SP500.
Low income neighborhoods would be among the biggest beneficiaries of high quality cycling infrastructure, but a lot of people tend to reject it as gentrification.
> find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status
Yeah, I wonder when the perception will shift to represent reality. I sometimes see people with cars that are more expensive than you'd expect by the neighbourhood, but my default first thought is that it's either leased or backed by a loan, so nothing to really brag about.
How about something that requires hard work, sacrifice, and effort to attain. For example, is most social circles, having a faster car is a source of pride and admiration. Driving a fast car requires money and the ability to press a gas pedal. Wouldn’t it be better if training to be fast runner or fast cyclist was instead the thing being judged?
The poor neighbourhood where I lived had a statistically extremely low rate of car ownership. If you owned a car at all, it was a cheap second-hand.
There were expensive cars rolling around though: due to rich people were passing through from expansive suburbs to the financial district, creating pollution and externalities that the poor neighbourhood had insufficient power to deal with.
If it makes you feel any better, I live in a wealthy suburb by some major traffic congestion and in the age of Google Maps, has become a major "short cut" so much that backed up cars will block my driveway each morning during rush hour.
So even the well off have to deal with these "externalities".
Our road is also in poor shape and had no shoulder to begin with. It is not meant for this level of traffic.
I would consider myself a car person, it has always saddened me when I see very expensive cars being driven badly by people that don't actually care about driving.
Running red lights, getting stuck in intersections, doing 20kmh under the speed limit in the fast lane, drifting between lanes without indicating or looking first, speeding when there's an overtaking lane and then slowing back down when it's finished. The usual.
Personally, I love daydreaming while in public transit (to the extent that often I dread arriving at my final destination), whereas cooking is a constant debate of "will this be edible today or will I have messed up food again" even though the failure chance is relatively low nowadays for me...
I can feel stressed cooking, but usually that's from an Internal desire to create something good. It's also avoidable with frozen or delivery (or asking my wife to cook). The end result is often enjoyable, too.
Driving in traffic stress is external, reduces my faith in humanity, and is most often unavoidable. The end result (was) often that I was at work or home late. Not enjoyable.
Yeah, for me. But it is definitely not true for lot of people. My friends would drive long and through traffic to get some rather average restaurant food but cooking is pain.
I last had an uncomfortably long commute in 2003. I had 4 or 5 routes I could take, varying from almost totally Interstate freeways to almost no freeways at all. There was a small mountain range in the way. So get to work there could have been a pass via a private dirt road, a variation I never tried. Instead I went around the mountain via a freeway. I definitely rotated through the many routes that led to that freeway, especially when I was rested. Also the freeway gradually extended during the time I worked at that place, which added variety. On the other hand some of the non-freeway parts were fairly cranky because some of them were not empty backroads, but shortcuts through fully populated suburbia. But some routes were empty and enjoyable.
Now I have a 9-mile commute and I am using the empty side of the freeway both ways. Sometimes I take a coastal byway on the way home if it's summer.
I've definitely had easy / comfy commutes. 10am-7pm workday, missed most traffic, easy 20 min rides, sometimes a little longer in the evening. Drive took me past a grocery store and a liquor store, so I could stop off and grab things. I don't miss it, but it wasn't a soul crushing slog.
I bought a new but cheap car and have driven it for slightly more than 100k kilometers. I really like the car and even if I had more money I'd just buy the same car again.
I don't see how cars can be status symbols if you can just buy a 3 year old car at a steep discount. Nobody is going to know the difference between a new car owner that kept his car for more than 3 years and someone who bought a 3 year old used car.
> The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me.
This shouldn’t be depressing, this should give you hope. Imagine a world where even the poorest of people can have access to luxuries of their choosing.
The alternative is a world where if you are poor, you must drive a beat up car or more likely have no car at all, while the upper classes drive shiny brand new cars that become more powerful status symbol, because now the poor unwashed masses can no longer get their grimy hands on them. This widens the inequality gap, and stimulates rage.
And believe me, many people who have grown up with nothing aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the real goal should be “peace of mind” or sound financial decisions, rather than having a new car or whatever. What’s the average savings rate again?
Better to placate them with shiny objects and a consumerized roadmap to happiness than to tell them they’re poor and need to live accordingly so they can find happiness another way, while everybody else gets to be happy by buying cool shit.
There’s a big difference between car culture and commuting though.
Having a car comes with a great deal of utility and freedom.
Commuting is almost entirely driven by city centers and population density that inflates real estate/rent costs so high that living out farther and driving in seems to not only make sense, but be the rational choice.
Aside from having a sales office in a densely populated area, there’s almost no real value to other functions of a business being located in the middle of a huge city.
Yeah, not a fan of sitting in traffic (commuting is actually entirely fine if not for the traffic), but I LOVE my car- it allows me to go anywhere I want whenever I want, and it allows me to make forward progress by leaving the past behind and going somewhere else (physically and metaphorically true).
I see all the talk of higher density living without car ownership as primarily driven by corporate interests to keep labor more concentrated and more easily controlled (secondarily driven by cohorts of people who haven't experienced anything better than that and therefore wanting to keep status quo), at the expense of quality of life for the average person. The monied interests wouldn't care one way or another in lowering this standard of living, but I'm surprised to see how many ordinary citizens get swept up by the rhetoric.
Interesting point about corporate interests. I do think Pre COVID there was something genuinely charming about living in a human scaled place where you could walk or bike to a bunch of interesting small businesses. Recently I’ve started to see the benefits of space and privacy with everything thats going on and staying in a low density area was an unbelievable increase in quality of life.
There is a great deal of research (eg., see Enrico Moretti and Ed Glaeser) that documents that you’re statement isn’t accurate. There are very strong network effects of educated cities, and unless you believe all future post-COVID network will be over Zoom or Slack (which feels rather dystopian), then post-COVID cities will do just fine.
In fact, you could argue that what will suffer is living close to suburban office nodes in order to save commute times. Even more young people may choose to live in cities if they can avoid the schlep out to their suburban office (think Google bused from SF to Mountain View, but where you only need to take them for big meetings in the office rather than every day).
> There are very strong network effects of educated cities.
According to the research you mentioned[1], the "network effect" you mentioned raises wages moderately for uneducated people and a little for educated people. But still nowhere near enough to account for the astronomical rent prices in a city.
They also show that educated cities grow faster than uneducated cities, but don't make a comparison to smaller towns and suburbs.
I see no reason why cities are objectively better. They are convenient for some segment of the population, and they are very unenjoyable for some segment of the population.
The business network effect is mostly beneficial to the companies, not to the employees. The employees are simply attracted because of the better employment opportunities.
Most of it is centralization. Google is in the bay area so everyone must go there if they want a job. Now apply this to a hundred different companies. Now that major city is absolutely essential if you want a high salary.
Rent prices are just a matter of greed. Cities make themselves business friendly to bring in more taxes but do not pay attention of how to house workers. If they wanted to prevent gentrification they'd start by kicking out companies, not the people that have lived there for decades. The reality is that all this bullshit is about making money. Land owners want a higher ROI so kicking out companies is a no go but building more housing is a no go too.
A lot of research looks like this looks to be deciding on car less way of life and collect facts only to prove that. Seems most people look for ulterior motive in case of oil and tobacco companies research while everything else is obviously right 'science'.
As someone who's lived in both New York and Los Angeles, I find the car-centric low density city to be a much more pleasant living experience. In either case, my commute to work was around 45 minutes, but in NY I faced a great deal more noise pollution as well as bad weather, crowding etc. A car commute doesn't deal with any of that.
I'm open to arguments about environmental impact (and also others may prefer the NY style of living and that's fine too), but I generally see a lot of negativity about cars on in this (HN) culture that runs counter to my own preferences, and the apparent revealed preferences of a huge portion of Americans. Inflated real estate costs due to lack of mobility also meant I could afford a much bigger place in LA than in Manhattan.
> Commuting is almost entirely driven by city centers and population density that inflates real estate/rent costs so high
It's actually lack of density that inflates the costs. Nearly every major US city has zoning laws that keep density much lower than what the market would support, which artificially restricts supply and increases prices. If city cores allowed increased density, housing costs would be lower in both the city and the suburbs, and as a bonus, fewer people would need to drive.
I agree with you, there are dozens of us who separate commuting from car ownership, but at the same time I feel (at least in the US) the vast majority of the population don't have that separation.
(For my personal case, I have a car and drive a lot, but rarely for commuting. I usually commute by bicycle+Caltrain, and only use car for commuting when it rains, to drive to my nearest Bart station, as I really don't like to bike in the rain. Lucky for me it rarely rains in the Bay Area.)
Except that cars have influenced the way we build towns and cities: separate everything by non-walkable, non-busable distances because the basic assumption is that everyone has a car.
Public transit "sucks" for a number of reasons, many of them car-related: (-) buses have to share roads with cars, so they have to put up with the congestion they are trying to solve, (-) money that would have been spent on public transit is being spent on road expansions to "solve traffic", and others.
> cars are the worst solution except for all the others.
This doesn't explain cities that have successful public transit systems...
We wouldn't have built our offices and homes so far from each other if the expectation was to walk/bike/bus everywhere.
Unfortunately this is a chicken-and-egg problem, where things may need to get worse temporarily for things to get better.
Which public transit system enables the median earner to own a 2,400sqft single family detached house on a quarter acre in a socioeconomically homogeneous school district?
No system of any kind allows that. With public transit, you pay for it in personal discomfort and rigidness of schedule. With personal automobiles, you simply externalise the negativities – but there's still a huge cost, only no longer paid by the individual.
> You have to explicitly optimise the city for public transit. Quite a lot of European cities do that.
Even in those cities very few enjoy taking public transport - and would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc
This is not true, driving in european cities is stressful (narrow streets with irregular layout, high density of pedestrians/cyclists, not enough parking places). The public transit, when done right, is way more convenient.
> would drive if they had free parking, didn’t have to pay tolls, didn’t think it was terrible for the environment, etc
So basically your argument is that people would drive if it weren't terrible in every way? By that logic, people would eat plutonium... if only it were more available, tasted good, and didn't kill you.
That would still make things worse, because cars need roadspace. Getting rid of the road space for cars and making public transit good enough is a pretty good solution.
To go along with what chiefofgxbxl wrote, this circumstance need not be the case. It is possible to reallocate more of our limited road space to more efficient ways of moving people instead of concentrating on simply moving cars. This has the effect of bringing transport on par with, or ahead of, driving alone.
Where I live, my commute to work by bus is only 7 minutes slower than doing the same commute driving myself alone. And for those 7 minutes, I do not have to pay any attention except once to remember to get off at the appropriate stop for a transfer. (I could avoid the transfer by walking but I'm not that motivated.) And I am not concerned with not being able to rush out for an emergency because my employer, or my county if my employer did not offer this benefit, will call me a taxi if I need to leave in a hurry and arrived to work without driving myself.
Because the bulk of my transport needs are now handled, I can also see what the transport network can do for me in other areas. As of two years ago, my family moved to a place in our city where we need not own a car, so we sold our last one. If we desire one for a few hours or a day, there are services (far cheaper than the few hundred dollars per month required to maintain one for our exclusive use) that will provide one upon request. They even take care of fuel.
We can make these choices to wean from cars; we choose not to. And at what cost to ourselves, our neighbors, and our planet?
I live in a town with good transit that borders a major city with excellent transit, and it's shocking how much people fight everything that would make our town better. Bike lanes, bus lanes, and increased density are routinely rejected because they would make life harder for car drivers.
The underlying message is that they don’t want to be near people who can’t afford cars and the accompanying expenses.
Which is a valid reason, as the data clearly shows the benefits of growing up in neighborhoods with high income earners, and the disadvantages of growing up in neighborhoods with low income earners:
> the data clearly shows the benefits of growing up in neighborhoods with high income earners, and the disadvantages of growing up in neighborhoods with low income earners
Of course being in a wealthy area is better than being in a poor area. But does the existence of such areas benefit society? What would it look like if more neighborhoods were mixed income and public resources were shared equitably?
Sacrificing individual benefit for societal benefit is always the questions. We’re always making decisions about which tribe to benefit at the expense of another tribe such as individual, family, religious, geographic, racial, socioeconomic, nation state, present, future, etc.
An imbalance will cause discord and disorder. Hopefully you catch yourself on the right side of it. Prioritizing cars is very much a “me and my immediate family” above all else move, and that can be an easy choice when you don’t see others as belonging to your tribe, or vice versa.
Roads are still necessary for delivery, garbage disposal, emergency services (fire engine, ambulances, police cars) and construction equipment. The picture is extreme to the point that it fails to deliver it's message.
To me, the picture shows the trade off of prioritizing cars vs walking/biking. You can’t have both.
Fewer cars means fewer lanes are needed. I’ve seen intersections 9 or 10 lanes wide in US cities. How can any senior citizen walk across 9 lanes of traffic, especially at night. One or two lanes is sufficient for all infrastructure like waste removal or emergency services.
But the root of the problem is insufficiently dense living. People have to make a choice to sacrifice their expansive living quarters (such as in Tokyo, Hong Kong, Manhattan, London, etc), otherwise the whole public transit and de-prioritizing motor vehicles doesn’t work.
As I explained in other comments, obviously people do want their space. But is that a luxury they can afford? They’re future generations can afford in terms of infrastructure debt repayments and environmental damage? Health damage from over reliance on cars? I guess we’ll see...but I’m betting not.
There's a lot between what the US has today and eliminating roads. To start, we should have fewer motor vehicle lanes, wider sidewalks, lower speed limits, more protected bike lanes, intersections designed to minimize crossing distance for pedestrians, and centerline hardening for left turns.
You really hit it on the head. Public transit where I live is a nightmare.
It would involve me driving my car something like 15 minutes to the nearest train station and paying for parking (an amenity that is free at my employer's office). Then I'd have to take something like two different trains, followed by two bus rides which would drop me off at a location that is about 3/4th of a mile away from the office. The walk is then along a route that is not pedestrian friendly in any way because it partially along the major access ramps on/off a tollway.
As one of your sibling comments points out, it's only this way because of the prevalence of cars. If we didn't place so much emphasis on making it easy to drive everywhere, we'd see far more housing and offices adjacent to transit hubs.
except that a lot of business isn't in an office. You will never make a meat packing plant, distribution center, mushroom farm, or many other types of work fit in a walkable city. A lot of this is really knowledge worker privilege for people who can exist in dense zoning. A tremendous amount of businesses simply cannot be built close to housing.
while living close to work is ideal I've always vastly preferred public transport to driving, because I could use time on the train for reading or anything else really, so it wasn't really a waste of time.
Driving you need to pay attention and navigating traffic and worst of all stand in a smog filled traffic jam on a highway, which is absolutely awful.
Higher density living conditions results in conditions that significantly increase transmission of diseases. Mass transit won't help due to crowded conditions. Other individual transportation options like walking or cycling cannot cover the distance that a powered vehicle can and also are not desireable during low or high temperatures or significant amounts of precipitation.
> walking or cycling cannot cover the distance that a powered vehicle can
The whole point is that in a dense city, you don't need to cover a long distance. 75% of car trips in NYC are under 5 miles, which is an easy distance to cycle with proper infrastructure.
>Higher density living conditions results in conditions that significantly increase transmission of diseases
Oh, I guess this is why low-density Florida and Texas are doing so well with Coronavirus, and all those super-dense Asian cities are having a tough time managing it.
Of course, if people are super dense between the ears disease transmission starts becoming more of a hazard. General population density evidently has little to do with it.
For me it will be interesting. I have been working from home for 21 weeks now but will put in some office days in the next week. so that my SO can have the house for herself and I have a room with a temperature not reminding me of a Finish Sauna. Not sure how it will feel, but I expect to have my mind at least a little bit less occupied with work after 30 - 40 minutes commuting and listening to audible. Maybe thought I will be shocked how traffic feels and gladly go back to full-time WFH. I will probably experiment with times of commute and number of days per week, thought. hoping that this change of scenery will add stimulus to my days.
In London maybe. The Beeching report made sure that as soon as you’re outside a major city you are unlikely to be connected to anywhere useful by train.
I have also spent years cycling between work and home, until my luck ran out and a motorist hit me. I had several close calls before then. I spent a lot of time piecing together a route that keeps me away from vehicular traffic, but there are a few dangerous intersections that I have no choice but to go through in order to go where I have to go, and sure enough one of them was where a motorist broke my hand.
Now, working from home, I often start the day with a bike ride, but since I’m not forced to go between two specific points, I can choose a route that has a lot less risk. I am also not limited by the length of my commute, so rather than 40 minutes of riding split in two 20-minute segments, I can instead ride for a full hour if I want.
When (if?) it’s time to go back into the office, I will go back to using a steel cage with crumple zones and air bags to traverse the dangerous intersections. The cycling for fun and exercise will continue to be on my own terms with whatever routes I think are safest.
If you haven't yet, be sure to call your city councilperson and demand improvements for cycling safety. Probably nothing will happen, but it can't hurt.
3. Required gear includes leather pants, a leather jacket, a helmet, a mouth guard, a crotch guard, boots, gloves, safety glasses, and a wearable air bag system.
4. Plates (a.k.a. "tags") with inspection stickers are required. Safety inspections will be quarterly.
5. Licenses will be required. Licensing implies consent for random drug testing.
For me the commute traffic was the worst part of the day and I don't have to deal with that now. Also saving time overall and more quality time with the family. I also have kidney failure and am on daily home dialysis and working from home gives more flexibility. And the fact that more employers will tolerate work from home means I have more job opportunities in the future. I had skipped lots of job opportunities because the longer commute time clashed with my dialysis schedule.
I'm not sure about more job opportunities in the future, remote work is going to accelerate jobs moving out to lower wage countries and put downward pressure on salaries here.
Maybe, but I'd theorise a big part of the outsourcing trend has reached its economic conclusion by now.
I started my career in Poland, just before the foreign startups decided it's an interesting market to outsource to. A number of US owned startups and medium-sized tech companies started offering salaries 2-3x higher than the local firms. I moved from a place where my last conversation was "No web developer can hope for more than $4/h rate, come on" to, well, a $10/h place. A lot of this was made easier by EU, a lot was just US companies being encouraged by the economic growth, stability and the prospect of saving the half of their bottom line. With salaries at ~$20-30k a year everyone was happier than before.
Then a natural thing happened, the market became increasingly competitive. Ten years later, a good senior developer in Poland could earn $60k, but crucially, costed the company close to $100k due to employer taxes and other costs of running business. Some companies are fine with it, but some understand that it's ever closer to what an employee in their HQ costs, and some are slowing down the growth or moving out alltogether. Surprise, over-the-pond communication is not so easy even on a good day, and there are cultural differences to deal with too. Some moved further east, I'm curious to see how that plays out.
Going back to the remote work pushing down the salaries, I think that's unlikely to be the reason, because lower wage locations are rarely saving that much in the long run. Maybe we see a temporary dip, but I also look forward to moving out of big city and lowering my cost of living.
What I think is more likely is that the economy shrinks and the endless supply of engineering jobs dries out, moving us back to employer's market. That can have all kinds of ripple effects on the local and outsourced jobs.
This is what I hear out of Bangalore too. Maybe even further? Like you can command Valley level comp (or at least base+bonus) if you can clear the right hurdles. Though maybe in Poland too, the issue is that there are far more people one rung down. Cut distance from from 110m to 100m and suddenly there's a lot more competition
I don't see how you can rely on the past to predict massive historic trend shifts in the workplace. Previously offshoring created an in-group and an out-group with shitty communication between them. Post-pandemic everybody is in the same virtual group with the same shitty communication tools.
It's a lot easier for a bay area company to successfully have remote workers in Idaho than in Romania. The time difference is minimal, cultural differences are less, and it's easy for the person to visit the office.
"Sure, some manufacturing is being done in China now, but the total amount of manufacturing has expanded." -Some soon to be unemployed factory worker in what is now known as the rust belt, circa 1988.
If the only incentive to source talent locally was having butts in seats in an office building, what does that say about the current state of office jobs? Sincere question.
It's not butts-in-seats per se; rather, it's middle-managers being able to create backchannel fiefdoms to increase the leverage they have over rivals.
"People who trust only you" is to managers as "code nobody else understands" is to engineers: job security, and a springboard for making you look like a hero and so getting you recognition/promotions. And it's hard to develop relationships like that, if you can't just wander over to those people and have in-person (i.e. not on-the-record in the company's logs) conversations.
To exactly the degree that your company resembles a feudalist society, you'll see managers excited to have their own physically distinct office units/departments/working groups, where they can most-effectively hoard and develop private talent pools on the company's dime. And you'll see them heavily resist anything that makes that talent-pool of theirs less private, e.g. WFH, cross-departmental collaboration, "war rooms" during emergencies, etc.
I don't expect this to be true in the short to medium term, as the large shift would take place in larger companies who have already attempted this and demonstrated quite clearly that they do not know how to outsource work to lower cost countries.
There are certainly opportunities where workers in developing countries can do the same job for substantially less money, but very few companies do the hard work of really integrating these workers with their existing teams so it's just colonialism 2.0 where westerners who are trusted by management are told to create robotic tasks for the cheap labor in such a way that no one can meaningfully fuck it up. It creates a predictable result.
On more of a 25-50 year perspective, it has always been impossible for the majority of the world to be lifted out of poverty without those people eventually competing with us. The 20th century economic advantage and resulting broad equality of prosperity in the US and western Europe was a historical fluke of right place, right time that will likely never be repeated. I expect developed countries to start looking a lot more like developing countries do now in terms of economic equality.
I always judged new jobs by including the commute time into it. Hence if I could shave a lot off my commute I would consider less income.
However prior to COVID19 I was on two to three days at home for the past few years so adopting to everyday at home has been easy.
In a way I see my commute hours being productive as free time at work, meaning I can knock stuff out without feeling obligated to reply to emails; because I am not "really" at work yet.
Yeah, I did the same when I bought my house.... made sure I was only 10 minutes away from where my office and many other tech offices were.
I was always shocked at how many people were willing to spend 50 hours a month driving just to save $500 on rent... is your tone really only worth $10 an hour?
Now, I am totally screwed because I pay more and no one commutes anyway.
Well, outside of the commute, where they are one of the only things you can do, podcasts compete with surfing the internet, Netflix, etc.
Your rubric isn't very useful. Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time.
You don't account for the fact that we actively sabotage our true ambitions. Not many of us are on HN going "definitely glad I'm here wasting my time instead of working towards things that actually fulfill me." It's just constant procrastination.
Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining.
By the same token, exercise isn't worthless just because most of us avoid it. And we are often slaves to what is easy to do.
What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do.
> Else you would conclude that taking heroin or posting on HN all day must be the most valuable way to spend your time.
Considering that I don't make time for heroin use, I believe by my metric that I don't find it valuable. Or else I would use it. Conversely, I don't spend all day on HN because the value degrades as the day goes by. This kind of response is wholly inappropriate. As you yourself point out
> podcasts compete with surfing the internet, Netflix, etc.
So what I'm suggesting is that you are placing higher (satisfaction) value over surfing the internet, Netflix, etc over the value of podcasts.
> Being unable to identify this procrastination usually stems from rationalization. "Hmm, if something was more important to me, I'd surely be doing it!" being a great example of that faulty bargaining.
You are misreading. Asking if you find value (what kind of value?) in podcasts is a driving question. The question may be rhetorical in nature but the answer isn't simply "I don't make time for it ipso facto it is not valuable to me." Rather the answer is deeper and not singular, coming to possible different conclusions: "podcasts aren't as valuable as the other things I prioritize" or "podcasts are more valuable than the things I am prioritizing over it, maybe I should re-prioritize." You may fail at the latter, but the question and (personal) answer is necessary if you are to take that step. Either you convince yourself that you're placing too much weight on the value of podcasts and that the relaxing nature of surfing the internet and Netflix is more valuable to you, relaxing IS a valuable and necessary part of existence (yes, people go too far). Or you need to evaluate and work at extracting more value within your day, be that with podcasts, exercise, whatever. No one, except you, implied that such a task is easy. The whole point of the question is to get you to prod yourself and push you to make a decision on the answer instead of just expressing frustration. What you choose is up to you at this point as well as how you choose to accomplish your answer.
Additionally I should mention that there are different types of value and what that means to people is different. Don't discount stress relief in the form of "slacking off" as not valuable. You can't be running in high gear all the time. This statement also doesn't ignore addiction unless you are not giving a good faith reading.
> And we are often slaves to what is easy to do.
Do not fall into this trap. Addiction is treatable and you can get out of it. It isn't easy, but it is treatable. You are not subjugated to that existence forever.
> What is easy to do doesn't always agree with what we want to do.
Who claimed this? Rather I'll say that not everything that is critical is a personal attack and often we package complex questions that require the listener to make difficult decisions into compact statements as an intentional method to get the other person to think hard about the question. Frankly because no one can give you an answer but yourself and thus it is woefully inappropriate to do so. So a mechanism is needed to get you to do such a task. This is not an attack on you unless you make it one. The pattern which I have just discussed is littered all throughout this response. What it means to be a good faith response is to think about the intention of the words and not just your interpretation (which both are different than the literal words). It does not mean you have to agree, but it does mean you have to demonstrate that you listened.
It is traffic to an extent, but honestly, it is also not having fixed hours now that you remove the traffic. It's easy to just start working whenever you wake up, and not stop working until you go to sleep.
So on one hand I get what you're saying, I personally spent 3 hours per day commuting and I'm so grateful to have put that behind me now, at the same time if I'm overworking now it's mostly because I don't know when to stop the day.
Sounds like you need to develop a hobby or two. I also tend to overwork when I have nothing else to do as I'd rather work than zone out in front of the TV. But this hasn't been a problem as I'd rather spend time on my hobbies than work... so end of work day is when I get to switch to my hobbies.
To put it another way, what I hear you saying that your work is the most interesting thing in your life right now and so, of course, you spend most of your time doing it. If you had other things in your life that we equally or more interesting...
I actually am writing a book and I have told myself that I should work on it after work, but I have failed miserably to switch to that hobby after work :(
When you consider that all you have to do to acquire (not master) a skill is get past the total beginner phase it actually makes quite a lot of sense to jump to something that catches your interest as soon as possible. You can use that newfound interest to break through the first few weeks which are generally the hardest. Basically catch the spark of curiosity and go start a fire instead of letting it vanish.
Okay long story short here is my advice: Just do it. Do it every day. If you find something more important and interesting then do that instead.
Of course it is even better if you have found something that is more important to you than everything else. There is no shame in doing the same thing for years.
I do love writing, but technical writing actually takes more reading/researching and revising chapters than actually writing new chapters. It makes the second job quite hard :)
> It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.
I may be weird, but I enjoyed my commute prior to COVID. I purposely avoided the Interstate Highway, even though it would have saved me 10 minutes, in favor of backroads that have less traffic. Then during my commute, I listen to Audiobooks.
I kind of felt that this was my personal time just for me to listen to the books I liked. At work and home, there are always people clamoring for my time and attention, but my commute was just me time.
In addition, I have a vehicle with stop and go, automatic cruise control, so even a traffic jamb is not all that stressful.
With all the energy drained from job +commute it can be hard to have much left to care about the planet and our community. It’s easier to be angry and isolated and fall back on tribal stereotypes and assume someone else will fix climate change and other global problems. With more time and energy, it’s easier to participate.
I've only saved about 50-60 daily minutes as I live pretty close to the office, but I've also been very cognizant of my hours and not working more just because I'm available. Our pay wasn't increased (in fact, the opposite), so why would I work more?
Yeah averaged about 25 minutes one way. Both my apartment and my office are close to the highway and I'm in a relatively low population area (especially compared to SV/NYC).
I believe I'm working on average longer hours, but I'm able to more flexibly use my own time whilst doing so. I'll work as I'm watching a Twitch stream, for example, and I feel far more relaxed doing this than trying to focus 100% on work and only work. I can pick when I work, so when I'm feeling completely mindless and distracted at 2pm I can just zone out and do my own thing, but then make it up later.
For me, the hours might be longer (even not counting the breaks in the day), but the time when working is more relaxed. I prefer this balance.
> I can pick when I work, so when I'm feeling completely mindless and distracted at 2pm I can just zone out and do my own thing, but then make it up later.
This is by far my favorite perk of working from home. I’ve been able to max my efficiency. When I hit this wall, I usually go do something that requires me to move around, such as going to the grocery store or doing laundry, which are things I would’ve had to do anyways. The difference is that I’m doing those tasks when I’d otherwise be sitting at my desk being unproductive. It’s kind of like intuitive eating; working when your brain is up for it. Of course, you can’t utilize this luxury every day and every hour, as often times you do need to bunker down to accommodate the typical 9-5 schedule. But, it’s still much more apparent than when being in an office.
Oh so the internet and the endless distractions it brings with it existed in the 19th century as well? /s
You couldn't be more wrong. There is mountains of evidence that attention spans have shorted, and parent comment was a perfect example of that. Can't be arsed to deal with whatever you should be doing? Ctrl + pgdown to the twitch tab.
I don't know about you, but no matter how much I try I can't just spontaneously summon up focus if my mind's not commmited to it. I was that way in school, in uni and now in work.
Working in an office pretending that I can focus on the task at hand whenever required by the roster of office life is one of the biggest charades I've ever performed. It's not possible for me and I piss around on the internet on their time when I am unable to focus. I don't feel that's an abnormal situation for people, either, as it seems many of my colleagues also do it.
Is that so? There was a period during industrial revolution, where people were hopelessly overworked but before that most people must have a had fairly well defined work-life boundaries.
Conceded, it can be a slippery slope for some. For me it's not, thankfully. I've no doubt the rigid clock-on/clock-off process helps to keep some people from overworking, but that isn't me. Even in the office I would show up when I finally got to showing up, and would leave when I felt I'd, personally, done enough for the day. I have absolutely no qualms with putting down my laptop when I feel I'm done.
The major difference is that instead of my mindless scrolling through HN or something at 2pm being on work time that is just lost to unproductivity, it's now not because I can get up and do something (grocery run, make lunch, etc.), and conversely that burst of focus and energy in the evening now goes towards productive work rather than focusing more on a videogame or something.
It's not common in English for that distinction to accomplish the work that you're asserting it does. "Should" and "ought" are synonymous. "Ought" has a more formal tone, but outside technical settings in which the distinction might really matter, no one should be drawing any conclusions from the choice.
1. (auxiliary) Be obliged to; have an obligation to; indicates that the subject of the sentence has some obligation to execute the sentence predicate or that the speaker has some strong advice but has no authority to enforce it.
2. (auxiliary) ought to; speaker's opinion, or advice that an action is correct, beneficial, or desirable.
Yes, yes, the language has synonyms. However, the beauty of synonyms is being able to create slight distinctions between them. A native speaker often learns connotations that don't appear in short definitions of some words. Punto e basta.
That seems to be distinguishing, as the name suggests, between 'is' and 'ought', not between 'should' and 'ought'. Indeed, both the article itself, and its quotes from Hume, seem to use 'should' as nearly synonymous with 'ought'.
(Even if I've got it wrong, ryanklee claimed that "[i]t's not common" to make that distinction, and pointing to the technical work of philosophers doesn't undermine the claim about common useage.)
Back in high school, Lincoln-Douglas competitive debate taught that "should" was for practical justifications and "ought" was for ethical justifications. Again, to your point, most people don't bother to be so careful with their choices of words.
I think I need to go back to the office just to get a better separation between work and home. Working during the week I'm helping with kids and house stuff, and if I have nothing to do for a few hours on the weekend I'm dialling in to work to finish stuff off I should have done during the week. Its all becoming a blur and I'm not doing either role well.
Same. I pretty much spend the whole day with our daughter between cleaning, preparing food, feeding, and playing. My wife had multiple consulting roles that required her to be on calls frequently. It's chaotic when both of us have conflicting meetings. I honestly don't know how other people are managing. My working hours are 11PM to 5AM every day for the last few months in addition to attempting to be responsive on Slack and attending required meetings during "normal" hours. Some days I'm only operating on 1-2 hours of sleep. It's not really sustainable or healthy.
As much as I oppose forcing people into the office, there is nothing intrinsically bad about being in the office.
Two guys from our team are in a similar situation as you are and we've agreed on them taking up our office spots permanently. It's still simple to control and track contact in that situation in case an infection occurs. But all in all, it's been a great boost for their mental well being.
Set alarms, for starting work, stopping work, lunch, end of lunch, etc. Keep strictly to the schedule. Block out your working hours on your calendars, both work and personal. Set up things like Slack to automatically mark you as AFK outside working hours. Never use personal devices for work, or work devices for personal stuff. Basically create strict domain separation, to prevent this blending.
From 9:30pm, when both kids are asleep, I can spend 2-3h feeling exhausted, trying to get myself to do something, trying not to fall asleep and failing at it. It's fun.
I’ve definitely noticed shorter meetings and it is now more common to end the meetings when the topics are covered. However, there are a few people that I work with that simply must blather on until the schedule time is used up. Making up additional topics, begging people on the call to raise additional items which are always completely off topic and unimportant. Perhaps they are lonely, but it is especially annoying with video calls. I am going to get rude about it one of these days.
The appropriate phrase I've found to be effective for when someone is wasting my time is "this seems to be out of scope for me right now". It forces someone to justify why this waste of your time is somehow relevant, which they usually can't do.
Ex: "I'll leave you guys to finish talking through this one as it seems out of scope for me right now. I'm going to get started on previously-discussed-priority-item."
For someone to ask you to remain on the call after that is implicitly saying their discussion is more important than another item that has been agreed to be a priority.
We have some team members who leave immediately when the core topics have been covered. Sometimes the PO suggests to them that their attendance is no longer needed, so they can either leave or stay (eg QA or designer who doesn’t need to hear that technical discussion). It’s a culture thing.
Rather than getting rude, get passive aggressive. Just drop off the calls and blame Comcast -- something that's more difficult to do in an in-person meeting.
Someone created a video background for Zoom that says "reconnecting..." in the same font Zoom uses for other stuff. They just put that up and step out of frame.
This is a matter of time discipline. Start your workday at 9AM. Someone sending you a Slack message at 7AM - too bad - you are in the middle of your morning routine.
At end of day, log out of your work account or shut down the work laptop, whichever case may be.
You are not using your personal user account and a work account during the day still, ARE YOU?
I'm sorry, but answers like this have always struck me as unhelpful at best and usually feel like they are more of a person's expression of superiority than anything else.
At the very least, it does not take into account the intended recipient's environment. My employer was very flexible but we still ran into times when there were conflicts between an employee's family and professional responsibilities. Many people were thrust into positions where they had maintained both their full time employment and had to fill the role of full time teacher/child care worker as well. Someone has to be available for the child at all hours. While a spouse can help divide up that responsibility, there is a high probability that one or both parents will have their workday interrupted.
At the other extreme, you are also contending with people who had their lives upended and are having trouble dealing with things psychologically. If you're having trouble coping, chances are that discipline is not within your reach.
Particularly in the latter case, it doesn't all come down to the self. In the early days of lock down, our team spent time during our staff meetings making sure everyone was okay and discussing what was going on in the world around us. It seemed to be helpful for most of us. I do some part time work for another employer, their response was, "here's a support line, but it is only available to people in these positions." Not only is the solution emotionally detached, but it instantly conveys the message that the excluded employees are not valued.
None of this is meant to excuse a lack of discipline, but it is meant to point out that the circumstances play a strong role for many people and that it is quite often a matter that has to be facilitated collectively rather than fall onto the individual.
Believe me, I know how it is. My productivity has been shot to absolute hell. I am talking about start/end of day discipline that does not make it worse.
Sorry, this doesn't work for the many people who simply aren't equipped to WFH and are learning to work remotely. They lack the dedicated workspace at home, they have children/family/roommates who don't respect the "im at work" mentality, or they simply need a mid-afternoon nap, and as a result they have frequent and often lengthy periods of not working.
Would be fair to the employer if those people still adhere to a strict 9-5 schedule despite the lowered productivity? I think most reasonable people simply adapt and that's why we have articles like this pointing out longer and different work hours. It's not unreasonable at all.
It's partially discipline but culture plays a role as well. If everyone at your company is sending slack messages at 7 and you aren't it becomes easy to be branded not a team player.
That is a pretty fantastic expression. I'm in IT, but I dabble in photoshop and was having fun making some silly photoshops for my coworkers. Word got out and suddenly I had a queue. They even asked me to do things that we were paying outside vendors to do (make logos). It got pretty aggravating until I finally put my foot down and closed the "Graphic Design Shop."
In many senses it's a good thing. The major fear is usually getting fired for it. However if you are in a position where that's not true or you can recover from it easily you should absolutely push back against that sort of nonsense.
This point, you really got to set your boundaries and communicate that with your team (calendar, slack status message etc). This is my first time working from home for a longer duration, and it was really harder to do this the first month. I was unknowingly working longer hours and was burning or stressing myself out. Now my setup is as follows:
1. Calendar has defined work hours, lunch time break, coffee breaks, spending time with kids break.
2. Slack has the status messages for the same hours and in DND mode
3. I shutdown my work laptop by 7PM and open it only by 9AM
4. My router cuts access to all connected devices by 7PM clearly as reminder. So if I'm to extend a call or continue working I have to do it consciously.
5. I create a two users in my Android phone called "Home" and "Work" and each has apps and accounts only required for each mode, but contacts are shared. If people need me from work, they can call or text me in case of SEV1s.
6. I sent this in detailed email to my team and other people I interact with in office.
Of course it is "just" a matter of time discipline.
Unsurprisingly it is harder to pull off when there are fewer significant external cues, such as physical separation of workplace and private space.
At the office, I'm reminded about ttgtfo by the building turning dark and silent. At home, as Europe signs off, the Americas come online and the buzz keeps going until Asia takes over ... For people without kids or family and an existing tendency to work too many hours anyway, this is not helping.
Also, communication feels a lot more time consuming now. More dedicated meetings to align, less time for craft: Either get less done or put in more hours.
I'm glad we've already seen a controlled re-opening of the offices here. I don't mind remote being an option, but I appreciate not being forced to work fully remote.
Agreed. If you’re workplace doesn’t let you set boundaries, it might be time to start looking for something else. I understand early stage startups can be a bit different with time demands though.
On call doesn’t mean always available for anything, though. It should mean if something truly breaks you’re there to help fix it. If the former is the case, I’d definitely set some boundaries to reduce that over time.
And inevitably, when trying not to be, you are anyway.
Fun times getting out a tablet to tweak firewall settings deflecting a DDoS attack while at a furniture store.
At least at home, people won't look at you oddly when you take out a tablet out of nowhere because, yes, something is down, and people will want it to be solved right away.
I was let go but I found that I worked a lot longer as it was harder to get things done with two kids in the background. Even as my wife struggled to keep them away and let me work, inevitably I felt the need to help her or help the older one with online school. As far as telling people that I wasn’t available at certain times, that just didn’t seem to be an option.
What didn’t work about telling people that you weren’t available at certain times? I’ve had this feeling as well, but in practice I find that people either respect my boundary or try to get a reason and then argue with the reason—the latter type now just send me the signal that I don’t want to depend on people like this anymore and that I should make space for new people. Asking more to trigger reflection than for an answer, rhetorically I think that’d be called. Best wishes. (Ps. It’s true that I’m homeless, if you check my history, and I don’t feel that’s an indication of having boundaries not being sustainable, I think I just had a lot of old garbage from being weak that lead me here but I’m more likely to overcome it with this approach, even if it’s slower).
I love WFH but I found myself having serious productivity issues because I'm an ADHD guy and I'm having procrastination issues, and WFH makes it even more serious.
At first, I was struggling because I always wanted to open YouTube or just stay there and thinking about random things and basically doing nothing for hours. Eventually I have to secretly compensate with my own time regretfully.
Then I found when every time I compensate the work at night I'm pretty productive because I'm under enough pressure to keep me focus and not overthinking things. At that moment, I realized I can swap the time slots to maximize everything.
Now I usually try to start working in the morning, as long as I'm productive, and setup a timer to keep tracking on how long did I work. When I found myself stop being productive and my mind is wandering, I would pause the timer and just relax - do what ever I want, just not struggling anymore. When I feel I'm ready to work, I would go back to work, and repeat. The most important part is, if according to the timer I only worked 5 hours today and I ought to work 8 hours, I would start working no later than 9pm (given I usually slept at 12pm). It gives me enough time to finish my stuff, while I would unconsciously understand it's the deadline thus it gives me the pressure to focus and being productive.
It's pretty effective for me, and it helped me being able to keep being productive without struggling. Some people may argue it's not good working ethic, but as Martin Fowler suggested "Don't tell your manager (you're refactoring)" (because refactoring would be a part of developing). Usually in the office, there were times I have to force myself working in low productivity mode. I'm refactoring my time to keep both my productivity sanity.
100%. Don't let internalized capitalist guilt make you give your employer free labor. Working more for no tangible benefit is just deadweight loss on your end.
EDIT: Thanks for the downvote, anonymous capitalist HN stooge. pg, is that you??
If you only work hard enough to receive your salary then you can't ask for a raise. If there is surplus between how much value you generate and how much you are being paid that's an opportunity to switch employers and collect the surplus.
At many salaried companies, comp is banded and stepwise. There's a bar for you to reach that puts you on the path to promotion or a raise. So if you work more than that, that's loss. It's silly to say that you can work super hard always collect the surplus. The market isn't _that_ efficient.
This says that people work 48 more minutes per day on average. I looked up the mean commute time in the US, and it's 26.6 minutes each way. So this would still be a small net win for people who are working from home. The win is bigger if you factor in being home for lunch and other breaks.
Sure, on the surface, that's ~6 minutes "won back" during lockdown... but time commuting and time working are not equatable. Speaking for myself, my commute is a time to focus on something simple, reflect, and listen to the radio or podcasts. Work, while more interesting, is infinitely more mentally and emotionally taxing.
Also, lunch at the office can be a nice time to take a break and socialiaze, whereas lunch at home can turn into eating in front of one's laptop.
There are winners and losers here for sure. Long commutes are gone but many people relied on their commute keeping their work hours more strictly bounded. You’re right that the the office camaraderie is mostly gone—-assuming your office ever had any! I do miss lunchtime chats with coworkers—-and morning chit chat as we settle into the day. Unfortunately as more people shift their hours to better fit their different lives the possibility of a lunchtime connect goes away entirely.
But, this has given me an idea to try and start a lunchtime video chat at work. It might be harder with teammates in different timezones, and God forbid should it ever become mandatory. But it sounds nice in theory...
We’ve done the social lunch thing on video chat and while it has been nice it can also add to overall fatigue of being in camera and in front of a computer all day. It also doesn’t scale that well in terms of number of people. Still though, having it there as an optional way to socialize has been a net positive
Commuting by train, I agree! But when I commuted by car in the past, it was a time to languish in my vehicle, parked on the highway, wondering why a drive normally taking 15 minutes on weekends instead takes 60 minutes on a work day. Definitely not a de-stresser for me!
I hate commuting and even though mine is as best 30 minutes door to door on a train I still think I’m benefitting less.
The brain solves its creative problems when you can just sit back and space out, I’m not longer forced to do that and it’s going to take extra discipline to wake up earlier than I have to then add a new routine in to get that.
On my home commute I take short detours to buy groceries, go to the bank, get my hair cut, go to the gym, etc. When I do a whole week of home office I actually don't gain that much extra free time because I need to go to these places anyways.
Also, I would pay someone to do my lunch and breakfast cooking and dishes. Now I do that myself which I enjoy but the 15 minute lunch is no more for me. Plus that was a small walk. Now I cook, tidy up and go for a walk before sitting back down. A net win and better productivity for my life, but I don't have that much more time in my day. Also kids, so that may make this an irrelevant data point. But I'm cooking 4/5 meals a day and doing 3 loads of dishes a day, up from one of each.
From the underlying study, I wouldn't even assume that all of those 48 minutes are actual "work" either- they just use the difference between the first and last email sent in a day. The flexibility of being at home in many circumstances is a pretty big deal- I can spend 20 minutes getting dinner for the family prepped and cooking and easily make it up later, which I can't do at an office.
In fact small chores which were a hassle when coming home after a 10-hour long (or longer) day of commuting+work+break+work+commuting can become a welcomed break, for they are actually a break from work, a tiny bit of manual work inside the stream of intellectual work.
> I can spend 20 minutes getting dinner for the family prepped and cooking and easily make it up later
Furthermore, for some parts, you needn't even make it up, because after a bit of preparation, you can go back to work while some stuff will gently cook alone for 1 or 2 hours in the kitchen.
I wonder if that 26.6 minutes factors in swiping your card, walking though turnstiles, elevator rides, crowded lobbies, etc.... or if it's just literally time inside the car. I also don't do as much to "get ready for work" now compared with when I had to go to an office.
The key thing here, as most people have noted, is that although it's a bit more time, the flexibility and lack of commute makes it an overall net positive.
I think this is actually already what most people doing WFH have already experienced. Whether you're WFH forever or just during this lockdown, the key thing is to be aware of your time and create some routines that break up your day in ways that bring you joy and peak productivity.
(stop reading if you dislike a little self promotion)
For anyone interested, I cofounded a startup (https://reclaim.ai) hat helps here. It lets you establish personal and professional habits and block out time for tasks, while preserving max availability for genuinely necessary meetings. If you're struggling with this stuff and on Google Calendar, give it a shot :)
Yeah. I am extremely confused that you seem to be the only comment on this entire thread who isn't focused on commuting tradeoffs or work/life balance due to commingled environments, as if this is "life a small usual, except working from home"... I have always worked from home (and think people who go to an office are crazy), and my job is thereby identical to what it was before COVID-19... and yet, I am working much longer hours because I have absolutely nothing else to do :/. I used to go out to eat a lot, hang out with friends, go to movies and concerts and events, I live next to a university where I could drop in on classes and talk to professors, I used to go to a lot of conferences (which you could argue was "for work", but frankly we all know a lot of the time spent at them isn't just a vacation you can justify as being sort of related to your job; do I really need to go to CES every year? no)... hell: I used to spend a weirdly large amount of time just grocery shopping, as I enjoyed finding new foods and it was an activity around people I didn't have to interact with (as we are all doing stuff), but since I live in a small-ish town (where I am even in local politics, which helps make it smaller for me) I would often run into people I know and exchange at least a few pleasantries; but now we all treat grocery shopping as something to do seldom, in bulk: it is all very transactional and you can't wander the isles for an hour, or get into conversations with people. So like, now, I am spending more time on random hobbies, but those are still a bit lonely :/. I have gained a bunch of weight, in no small part because I have gotten better at cooking... just for me :(. I swear I am mostly an introvert, but I know I have an extroverted streak (it is why I am able to be a politician and a public speaker despite kind of hating other people ;P) and I normally have ways to burn that off but I just don't have that at all anymore. I have watched an infinite number of movies and TV shows (I now have a "quota" to get through three movies a day ;P...), as my brain considers the people on the screen vaguely similar to being around other humans (this has even caused me to start following people I don't know on social media--like Instagram and TikTok--as it causes the same trick), but that only uses part of my brain most of the time (most movies aren't good) and so I still want to do something while watching them (which also helps my brain not realize they aren't made from real people). You know what working has? Coordination with other people on what feels like a shared sense of purpose. I need that right now :(.
I wonder how much is people anticipating that a hammer is probably coming. In nearly all areas of North America and Europe, even the best managed countries are expecting some sort of economic downturn - and it's likely to spread and impact every industry eventually to some degree.
I know that I'm thinking that a bit. No one wants to be the easy pickings when the layoffs come rolling around.
What I'd like to know is how they collected that data from 3.1M people.
> To study this question, we acquired de-identified, aggregated meta-data from an information technology services provider that licenses digital communications solutions to organizations around the world.
I'm guessing Slack, Teams or some other company provided them with this data. If they have access to this data, then what kind of data do employers have access to?
> Using the span of time defined by the first and last email sent or meeting attended in a 24-hour period, we also find the average workday span increased by +48.5 minutes
So that's how they define a workday. When you're in an office, you have lunch with colleagues and there might be pressure to end it quickly, especially if your boss is joining. At home, you can easily take a few more minutes, which might actually be the 8% increase they are seeing here. To add to this, just because the workday seems longer, it doesn't mean that the entire time was spent working. It's possible to take more breaks when you need it.
> Using the span of time defined by the first and last email sent or meeting attended in a 24-hour period
What a worthless definition. I often start my day with hours of development or debugging work that doesn't involve sending any emails or attending any meetings, so that would be completely missed. I can't be the only such person, surely.
On the other hand, timezone issues mean that I sometimes have late-night meetings, so I'd look really dedicated on those days. Of course, that'd miss the fact that I took time out to go shopping, make dinner, do some gardening, watch a movie, or whatever... all that now counts as part of my "work day" because of a late-night meeting.
Seems like they've come up with something essentially meaningless here. This "workday span" is (a) wildly inaccurate for anyone whose role is more than sending emails and sitting in meetings, and (b) totally ignores the fact that many people when working from home have huge flexibility to take breaks when it suits them.
Ah well... I suppose a publication "dedicated to the design and management of workplaces" has to try and justify its existence somehow.
From personal experience I can confirm: I worked longer and more efficiently during working from home (WFH). There were a few more meetings as well. Sometimes a few developers and I simply stayed in a conference call for almost the whole working day. I had to start maintaining a log o working hours to stop doing more than 8 hours. There was always that last thing I wanted to get done that day, often costing 1 or 2 more hours.
And that was still better than having to waste 1h+ on the way to the office and 1h+ on the way back. I am not sure I would decline, if I was offered to work 9h a day but was allowed to WFH. I would still start earlier and be done earlier than when not WFH.
I really don't get why anyone who can choose when to stop working and whose compensation is not hourly would ever work longer hours. Your time doesn't belong to your employer.
Yeah, what on earth? I’m working fewer hours because once I get a reasonable amount of work done (i.e. about what I would have done in the office) I close my laptop and stop for the day. I’m shocked by the number of people saying they’re working longer out of lack of anything else to do. That’s really sad.
It’s because an aspect of work is gamified. People may compete with each other for promotions or commissions. Academics compete for fame, grants.
Also there are students who don’t stop learning when they know they can ace their school exams... sometimes they are genuinely interested in the topic.
I haven't run into a software job yet that actually required 40hrs/week to hit requirements. Remote work just means now I don't have to waste time in the office to hit 40hrs/week. Now I can use it to play video games or spend time with my family. And get paid the same to do it!
There's a difference between "I enjoy programming in my free time" and "I will program my employer's stuff on my free time." The first one is enjoying what you do, the second one is a sucker creating value for their employer without being compensated for it.
That’s an over simplification. My job is owning part of an open source stack. There’s countless fun projects in that which aren’t a necessary part of my job but are fun to do out of hours and and still happen to contribute to my employer’s larger goals. Eg, refactor some subsystem to make it faster. Everyone wins, and because the source is open any future employers can see it also. Plus I enjoy working with my coworkers and learn a great deal from doing so: it’sa good environment for such projects.
You're right it's not 100% but I made that comment to admittedly "get a reaction". I think it's good to remind people of this dynamic, the way you think about your workplace is just half the story.
> Human emotions are real and managers aren't just blindly following game theory
Absolutely, which means this isn't guaranteed. This isn't part of a companies DNA ( you could argue good people always get hired?). This isn't true for all work places. The truth is it depends on the people that work there and just like you mentioned that you could have caring emotional humans as managers, you can also have not-caring emotional humans as managers.
If I had to make a grand generalization about most workplaces then I think it's safer to say they would care more about money (for profit/staying in business) than I would say they care about making me, an employee, happy.
Having said that I've worked in great places where I don't feel it's 100% about the money. I know some of that feeling is genuine because of the people I work with. I also know that feeling is intended and is the primary focus of some departments in companies. I know that I'm in a field that has enjoys greater privileges than other workers.
I try to remind myself about this and I think I'm ok with saying that "it's 99% about the money for the employer". A bit cynical (or realist depending on your view).
That's true, but it is also true no other single thing (other than sleep) in my life gets 40 hours/week from me. Not even my partner. That's simply a lot of time.
That being said, when I was working full time job, I didn't mind working extra hours sometimes if it seemed like it was a legitimate need and was respectfully asked of me, but I did expect an equal amount of time off afterwards.
Agreed. Between work and non-work, I’m literally spending over 12 hours per day in my living room. No matter what some people would have us believe, this can’t be healthy.
I've made efforts to go out after work, spend time with friends, and get back into my hobbies.
But none of these are enough to make up for the 8 hours of social interaction I was getting each weekday by being in the office.
Also as a single person, working in an office environment downtown felt like I had way more opportunity. Opportunity to move up in the company, opportunity to meet a girlfriend, etc.
I have a couple single friends in your position who were getting dangerously lonely. They got a cat in one case dog in the other and it hasn’t fixed anything but it’s given them a reason to get outside and a bit more of something alive in their life
I in fact realized how much time I spent locked down in an office everyday. And it seems too much. And now with home office, I'm locked down most of the day again, at home. With this corona situation I was unemployed for 4 months. I finally had time for my own projects. And I was able to actually finish them. I'm now working home-office for a company. But the idea of earning money with my own projects remains.
Not that the article claims this, but this doesn't mean lockdown is leading to more or better work getting done, of course. It may just mean work-life balance is harder now that the lines have been further blurred. Or maybe work without commutes is relatively more relaxing to the point where start and stop times don't seem to matter as much.
I feel that I work more, but I spend less time at work. I may work 30 minutes more a day, on average, but save 2 hours commuting, $130 in mass transit and a bunch in lunch money. As others said, I can also modify my hours a bit as needed. I also have vastly more and longer meetings, unlike the article.
Personally, I’ve been working harder because I lost my sense of job security. My company wasn’t hit hard, but there are so many people looking for jobs right now that I could easily be replaced. I feel I have to constantly impress my bosses to keep my job.
Someone should map the sentiment in HN comments on working from home during Coronavirus articles, I bet it would look interesting. I feel like they're getting gradually more negative. (I personally can't wait to go back to the office.)
I'm not sure it's necessarily more negative as that people who resignedly accepted the current situation are seeing that the "new normal," while not 100% remote in most cases, is probably often not going to be entire teams working together in one location. Which means, more or less, that teams will have to work as if everyone is remote to be effective. And that's a big change.
What if your employer did the same as Twitter etc and declared working from home was allowed forever. Could you imagine moving somewhere you’d love to be - with excellent internet - finding new friends there and being happier than other situation?
Working from home is already allowed at my company, but if they moved to everyone working from home indefinitely I would absolutely leave the company, even if it meant taking a significant pay cut and changing careers. I don't want to stare at a computer screen without in-person interaction for 8 hours/day.
It's all about finding the perfect work/life harmony, though. Everyone's lives have slowed down considerably, and in many ways work is a necessary and welcomed use of time. As long as you have enough time to spend with your loved ones and pursue your hobbies, working more may not be a bad thing.
Sorry to hear friend. If you have family and friends that can hang out with you, try making regular outside time with them. Heck, or just take a daily walk at the park (with masks,etc...).
I turn slack off (currently in office until notice period is up then remote) even when I'm at the office and I don't have a phone on my desk, if someone wants something so urgent it's worth distracting me they can physically come find me.
Anecdotal: I work less hours and different hours under lockdown. Burnout means I barely do shit and no one can tell the difference because I was just doing the same thing (YouTube and Twitter) at work anyways.
my wife and I both work full-time (SWE). Have been fun WFH with 2 and 5 year olds. And, I know, we are among the lucky ones who got to keep their jobs.
We should all be working only 3\4 days of the week.
When you think of it, it's crazy how we just succumb to the notion that we have to work at least 5 days a week (yay magic numbers) just so we can please our corporate overlords.
It is amazing how I manage to rationalize sitting in traffic for that amount of time every day to myself.