Why Do We Still Commute?

Not just that, but there's also the other side: Easy to procrastinate, easy to give false reports which then leads to regular overwork in the days just before a hard deadline.

I know these issues from remote workers I worked with, but also know this personally while working on my Diploma theses.

While we are at it: Working on Diploma/Master thesis is in many ways very similar to remote work: One works mostly from home, maybe in the library but even there mostly alone, i.e. not in an office, meeting one's mentor at most once per week. I met with other students which were in the same situation - just to get into a group feeling. That worked quite well, even though we had no overlaps in our topics and hence not much to talk about.

The situation is a bit different if you write your PhD thesis, as that usually means you have a job at the university during that time, and at least have an office and collegues.

The commute? 10 minutes on the bicycle. There's a song by Tripod about the distances between home, work and shops being your triangle of hapiness. Not that serious, but it has some substance of truth https://3pod.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-of-happiness

However I must confess that the downsides of working from the office majority outweighs the other.

I can no longer focus. I am constantly pulled into meetings. I have 120 minutes of commute everyday.

When I get home I am too tired and can no longer spend quality time with my partner like I did when I was working from home. And above all my sleeping schedule has to fit the 9-5 schedule and it is very hard to adjust.

I also have to deal with the heavy Canadian storms during winter.

In the future I'm choosing remote work at a heartbeat and might even consider a salary cut to get it.

YMMV.

> if you have personal discipline, good co-workers, and great leadership

I agree this is true, and have seen a couple of high-functioning distributed teams. But a question for me: if we have those things, do we want to spend them on working from home? Personally, I'd rather have a modest commute and spend our discipline and leadership points on solving a problem in the world.

Since the purpose of going to the office is not to do actual work being able to work from home has not removed the need for the office.

On the flip side, when your entire company works from offices, you develop a culture of acting like there is no better choice, and the resistance to change outweighs its obsoletence, causing people to not fight very hard to evolve the workplace, and to accept offices longer than they should.

I worked from home full time for about 3 years then moved to a job that had about 1.5 hour commute each way. One of the reasons I took the job was the fact that I did feel like a hermit. I then started to resent the commute. I'm lucky that I have been able to work out a deal with my current employer where I work from home 2 days a week and come in to the office 3 days a week. This gives me a nice break from the commute but I also don't end up feeling like a hermit.

1) I get out of the house and I just seem to focus much more there at the office.

2) I feel like a normal human going to an office and talking to others. (Maybe I don't always talk to others, but I can if I want.)

3) When I want to be lazy and just stay home, I just do.

4) Co-working space or cafe is just a 2-15 minute walk away. No commute in a car.

On the other hand, employees would have an incentive to try to stretch out their commute as much as possible, to get extra pay for time "not working". I don't know how rampant that would be. I like to think most people hate commuting enough that it wouldn't be worth it to make an extra $20 sitting in traffic when you could just be home faster, but who knows.

I prefer an alternative approach: a telecommuting incentive tax credit. Telecommuters themselves get a tax credit and companies also get a tax credit.

That would be the fastest way to spur more remote friendly workplaces. Then the environment, congestion, commute stress, etc will all be reduced. The "cost" of the credit would be more than offset by reduced road maintenance costs, lower pollution, fewer accidents, etc.

Unless you're dealing with customers directly, or making a physical product, there's no reason that offices in their conventional form should exist.

My career has suffered because I have never wanted the stress of a long commute nor could I afford the real estate prices and city problems involved with being closer in. It's a bunch of diminishing returns every direction I look, so my solution was to just find work that was less desirable but at least manageable in the context of my whole life situation. I contend that people who don't do that eventually suffer mental breakdowns, but have no evidence to back up that claim other than conjecture.

As it stands, my current commute is still bad, but I bet it's only 10% as bad as the hell most people around here go through. I've decided that working for a living is just generally bad for health, but a necessary evil, of course. I probably sound like a whiner, but I am truly interested in the commuting problem because I work for a company that heavily promotes cycling to work and ride sharing. Unfortunately, the infrastructure between my home and my work location precludes safe cycling along much of the route so I don't do it, but a lot of employees do. Instead, I stupidly get up at 5:45am, get out the door by 6:30am or so, creep along on a stupid, dark bridge with lots of other stupid people, then arrive to work around 7am or so, depending on the breaks. At least the drive home isn't as bad as long as I'm on the road by 3:15pm or so.

I do get the occasional work from home day, but our team is highly collaborative, so I'm at a disadvantage if I'm not at the office. In previous roles I had more autonomy and could thus make a better go of remote work. I worry that 100% remote roles make you a non-entity in your organization and thus dispensable.

If you have a job, you're selling your labor. The commute is part of what you have to do to get your goods to market. Are you, as a purchaser of bananas, "pushing off the costs of transport" on to the seller? That seems silly considering the transporter prices that into the bananas, just like workers can price in longer commutes. Don't accept less money to travel further each day.

This is a severe misunderstanding of the economics of the situation. Employees know that they're going to be spending time commuting, and they take that into account when they decide whether to take a job. In more academic terms-- that information is already informing the labor supply curve of which each individual is a part, and thus the market is already incorporating the information in the wages.

If you've ever taken microeconomics 101 then they'll probably have explained how it doesn't matter which side of the market, buyer or seller, pays a tax on business. The tax is incorporated into the price one way or another, whether it's the buyer or the seller that has to actually pony up the physical cash, and the actual tax burden of the two sides has nothing to do with who does that. The same principle applies to commuting, which is after all just a tax that the workers have to pay to the void when they have to wastefully sit around in their car.

With all that (plus what you said), most individual employees will prefer the office over remote access. So remote would only work if you moved everyone from the office to remote access at a single point in time.

There also seems to be a lack of properly planning tasks and as such this lack of planning is papered over with the sort of serendipitous spontaneous communication that happens when you have to walk over to someone and ask them what on earth is going on.

A focused remote worker can be orders of magnitude more productive than the typical office worker who is simply doing "busy work".

The driver of this lack of trust is the rise of managers (e.g. MBAs) who have limited expertise in the fields which they manage.

For jobs where there are measures of performance that are accurate and not gameable (e.g. certain call center workers) and/or it is a job executives probably reckon that they could do themselves, they are generally happy to let employees work from home.

IMO this is why Github and Mozilla are remote-first - by and large they're managed by developers.

Yes. Having managed remote teams and being a remote dev, it's all about response time. If someone slacks you, the response should be as quick as if it were verbal in the office. If it takes 2 hours to get a response out of someone - then they are not participating correctly on a remote team. The team should work in a way they can all be online at the same time so communication can flow freely. If someone is interrupting you and you need concentration just explain it to them - like you would in the office.

Immediate responses is a remote team. Day long responses is contract work. Week long responses is open source projects and government work.

Let's say you're right and people are to blame for being lazy. How would you address this?

There are extensive sets of studies that show all of that it generally doesn't, where it especially doesn't, and why it doesn't (which the article mentions.)

Data > anecdote.

It could also mean they actually have sufficient social skills that they're able to make full use of the higher bandwidth available face-to-face, and aren't willing to suffer thru the markedly inferior communications that are all that's possible over the 'net.

I can either put a lot of time and effort into remote communication, or I can work closely with people in a space that supports direct communication, putting that time and effort into whatever we're actually trying to do.

I freely grant that most office setups are shitty, so that for many people they waste time commuting and then waste plenty of time dealing with a bad office space and bad office culture. But that doesn't mean that offices can't be great places to work.

If I have my choice, it will always be working in close physical proximity with a team, just as long as we have a good space for that and a culture that supports actually getting things done. I like writing and am good at remote communication, but I'd rather save that energy for actual productive work.

Speaking as someone who has worked in three different remote companies of varying sizes, I have not found any evidence that remote teams achieve this any more frequently than conventional ones do.

> - an atmosphere of trust rather than petty control freaks who need to constantly keep an eye on their subordinates in order to know they're still 'working'

Again, I have not seen that remote teams make this any easier than conventional ones. Moreover, I think proponents of remote work in general are unaware of, or vastly underestimate, how many remote coworkers fudge their productive time because they can get away with it.

You can just as easily establish a culture of trust in a conventional office environment.

> - adapting to different forms of communication

Sure, but it’s unrealistic you’ll appeal to everyone’s favorite mode of communication, and many people don’t really care to adapt because they don’t need to. It is just as unreasonable to expect in-office coworkers to adapt to remote workers as it is to expect remote workers to come into an office for face-to-face communication.

I agree with you that remote teams can be effective in communication and productivity; however, I think your comment does more to support the position you’re arguing against than it does to negate it. Listen to what you’re saying here:

> Working remotely requires the participants to be much more communicative because in such a setting communication for the most part doesn't just happen serendipitously, you have to work to make it happen.

This is fundamentally why most companies do not have remote teams. It’s attractive to remote workers and to teams that are entirely remote, but most people don’t really want to work remotely most or all of the time. What you are stating evidences this friction, because you keep reiterating that remote teams can be just as good if they put in the work, but that’s precisely the point - most people and teams really don’t want to put in the work because it’s an extra hassle.

You started your comment by attacking the idea that face-to-face interaction is important, but it quite demonstrably is important. By your own comment (and my experience, as well), remote teams need to invest a significant amount of “cooperative machinery” to make communication and productivity as seamless as it is in face-to-face interaction. That’s obviously not to say it cannot happen, or that it shouldn’t be a goal, but my point here is that this is an additional hurdle that companies considering remote teams need to be work on, which is frankly unattractive.

Some people are disciplined and motivated enough to work productively in any environment, and that’s fantastic. Some people are not intrinsically so, but they become that way in the environment of an office. And some people are simply never optimally productive! Also consider that while a very vocal minority of people want to work remotely, this does not typically jive with people who are in-office and who then have to deal with an additional friction to communicate with some subset of coworkers.

I guess to put my point more succinctly: yes, of course remote work can be wonderful and properly engaging for optimal productivity if the majority of your coworkers are intrinsically motivated and really want to work remotely. But that’s not the world we live in, and it’s not reasonable to put the effort of achieving that ideal on companies that have already established a culture that works for them through face-to-face interaction in the office.

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

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

I used to walk with my wife to her office and back when I started full remote work (it's been 6 years, in a fully remote company).

Also, you're free to rent coworking space or shared office space if you like to. Working remote means you have a choice - not that you have to work from home :)

People traveling for 30-90 (or more!) minutes to and from work, particularly the ones driving in traffic, are the commuters. And the ones I know that fall into that category hate it.

Good for you that you have such a nice situation, though!

A majority of people don't have to prefer something for it to become standard. It's possible for only a minority of influential or vocal people to prefer commuting for it to be widespread.

In that case, 'they' prefer it, not 'us'.

This is not quite a commute.

When I'm at home I'm specifically not at work, which means I don't do any work, I don't think about work, I don't talk to anyone from work (unless there's an emergency that someone else can't fix).

What I think would be an awesome balance between this, is very small regional shared offices. Just shared office spaces that offer usage of their space as a 'subscription' to businesses, and as part of that subscription you get 24/7 access, a desk, internet, a kitchen etc. That way you don't have to have dirty dirty work things in your house, AND you only have to "commute" to a potentially very local office.

This is in general a common, elusive mistake: "We can't measure it, so it must be zero." Better to be ridiculous and say it's worth between $100 and $10,000.

I can think of an awful lot more jobs that are pretty well defined but nonetheless can't be done in someone's living room.

However, the "firm" structure creates lots of efficiencies. Individual contracts are costly to enforce and having one type of contract (the employee contract) allows hiring to scale a lot better. Employees (and usually not contractors) are exclusive to an employer which is also desirable for employers. Employees also get benefits, which a lot of people like.

There's also efficiencies gained by people working in the same room. Any type of creative work for example can benefit greatly from a quick in-person chat, or just bouncing a quick idea off of your colleagues. This is even true for some developers (myself included). Some types of work truly rely on communication between colleagues, and that would be really hindered by latency issues due to low frequency async communication. Coordination is also very important and much harder to do with async communication.

Tribalism is an interesting lens, and maybe it started out that way, but the firm is certainly valuable.

Aside from them most of the people I asked about this would either want to have a very short(20 minutes max.) commute, or work from home, since it's usually the most comfortable environment for them.

Nearly everybody I know who spends at least two hours daily in traffic would love to change that in any way possible - including switching to remote work.

But regarding people who might want to avoid being home, that is a whole different problem that needs solving. Wanting escape should not be an argument for commuting.

Early on in my WFH career I had to make it VERY clear to my family (and friends) that when I'm working they need to consider it as being NO DIFFERENT from me being 30 minutes away in an office.

I refuse to structure any part of our life around the belief that I am more available or more flexible.

In practice, yes, I am more available and more flexible. So occasionally, I can do things like run an errand in the middle of the day. But my close group of family/friends understands that this is an exception to the rule. In general, they should consider my work as being no different from theirs.

There's no excuse for piss-poor planning and communication. It's not that hard to send an email and get it on record.

Also "Walking around, bugging people, and getting shit done" may be very effective _for you_. Meanwhile you've blazed a path of interruption and disruption amongst your colleagues in your wake.

This might increase the efficiency of the person walking around, and decrease the efficiency of the people getting bugged. I wouldn't say it's a net win for the company.

> But all of these things also involve communication which isn't relayed to remote workers. People either forget you, or including you in the conversation is a hassle, so they don't. You feel like the unwanted stepchild, constantly pinging people to get some kind of feedback and never seeming to reach them until much later. It's really inefficent.

Yes, working remotely with a team that has an office is awful. Working in a fully remote team is much easier, more pleasant, and more efficient.

> spins around in chair, interrupts and asks coworker a question, workshops ideas for 15 minutes, comes up with solution, makes a meeting

Slack please. Don't interrupt me.

> boss comes over and tells workers there's some issue going on he's going to go deal with and he'll be available via cell only

I don't care. If I need the boss, I'll text/Slack/email him/her. I'm not a child -- I know what I need to do. If it's an emergency, obviously I'll know how to reach him/her.

> when SCRUM ends, conversation continues in person, things get decided

What conversation needs continuing? What actually needs deciding? Is there no leadership?

> walk into boss's office and make tentative strategy plans

holy crap. Does anything actually get DONE in this office? A whole lot of deciding and planing and interruptions and workshopping.

> discuss current issues, decide to rework something, meet with another team, make plans, start working on it

Sounds like your company lacks vision and leadership. It seems like a disorganized mess where there's no clear product vision, no clear leadership and horrible communication that requires a series of interrupting, impromptu meetings.

You described a day where code probably gets written for all of one hour -- the rest of the time is spent just feeling good about how much stuff you've gotten done. Meanwhile -- what have you actually shipped?

My comment isn't about remote vs. non-remote -- it's just pointing out that this "getting shit done" depiction is pretty much describes the sixth circle of hell.

Selling insurance: not required. Customer service for the electrical company: nope. Most of that is on the phone. Logistics for a trucking company: also phone/computer based, no face to face (or rarely.) Medical claims processing -- never face to face Coordinating cable TV installation appointments: all phone or online based

If you think about it almost ALL jobs can be done remotely. I agree that most jobs still require it, but that isn't because of the nature of the job, but the lack of vision from those particular industries. Most businesses seem to operate under 19th century ideals.

I realize not everyone wants or can work from home; but I would advocate for a decentralized workplace -- remote working with perhaps small satellite offices scattered around the world -- offices that can simply pop-up at WeWork/etc. As employees in the area need/want.

Obviously a hardware company like Apple actually needs a physical space for people to build things. Same for Boeing, Tesla, etc.

But Facebook? Farmers Insurance? They don't sell anything physical.

>Conversations around whiteboards between stakeholders creates value.

Why ? Are whiteboards magic ?

>Pair programming makes for lower defects and more reliable scheduling

Putting aside the fact that the benefits of pair programming as less consensual than what you seem to suggest, it can be done much more conveniently in a remote setup with a screenshare and a headset than by sharing a desk.

>Software is a design delivery operation.

So ?

>There was recent article on MS office space redesign to create more value.

Here we have the business case reference, always good to include one. The substantial remark is that once again this doesn't prove anything, the first reason being that "value" is extremely vague.

>Productivity is not per-keystroke

The art of looking like you are siding with the people you want to control while it is actually the opposite. If we go the bottom of the reasoning : value is not per keystroke, we therefore need to put employees in a room because their true value must be monitored to be appreciated. "Please understand, I really want to be able to appreciate your true value". Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.

>Personal productivity is almost a misnomer

One more slogan.

>I have been paid extra to kill projects that never should have started.

While I am the first to advocate careful planning and writing code last, as an entrepreneur, I consider it a crime to sabotage projects, because anyone who has ever created something, or started a project or a venture understands that creativity is almost Holy. Beyond the technical deliverables, projects trigger group (and market) dynamics and institutional learning that may be hard to reproduce later in time. For this reason, doers do not sabotage or kill projects, they rectify them. Sure there can be pure follies that need to be stopped ASAP to stop diverting valuable resources of the company, but my overall impression is that you have a more liberal approach to assessing what must be killed.

I respect arguments from both sides, but this comment is really representative of the crap filling most companies.

Then somewhere along the way, some marketing guy came up with the spin, "It fosters communication!". Open office does indeed make people close in proximity, but it's not a necessity.

And as with anything else in life, we must weigh the options. Face to face can indeed be better than remote. It can also be worse, because some people just irritate others by their presence and little behaviors. But more significantly, some of us do work which requires a good amount of thought - uninterrupted, quiet thought. Shared offices make this more difficult (compared to a quiet home office).