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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Mandated tue/thu means they don't perceive capacity/safety issues, because its all-hands. Ignoring health issues for now, the good side is meetings won't be zoom-anyway because of the mass of non-present people thing.

Going to health, if they have HVAC and a good mask protocol for dense spaces, I don't personally see the problem in the building. Getting there, may cause increased exposure.

Apple can afford both the HMO, and the epidemiologists to work out if this change has any impact on health in the company, in the families at large, and in the wider community. I look forward to the research papers!

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How do they coordinate transit? Does the metro authority run different schedules when Apple is on an in office day? Also doesn’t this cause huge traffic problems?

Most places are fully back in offices, no research papers needed.

My company has been fully back in-office since the vaccines came out. The descriptions of WFH I've heard online have sounded like dispatches from a parallel universe. I haven't been on a Zoom call since 2020.

I haven't been in an office since before 2018. Really don't think I ever want to go back.

Same. Won't miss 1 hour daily comute.

One hour each way or round trip?

1.5 hour each way gang reporting in

I did this for 6 months and was on the edge of what I could handle. God help you, and I hope you can swing remote!

That sounds absolutely miserable. Is your base comp like 350k or something?

Did a commute that took that long for a year, by rail. They really need to finish electrifying Caltrain.

It was 65k at the time. I live in Canada

If you work a 230-day year, every ten minutes on your commute is over 38 hours of time. You're spending the equivalent of 17 work weeks in the car, or 37.5% of your 230-day work year.

That's a lot of time.

I take a bus. Canada pays too little for software to own both a car and a house

> I take a bus. Canada pays too little for software to own both a car and a house

Can you get comped for working on the bus? Is it even possible? Commutes like this are really killer.

The commute is really the thing that makes some workplaces intolerable, I think. You can put up with a lot more if you don't have to sit and angrily drive home for an hour afterwards.

All non remote offices are intolerable when you've become accustomed to taking lunch with your spouse and having your kids hug you at your desk when they return from school.

I'd add having pets around, too.

For me, that's looking up from the monitor to watch the kitties romping together (20-20-20 eye rule reminders), taking a short movement break to throw them some toys to chase, and occasionally having one curl up on my lap while I'm thinking.

So many chores get done too with working from home. Laundry, dishes, yard work, errands etc, all on my lunch breaks that would otherwise be spent scrolling the internet over a sad sandwich i cobbled together in 5 minutes at 7am. By the time the end of the day rolls around I'm actually done with work, not just work work but the home work that I'd have to do in the few tired hours that exist at the end of the day after you've finally commuted home and finished cleaning up after dinner. Plus being able to attend to essential business with fickle hours is a godsend. I am no longer forced to do all my banking and DMV business on saturday before 3pm when all these things close. I can do it in the middle of the week like a retiree and not hit any lines. Running errands in the middle of the day means I don't hit any traffic either. It's still a 40 hour work week, its just one that's way more optimized for my convenience, to the point where it would be hard to put a price on the stress relief it brings.

love the office or hate the office, pretty much every hates the commute.

Source? Im friends with a fairly high level commercial real estate agent in manhattan and per his view of things, vast amounts of empty office space in most neighborhoods. covid and zoom may have changed the market forever.

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