First day of Apple going back to office. Exit lane on SB280 backed up for miles | Hacker News Reader

First day of Apple going back to office. Exit lane on SB280 backed up for miles

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33 pointsdmitrygr26 comments

C'mon, everyone. This is a comment on Reddit, used here as clickbait. It's just someone's opinion, probably written off the cuff without much thought or additional research. If the traffic in the photo were on I-280 North, it wouldn't be backed up to Highway 85. Wrong direction.

I would be more interested in hearing about traffic on CA-85 North and I-280 North towards Cupertino. I suspect the vast majority of Apple employees are living in homes to the South and East.

I can't say that the hero picture is any indication. It looks like what you get when you type "traffic" into Getty Images or summat. Two buses, coupla cars, and it looks to me like the lane closest to the barrier is plain empty.

My follow-up question is: yeah, so? What do we compare this to?

I wonder if this will affect employee retention. Going from no commute to "miles" must be a pretty jarring experience. I'm sure the rest of MOFAANG is paying attention to see how it pans out.

Plenty of Apple employees have some very valuable golden handcuffs.

Apple's insistence on an in-office culture isn't insane when you consider the amount of hardware design that goes on there. That said, I have to think that the majority of the company doesn't touch any physical object outside of a standard laptop to complete their work.

Doesn’t almost every person in a similar position working at any of the Big 5 tech companies (FAANG - Netflix + Microsoft) always have “valuable handcuffs” if you define handcuffs as “unvested RSUs”?

I only see 3 vehicles in a row, it doesn't look too bad.

One of the most annoying arguments against working from the office is that you have to have a terrible commute. Yes, if you have a 1 hour long commute working from the office will be miserable. But the problem is not working from a a workplace, it’s the Wall-E esque culture we’ve created for ourselves.

American cities are made for cars, which stretch cities out and transform our entire lives. The Cupertino campus had an insane parking minimum that even Apple failed to fight against. (Or maybe they decided not to).

It’s annoying that we blame everyone but ourselves on issues like long commutes, gas prices, obesity, pedestrian deaths, pollution, loneliness, etc. You can’t have an affordable 3000sq ft. home without some sacrifice. Ideally people with larger homes just hop on a commuter train but 90% of American simply don’t want that.

Instead, we are happy to blame these problems on transplants, construction projects, Joe Biden, and evil corporations who ask us to… gasp come to work. Never ourselves.

I of course say this from a position of privilege because if I were to have a job with a commute (which I dearly miss having tbh) I could probably afford to live within walking distance to the office. But I’m not telling people to “just move closer” I’m just asking for trains.

Anyways - that was a rant, but I think this is one of the most important issues in American society today.

A public transport commute is no less miserable and is easily 1 hour door to door each way.

IMHO car commute is worse if traffic is reliably awful as personally I find sitting in a traffic jam worse than sitting in public transport. But if traffic flows then public transport will take longer and be more annoying.

My preference goes to walking or cycling (if there is good infrastructure! I.e. segregated lanes) but that implies living near enough your workplace.

> A public transport commute is no less miserable and is easily 1 hour door to door each way.

Not all public transport is equal. I had a 1 hour commute on BRT (Bus rapid transit) and it was really nice. I would work on the bus or decompress and listen to music. It wasn’t perfect but it’s way less stressful than being in a car in traffic, and having to pay 30 bucks a day for parking.

At the same time I’ve also had to take a city bus for a 15 minute ride and that was unpleasant. So I agree, public transit isn’t always ideal but we can have nice public transit. We can improve our current infrastructure just like cars have improved.

1 hour each way? That's some dramatization right there. You can travel the entire length of the red line in Chicago in 1 hour (26 miles).

GP said “door to door” in 1 hour, which you seem to be overlooking.

No, I'm not overlooking that. I pointed out that an hour door to door is a very long commute, and just used one example to demonstrate how far a 1 hour commute takes you.

Here's the actual data:

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

New York City's average commute time is the highest among US cities, and it's still well below an hour:

https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-commute-time-statistic...

From the census.gov link you posted:

"The longest average travel times were associated with various forms of public transportation. For example, workers who traveled to work by bus had an average commute of 46.6 minutes."

From the zippia.com link:

"Public transportation in the U.S. takes up to 85% longer than commuting by car."

"Subways have the longest average commute times in the U.S. at 47 minutes."

These are US-centric stats.

My experience in Europe is that they are not bad numbers and still show than it's easy to commute for 1 hour door to door by public transport. For instance it's common to commute by train in which case you need to add the time to get to the train station and back plus the time you spend at the station.

I should blame myself for 60 years of public policy none of which I was consulted on? Ok. How about I just not do that and get a job that doesn’t require me to commute? That’s how labor markets work, and feels a lot more productive than commuting for penance.

Edit: I used to commute by train in NYC for 10 years, and I would most certainly rather drive nails through my eyes than do it again.

Why shouldn’t I blame the management for a demonstrably optional policy that materially makes my life worse? They could just say “work the way that works best for you” and leave it at that.

Just because “work” involved large headquarters and offices in the 1920’s doesn’t mean it did for all of history before that, nor must it be so into the future. Better than trains, used to be work was decentralized into many offices within walking distance. Work 1000 years ago looked nothing like today. Nothing - nothing - says work has to be ANYTHING. Work is a fiction we created to enlist more people in our projects, and it’s construction in reality is artificial and emergent.

We have the tools and ability to break the emergent reality and reclaim our downtown space for residential and retail use - that sounds much more attractive than trains to work.

I am not trying to debate how labor markets work. I’m pushing back against conflating working from the office with terrible commutes.

Yes, they are related, but the cause of the terrible commute is not necessarily having a job that requires you to come into the office, it’s the shitty infrastructure we’ve built for ourselves

And I’m saying all commutes are both terrible and optional, and only management policy makes them necessary.

Btw, I commuted for 10 years by train. It was awful. I’d rather commute by car and moved so I could.

I just read your edit. I agree walking is probably the best possible commute type. And having lots of little decentralized places of work you can walk to is ideal. But it’s probably not scalable. Eventually you’re gonna have people who want to live in the suburbs and work downtown.

The idea of work has definitely changed but at the core, it’s about working with others to achieve a common goal. It used to be that sustenance and surviving the winter was the common goal. I’m not sure how it’s going to play out but I do think there are some advantages to being with your coworkers IRL.

> And I’m saying all commutes are both terrible and optional, and only management policy makes them necessary.

All software engineering commutes are probably optional. I’m not sure how you expect a janitor to work from home though

> Btw, I commuted for 10 years by train. It was awful. I’d rather commute by car and moved so I could.

This is an interesting data point for sure. Is traveling by train just inherently bad or can it be improved ?

I know you said "probably," but, in fact, not all SWE commutes are optional. I once had a job programming a $50k test rig for a $75k piece of hardware, neither of which existed outside of my company's test lab. You could SSH into the test rig, but there were other logistical issues that made that a painful way to work, and not something you'd want to do often. I didn't mind my commute, anyway, because it was a 5 minute bike ride or a 20 minute walk at a leisurely pace.

No, but I think the point here is that part of the cause of the terrible commute is so many other people having a job that requires them to come into the office on that shitty infrastructure. Shitty infrastructure isn't something you can snap your fingers and fix, but companies that were fully remote for the past 2 years can certainly stay or go back to being fully remote. It's not a full solution by any means; indeed, it's a bit like putting a bandaid on a shotgun wound, but it stops some of the bleeding right now.

OTOH, you certainly could argue that SWEs and other well-paid professionals who are inconvenienced by a terrible commute are incredibly privileged and need to get in line behind those experiencing real societal issues, but that's a completely different argument altogether.

All commutes are terrible. If you have the type of job where you can work from home, then any commute is a theft of your time.

Careful. If you value your time you might be accused of being a “quiet quitter.”

Sorry, but I'm only accepting blame to the degree that I had the power to affect the problem. I'd love to train around the city, but until I'm elected dictator of trains and urban planning, it's not going to happen.

>It’s annoying that we blame everyone but ourselves Using "we" here is doing exactly that.

Train commutes are usually unpleasant and inflexible unless the infrastructure is overbuilt (like roads) or unless you live close by (expensive in areas where huge companies operate.) Distributed clusters of workers in mixed use is a better policy aim if good commutes is the goal.

Oh there are plenty of other arguments against working in the office - the primary one being not having an office and being forced to work in a distracting, noisy open office.

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