'Super commuting' is on the rise – and it spells big trouble for mid-size cities
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Though I did get put under such a manager from out of state. They would be in the flesh a week out of the month, managing an in office team. Ironically the setup was done under someone who disliked remote work. Around the same time I was approached for a fully remote role. Staying would have been nice, though I had doubts how long WFH would last, even though I tried to negotiate for it at the time.
I also tried only going in 3 days a week during college. It was nice since I was commuting and could stack my schedule. Still, I can't imagine driving 2+ hours a day to go in so often. It's a time waste and so much time is cars is dangerous.
> All these super commuters, as researchers have dubbed them — those who average at least three hours traveling to and from the office each day — are reshaping the geography of American work. The winners will be the big cities that best accommodate the needs of jet-setters when they're at the office, and the quieter locales that cater to their lifestyles when they're at home. The losers will be mid-tier cities like Cleveland and Syracuse that have long served as regional hubs for large employers. > > "If employers and their top sales and managerial staff want to be where you can have the most amount of interaction, it's going to be in the big cities like New York," says Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University. "The regional headquarters as a concept is gone."
Okay, so they got one expert to weigh in. But the article and that expert go in some weird fanciful directions.
> A super commute may sound like a grind, but consider the math. Let's say your commute back when you went into the office every day was an hour each way, for a total travel time of 10 hours a week. And let's say that today, you're expected to come into the office for what is rapidly becoming the standard schedule for hybrid jobs: Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. By commuting two fewer days every week, you can now live 40 minutes farther from the office than you used to, while keeping your weekly commuting time constant. That extra radius gives you a lot more options. If you work in downtown San Francisco, say, it's the difference between living in the bland suburbs of Novato and living next to a vineyard in Napa. > > That's the kind of choice that appeals to super commuters. Why live in sleepy old San Jose, they figure, if you can hop a plane from Sun Valley? "The young tech people," Moss says, "their quality of life is defined by 'I want to go snowshoeing or go hiking' or 'I want to ski.' They're much more inclined to pick places which are compatible with their lifestyle and values."
During the pandemic I knew SV people who moved up to Tahoe. Odd to super commuting is empowering that and not just full remote work.
Article feels like a way to try to equate full remote with outlier super commuter hybrid work. Their other example is a VP at an Italian startup who lives in Lisbon.
> For Istochka, super commuting offers the best of both worlds: the flexibility to choose where to live, and the chance to build close relationships with her coworkers. "I love going to the office," she says. "I don't think we would be able to make sound and quick decisions and collaborate so effectively if we didn't have time face to face."
You can have it all, it just takes a five hour commute!