I think if anything, and this data supports it, developers are underpaid and that's because they are easy to push around, IMO.
Say you have 2 kids under 5, you have to pay around 1200-1500$ for education for each of them, 3200-3800$ is rent.
Doable? Not really
[edit] Even if your kids are not in school yet, good school district means better neighborhoods (for most parts).
[0] http://priceonomics.com/the-san-francisco-rent-explosion-par...
[1] Especially many of the tiny places that pass for "one bedroom" apartments in the city these days.
[2] Of course, the trick is finding an apartment to house your clan.
However, because Facebook is now a bridge away from the easy bay it drove prices up like crazy.
For a 2 bedroom in a good school district, I doubt you can find anything under 3200, this will be a steal.
Yeah you can fill that time up with podcasts or audiobooks or that sort of thing, or work for a Bay Area tech company with a work shuttle and maybe-kinda-sorta-work along the way, but you're still giving up 2-3 hours of free/unconstrained time (one might make the argument "but I would be doing the same things at home anyway" but in my mind there's a huge difference between those two situations).
It'd actually be 4+ hours a day since it's 2-3 hours each way.. sounds crazy to me
The absolute level of craziness of 4 hours commuting daily is pretty high, but the incremental craziness on top of your typical commute is really what I meant here. :)
And that glimpse is without a family...
Spending 4 hours to work 8 hours is crazy.... It amazes me anyone does this and has a normal life.
It was awful. Sure, I got to listen to ~90 minutes of podcasts or Audible each day, but even still that's not productive time. All it took was one accident on the highway and my day just went from 9.5 hours to 12.
Needless to say, my next job (and current) is about 4 miles away from my house and my quality of life has gone up exponentially, even though when I was doing it I did not mind the commute much.
You could double my salary and I don't think I would even consider a 2 hour one-way commute.
If it's driving yourself, that's 4 hours a day, 5 days a week. 20 hours a week, say 48 work weeks a year (assuming vacation and holidays give you 4 weeks off), that's 960 hours, or 40 days of driving each year. Just to and from work.
I agree that it's not the end of the world, but I resolved long ago to never have a commute like that (I came close at 1.5 hours each way for a month before I moved closer to work). That's a lot of time not being spent with family (if you have one) or that could be spent on other goals (personal, professional, educational).
I can't imagine a scenario where I am just sitting in my car for 2 hours on the way to work and on the way back.
Almost to the day 2 years ago I wrote this post http://avi.io/blog/2013/12/06/why-i-will-never-work-out-of-a... still super relevant today.
I don't know your situation and if you have kids or not, but I will never be able to do what you do. ever.
I do sincerely hope that you're one of the few who can happily give up half of 5/7ths of his leisure time for his family. I've never personally known anyone -family man or no- who can endure such a lengthy daily commute for more than a few years.
Something just wears away at you until -one day- you realize that you're deeply dissatisfied about something... and eventually come to realize that it's your long-ass commute.
So, no. A 120 minute one-way commute time is not normal in Japan.
[0] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/world-of-commut...
http://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/2014/02/20/124942
and this one for Japan paints a more vague but differently interesting picture:
http://www.japan-guide.com/topic/0011.html
Really, it's not unusual to meet a salaryman with a 2-hour commute.
> http://nbakki.hatenablog.com/entry/2014/02/20/124942
Those data for all of Japan (not Tokyo(!)) put the median commute time somewhere around 44 minutes, the max commute time at 90 minutes, and the average commute time at 57 minutes. That is totally in line with what I reported in my comment.
Did you maybe mean to link to [0]? If you did, then that survey tells us that of the 583 Tokyo respondents:
* 2.9% have a 120+ minute commute.
* 17% have a commute between 90 and 119 minutes.
* 66% have a commute shorter than 70 minutes.
* 20% have a commute between 60 and 69 minutes. This is the most frequent commute bucket. Second is 50->59 (14.9%). Third is 40->49 (13.89%). Fourth is 70->79 (13.03%).
> Really, it's not unusual to meet a salaryman with a 2-hour commute.
If only 3% of a population has a property, that property is actually pretty unusual.
> ...and this one for Japan paints a more vague but differently interesting picture:
From that page:
"About half of the Japanese respondents indicated that they need less than 30 minutes to go to work/school. On the other hand, one fourth of the respondents need more than one hour."
To break it down:
~50% < 30 minutes
~25% >= 30 minutes but <= 60 minutes
~25% > 60 minutes
That doesn't mesh with the official stats for the country.
> But you know, normal kinda also means "within 3 sigma" as well as "mean".
It's a pity that the standard deviation of the reported figures was not reported. I gather that it's hard to determine what is within 3 SD of the mean without that information.
+/- 3 sigma = 99.7% of the sample, and we know 3% is > 2 hours (for all of Japan, not Tokyo). There's near the same percentage of LGBT adults in the US (~4%).
All we're arguing over is the use of the word normal. Would you be happier with "uncommon but not an extreme outlier"?
Oh. You meant "The Tokyo Metropolitan Area", rather than Tokyo. Gotcha. :)
> Your calculations are median / max / average of averages.
Mmhmm. Given that that's the only data we have to work with, I don't see the problem with it (other than the violence it should have done to the phrasing in my previous comment). I'd rather have the more detailed data, but alas.
> ...and we know 3% is > 2 hours (for all of Japan, not Tokyo).
How do we know that? The data that my 3% came from was -apparently- from Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, or Saitama respondents.
> There's near the same percentage of LGBT adults in the US (~4%).
1) If that's L, G, B, and T adults in the US, I don't believe that number for a second. That stat has to suffer from under-reporting.
2) I would absolutely say that a property shared by only 4% of a population is not common.
> All we're arguing over is the use of the word normal. Would you be happier with "uncommon but not an extreme outlier"?
Based on the data, a 120+ minute commute appears to be rather uncommon. I'm uncomfortable about speaking about the nature of the outliers without knowing more about the individual points in the data set. That last bucket is potentially a very large one; who knows what its contents look like? [0]
"Normal" is... not the best term to use when trying to speak precisely.
If I have a system that only fails in a particular way 3% of the time, I could reasonably say "That failure mode is not normal.". On the other hand, if I know that it fails in that particular way 3% of the time, I can reasonably say, "Oh, that's infrequent, but normal behavior of the system.".
See the problem?
[0] I mean, obviously, we could have a few reasonably good guesses at its highest possible upper bound, but other than that...
http://www.japan-guide.com/topic/0011.html
The LGBT stat came from Wikipedia. For controversial stuff like that in the US, WP is pretty good. I used to think it was 10-15%, 1 in 7 was the number I learned growing up, I guess it's 1 in 25.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_demographics_of_the_Unite...
For me, "abnormal" generally means "what is wrong with you" (the response given here), whereas "normal" can even include eye-rolling and "oh so you're one of those". The difference between 1 in 33 (3%) and 1 in 666 (0.015%, from the tail end past +3 sigma which accounts for 50% - 99.7% / 2) is really quite palpable.
But again, let's face it: it's not as common as I thought, and it's not as uncommon as you thought.
...really? From my reply:
> From that page:
> "About half of the Japanese respondents indicated that they need less than 30 minutes to go to work/school. On the other hand, one fourth of the respondents need more than one hour."
I read and commented on everything that you linked to. The only time 3% appears in that article is "3% take the motorcycle, while 7% indicated not to commute at all." The bar graph that is titled "International comparison of commuting times (one way, in minutes)" has no Y-axis label or grid lines, and is small and low-resolution so determining what percentage is represented by the 120+ minute bucket is tricky at best.
> For me, "abnormal" generally means "what is wrong with you" (the response given here)...
Folks feel that people who are spending four hours every weekday on the road are doing something strange and aberrant because that's an enormous amount of unpaid time to spend doing something required by work. It doesn't matter how much of a population does it, it's aberrant and -to a degree- self-destructive behavior. [0]
> For controversial stuff like [LGBT "membership"] in the US, WP is pretty good.
Sure. I'm making the argument that the studies are suffering from under-reporting. This is something that you have to ask others to disclose, rather than something you can test for.
> But again, let's face it: it's not as common as I thought, and it's not as uncommon as you thought.
No, the Japanese commute time stats sound about right to me. The numbers for Japan were more like what I expected the US numbers to look like, actually.
[0] As always, remember that if I were assigning blame, I would do so explicitly.
Sneer? No. Pity and feel sorry for? Unless he was getting a really big payout from all that work, absolutely. Because:
> ... that's what a 40-hour work week with a 4-hour daily commute amounts to.
Don't give up half of 5/7ths of your leisure time on anything that doesn't richly reward you.
Personally I would never do it, but like, different strokes.
Also, define richly. Assume monthly savings of $2000/month on housing, call it $500 / week, that's $25 an hour. Plenty of people make less than that, so again it's just priorities.
I know. That's why I said:
"Don't give up half of 5/7ths of your leisure time..."
> Also, define richly.
For the purposes of that analysis, I can only define it for myself.
My "richly" is probably not going to be the same as someone else's "richly". What's more, as we age its definition is very much likely to change.
One thing's for certain: a "lost wage" analysis is probably going to grossly underestimate the value of the lost time for a lot of people.
Let's face it, we're both being kind of sloppy.
Unless his partner is unemployed or a "housewife", there are childrearing and housekeeping tasks that are certain to occupy the "work" time on the weekends. Until the kid gets is own job and (if you live in a place with poor-to-nonexistent public transit) can be trusted with a car, having a kid is work.
> So it's half of 5/9, or simply 5/18. Which doesn't sound that bad compared to 2.5/18 which is what a 1-hour commute gets you.
No, it still sounds bad. A two-hour commute kills half of your leisure time every work day. A one-hour commute kills a quarter of the same. In both cases, that's a lot of time to lose.
I consider quitting every time my drive home takes over 40 minutes.
I'd imagine people with family wouldn't want to spend a lot of time away from families to commute
If I want to live in my car for four hours a day sitting in traffic. Some of the bigger companies have shuttles and such but it doesn't fix the problem that all highways in the Bay Area during rush hours are parking lots.
The ownership comparison looks more like this: 1) in the midwest you can buy a large home; 2) in San Francisco you don't buy at all.
If you want to live in San Francisco or New York or London, then just go do it.
Couldn't agree with this more. If you want San Francisco, then you're not going to find anything like it in the Midwest. But don't be fooled into thinking your other option is a farm.
So back to that trade-off. Cost of living in San Francisco is 60% higher than cost of living in Los Angeles. Do you want to live in SF at least 60% more than you want to live in LA? Then it makes sense. Your standard of living will be lower in SF than it was in LA, but that lost happiness will be offset by the increased happiness of living where you really want to.
...I know that a web developer with one year of on-the-job experience and no formal training pulls down right around $100k in SF.
$130k may be twice the median for the area, but it seems like the pay bump for mid-to-senior level people should be substantially more than 30%, no?
If you are relocating to the bay area with a family (say on a visa that doesn't allow your spouse to work) and your offer is 130K$, no matter (almost) where you live, stay there!