I never got used to the Microsoft commute, and that was rarely worse than 90 minutes coming home. It sucked, it continued to suck, it never got any better, it ruined my day, I hated my life, and it felt so good to drive away on my last day of that terrible job knowing I would never again have to spend any time on SR520 if I didn't want to. (I avoided that road for years afterward, actually, even when it would have been the sensible route to wherever I was going.)

I'm not going to try to get used to it, never again. Life is too short to waste that much of it in hell. I won't even consider a job with a bad commute anymore. If that limits my employment prospects, so be it - I have a life to live!

Commuting by car is much worse than commuting by bus or train (for any time greater than 45 min).

Your bus options must be a hell of a lot nicer than mine. (I haven't had the option of commuting by train since college, alas.)

NYC metro area - I've been commuting by train, but I know many people who live in NJ who commute in by bus.

wow, where did you live where getting to microsoft via 520 took 1.5 hours? 1 hour i believe as an occasional max. maybe across puget sound?

Getting to Microsoft never took all that long - it was getting home that took forever and sucked the life out of me.

Yeah, I have the same issue going south on I-405 in the afternoon. The road is clogged from 3 miles north of Bellevue and remains clogged until a couple miles south of I-90. I used to spend 50% of my commute time in that pile.

We really needed to build rail in the space where we added a toll lane.

I commute ~60 minutes each direction by car. My drive is simple: few minutes to main road from work/home... 55 minutes north/south on a single road... few minutes to work/home.

The time honestly dissapears... Podcasts and/or audio books.

The scary part is how much time is spent on "auto-pilot".

Was the connector not an option for you or have things gotten better? I commute in slightly off hours (7am and 4pm) and it consistently takes ~35 minutes door to door.

The connector was not an option for me. I quit in 2009; things may well have gotten better since then.

Do you subtract those hours from how much time you'd be in the office or do you spend 12 hours a day away from home every day?

I do about 2 hours a day when I'm not biking, but because we have a strong remote-work culture, I find myself working from home more and more, and expect to be fully remote pretty soon.

Like many "knowledge workers" I don't track my hours, but my job requires a certain amount of in-office time, and the length of my commute doesn't really affect that requirement.

I've seen many people on tech shuttles in the Bay Area get on the shuttle at 9 and get off the shuttle at 6. The shuttle is considered to be "in the office".