I know that some people just dont have the privilege of living close to their jobs, but after spending one internship getting up at 5;45am to drive with my dad to work to beat the traffic for 1hr, and then spending 1.5-2 hours driving back in heavy traffic in NYC, I vowed to never ever live in a place where I have to drive that far to get to work. 2 months of that and I was already losing my will to live. My dad did it for 15 years and I can see why towards the last leg of that job, he was bitter and angry on a daily basis. That is not a way to live.
Of course I can't speak for anyone else, but I find that taking a train to work is a lot less stressful than driving every day. At least on the train, I can read, or pull out my laptop, or just play a video game.
I don't ever recall feeling comfortable pulling out a laptop on the train though. Not even for fear of someone stealing it. I'd be worried about a subway monkey doing some spinning dance move and destroying the screen, or some hipster spilling coffee on it when the train slows down. Fond memories...
Until today, I've typically gotten on the subway between 9:45am and 10am for my 30 minute commute to work (that's bed to desk travel time). The train usually wasn't packed, but I was certainly squeezed up against people. Perfectly tolerable, but certainly not comfortable.
Today I did an hour's worth of work from 9:30am to 10:30am and then I commuted to my office arriving just before my 11am standup. The 10:30am train was wonderfully empty in comparison to the 9:45am train. I got a seat for the first time in months! Furthermore, that hour of work was wonderfully productive since my apt is dead silent and no one was around to disturb me. I got most of my "heads-down, high-concentration" work done for the day in that hour.
My work place is about an hour and a half commute and the trains are incredibly packed starting from around 7am all the way till 9.15am.
What I've done was wake up and started working from home sometime between 7-8am till around 9.15am, then leave for the 9.30am train and I'll be in the office by 11.
Work gets done and I don't get stressed from silly crowds. I also do the reverse and leave work around 4pm to avoid the return rush.
It's a small change but it's an incredible quality of live improvement. This is literal pareto, 20% effort with 80% effect. Do it.
Spent a lot of money on REALLY good rain gear and averaged almost 8K mi a year for the four of the five years we were up there. As long as I wasn’t stopped in traffic I felt even more relaxed getting a good motorcycle ride in every morning and being actively zoned out (focused on now instead of life) vs taking the train and being passively zones out with media.
Now that I’m 4mi from my office, come home a few times a week and say hi to the wife at lunch, etc. I will also never go back to anything resembling a commute.
Living in a city with approximately 100,000 people has its advantages!
I recently got a GPD Win 2 as well though, so I've been able to do more computerey stuff lately, even when it is crowded.
DisplayPort output via USB-C is another plus (monitor/mouse/keyboard/charging with one cable!) though the Win 2 may have had that as well, I’m not sure. The original Win did not.
What I’m experimenting with now is taking Uber Pool most mornings. It’s usually about $20 but you can pay for it with tax free commuter benefits, and I’m saving $2.75 in subway fare, so it’s like ~$10 for almost an hour of time to catch up on administrative junk for my side biz. Seems worth it so far, although still a little frustrating.
Now I take the bus, and I never have space at least not for my work laptop. I should have gotten the 13" instead of the 15".
I mostly agree with you...but...I found the past several years of subway outages worse and started driving/ridesharing more and more. I’ve had times where subways constantly get rerouted, suddenly go express, skip stops, run on different lines, etc. it became so maddening.
I used to take the Path trail from Jersey City and then transfer to the F trail to Queens. I let my boss think I love my job so much that I arrive at work pretty early on most days when in fact, I was just trying to account for the inevitable delays on some days.
I understand worker safety is important. Even if we didn't care about the workers, accidents can get very expensive and budget is tight. However, there has to be a better way than slowing ALL tracks to a crawl every time there is track work on ANY of the tracks.
But I agree. For all that New Yorkers complain about the subway, it's my favorite thing about New York.
I'll take the commute for the luxury of living in the countryside away from the noise, overpopulation and dirt.
It's almost as if they designed cities to only be driven too without any thought given on how to place living spaces closer to working spaces.
Unfortunately I think I'd still need a few hours to unwind and get out of "work mode." I've worked jobs where I could actually walk to work and I still went home just drained. TBH, I'm an introvert and I'm not sure going in to the office will ever be really conducive to my personality.
I've worked jobs where I had an office to go to when I needed/wanted to be there but could work from home or at a clients office. That was wonderful. I actually showed up to it much, much more often than I expected - by pure choice. If I was having an off day or felt especially introverted and just needed a break from people I could just knock things out at home!
It's insane to waste that much of your daily life shuttling to your job (if you have an option, which I hope to remain lucky enough to have).
I used to ebike for an hour each way, and it was torture. Now it's a ~20min drive and 30mins of the commuter train. Still pretty miserable, but at least it's not raining directly into my eyes anymore.
I have some of the infrastructure where I live in Norway, but I'm not brave enough to bike on the snow and ice in the winter. Walking is perilous enough.
When I lived in the states, biking was often dangerous and the fastest routes weren't always available to me. I lived in the countryside for years, close enough to bike by main roads, but it not only wasn't allowed on the best path, but it would have been dangerous. No shoulder, curvy road, and cars going over 55mph (over 80kph). It was illegal to ride on sidewalks, where there were sidewalks, and few cities had bike lanes outside of downtown areas (if that).
One job literally had no entrance other than off of a 4-lane divided highway: No biking or walking to that job.
Even if I got over those hurdles, there was often no where to safely put my bike while I was at work. Heck, some of these places didn't have anywhere to store cold things for lunch.
Additionally, every company should provide at least one work from home day. Having a day at home where you can do laundry while working and other minor chores are such a huge win. Not to mention sleep-in to 830 if I want. Even while doing these mini chores I am WAY more productive at home. It also breaks up your week. My WFH day is Tuesday. So I deal with Monday, then have that cushy WFH day, then when I come back on Wednesday it feels like just a 3 day work week. Friday is casual and most employees take Friday to WFH. Its a ghost town and I love it.
I need to begin looking for one of these dank jobs that are truly a four-day work week though.
I had a ~1h commute for years, which meant 10 hours gone a week, but I commuted via public transport (train+metro/subway/underground) which meant I had 10 hours a week for reading or conversation with friends on the same route. I worked from home for 10 years after, and I swear I read less!
If I had been driving those would have felt like completely wasted time.
Or, a friend of mine in Sweden had an even longer commute by train, but his company counted the time as office time, since he'd just work on the train, which meant no loss of free time.
(I still agree all companies should encourage WFH as much as possible)
Since I lived and NYC and London, living near work often meant living in busy and noisy city areas, but it's a compromise I've generally been happy with.
These days, it's likely semi-remote work, where you commute 1-3 days a week or in off hours (part of day at home, part at work). For me, I've been lucky enough to always find something that I found interesting and that pays well enough while not having to commute more than 10-20 minutes in the local area, and that's having been born, raised, and lived my entire life 45 minutes North of SF.
There's not guaranteed to be something good in the borderlands, but I think people might be surprised what they could find if they can resist the call of the behemoths (and those that congregate in the same area) while being within throwing range of them.
Crazy question but why not invest some of that higher salary into quality of life improvements like moving closer to work?
But as for why people don't do that, I think it's often because "quality of life" means different things to different people at different times in their lives.
For a single 20-something, moving closer to work, and the much higher cost of living that usually entails can be worthwhile.
For a 30-something or 40-something with a family, what kind of worth the spouse does (and whether it benefits from that move monetarily or in quality of live) and what it entails for the children can be much more important.
For a single (or mostly single) income household, shaving 2 hours off your commute in exchange for double the cost of living is very hard to justify. There's often a reason they live far enough away to need to commute.
For me, as I said, I've never had that commute. I've been very happy working in the tech industry an hour or so away from SF and its surrounding area. What I advocated is not moving closer to work, but working closer to where you moved. If you move to a suburb of SF, if you start looking for work in that area instead of focusing on SF, you might be surprised what's there. It won't pay as much, but theoretically cost of living is already drastically reduced by moving to the suburb, so maybe re-examining what's a good job to look is called for if that commute isn't to your liking.
One could of course argue that more time with their parents is crucial for the child as well and that is absolutely correct. My main concern though is that my kids are safe and well looked after during the time they are away from me though.
Now if I was a young single person, I would absolutely choose living in a studio a block from work over commuting an hour each way to a larger house in the suburbs. With kids other factors take precedence.
Now I am lucky enough to work remotely and it is indeed the 'bees knees'.
Driving is the price you pay for a nice home.
With that said I commuted for just over an hour+ each way in a sports car pre kids for 3 years and I never want a low car again. Give me a comfortable SUV / sedan any day now.
I could easily get a nice place walking distance from work but my 30 minute commute (pretty much against traffic so not stressful) allows me to enjoy my time after work and the weekends much more than I would from the extra time from a short commute. I also enjoy driving and listening to music in my car so maybe thats part of it too
Even though it's a small studio apartment, saving two hours of stress per day is heaven-sent for someone with low energy and chronic depression like me. It's like life switched to easy mode all of a sudden. The only downside is, I can't manage to schedule a time to read books – subways and trains were ideal for it.
Now, if you're DRIVING that same hour, then yeah, you're nuts.
It was one of the best decisions I've ever made - it feels like I have so much more time for family, side projects and hobbies than I ever did before. And for reference, I work around 90% from home.
TBH, the company I work for has got a pretty good deal out of this, as I'm sure my productivity hasn't dropped at all. (it's a mega corp, so there is zero chance of negotiating back to equivalent of a 5-day salary)
Are you in the US? If so, you can't save money on taxes by making less; it's a progressive system.
If you actually paid less in taxes on _every_ dollar by dropping a bracket, then you'd have been making more all along in a progressive system. Are you certain that was the case? Just curious.
I do the same thing (Australia). Worked 9 months last year and made about ~82-85% of what I would have working the full year, rather than 75%.
Incidentally this is why progressive tax is so important for a good startup culture (and thus overall tech scene). It's a negative tax on risk. The steeper your progressive ramp, the less of your geniuses are working in shit jobs creating UI form widgets with 40 managers telling them to redo it every other day.
In the UK, employers have to give consideration to reasonable requests for flexible working. But it also helped a lot that I work for a huge corporation, so they are better setup to deal with and permit such requests.
If everyone had a 4-week, it would be just like the current weekend. You can't go to the bank or dentist, because they would also be off.
Perhaps you could get the same effect and quality of life by taking Sunday and Monday as your days off and working Saturday.
I have a friend who once had M-W off, and worked the four remaining days. He hated it because his time off was completely misaligned with his peers, so he had no social life.
Edit - I don't have any fundamental problem with working fewer hours or fewer days. But, I think I'd prefer 5x7 hour days instead of 4x8.
I can imagine there are plenty of other people that prefer the same thing.
Having tried both, 4x8 is far better. I don't do much during 5x7 evenings anyway because I'm drained after 7 hours at work, so I'd much rather just cram that into 4 days and have an extra day of rest.
Rotate who gets which days off each week.
My dad is a letter carrier. He's off Sunday and then has a floating day off that changes each week. (Scheduled far in advance.)
What I do is that I work five days a week and around June-July I take ten weeks off. I have the same amount of working days per year with the same income but it feels like a godsend to have a yearly sabbatical of over 2 months during the best weather of the year. It reminds me of being in school again with the long summer holidays.
If I ever have children that means being with them for six weeks fully dedicated to them.
If I had children, taking the summer off with them seems great - it's a shame their vacation policy isn't flexible...
I expected that lots of useful or interesting things will be made during that time, which is true. But for me, the most beneficial effect is that my enjoyment of my work (which previously wasn't bad - I really liked my work) increased a lot.
So this can be another way how to boost your job enjoyment.
This seems to conflate working from home with having time off. Is your employer paying you to work on that day or not?
I work four days a week (30 hours). On my days off, I do not work at all. On my days on, I do not do random house chores during office hours. That's what my employer and I agreed to, and I think it describes what most people understand as a four day workweek.
As far as work schedule goes, my company/team is fairly flexible when it comes to WFH. However, I still operate in "work mode" while at home, which makes it difficult to take of chores, etc.
All of these things wind up on the back burner when I'm in the middle of high stress projects and forced to sit at a desk for 8-10 hours a day.
All that does is lead to more stress because now I'm falling behind on my life tasks and have to burn a weekend catching up when I should be able to spend that weekend de-stressing.
I know not everyone is as sapped for energy as I am after work, I hate that I'm this way. But after leaving work and siting in an hour of traffic my energy is just sapped from me by the time I make it home. I have enough energy to feed myself and sometimes work out to maintain my health..