At some point, I'm going to want to buy a house (so money now can be saved), the total cost of which is >$1M in not just the Bay Area (which I've now left, for these very reasons); even where I am now, housing remains that pricy … unless you give up having a sub 2h commute.
> A 2-hour round trip commute is insane.
My employer doesn't believe that. If they did, they would pay me sufficiently that I wouldn't need to choose. The Bay Area doesn't believe that: if they did, they'd address the housing crisis.
There has to be a name for the logical fallacy of treating the market as some kind of oracle, as if it was a global optimizer, instead of a greedy optimizer that will happily ignore the costs it can externalize.
"The Bay Area" doesn't "believe" the housing crisis needs to be addressed because for most interested actors, it's in their personal interest to further the crisis. You paid a lot for your house, and you want it to appreciate in value. You paid a lot for your house, because others who bought before you wanted theirs to appreciate in value. Someone else will pay a lot for their house, because you want yours to appreciate in value.
Pollution is the clear example. Unless forced externally, producers will just ignore negative externalities.
For many people it comes down to whether they can afford to deposit or get the income multiple loan to buy in the city, not monthly expense.
I lived and worked in London (South Kensington/Pimlico at college, Streatham, Walthamstow, Acton Town, Notting Hill - all over, really) for about 16 years. I've been in the Bay Area for ~17 years. There really isn't any comparison. Londoners have it made, even if it doesn't feel it when the train is packed/a few mins late/cancelled.
I see the light-rail here going by on occasion. It's empty. BART is inadequate (there are 270 stations on the tube, there are 50 on BART covering a larger area), and it runs with a 10-20 minute cadence, not the 2-5 minute cadence of the tube. As far as real trains go, Caltrain is pretty good if you're on the track (really, the train itself is nicer than most in the UK) but it's coverage is very limited.
Just like the NHS, you don't know what you have until it's gone.
My solution was to figure out how to afford to live in the city. I am privileged in that sense, however.
This obviously depends on your city / county / state having good public transport infrastructure but if the option is there and its practical then I'd take the train over driving to work any day of the week.
People on HN often love to get on their high horse about parenting responsibilities but the fact remains that even the best parents need some "me" time occasionally. We do our best parenting when we're not mentally and physically exhausted. Much like a good company shouldn't allow their employees to burn out -- a good family shouldn't let either.
So my point about the commute was about how that time can be optimised for relaxation so you can better serve your family once you are home.
We are not talking about beer with friends once in a while either. We are talking about regular very time consuming activity.
It sounds like you've only worked in organisations that force a really shitty work/life balance on their staff but I assure you that you can have your proverbial cake and eat it. Maybe it's a US vs Europe culture but here companies are generally (not always, there's a fair share of shitty companies here too) accepting of employees working from home when they need it. I've never once had a job that hasn't allowed me to work flexible hours to accommodate school runs and other family commitments, nor take time away when my child is ill.
In fact because my wife is a school teacher (and thus has less flexibility in her job), she is the one who depends on me most of the time. The commute was the one little block of the day (and it wasn't every day) when I wasn't running around for a wife and two small children.
So you can absolutely have a commute and still be dedicated to your family. You just can't work for c*nts who thinks a working relationship should be one way.
This isn't a theoretical argument either: I spend more time with the kids and help out with more duties since taking up a job with a 3 hour round trip of a commute than I did when I had a previous job in the same town.
The distance will obviously have an impact on your day, but what matters far more is the employer. Plenty of employers enforce an unhealthy culture of > 40hr weeks. Whereas my current employer is very family focused and offers a lot of incentives to enable parents to balance work and home life.
I suggest people open their minds a little. IT is a broad industry and there are plenty of good jobs around doing interesting things that pay well and also offer a good work life balance. Again, I know this from first hand experience :)
Basically an hour each way, of which 20m fast walking, if you timed it right. Hit a slow train, try for the 10 bus and miss, get rained on, train late, miss the train, train runs over someone — sometimes it took longer.
I moved up to the city and had about 40 minutes each way by bus, and if you haven’t tried it let me tell you: an hour on Caltrain is much nicer, not to mention safer, than half an hour on a MUNI bus.
On Caltrain I could at least read the news, on the bus it was pretty much watch your back.
I haven’t commuted at all in the last 12 years but I accept that if I ever work onsite in the USA again I probably will need to, and the trick is to try and find a form of commute that isn’t a complete waste of time.
But if you live in a HCOL area, and you want a yard, you're pretty much locked in to hour+ one-way commutes.
One of which was that my 6 mile commute in Austin took between 45 minutes to an hour.
Saving that time does make a huge difference, indeed.
It's exactly my case, actually. My commute was just under an hour each way, walk and train, so I have been saving a lot of time and money since WFH. I go for a walk at lunchtime, though, in order to do some exercise but it's much nicer than walking on busy roads to train stations.
And in case you think Canada is wildly different than the US, not only is it not, but it's actually even better: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/190225/dq190...
"3 hours is the norm" is just not true for any area of the US or Canada.
No, I didn't sleep, read, or do anything distracting on my drive because when you're in deer country, dawn and dusk are times to be vigilant and ready to brake or swerve if horribly necessary.
Still had $4100 of damage one January.
Commutes can be anywhere from 0 - ? percent multitaskable.
Most people are experiencing a noisy packed out train car lit by bright fluorescence lamps, full of tired, irritated people, where they could easily be standing for half the trip.
Not exactly the ideal environment to dine or work on your hobbies…
Let's look at a 1-hour round trip commute assuming 240 working days per year. This means 240 hours gone in a year to your commute. That's 10 full whole days. A 2-hour round trip commute means 20 full whole days... almost a whole month gone. 3-hour round trip commute = 30 full days.. and so on.