I need 30-45 minutes to get there, and our public transit system is supposedly good. But the metro's still too crowded, dirty, smelly, etc. And I even usually avoid rush hour and take an automated, hassle-free line.

Commuting by personal motorized vehicle is hell, so you can forget that.

I'm contemplating buying an electric bike, but only because I'm lucky I have a place to keep it secure both at the office and at home.

The situation may be better in smaller cities, but I think that this consideration still affects a quite sizable bunch of people (20% of the country's population lives in the Paris region).

A threshold for me is probably around 5 minutes, counting from my apartment's door to the office door. Anything more feels like wasting time, so I'll avoid it for as long as I have the option.

On the other hand I have an 45m2 apartment, since I would rather have a small place in the center of Stockholm than having a bigger one in the suburbs.

For example, I would much rather prefer to walk 30-40 minutes instead of taking a crowded, smelly metro for 20. I actually used to regularly walk 50 minutes to get home in the evening because I didn't want to deal with the transit.

There's also the fact that this is the time it takes when everything works well. Again, I take an automated line, which is fairly reliable.

But most of the other lines have "incidents" going quite often (more than once a week). In this case, if the delay isn't extreme (less than 30 minutes) people will just wait and stuff themselves in the even-more-crowded trains when they do show up. Or they'll try taking another line, adding to that train's usual crowd.

When there are too many people, trains usually have delays, because they have to deal with people literally not fitting in the train at the stops.

So even if you're OK with riding a train packed to the brim (say you ride from end to end, so you're guaranteed to have a seat and won't have to fight your way off the train), you still can't count on getting at your destination on time.

Why?!

I won't walk for 5 minutes sandwiched between a fast road strip-mall parking lots, industrial facilities, or open fields.

Edited to say I suppose I am privileged enough to have the option, and that I have traveled more than an hour before (I just wasn't happy about it)

It's fine if you walk you can think about anything, but if you drive a car you waste your time.

The rest of the world would prefer you to think about driving a car when you drive a car.

When you're walking, OTOH, thinking about anything is OK. (The only person you'll kill by doing that unthinkingly is you.)

God, Americans are weird.

I used them as synonyms because I assumed the GP meant "thinking" as in thinking with concentration about some specific issue(s), which tends to divert your attention from your surroundings far more than the idle stream-of-consciousness / daydreams we all have going in the back of our heads all the time. Didn't you?

Should probably have said "When you're driving, the rest of the world would prefer you to concentrate on your driving and your surroundings, traffic, pedestrians etc. Deep actual thinking is far better done while walking than while driving."

But that wouldn't have made for a snappy turn-his-own-words-against-him comeback. :-)

Once you get used to a life where you do not have to drive more than 5min to get everywhere, it would really suck to have go further. Even better than a 5 to 10min drive is being walking distance.

I cannot even imagine not being able to rewatch part of a lecture as a student. That seems incredibly bad.

I miss taking the train when I was in Europe compared to driving in the US. I had the option to read a book some days or play a game. Definitely more options to find joy when compared to driving when I can only choose from podcasts, music and audiobooks

The main difference for me is the mode of transport provides different possibilities for joy or benefit. While the cons of biking or walking maybe be sweating and climate, there’s a lot of joy and health benefits to be had if the times are comparable (e.g., 20 minute walk, 20 minute bike ride)

This is the standard way of commuting in most of the US.

Hmm, European cities weren't built for commuting or public transport, almost all of them were laid out in the medieval era for walking. They then acquired one or more railway stations in the 19th century, creating commuter ring #1 and becoming an order of magnitude larger, and may have been partially redesigned for cars in the 20th century, creating commuter ring #2. A popular conversion was demolishing the medieval-era city walls and replacing them with a ring road. Some were entirely flattened during the war, although generally rebuilt on the same plan.

Now most American cities were by comparison entirely designed for commuting ... by car. The problem with car commuting is that once you're over capacity it slows down the experience for everyone. Public transport just jams you in physically, which was uncomfortable before the pandemic and now just a nightmare. An overcrowded train is not slower than an empty one. (Subway throughput can be embark/disembark limited, though)

The difference to me seems to be the walkable core. That in turn depends on norms about use of public space and perceptions of public safety.

I'm slightly biased, but I think the Edinburgh New Town design with a couple of modern adaptations could be the ideal even for the 21st century. Grid layout, four to six floors, high ceilings, decent size windows, wide streets, occasional shop on the corner or restaurant in the basement.

("New" here means 18th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Town,_Edinburgh, not "new" as in postwar new town or medieval New Forest)

I have taken the "California Train" which runs from San Francisco to San Jose, and advertises its capacity to carry bicyclists. Numerous times, however, bicyclists were denied boarding (each had paid for his ticket) because the carriages had become overcrowded, with the subsequent train arriving in forty-five minutes' time.

This experience made me understand why many commuters in that region embrace the automobile in spite of its many drawbacks.

Likewise Berlin, though a bit taller: https://goo.gl/maps/HyMJsSFKQNErfWJZA

(New Town reminds me a lot of some parts of Cambridge; I think it’s the stone colour and some of the motifs).

I moved from the Middle East to the US. Cairo was a shit city for commuting. But that didn't stop socializing, because the other big difference between the US and many other countries is how individualistic and work-based society is. Back home, I had relatives, child-hood friends, etc that I was not only able to see, but often EXPECTED to see (even when I didn't want to).

In other countries, life was much more social, and work was just a tiny part of your social life. In the US, everything is individualistic (and nuclear family oriented) and people rely on the office for socialization.

so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.

This is the same argument has "what about the rain ?" for people who don't want to commute by bicycle.

Yes, it happens. But it's only a few days a year. Contrary to traffic. So you can adapt. Human is supposed to be great at adaptation. And the rest of the year it just works.

As for rain, the average where I am is about 120 days a year. While some of those days are "not much rain", it's still enough that walking/biking to/from work would be fairly annoying a large number of days per year. Plus... winter and snow (which is included in the number above, but more of an issue).

It only matters if it rains in the few minutes you spend cycling. Yesterday it rained here, but I assume it was before dawn.

A few days a year? Thanks for the euphemism, it made for a good laugh.

Well, until recently I've lived in a very much French city for twelve years and I've never had to face a strike or any problem besides bus traffic being shifted around due to road work. To the point I've now got to get a driving licence in my thirties, as I've never needed it before. Maybe that was just luck.

It's working well and reliable enough.

> The city with the best public transport in the world is probably Tokyo in terms of frequency and service reliability but it is constantly over capacity and things are not getting better.

Things absolutely are getting better; crowding is better than it was. A healthy growing city will always have some capacity issues at any given time, but that's the same as anything.

> so no commute is certainly better pretty much just anywhere.

Not at all proven. Most people choose not to live right next to their workplace even when that's an option. 15-30 minutes' separation is helpful IMO. Even if I'm not commuting, it takes me that long to get my head out of "work mode", and having my home be my workplace makes that worse. "You don't take your work home with you" was always something I looked for in job applications.

If you change jobs, the new office might be on the purple line. Which does not cross the red line. So now you need to take the red line, to the green line (15 minutes + 10 minute layover = 25 minutes), and then change trains again to get to the purple line (15 minutes). That's assuming there are no delays, weather, construction/remodeling at any of the stations. If your morning coffee takes too long you might miss your connection, and now you've blown out your schedule by another 15-20 minutes, especially if part of your commute takes one of the less-frequent suburban lines.

End result is your 20 minute commute to your old office, has turned into a 40+ minute commute one way, assuming no delays. On a good day. Plus walking to and from the station.

My old office used to be on Castro Street in Mountain View, a 5 minute walk from the Caltrain Station. Then they leased a large building in the warehouse district, a 20 minute walk away. My old train commute + walk was almost exactly 1 hour from San Francisco; with the new office relocation it turned into 1 hour 15 minutes each way, which meant when I got home in the evening, the tram I wanted to take home had already stopped running, meaning either walk 45 minutes, or take a $9 (probably $15 in today's economy) uber home.

What point was he making? Well, switch jobs, and just move closer to your new office! Easy! Just never buy a house and only switch jobs at the end of your lease term, and rent forever.

Sounds precariously close to "you'll own nothing and be happy" or something along those lines.

Clean, blanket statement, what a good argument to make! based on what metrics exactly?

For whom?

Around this German state, a 30 minute drive turns into 2 hours commute into each direction if I go with public transport.

And this is one of the places with best connections.

Back home in Portugal, and many other southern countries, good luck with the bus connections that only come around once per hour, and better not skip the 2nd connecting bus/train.

It depends. Though German public transport is one of the best in Europe.

There are tons of places where car is the only option, or after 8pm there are no running public transports (you are supposed to stay home, I guess).

I wish I had American citizenship tbh.

Seems to me that many people here simply project their tourist experience while vacationing in London of Paris, as a result getting a wrong image of how people in Europe actually live their lives.

Citation? I think we travel less far, but that's not because people choose to stay home so much as because you don't have to travel so far to achieve the same things (e.g. we probably travel less far to visit relatives than Americans, but still visit our relatives more often and spend more time with them).

Sounds like you two are nit picking over the difference between the I495 loop being the "DC area" vs everything east of Fredricksburg/Front Royal/Fredreick being the "DC area".

[EDIT:] So, sure, most of those cars must be owned by inhabitants of the Greater Helsinki area. Heck, I live in Helsinki proper, and I have a car. But... Up until last year, when I still worked at the office in the more central parts of town, my daily commute there was by bus and metro (and will possibly be again sometime soon). And AFAIk I was(/am/will be) far from alone in this combo. [/EDIT]

I'm not sure this is true. Ireland went from one of the poorest nations in Western Europe to one of the richest from 1990 to now. In Dublin, commuting to work via car has been falling since at least the late 90s, driven by increased traffic, and greatly improved public transport and cycling infrastructure (though still quite bad by European standards); it hit 30% by 2018. The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.

Rural areas of the country are much more of a mixed bag, and prosperity did drive an increase in driving there (though it has started to fall off a bit during the recovery after the financial crisis). But in urban areas, prosperity does _not_ seem to drive increased car use.

Ah, the classic joke, "nobody drives in Manhattan; there is too much traffic there".

> The number of cars per capita is still, as far as I know, rising, but they're being used to commute to work less.

Alas, 75% of Irish workers commute by passenger car, either as driver or as passenger. Only 10% of workers commute using public transit. That's what I meant when I said that Europeans are very much car dependent too: even in Dublin, the capital, most of the workers drive, and small minority uses public transit. Outside Dublin, cars dominate even more.

#2 I live in Zagreb, Croatia - recently drove from Austria back through Slovenia to Zagreb, ended up spending more time in Zagreb traffic at 11:30 am then driving across three countries.

OTOH they extended the Metrobus and Expressbus like mad, at least it felt so after my initial disappointment from around 2004.

Most bus stops have an electronic timetable, dynamically updating their 4 rows. The busses are prioritized on traffic lights and partially have their own reserved lanes.

For when- and whereever I need to go I simply don't care when exactly, because a few minutes later the next one is coming, which applies the same way for sometimes necessary switches.

30mins max from outlying suburb to core, rather 20mins, maybe 50 to 60min from my edge to another edge of town, not necessarily through the core.

Only at night the intervals are getting longer, and the net is less 'dense', but not catastrophically so.

And it is fu****g expensive for single tickets :-(

When was the last time you used the HVV?

Besides that usually I want to ride my bicycle, bicycle, bicycle... ;)

edit: Try this? [·] https://geofox.hvv.de/jsf/home.seam?clear=true&language=en

Yup, inner centre is pretty great for a bike.

Even in another much smaller German city of only ~50k inhabitants, my school commute for years was ~40-50 minutes (dependent on season etc.; EDIT: 40-50 minutes per direction, also on mondays and another weekday my schooldays started at 07:05 not at 08:00) when the trip by bicycle to the same school would only take me ~20-25 minutes. Add to that the rapid aging of the population combined with the old people having the absolutely stellar idea to go by bus during the 07:15 morning school rush. Not like they have the whole day free to schedule their appointments... oh, wait And after years of having to deal with these fossils (most with that creepy perpetual half-smile-half-smirk) who think they're entitled to demand that people of all pre-pension ages (sometimes even heavily pregnant women) vacate their seats for them instead of literally just walking one or two steps further to the next seat, thereby not only clogging up the bus corridor while everyone has to shuffle around but also being a general nuisance I've got enough and for years haved avoided riding busses in this city like the plague.

I've seen public transport done differently and better in other cities, one key feature for working better AFAICT being tram lines with low intervals, not like in the above example relatively short busses every ~15-20 minutes per line.

Well, you get used to it. I like reliably crowded trains much better than occasionally crowded trains.

Why would I want to go to the office???

I had to, though, be intentional about setting up my commute so i had time to read a book to and fro, and I’m sure not everyone is willing to think about it in those terms.

I foresee a movement in a few years of “commute forward” people trying to improve on their work-life balance, once they realize how much of life they’re going to be missing once they start commingling work and home life together.

Could we just agree that people are different and that some of us do not feel the way you do?

When I'm working I put on work clothes, I sit at my work desk and I take my work coffee cup. When I am done, I roll down my roll-top desk, and go pick up the kids on foot.

Arguably I appreciate that work culture in North-America and Asia may not be conducive of this. But ultimately we can all have the separation we need.

For me I built it around routines and work/leisure separation. For you it is your commute. Could we not let us both have what we want?

I live (well lived) within easy biking distance of the office (and commuted by bike nearly every day) and after the first few months of COVID work from home, I didn't ever want to go back to the office. We have an open floor plan office that's loud and not conducive to concentrating on work, and we have a distributed workforce (3 USA locations and 3 international locations), so most meetings had at least one zoom participant.

I took advantage of working from home to move farther from the office (now I'm within biking distance of a transit station that will take me to work, but the commute takes over twice as long as it used to), and will do my best to go to the office as little as possible. (we don't have a return to office date yet, but we reportedly won't be expected to be back 5 days a week)

But I hate being at the office. There's nothing I like about it. Noise, disturbances, poor desktop setup, too hot in summer, too hot in winter, no place to take an actual break...

It might be nice for a change of pace of a specific purpose (i.e. planning meeting that is just easier in-person).

If I want to go downtown and socialize with coworkers, I can do that after work (and have while WFH).

Obviously this isn't viable solution to many people, and cycling has lots of risks, but its just an anecdote I had.

ALSO, the days I had to drive my car in the city were some of the most stressful ever(big car too).

Unless you're rich you will be living 40 mins - 1hr out, I am more like 1hr20 so I can own a home that isn't tiny or in a high crime area.

The commute costs, if I pay a year in advance, ~£5k/yr, set to go up by 10-15% next yr.

Generally speaking, and especially taking into account the climate crisis, it really doesn't make much sense to do all this even when there is more infra.

It is time for more companies to accept that WFH is largely a win/win.

House prices are obscene in/near big cities, and commuting still sucks (used to do 2 hours each way in London!).

Been "from home" for the last 20 years as I am an ISV and pretty much "enjoy some social life" without any commuting to work.

* Zoom fatigue is real.

* I find it much harder to collaborate with peers.

* I feel like less of a part of the company. Not being in the office, so I'm no longer seeing that busy bee activity on the floors, not able to mingle with other people from other teams, not seeing new faces, no team activities, and no desk with my name on it. It's a very isolated feeling.

* I find it even more Groundhog Day. To wake up from bed, walk a few steps to my desk, and start plugging away. Yeah, commuting can suck, but at least there's more stimulation and "life" to it.

* Deadlines, at least from my perspective, got even more ridiculous since WFH started.

Companies that are embracing remote work are changing the way they work. Becoming a true distributed organization isn't easy and we're not really sure what that looks like yet, but it's much easier to cope with than WFH in an organization where the executives say "we can't wait to be back in the office, and we know you can't either".

Edit: Of course, if you can't wait to be back in the office, maybe Amazon is just the right place for you in the long term. That's perfectly reasonable. I just doubt your experience is representative of the emerging industry trend toward permanent remote work.

I've worked at two companies that have embraced remote work, and are hiring "anywhere", though still obviously limited by language, jurisdiction etc. The changes I've seen are mainly cultural: preference for asynchronous communication and preference for structured coordination over ad-hoc. So fewer meetings, and those that remain tend to be standing meetings on a regular schedule with a defined leader and consistent agenda, and they often get cancelled or ended quickly if possible. Slack tends to be more asynchronous; you're not expected to respond right away, and people turn off notifications when they need to concentrate. Waaaay less email, to the point where it's mainly meeting invitations. More writing and documentation, but even then, a preference for things like Jira, Notion, Coda or Team Retro over more unstructured tools like generic documents or spreadsheets.

Now obviously none of that is new or confined to remote-first organizations. But I do see deliberate thought about how to collaborate more effectively, and how to mitigate the downsides.

There are real traps when it comes to WFH that need to be considered, even outside COVID. Trying to work from the couch or bed is 'possible' but 99/100 a terrible idea. You will likely need a fairly dedicated space, setup that supports your workflows. These things take time to workout, and having a supportive company that gets this can make such a difference.

Once I found what works for me and was clear about what I expected from employers, things were generally a lot better. Saying that, if your bosses ever become heavily anti-WFH, they can make things suck pretty quickly, but the same bad office politics/dynamics I guess.

The issue I had is once we started going back to the office 2x a week, all my meetings were STILL on zoom all day, I just took them from my cube with my mask on. It was a total bummer!

One on ones with the boss are much nicer when we can go outside for a stroll....

This. People keep talking how much more time they have for work now that they don’t have to commute, and don’t realize how terrible that is for them.

For me, the dealbreaker is the groundhog day effect that working from home has. Never heard anyone one describe it that way, but it’s so true, i will probably steal it. It’s the primary reason why it still feels like April of 2020 for me. Time paused then, and hasn’t moved since.

IME different life seasons can bring different preferences. With a young family and project house I don't want to socialize as much with coworkers as I did when I was a single 20 something.

It seemed like a pretty good experiment, but I don't think it caught on. Maybe Slack (or Teams) should aquihire them and implement something similar.

I was wanting to do that for my birthday last year, but I know too many people who don't own laptops

The question is whether there are enough developers like you to run one of the largest software companies in the world, while maintaining 'the bar'.

You're allowed outside for non-work reasons too though haha. I've incorporated an hour of just wandering around into my day and it's the best work situation I've ever had

I try to do it every day.

Working from home is amazing if the company and the employee can embrace the changes that come with it. If your social stimulation happens to come from your office and your commute, maybe that's a problem? Same goes for meetings, usually embracing work from home comes with more async communications, more emails, documentations and less meetings.

But I agree, even at it's best work from home makes you come across less people face to face than a commute + office time. And I think in the coming years we will see some cultural impacts of this between people who love work from home and people who abhor it.

Some members of the team, for example a woman that does documentation, I see almost not at all any longer because she's not one of the WebEx invites. But she was always just down the hall in the office.

How about replacing your commuting by a morning walk outside?

/anecdote

But TBH, after the pandemic hit, I found written communications to be far better than they had been previously.

That really leveled the playing field for me. But from my point of view, I've derived much of my communications from mailing lists, forums, listservs over the years. When people get around the water cooler and and I am just hanging around Thunderbird, I'm at a big disadvantage.

In particular, "remote-first" can effectively work, and bring diversity in the work place that is always welcome. It requires discipline and a real buy in from every layer of the company, but when it works I think it's the best.

Vs

A culture that will always prefer an hour long zoom meeting to a 2 minute exchange on stack. A zoom based culture is one that hasn't fully walked away from the office.

What an advantage in life to have chosen this career path over any of the above ones. And what a shame whenever we come across one of those "I am a developer and it's horrible!" type of posts.

I looked it up so you don't have to.

Success leads to ossification, which creates opportunity for new life to exploit untapped potential.

  > Senior engineers started quitting. 
  > The exodus continued.

The Toronto office (where I worked) is seeing a shift in the seniors vs juniors ratio. The rate of senior engineers leaving is exceeding the rate of promotion and hiring- not that Amazon has ever had an easy time hiring senior engineers in Toronto.

The other big names will pay you the same or more and treat you better.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/my-wife-was-dyi...

Amazon also has an on-call culture that - depending on the team - can be brutal. And it's often viewed as the team's own fault and problem to fix.

There are some really wonderful niches within Amazon that I will continue to refer friends to.

I figured, well, at least he was honest with me.

However, I'm anti commute all the way. I'll never go back to working full time at a office where I need to commute to.

Can anyone name some of those companies? I would like to start applying in those places.

Using a camera cover, and working butt naked.