Today I Learned

Marchetti intended the constant to be 1 hour round trip, so a half-hour commute one-way. It's an important distinction, since here in Atlanta the exurban commuter is clocking in at 1.5 hours or more into the city, well outside of what is considered tolerable. Multiply that by a million and you get some irritated people.

Anything beyond 45 minutes is a schlep and there better be something good for me losing an hour and a half or more of day in transit. Especially a car where I can't even read or relax.

I know a guy that's doing at least once a week, probably more, commute from DC to New York City. To be a product guy at a like 5 person company. As if you really need to be in a shared office to move jira tickets, ask eng again "How's that feature coming?", and so on. The CEO is a crazy person.

The CEO is also making the front end developer guy who lives in Connecticut come into the office 2-3 times a week. So he can work on his web page, the one with the code stored on github.

I hate all this "return to office" stuff. I don't care about management's feelings or real estate investments, and I don't care about people who hate their family and can't focus at home. Making people commute is a pay cut and a blow against labor.

I have diabetic retinopathy and about 10 years ago, I saw enough blind spots that I stopped driving. My company accommodated me by letting me work from home. We already had another employee who was doing that for vision issues, it was simple to do.

Because we were successful, they replaced our desktops with laptops at refresh time and started letting everyone work from home 1 day a week. Then when Covid hit, they just told everyone to bring their laptops home and WFH full time. The CEO talked about return-to-office for a year or two but decided to make it optional.

It's an amazing benefit. It gave me back about 90 minutes every day, and my dog doesn't have to be crated during the day. I can sleep later and have access to my own kitchen for lunch. Theres a reason that average tenure in my department is around 20 years.

There are people at a place I worked that did a 2 hour trip each way each day.

This is totally bullshit, the Starbucks CEO hardly minds his 2-3ish hr commute from CA to Seattle by private jet.

If the poors weren't so stupid and lazy they'd buy jets for a more comfortable commute too. /s

I wonder how this looks for people with flexible commuting methods. I can bike to work (45 mins each way) or take the train with some walking (40 mins), or take the metro to the train with very little walking (50 mins). The fact that it's sometimes exercise helps break it up, and I don't much mind it

Sounds legit, I turned down multiple higher roles in my last company after doing a test commute to the more remote office. It was consistently 90-120 minutes each way. That would end up with me be away at work for 12-13 hours each day for 8 hours of paid work.

Marchetti never went to NYC.

When I interviewed at a company some years ago, the commute would have been ~an hour on a normal day (potentially longer if I did park-n-ride). I was very forward about wanting to only come into the office once or maybe twice a week. The manager I was talking with brushed off my commute time by basically saying that the commute wasn't that long and he knew others that commuted much longer. That was a huge red flag for me and I did not proceed with them. I don't care what others will tolerate. If management is going to ignore concerns like that, I don't want to work there. It was really apparent that he wouldn't let me work from home more than maybe once a week if I was lucky.

I’ve in my entire life never had this short a commute. All the following is one-way commute: 45 minutes to school growing up. 2,5 hours to university 5 days a week for years. 1,5-2 hours to work since. Since the pandemic only 2 days a week though, which is a relief.

Sure it would be nice if it were shorter, but using public transport helps. At least I get to relax, play a game, knit, etc. And not living in a polluted city and having a yard makes it worthwhile.

I do an hour and a half single trip. It's only twice per week and it's by train. So I read a book or I bring my steamdeck. I really don't mind it. I'd be less happy if it was 5 days per week. I'd still be going by train, but also looking for a better job.

If my commute isn’t a 30 second walk to my home office I won’t take the job.

And productivty drops for most people after 6 hours of working.

I personally hit a wall at 41 minutes of in-car travel time for a daily commute. I've timed it. Every second after that feels like a whole level of abnormal waiting, a kind of cold torture or injustice that you must wade through to to your destination. It's not a healthy headspace at all. I've naturally sought out shorter commutes after this revelation, and yeah, the 30 minute estimate seems right.

Neat. Anecdotally I can confirm that as I work construction so have a variable commute. 30 minutes is fine, 45 an inconvenience, and an hour having me thinking about quitting.

laugh-cries in 4 hour commute to a job only 50 miles away

Fuck the Altamonte, man... Where's our fucking high-speed train?

My limit is 30 min, anything more than that is a fucking road trip, not a commute.

Then his law has failed.

There are plenty of successful housing areas much farther out than 30 minutes one way (the 1 hour is daily). Nearly everyone I know has a longer commute than that.

There was a pretty large, family-run business near me, it was a pretty popular local landmark, and it sat on a pretty big property, probably a handful of acres.

The owner died, his kids didn't really want to run the place, so they did everything they could to run it into the ground so that they say that it wasn't profitable to avoid some of the backlash from closing it down.

They had some sort of scheme to turn it into housing for homeless veterans. Noble enough idea I suppose, though I don't know how they thought that was going to work, let alone be profitable.

Of course there was a bit of the usual NIMBY backlash, veterans or not, a lot of people don't particularly want some low income housing project springing up in their neighborhood.

But more importantly, it just didn't seem like anyone was particularly interested in living there.

This is sort of the rural end of the suburbs. We're not out in the country, I'd hesitate to even call it exurban, but things are less dense, not much is walkable, no public transportation, there's not all that much around. A couple of the basics are nearby like a grocery store, but not much beyond that.

If you have a car and money for gas, it's not a terrible place to be, pretty much anything you could want is within about a 30-45 minute drive, if traffic cooperates, you might even be able to get downtown in the city in about an hour.

But thinking about it in the context of a bunch of homeless people, what the hell are they supposed to do? Not many opportunities for them to find work around there, certainly not anything well-paying enough to help them improve their situation by much. If they need any sort of mental health or drug/alcohol treatment, their options would be severely limited there. It's not at all convenient to the VA hospital nearest to us. And unless they manage to get their hands on a car, they'd basically be stuck there to sit at home, or maybe wander around town and do nothing in particular.

So that project never got off the ground.

I do wonder if the limit varies between personally operated transport (walking, bike, car) and public transport (bus, tram, train).

A 1 hour bus journey is much more relaxing than a 1 hour drive.