Ask HN: Why isn't remote work advertised as a pro environment initiative? No form of transport requires less energy than telecommuting. Why aren't there Zoom/MS Teams/Slack bill-boards on 101 and 880? Where is everyone's outrage at needlessly requiring people to move themselves into offices and the congestsion, waste, and environmental damage it causes? |
Yes there's climate change, Yes there's human influence to it. And well sure as hell adapt to this slow moving challenge.
Kind of like Republicans on the southern border. The issue can exist, the extent of the issue can be exaggerated, and the proposed solution would do nothing to solve the root cause.
Change is hard and re-thinking work as an entirely online activity requires a lot of change.
For some, their jobs which were fun before the pandemic now just suck because they don’t get to meet people face to face.
Some dread the long boring days WFH and spending time in back-to-back Zoom meetings where 90% of those attending have their camera off and do something else.
Some are frustrated because their coworkers are slacking off WFH. Others are frustrated because their productivity at home is a disaster.
But there is also a pro-environment factor of working in an office: In countries where buildings need heating, heating one office compound is more efficient than heating a hundred homes at the same time.
Additionally, lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl.
I am not saying that's the case, but I don't buy that it's a strictly pro-environment win a-priori.
If anything commuting is the daily theft of an hour of everyone's life, more so for drivers. "Get an hour of your life back every day" should be all the marketing that's ever needed.
>lack of commuting incentivizes un-environmental and inefficient suburban sprawl
I dont understand this point, IMO commuting leads to more suburban sprawl? Also i think this is a very USA-centric problem.
I'm not trying to argue that commuting is more environmentally friendly, it's very likely not, only that I need a bit more substantiation than "it's obviously true," and I particularly would want substantiation on the long term. I also would want to understand if electric cars are being accounted for.
The reason not to live in the suburbs is a long commute to your office. Living in the city might make a commute walk-able. So a commute dis-incentivizes suburban sprawl.
Definitely a USA problem. Cars are poison, literally and metaphorically. I don't think the average American has experienced what car-less living is like and how much better it is.
My critique of your original post is that there are many reason's remote work might be better, but environmentalism probably isn't the strongest.
Audio is very low bandwidth, but for work it is usually more than adequate. Screenshare, where important, is mostly just a matter of providing small diffs over time, it's usually much cheaper both to encode/decode than normal video streaming. You can also run it point to point in smaller calls, which means fewer hops and datacenters (more routers, perhaps, but you were going to need them anyway)
https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2022/06/staff-analytical-note-20...
Telecommuting: Turn on your PC in a room of your house and start work Biking/Walking to Work: Bike/walk to work and turn on a PC in an office.
What's the extra telecommuting energy expenditure? Servers for a VPN?
Also with distracted driving becoming so much more of a problem, and accidents increasing even though we've got driving assist technologies, the workers are running personal risk of debilitating injuries.
Cons: - I’d probably make up those 16mi of commuting in other ways (errands, driving to a lunch time hike, etc) - I’d need more space at home, and consume more energy (prob not fully offsetting the savings from work, but a meaningful part) - I’d probably work remotely from other locations more, increasing my air travel footprint meaningfully (which I think puts this in the red) - I’d probably cook more at home (while cheaper, is probably more energy intensive than a commercial kitchen per meal?)
Doesn’t feel like a huge net savings
Everybody heating their own workplace requires more energy.
In general: Anything you do alone is more resource intensive than a comparable group activity.
This applies to both office and WFH. When I worked in offices, 90% of my meals were prepared at home.
Some jobs are worse candidates for that too and if you force everyone to WFH of course that won't be positive.
Then you have internal forces at play too. HR managers, and department managers don't look so useful when the majority of people never interact in real life. No matter how optimistic we look at the human condition, people have the desire to exercise power and control over others. With people working remote exercising power and control is harder. Additionally, you still have gen-x and boomers working, especially in management who have a different idea of work culture than millennials and gen-z. To the older generations working on-site is the only justifiable way to work. To them the notion of being at home for work is not real work.
There also appears to be a camp of management types who have seen evidence confirming that remote work doesn't work. They are going to stick to their position because they have evidence to support. I recently heard similar sentiments to Musk's take on remote work from Tim Pool, and a manager at my job. They are convinced that meaningful work can only happen in person.
So between those three main factors: Money, power, and bias of evidence the pitch for remote work being an environmental initiative gets drowned out. Really, makes you wonder if environmentalism is really that important for the business leadership class.
I personally believe work from home can be an amazing option for white collar work and for the right person. As a UI developer I love it. I don't get distracted by office stuff and get good flow often. I'm and expert at using online communication tools and desktop publishing tools so I can communicate my ideas and thoughts coherently remotely. However, I've seen some people not be able to manage themselves or have the skills to work from home.
I've been on multiple sides of this environment over my 3+ decades in the job market: managed people in office, managed people while I worked remotely, worked in an office, worked remotely (mostly for the last 13 years).
I'm very sympathetic to remote work, but my experience tells me that your "needlessly" is not well-founded.
Not anymore. Most jobs in a city are not in the center, they are in the suburbs as well. If you want a short commute you have to live in the suburbs.
Note that in most cases (US - other countries are different!) there are zero places to live within walking distance of the office. Suburbs don't have mixed use zoning so it is illegal to live near where you work. While city centers might allow it (not all do) in theory, in practice rent is so high in the city center that common people cannot afford to live within walking distance of a job there. At least the city center has a form that supports transit, but you still can't walk there from home.
Note that I said form not not density. Suburbs have plenty of density to support transit, but the way things are built mean a transit can't get to enough people.
Situations like this are extremely common in the industry, at least common enough to justify almost every company I've ever word equipping their meeting rooms with video-conferencing hardware.
This is an answer to both “Why is remote work currently not advertised as a pro climate environment initiative?” and “Why won’t remote work ever be advertised as a pro climate environment initiative, ever, for the foreseeable future?”
In a word: Rent.
So while I’m certainly spending a lot less time in total on transportation, the mode of transportation is much worse for the environment.
I now have a remote job that I do at home, with an extremely modest amount of travel -- I see my teammates 2-3 times a year at conferences or meetups.
It turns out that flying, even very occasionally, is worse for the environment than driving, and that my "eco-friendly" remote job leaves a bigger carbon footprint than my commuting job. A single person's share of a single cross-country flight once a year can emit more carbon than an ENTIRE YEAR of car commuting.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/sunday-review/the-biggest...
What we get instead though, is ringing, ringing ringing. Can't get my power ordered. I can't get roofing ordered. Can't get call backs.
Things were more expedient pre-pandemic. I often do wonder too, is part of the reason company X is OUT of something isn't because the ship is late - or is it because the ordering person no longer sits in front of a giant pile of insulation and goes - oh crap, that is getting really low. I should order more. (And guess what happens if he calls to order more - ringing ringing ringing)
I'm sure you can think of many other downsides than that. This topic has been discussed adnaseum, and there are many pros and cons of remote vs in-office
To be an environmental activist * requires a certain type of personality. The kind that thrives in groups and in public. Of course they wouldn't even think of working from home.
* or any kind of activist for a cause actually. But that would decrease the nastiness.
From https://www.agora-verkehrswende.de/veroeffentlichungen/wende... For Germany:
The climate effects of home office were estimated for 40 percent of the workers, each with two home office days per week, were estimated to save 5.4 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year.
This corresponds to 18 percent of percent of the emissions from commuting to work or 4 percent of the of total passenger transport emissions (Büttner and Breitkreuz 2020).
The result is a share of 25.8% (short-term) to 39.3% (long-term) of all employed persons in Austria who could in principle work from home on a permanent or temporary basis.
By overestimating the work-related passenger kilometers, this results in a savings potential of about 300 kilotons of CO2 equivalents per year, if about a quarter of all employed persons in Austria work from home for 40 % of the working time (or 2 out of 5 working days).
Due to undesirable rebound effects, such as an increasing distance between home and work, induced traffic as a result of freed-up capacity, or increased capacities or increased leisure mobility, this potential can increase to 90 kilotons of CO2 equivalents per year.
"Home energy usage SKYROCKETS as workers abandon the eco-friendly advantages of a shared work space"
That being said you are totally right that Zoom should be advertising the crap out of this - Microsoft may have incentivize NOT to do this (if they want their own employees in the office) but for Zoom it seems like a no brainer.
More CO2 is generated by remote employees than those that go to work. The CO2 emissions generated by an office (including heating / AC / water / employee transportation - in EU it's mostly by subway / bus) are smaller compared to each individual employee CO2 emissions.
Don't have a source, but you can find CO2 calculators online.
There seem to be opportunities in other places (such as EU) around as well, but one has to search far and wide instead of just having them available in the easy-to-access sites.
0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac3d3e/...
Not all jobs can be remote though, so i'm not sure why one would expect all of work to be remote. That makes as much sense as 'no remote work at all'.
But the point is, it's not mentioned in almost every article that discusses trying to stop climate change.
Telecommuting could be absolutely massive for reduced emissions, could bring down urban house prices, improve inter-family relationships, and revitalized suburban neighborhoods (e.g. more walkable areas). Plus increase wealth to relatively poor rural areas.
Even some corporations are starting to realize that telecommuting isn't their enemy, but large ships move slowly, and recently we've been seeing a lot of "return to work" used as a way to conduct layoffs with lower negative PR/stock tanking. This isn't a byproduct but a goal of return-to-work (e.g. see Musk's text message conversation during Twitter-lawsuit discovery).
I only saw this now : https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/09/elon-...
It's actually kind of incredible how it all seems to work. The cringe too of the fawning is a good indicator why Musk feels he can do whatever he likes, including attempting to troll everyone on his board. It seems so juvenile.
It's the fact that they were idealized that makes this dip into their intimacy so strange.
But basically, those communications look a lot like ones that I would have with my own friends. And when I was a students, we were careful about spending 10 euros. Now, we have casual chats about buying a sauna for the garden, and if you think about it, it would sound crazy to someone making minimum wage.
If I had billions, I would talk as casually about huge amounts for actions with big consequences, because I'm still ...me. And I would still make jokes like "you have my sword" since we quote LOTR for fun, not because of social status. What? You thougth billionaires were taking all their texts seriously?
Also, calling people out for making mistake that cost you is kinda what everybody sane does. And apologizing to people when you made a mistake is not being submissive, it's being decent. Again, it reads like text I would send myself.
All in all, it seems pretty standard human behavior to me.
Now you may feel shocked that regular humans have so much power, but remember:
- a lot of luck is involved
- some skills like managing stress or being persistent may matter more than a lot others and those people may have much more than the average person
- this is by design in our system, the problem therefore is not that humans are humans, but that our system promote profiles that you don't think deserve it
- nevertheless, managing tesla or spacex is not something most people would succeed at, so there is probably some human traits those texts are not showing that make them capable of doing billions of dollars of operations
> improve inter-family relationships
It could, maybe, but it can also be a significant source of strife. It's tough spending all day, every day with someone. Because of that, you find that people are either looking for larger homes in order to have private work spaces or renting office space. Both of those shift the cost burden from the company to the individual.
You literally do this with coworkers in an office. Except, you didn't get to pick those people and you have to be even physically closer to them. The last office I worked in was an open floor plan and the guy three feet next to me typed so hard I thought he would break his keyboard. And he was on a rubber dome!! It was louder than the loudest mechanical keyboard. Before that I sat next to the sales department. They would talk loudly on the phone for 8 straight hours. One time my desk was next to the break room. You like hearing people talk all day long?
> in order to have private work spaces
With open floor plans the only privacy you get is when you put on your headphones. Anyone walking by still sees your screen and wearing headphones all day is not great for your health.
For those with room, especially if you have a good sized commute, remote working is great (I really really value being able to eat with my kids and hang out in the evening), but you are right that if you are two people in a small 1 bed flat, or a few people in a house share, or just a family in a standard family house, then yes remote working is not always going to be a bonus.
However, contact hours are desirable for actual child rearing outcomes. Lingusitic development in the early years = has a huge impact on vocabulary development with college-educated parents and for older kids discipline... two brothers grew up being watched like a hawk by my mom. Two younger ones grew up as latchkey kids once she went back to work. Outcomes were quite different.
It is for this reason that you will never find anything that makes sense advertised as green or efficient. Corporations are things that exist solely to exploit: nothing in their core impulses moves them to be kind or understanding. Anything that makes it seem otherwise must be regarded with suspicion.
Most of the time corporations claim to be doing something in a carbon-neutral way it's because they are purchasing offsets where you just have to believe that they are actually computing the carbon costs appropriately and the offsets are "real" anyway.
Our leaders know full well that consumers and corporations have no power to act on this themselves. They will suck up any resources presented to them in the lowest energy configuration. Capitalism demands it. Regulation and governance is the only solution to tragedy of the commons. All else is noise being created by leaders who have been bought and paid for.
Without other changes, this would not happen (in the US at least). The default would be every more cookie-cutter suburban sprawl, with the cul-de-sac-y construction of these neighborhoods creating a more labrynthian, difficult-to-walk place to live.
Until there is more mixed-use zoning in the US, with high enough density to justify frequent public transit arrival times, WFH would only save the car and infra wear-and-tear (and pollution level) from commuting, but it would not necessarily create a "third place" automatically.
Public transit will never work for me except under very rare circumstances. For what it's worth, I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough make going anywhere vaguely tolerable. Amazon lets me avoid a lot of driving.
I get that you want to change things in the world but the only way to do it is not to say "it should be…" But find out what public office you need to hold, run the campaign, win the seat and then start trying to change from there. Then I can tell you from experience that you have to start local like planning board or zoning Board of appeals. Gain the trust of the people on the board listen to what people want. Once they feel heard they will hear you. If you go in guns blazing, everyone including potential allies will dig in their heels and say fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
Yes I've served on municipal boards and I have been told FU. Learned my lesson and then had my ideas heard. I didn't live there long enough to affect change but I learned a lot about local politics
So yes, wouldn't it be great people lived in denser environments? Oh yeah, but that's not the choice we're making today. The choice we're making is given that lots of people live a 20-60 minute drive from their jobs would we rather they commute into work or work remotely?
We need to learn that corporations care even less about the environment than they care about remote work. Invoking the environment to gain their support of remote work is just misunderstanding their priorities. The game is to make remote work attractive to them.
You think Elon Musk wants to hear your spiel about the environment? Or does he want you to get back into your office and work a 16 hour day?
If we want to get corporate america on the side of remote work, then we need to do it with dollars and cents. Not "indirect savings", not "improved morale", but concrete examples of how remote work is increasing their profit. (Even better, would be if it could increase their revenue as well. That would be a slam dunk.) We almost got there with the idea of lowering rent costs after the pandemic, but now it just seems that the idea of getting rid of office space in favor of remote work is getting a lot of push back. Maybe even backlash would be a better term.
I'm OK with working 16 hour days on something that matters (obviously burn out needs to be kept in check - it can't be done forever). I realize that I might be "wired" differently than others as I care a bit less about work life balance and more about accomplishment (not proud of it). I see no reason why this can't be done at the beach house however. In fact, I'm convinced it would be better as commuting is a burnout accelerator.
1. Middle and senior management who don't want to lose control or be rendered less effective. 2. Engineers who are not trained in written communication and largely cannot autonomously move a group towards a goal without a lot of supervision.
If you solve for no 2, then that acts counter to no 1 - because middle management will be questioned - why do we need you ? If a group of engineers can function on their own towards a common goal, then the manager's role is more or less rendered redundant. Sure there may be a need for psychological support but you surely won't need the current ratio of engineers: managers.
There is a deep rooted old school interest in staying physically connected. This won't go away anytime soon. I am not debating whether that is right or wrong, but the general notion that 'we are better if we are physically together' still persists. I don't know if this is a genuine feel-good-together feeling or just a made up emotion to mask point no 1 above.
I am flummoxed by how executive leadership is simply blind to these facts in most companies. I mean the CEO can declare a fully remote constraint sort of like the exact opposite of what Musk did at Twitter and drive productivity higher. The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
When I had an office with a door and window I liked going in. It was a good mix of seeing people and privacy. I hate the 1 year of cubicle stuff after 15 years in an office with a door. Then the pandemic hit and I really hate cubicles even more.
When I was doing the same during the pandemic, similar commute time, my car making 21ish mpg was only needing about 100 dollars in gas a month. About 10 miles with more than a dozen stop lights.
Edit - if I didn't have kids I'd totally have a beach house and a mountain house to live in. Maybe in different countries too.
And while some might say, “but then people who rely on public transit for things other than commuting to work would be hurt,” note that most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns. Example: https://www.ualberta.ca/folio/2022/01/public-transit-service....
This is the correct answer. Most environment related stuff (and other causes that are taken up) is mostly virtue signalling.
And this can be exceptionally difficult because it can be almost impossible to actually work out the long-term effects of things like "more people should work from home". It's easy to say "shutting down a coal power plant will reduce emissions" because they're so bad, but more remote workers could result in MORE pollution if it enabled more "working holidays" and therefore more flying. And that's only one tiny aspect of all the long-term changes that could occur.
It isn't as clear-cut as you'd expect either - one argument I've heard is that in areas where air conditioning is a large contributor to energy use and homes are poorly insulated, someone staying home and cooling their home with an inefficient, small air conditioner may be worse than having that person commute to an office instead. This argument is often generalized and sometimes dishonestly used by people who prefer office work to argue that teleworking is actually bad for the environment.
I found a meta-study https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab8a84/... that claims vehicle miles traveled increase (because people move further away) while the studies generally claimed a reduction in overall energy consumption.
Several studies claim grossly exaggerated environmental impacts for streaming/data transfers. I don't remember seeing it misused to dismiss the environmental argument for teleworking, but it wouldn't surprise me to see it. The worst offender here is the Shift Project, which overstated the results of their already flawed study by another factor of 8 in an interview, and then used that huge mistake to argue that their other mistakes aren't that relevant because they're small (compared to the initial mistake, not compared to their claimed impact). https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/shift-project-really-...
Most of our housing stock is not particularly energy efficient. Whole-house AC and heat instead of systems with multiple zones, big tank water heaters, ok but not great insulation.
I'd buy the idea that working from home lowers emissions and gasoline consumption but also increases the consumption of electricity and natural gas.
Everybody spending 8 more hours at home means so much more individual heating, whereas before, when you went into the office you'd turn the heating off.
Also as someone else pointed, working remote leads to leaving small apartments in the city to move into larger spaces (houses) in the suburbs. Then you would need to use a car more to meet people, get groceries etc. Cities are much more carbon efficient.
Not everyone commute with an ICE vehicle too
Despite modern office jobs being done entirely on a computer, most workers are still expected to get up in the morning, battle the daily commute, and physically congregate at the office to work. Companies have given innumerable arguments for why this must be so, and until recently there wasn’t an empirical way to test any of them.
Unfortunately, it’s often difficult to tell whether an argument holds water without running an experiment since ideas that sound great on paper can spectacularly fail in practice. However, the pandemic presented a unique scenario where it was no longer safe to continue following these practices resulting in a forced experiment of mass remote work across the world. We now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that remote work was possible all along, and a recent study shows that there is no loss of productivity associated with it. It would appear that the main barrier to remote work was the desire to stick with the familiar. Now that this valuable experiment has been run we shouldn’t simply discard the results. Office workers should demand the ability to continue working remotely. There is no longer any justification to keep up the daily commute.
I have quite a few people in my social circle who moved out to the suburbs/countryside and remote work was by and large considered only after they moved and found that they underestimated what an issue their commute would be(especially when traffic increased over time as it usually does).
Personally I live in the city and still work remotely because it's more convenient than travelling to work daily regardless how close to the workplace I might live.
But, sprawl is only a problem because of commutes. If you had sprawl with lots of small, local commercial outlets, then that's just perfect. No long commutes to work and no long commutes to get life's necessities.
I agree to an extent.
To be completely fair it is less efficient than densely packed cities in terms of energy and cost of providing services like sewage/garbage disposal.
That being said I see it as a tradeoff like any other and believe people should have the right to choose how they live as long as they bear the costs of that.
Plus, remote work is still not the norm in every company, so it's difficult for someone like you and me to move to the suburbs even if we wanted to, because we can't be 100% certain our next jobs will be remote.
That's what I've been saying, but I'm met with an attitude that doesn't accept anything short of what I see as a human pile-up with only the very rich owning real estate.
2021 emissions were about equal to 2019 emissions. So there may be not much of an effect from remote work.
- Have good writing skills, because communication is asynchronous most of the time.
- Task description needs to be as clear as possible ! You don't want to spend most of time to explain what the specification means.
- Self-management and time management: How to do things concurrently without less help as possible from others ?
Even if working from office, I'd expect any professional to know how to communicate effectively, and is able to manage their time and tasks efficiently. If they cannot do it remotely, then I'd worry about their performance in the office also.
I've been working ~90% remote for about 8 years. It works for me, because I'm disciplined and honest, and because I have a job that can be performed remotely. It also works for me because I've been able to find good ways to have facetime with the people I work with; but I'm normally shy and prefer to work in isolation.
Not every job can be performed remotely. Even jobs that can be performed remotely need facetime for helping people early in their careers start. Some people, unfortunately, aren't disciplined enough to work remotely.
Other people are extreme extroverts and really, really need to be around a large group of people for most of their day. A good friend of mine, who works in a hospital, used to love his job until he was assigned work-at-home work. He hates it now, just because he's a major extrovert.
There's another post in this thread from someone who lives in a small city apartment and commutes by train a few stops to their office. That's also environmentally friendly.
To phrase it another way, our governments are fucking stupid and it makes me sad.
If we really care about this problem, we should attack it coldly, rationally, as an engineer or economist might.
Truth is that composting your tea bags isn't that relevant. We have to look at the large picture and see if we can curb the largest emissions (from which everyone profits).
It may be risky to throw up billboards talking about the evironmental benefit of WFH if your customer's CEO thinks that they should be back in the office.
So let's say Zoom wanted to run an initiative like this… the market wouldn't be workers, it's be the bosses. So already you're talking about a tiny sliver of the population. No billboards or tv spends, that's for the mass market.
Okay, now that you've identified the target audience, what do they respond to? "This way of working that most of you hate, it's happy days and sunshine?" No, they respond to money. The campaign that would resonate with bosses is "your office lease costs too much money." Environmental concerns wouldn't even measure up.
Having said all this, I suppose one could make the case that remote-work-apps could advertise to "shift the conversation" amongst workers to demand remote-work for the sake of the environment, but I personally don't think anyone in America at least believes in this kind of grass-roots influence in business, that's too socialist.
Neither the billboards for Brex on the drive to Mission from SFO, nor those for Boeing in the Washington, D.C. metro, nor those “for your consideration” on the Sunset Strip come Oscar season, are meant for a mass market. This doesn’t seem a sound premise.
In being so physical, billboards are hardly mass media at all. More big brochures.
If only those polluters would stop pointlessly polluting! Gee I mean why would they even do it? It's almost as if you're paying them to pollute for you so you can have that new laptop and fast shipping!
The companies? They care about profit not the environment.
The employees? They are either already sold on remote work or don’t like remote work.
Whose mind is changed by being told the environmental benefits of remote work?
The employees? Isn't that the whole point of the "corporate culture" BS?
- The mind of those people who can't live without the daily commute to office
The employees don’t need to be advertised remote work software. They either like remote work or they don’t.
An ad for “Slack is good for the environment” doesn’t change anyone’s mind.
Technically if you want to optimize emissions reductions, you should eliminate homes, not offices. If everyone lived in the office we would all use less energy!
Anyways, transportation for commuting is one of the smallest buckets of emissions. So if it is a net positive it's still not moving the needle in a meaningful way.
That said, I do expect it is still ahead in most measures. Is a good question and I would love to see a comprehensive analysis.
It's not patently absurd, it obviously bring some benefit to their life to chose this, you're just ignoring those benefits to focus solely on the time and energy costs; which people gladly trade away in order to achieve these other benefits.
> The impacts on the environment, the number of hours of human life wasted in commute, the pointless buildings and associated costs to employers as well as the public infrastructure to support it (roads, trains, busses, etc.) are all incredibly wasteful.
This view is solely focused on the "information economy," and really doesn't make any sense once you start adding in light commercial or industrial activity. We built this infrastructure for a reason, and it wasn't solely to create a trap for white collar workers.
> Yet, we cannot tell one way or the other if it actually improves outcomes.
This is probably because most people do not view their lives as part of some giant "min-max" game designed to provide maximum benefit to everyone other than themselves.
For the vast majority of people in the last four decades working out of an office was not a decision up to the employees so I don't know where this is coming from.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/22/realestate/commuting-best...
And that's just commute time, which doesn't include getting dressed for work, gassing up the car, etc. (sure, WFH doesn't completely eliminate those, but the difference adds up across the population)
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...
45-minute to hour-long commutes each way have been the norm for me pretty much the entirety of my 20-odd year career in Silicon Valley. For me the outliers were the folk who opted to live 2+hrs away to afford a single family home, and were still commuting in - some did it daily; some did it weekly, and couch surfed during the week.
(The other outlier was the fellow who parked his Airstream in the back of the company lot until they told him he had to move.)
An hour each way including waiting time is perfectly normal for anyone who has relied on public transit.
It doesn't include the fact that when you're working remotely, you can just plop your ass on the work chair wearing whatever you slept in. Log in, check your messages and go make some coffee, prep the kids for school and maybe change into something smarter before the first meetings of the day.
You can also do chores while listening to meandering presentations on wireless headphones. If you're brave and cameras on isn't a culture in your company, you can do interactive ones by lugging your laptop or phone next to the dishwasher :D
You can flip that around too - If remote work was so great for productivity, all companies would switch to it? There really isn't any point arguing over it, because it doesn't change the current state of affairs.
My belief is that for remote work to gain mainstream adoption, you'll need a few trailblazer companies who establish a model of remote work where you can get everything done remotely - team building, motivating people, etc, etc.
Now we have remote work, and we're starting to get studies that show the impact it has on productivity… (and thus far, the ones I've seen show favorable results!)
Someday, scientists will finally reach the ultimate conclusion: that many companies routinely make poor short-term tradeoffs to their long-term detriment.
My belief is that a lot of the people who get to make these decision like the office, because they don't suffer from the same externalities. In other words, many of the things that make commuting to the office suck ass don't necessarily pertain to the boss.
When you’re flipping this pancake please remember that real estate prices and tax write offs weigh into the reasoning some companies employ when deciding their wfh policies
It's not just about gains in productivity (profit/surplus value) for companies*. It would be enough for remote work to be a net benefit for the whole society. Take the reduction in car traffic, the time savings, the pollution avoided, etc, and subtract an hypotetical loss in profit for capitalists. Still worth it? Then we're doing it!
> My belief is that for remote work to gain mainstream adoption, you'll need a few trailblazer companies who establish a model of remote work
Sure, but we can't wait for a handful of capitalists to take the lead on this. If it's important and necessary, governments should act and enforce it. The same way as we did for work safety rules, the 40h work week, the abolition of child labor and so on.
All of the labor rights we now give for granted, when enforced caused a reduction in the productivity of labor. Still, nowadays it would sound insane to advocate for a return to child labor in order to increase profits.
* Companies are abstract concepts without a will, so we can't really expect a company to take decisions. What we really mean here is capitalists. Capitalists are people, they have a will and the decisional power required to change things. We'll just refer to them as capitalists from now on.
Lol what? Why are they making you pay for these things?
I come in at 8am and leave at 2pm, when my commute is about 1/4 what it is during rush hour. Then I hope on for another couple of hours after dinner.
This type of flexibility gives me the best of both worlds, I get to go into the office because I LOVE it, and HATE work-from-home, and I skip the commute.
I recommend this to anyone looking for a perfect 'hybrid'.
What we, as a society, should do, is to increase the possibility of working in walking or biking distance.
The problem I would have to live near where I would work (likely in the city center). Which means higher rents and smaller places. Also if I change jobs my options would be limited.
Maybe the "illogical" issue is people living in high density massive population centers.
To add, I live on a nice tree-lined street within walking distance of local schools and shopping. I don't live in some apartment near my place of employment.
I suspect that you don't commute to a large city (either via car or mass transit).
It's more like 4-6 hours.
Crazy.
Specifically I think the major disconnect is not so much between middle managers and IC's, it's between executives and the rest of the org.
Unfortunately I'm beginning to think that this is truly a case of misaligned incentives that may prove hard to fix. What I mean is that executives are directly incentivized to be in the office. Almost all of their career capital is tied up in relationships and patterns of decision making with other executives.
Good day for a manager or IC - 'Wow, I really got a lot done today and I'm moving the team goals forward.'
Good day for an executive - 'That conversation with Dan and Steve went really well.'
Probably the only group made more productive are senior independent engineers.
One was hybrid remote / on-prem with on-prem menotring and sadly they turned up not to meet our standards. I don't think the work arrangement impacted them.
One was fully remote with their mentor fully remote as well and we hired them full-time.
One was fully on-prem as much as they could, with a mentor who was almost fully remote. They were also hired full-time.
So my experience is that there is no correlation between bringing junior developers up to speed and exactly where they work from. Communicating face to face and communicating remotely are different and require different skill sets, but that is down to the abilities of the individual mentors assigned to the individual juniors. Or put another way - every combination works best for some people
How so? What prevents that? I don't believe it, but people like saying it without evidence.
If this is a website supposedly for startups, the audience missed that mark by a wide margin.
In my case small percentage of total time and making the 5% more effective to make the remaining 95% less effective doesn't seem like good tradeoff, just not having co-workers interrupt me because I'm near and know the answer is a blessing.
But from manager position I can see that, my 5-10% spent on meetings & related stuff is what they do maybe 80% of the time. Then again bringing 20 people to office just to keep one or two managers happy is also a waste.
> The cynic in me says execs can't force this decision because the senior management simply will come back and say 'we cannot be this productive with a fully remote team anymore'. I don't know but I for one cannot understand the irrational exuberance behind RTO.
Remote work does require shift of habits, training can help (maybe a niche here for company doing the training?) but it still takes time and effort if you did it in person for last 10-20 years
Role of a manager that will change significantly based on where the team is sitting - The ability to convey meaning and emotion over written comms and over video calls, to drive the team forward without being too mechanical about it.
You then transformed it into <<suffer the commute on a train>>
I'm confused about that.
I used to live in a small apartment and walk to work. Then when my wife and I both had to work from home, we ended up renting a big house because we still needed offices to work. Maybe there are some jobs & personal situations that allow one to wfh without additional space and costs - really though it's just shifting space around, often very inefficiently.
Mountains of research show that this will increase total emissions. It would be one thing if the U.S. was developing medium density suburban cores, but that seems to be on the table in very, very few places.
*And this is why management and operation of public utilities should be policy-driven rather than profit-driven.
Commuters generally want heavy rail to get them from where their housing dollar goes farthest to where the highest wage is, and back, riding twice a day, usually over a significant distance. Fast trains, stops widely-spaced so they can hit top speed.
This is at odds with local service for residents, who want trains with tightly-spaced stops and care more about frequency than speed. I live in a dense city with largely non-functional rail transit (Baltimore), and IMO part of the problem is that our public transit options can't decide if they want to be commuter rail or local service and wind up being terrible for both (too slow for commuters because it's light rail, too infrequent for local traffic because of the cost of running a bunch of trains out to the burbs).
For me, WFH means I can walk/bike/drive to the local coffee shop or public library to work, but still live in a cramped studio apartment.
Dogs are optional, and I hear people cite them as a reason to move to a bigger place all the time. It also seems like "get a dog" is the first thing a lot of people do when they get into a WFH situation.
I wish we used the same logic for roads/streets as well. Except for toll roads, which only get a partial subsidy, roads are fully subsidized by the taxpayer.
Since others get fully subsidized roads for their private vehicles, I argue public transit should be fully subsidized as well.
If people are mainly working from home then we can redirect public transit from business parks or whatever towards places people still want to go (e.g. shopping, nightlife, events) but without a car. Starving already often underfunded public transit is not the answer.
Why not use the hundreds of millions spent on highways to subsidize people to work from home instead? Most commuters in North America are not using public transit but highways.
> most public transit currently doesn’t serve those people well because it’s focused on work-related commuting patterns.
Does it? Work-related travel is mostly during morning and late afternoon, but public transit also runs outside those hours. In my experience public transit works quite well for non-commuting travel. Of course this can vary wildly by country, but the claim that public transit only really serves commuters is not universally true.
It is always partially true, but each city is different. People who travel in the very early hours (like 2:30am) always have problems, (even the best cities run reduced and thus inconvenient service for maintenance reasons, most give up on transit completely). While those hours are not common it is safe to bet everyone reading this has had reason to travel at those times at least one night in their life.
In far too many cities, (and not just in the US) additional service is run during the peaks. By additional service I mean they run more buses/trains as opposed something with more seats (that is longer). This means people who travel at non-peak hours have to be careful about when they travel to ensure there is service without waiting. Of course if the wait is still less than 5 minutes nobody cares, but as waits get longer - humans don't have time for that.
Because if they promote it too much, they people move far away and the city loses the tax base. One extreme example is New York City -- they have a 3.5% income tax. If you move into next-door NJ or CT, the city loses that 3.5% income.
And once telecommuting is common in a given company, the workers begin to disperse, first to "driving distance" and then to "anywhere in a reasonable timezone".
We already saw how badly Covid hit city centers, perpetual work-from-home would be worse; causing a mini-Detroit in many cities.
Currently, when we see recession, we can increase government spending. This is usually done in infrastructure – we give people a job, and in return we get infrastructure, nice!
But if we agree that infrastructure does not provide that amount of value we either need to figure other large scale projects that 1) provide value and 2) requires a lot of manual labor or we need to not found money distribution in work (an alternative could be UBI here).
giant office buildings also have a giant impact. Those resources could have been homes or extra rooms to work from.
then there is the whole fast food and fast everything along the road and various industries that busy themselves with appearance.
Example for Heating
A German price comparison site has done the calculation and for their model – 20m² home office and a yearly usage of ~2000 litres heating oil for the whole apartment) – you would end up with ~4% higher usage [0]. That means that you have 80 litres more heating oil which is equivalent to roughly 80 days of commuting 20 km / day via car. The German average commuter does ~32 km / day [1].
[0]: https://www.verivox.de/presse/modellrechnung-homeoffice-erho...
[1]: https://www.postbank.de/themenwelten/beruf-vorsorge/artikel_...
We only get groceries twice a month. I only drive a 2-3k miles a year which is far below average in the U.S. and I owe it all to the lack of commute. Most of those miles are due to the fact that we own a cabin in another state which we visit in the summer as well and has nothing to do with the day to day.
I don't think the solution to that is "commute to the office where it's more efficient to heat all of us", though.
It's a long-term city-planning/suburb-planning, environmental architecture problem.
What about buildings semi-recessed into the ground (bedrooms in basement, use the surrounding ground for heat storage, sky-lights to allow sunlight in)? What about further adoption of solar panels for water heating and supplemental electricity? What about "keeping the door shut so the heat doesn't escape"...? What about neighbourhoods using communal heat pumps?
Then there's the fact that a helluva lot of us can't even afford these houses you mention because the housing market is in crisis so we continue to stay in our smaller city flats despite our ability to work remotely.
Like, there's a helluva lot more white collar office workers out there in Western civilisation who _aren't_ following that "get enough money, get a car, have 2.5 kids, move out to the 'burbs" life - don't forget about us.
I also live in Seattle where a majority of the homes weren’t built with AC. Offices will run the AC units all summer long too.
Citation needed. I would argue its very hard to make any general statement about this. In my case the office is much more wasteful than the space I use for remote work for a multitude of reasons.
A friend of mine spends 500+ euros per month on gas for heating since he works from home, no way on earth his office uses 500 per person and per month on heat
It's 100 houses used 50% of the time and 1 office used 50% of the time vs 100 houses used 100% of the time.
I used to drive every day of the week. Now, it's 3 days, on average. If I could walk or cycle to the gym (roads are 0% accessible for pedestrians), I could easily drop that to one or two days.
In terms of running errands, I've moved that to a "before work" activity. It's honestly amazing how smooth it all goes at 8:00am vs 5:30pm. Plus, I consider this a net positive for the community since I'm one less person clogging up the grocery store at their busiest time.
People often say it’s cost prohibitive, but it’s been done many times before, and valuations of Offices will get so depressed that conversions begin to look very lucrative
They may also not be up to code for residential use.
Most people also like to come back to warm house so heating is running during the day
Also if you have pets you don't want it to be miserable for them. You might make it a couple degrees warmer/colder but not too much.
Consider that he'd already moved to Sri Lanka in the 1950s, ostensibly out of his love for diving. He was primed to see the benefits of WFH and telecommunication, and certainly able to exploit the flexibility in his own life and career.
Ironically, with his adventurism and individualism, perhaps his imagination was too limited to think that many people are self-limiting. The companies you speak of are not abstract entities forcing the poor humans to live unwanted lives. They are the people---identifying with the rituals of office life and demanding conformance from one another.
None of this goes to suggest that the bad aspects of offices are better.
I’m really sorry this was your childhood. I can heavily relate, as I grew up feeling the same way.
Now, 20+ years and two adult children later, I can say that the best thing I ever did as a parent was make building and improving my relationship with my children my top goal and priority from day one.
They’ve never been my emotional punching bags, or my emotional support animals. I’ve always had my eye on where we are now—them being adults. This is the period I have been intentionally building toward since I was changing diapers.
It means I focused on treating and considering them as their own unique and independent people since before they knew it. My childhood modeled what I absolutely did not want to repeat with my children. This meant I was responsible for modeling how to truly listen, respect, and support their thoughts and decisions; for creating a safe environment; for explaining myself clearly when necessary so they could understand me as a person, without resorting to “because I’m the parent”; and, most importantly, for apologizing when I was the one in the wrong.
I’ve done a lot differently than I experienced growing up, and unless my sons are lying to me (which they don’t do), it’s made all the difference compared to the relationships they see among my parents and extended family.
For most of their childhood, I worked from home. I believe it is part of why I built such a good and healthy relationship that’s now the foundation of all three of us being adults—not least of all because when I screwed up, I could apologize and use all that time to improve the relationship by resolving my mistakes, modeling the respect and love they deserved, and building a better future.
A slight rewording of your point highlights the opportunity: change happens when business and environmental needs align. This means, the people's best (only) play is to craft policies and institutions that align business incentives with environmental goals (e.g. emission cap 'n trade, grants, etc.). For example, a central repository of public holistic impact assessments could force PR teams to focus on real impact over trivial greenwashing campaigns.
While the national level gets the most focus, local/state governments can move move faster and serve as models for larger change.
There's a place where I always uncheck "include utensils" and they always give me 8 people's worth of them anyways.
That's not necessarily true. Centralizing leads to congestion, for instance, to say nothing of the other failure modes of centralizing (single point of failure being the big one). I expect there is an optimal density for each of those, and it's not clear that "large city" is in that region.
Losses in distributing electricity are fairly negligible, and distributed generation should be encouraged for some of the same reasons.
Also note that, at least in my case, I've got a cubicle farm at work. I can't just up the temperature for my 64 sqft cube; I have to up it for an entire quadrant of the floor.
I don't think we would have many office buildings if information work and telecommuting would have started at exactly the same time. No serious business person would invest in something that is plainly unnecessary.
For about a year I commuted around 30 minutes by train, from a station <5 minutes walk from home, and <5 minutes walk from the office. I liked reading books or the newspaper in the morning, and the same or staring out of the window on the way back.
It was a good transition between work and not-work. Driving requires too much concentration, cycling is somewhere in between, and working from home doesn't have any of this.
Every few months, generally if I feel I've been really unproductive, I'll walk home from the office (~50 minutes) just to enjoy the walk.
Ideally, you will have companies that are remote, non-remote, and hybrid - so a candidate can choose which company they want to join.
You have a valid point, but if one way is clearly superior, your competition is going to adopt it and start producing results faster/better. I don't really have a strong opinion on this - I work in manufacturing so remote work is not even an option for me and my team.
Certainly, I would respect a study that has been replicated multiple times and shown the same result. Links are welcome!
>Someday, scientists will finally reach the ultimate conclusion: that many companies routinely make poor short-term tradeoffs to their long-term detriment.
I don't believe you can make any "ultimate conclusion". When it comes to human psychology, group behavior, and other complicated topics, there is no 'optimal for everyone'. You have to find what works for you in your environment.
You can't hand-wave science into everything. Science is observational. It's about proposing a model/argument/position, and then collecting data to see if the model holds up. You don't fit data to the model. Changing what you do just so you can fit a model is wrong and bad science.
Some people like the suburban lifestyle, but the reason even people who prefer the amenities of cities move out is that it's the only affordable way to get a lot of space.
The solution is vastly more urban construction to meet demand, but development and regulatory changes have been slow.
I do manual labor but i could/should/might be a software developer. Not sure, im definitely not going to give up what i have to relocate. Give me work/tasks and we will see i havent got what it takes or do and if the pay and stability is there to give up what i have for it. They already cant find people. Reduce it further and salaries will have to change.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/11/14/dc-area-leads-the-w...
And plumbing and wiring a building is vastly cheaper than building a new one from scratch.
Most modern office buildings are already designed so their tenants can orient the space however they like, Including adding/removing walls and plumbing/electric
If you can buy office buildings at half the valuation of a similar square footage residential building, converting it will obviously be profitable. It was already profitable in many cases pre Covid before office became severely depressed. The valuation gap between residential and office has probably never been wider
I had a crunch delivery before we had kids, and it was hell. In the office by 9, leaving around 3 or even 4am. 'Luckily' the office paid for cabs and food and tried to make it as good as they good for us, but I didn't see friends, barely saw my wife and felt rotten at the weekends.
BUT, we delivered some amazing work, was well compensated, and otherwise rewarded by the company. Many of those who did the work are still there and still rate it as a place to be. It was a one off that we all swore off repeating, but I don't regret it or the work we delivered.
"To determine the potential impact of fracking in the U.K., a group of Manchester scientists ranked it and other energy sources, such as coal, wind, and solar, after considering environmental, economic, and social sustainability. Of the nine energy sources examined, the scientists found that fracking ranked seventh in sustainability.
To make fracking as sustainable as energy sources higher up on the list, such as wind and solar, there would need to be a staggering 329-fold reduction in environmental impact, according to the researchers."[5]
[1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/why-are-natural-gas-prices-...
[2] https://sports.yahoo.com/sand-fracking-now-3-times-114500960...
[3] https://cen.acs.org/environment/water/Wastewater-fracking-Gr...
[4] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/frack...
[5] https://futurism.com/fracking-among-most-harmful-forms-energ...
The point you bring up about methane leaks is salient though, if you can't do it without leaking too much methane, it doesn't make sense. However, I don't think that's impossible. Taxing methane leakage and monitoring it from satellites, as one idea of how to do that, seems quite possible.
Obviously it's also good to mitigate damage to the environment via waste products, etc, but that also seems to be possible with the right regulation and enforcement.
It's a huge waste.
One might observe that if that's not an outlier, it ought to be.
My argument had apriori assumptions for the general audience on HN (VC funded startups, FAANG/MAAMA folks, etc). We can start off with different assumptions, I have no problem with that. Ultimately, I agree that we should change laws as we see fit so everyone can flourish.
When we all just give for discounted that there is only one valid point of view, we lose all the benefits of the discussion and just play reinforcement.
> I walk for exercise in my neighborhood
> Public transit will never work for me ... I hate wasting my time traveling and cars are the only things fast enough to make going anywhere vaguely tolerable
The suburban model doesn't allow people to live close to any of the places they go. I too dislike wasting my time traveling, but I don't have to: I can walk five or ten minutes to the grocery store, dentist, park, restaurants, etc. I end up walking a lot over the course of a week, and personally I also bike to further destinations (a lot more people would here too if there were protected bike lanes like you mentioned you want). My travel time _is_ my exercise time - no need to spend time on extra walks to accomplish that, and there's interesting things around me when I go from place to place. The subway or commuter rail can take me further away faster than a car when I need to go somewhere distant.
But I'm lucky I can afford to live in a part of Chicago that hasn't been totally disinvested in over the last half century, like a lot of the city has. The state didn't pave a highway through the middle of it like they did to other - mostly black and brown - parts of the city to convenience suburban drivers.
The suburban model that works just fine for you comes at a cost to society. We need to reckon with that and build more places where people aren't forced to drive for their day-to-day necessities and desires.
My walking is to get me away from urban noise and people. My recreation takes me to places like get away from urban noise and people.
I find your travel time report interesting. I believe it that for where you go, it works. But I did a test with places I would go to in the Chicago area and none of them accessible by public transit and are typically an hour to an hour and 1/2 drive away (state parks). I test travel time by Google maps and driving is almost always significantly faster.
Yes I am glad that parts of Chicago were spared the insanity of interstate highways into urban spaces. It makes no sense doing that. Interstates should bypass urban centers. Although we should probably look at history as to what might happen. I suggest looking at what happened to urban centers that lost the competition for rail lines back in the late 1800s.
Another interesting experiment would be to map out the impact of replacing highways with train lines and full switching yards etc. that carry the same load of passengers and freight in the same timeframe.
I agree with you that we do need to work out a way to minimize costs of human existence both suburban and urban. We also need to fully account for all the externalities for both living spaces. We also need to reckon with there are country mice and city mice. We have very different values and very different physical tolerances in our living space.
We also need to look beyond the dichotomy of driving or walking but instead consider neighborhood delivery services for food and other ordered goods. see: https://www.businessinsider.com/lifvs-grocery-store-sweden-u.... I found this article interesting because I got a chance to see firsthand urban and rural Sweden and Finland this summer. Both places have food deserts of a sort. I don't fully grok it yet but it looks like people are comfortable with having only one or two vendors for a given item in a small store with a relatively small selection. There didn't seem to be the same "obsession" we have with getting a better price.
You're correct, people generally aren't too bothered if there are only a couple of choices, either of shops (e.g. two supermarkets) or products (two types of cereal bar).
I wouldn't in any way call it a food desert though. All the normal food for the region is available, the rest is just luxuries.
(And to the general point, people owning cars but mostly using them for recreation would still be a huge reduction in traffic, noise and pollution. That's not unusual for European city-dwellers, who often own one car and use it once or twice a week.)
I went there on the weekend. It's very lively, but I wouldn't want this sort of liveliness during the evening when the only thing I need is to wind down. I prefer living here, halfway from the centre to the city limits.
I was implying that the demand would likely be met with strip-malls and residents would still drive everywhere.
There's existing evidence for this: how many restaurants do you see in standalone office parks? A few perhaps, but nothing like what's downtown.
You will need all of those "unsightly" B2B businesses to underpin the restaurants, consumer retail, etc, etc, that you do want. And unless we invent teleportation the cost of distance is going to put a cap on how far the B2B businesses are from the customers they serve so they are going to need to be somewhat local too.
Maybe these kinds of ads are made as memes to be repeated uncritically by decision makers with little specific expertise, or something like that
No. It’s brand advertising which has a pretty specific purpose.
The “EVs are good for the environment” ads are for the consumers, many of whom haven’t made their minds up about which car to buy next. People have made their minds up about whether they like remote work or not — see every HN thread ever.
This is also why you don't see restaurants by office parks - if you want to serve the business lunch crowd, it's better to be by something like a Costco with a big parking lot that's mostly empty on weekdays instead of an office park that's all parked-up at lunchtime. Even absent parking-lot efficiencies, it's probably just optimal to be equidistant from all the office parks instead of next to one.
That's the challenge you face, really - out in the suburbs most people would rather drive 12 minutes than walk 7. I think people just see walking as a way to be cold and struggle to carry heavy things, so fuck it.
Even suburbia isn't dense enough to support those things
Now eventually you do get into that problem in rural areas or areas that can’t be densely inhabited (like the mountains), but there’s no fundamental reason people can’t live in five-bedroom mansions and have access to services.
Our yard has rhubarb, asparagus, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, apple trees. We are re-wilding the lawn to help encourage local insects and birds. I am working on my neighbors to shield their outdoor lights so that nocturnal creatures aren't messed up as much by nighttime lighting.
I figured out once that for me to live comfortably with all of my hobbies/WFH, my partner and her son, I need approximately 2500 ft.² of living/working space. I have lived in shit-a-brick 1500 square-foot urban apartments and it means isolation, earplugs so I can't hear my neighbors, and high blood pressure. I dropped all my hobbies and did nothing but work because the urban space, was for me, the embodiment of depression.
Our neighborhood is dense enough for public infrastructure. Many rooftops around here have solar which is great for distributed power. Sadly my house is circa 1920 with the slate roof and there is no way on cover up that beautiful structure with solar panels.
There are ways to build suburbia they give people room to live where they live. You just need a different perspective.
Two friends if mine move to the nearest city and got a small one bed as they both do a lot out of the flat - theatre, movies, bars, sports etc - so the house was really a place to sleep and shower, plus eat and relax a little.
Home working for them meant losing space in their kitchen/livingroom/dining room - and having one of them work from the bed room.
Inner city UK flats are often very small, and still relatively expensive.
Your comment on the second+ order effects is much more interesting, but also much more uncertain.
Even if you did have some "smart" appliance that would make it easier, you'd have to "over-heat" when you come back to get again the desired temperature (or pre-heat a few hours before coming back), which would mostly make the effort's result insignificant...
It would make sense to drop heating when leaving for a few days though, week-ends/holidays. Offices are not heated on week-ends for example.
I will note that I am in a warm country, so we much more rarely have the heat on. But if I'm out of the house for 8 hours, I'll definitely turn off the AC. It might take time to get the house cold again, but c'mon, no way we'd pay for a day's worth of electricity for no reason.
I wonder how much this changes if it's heating vs cooling, and based on how much you have to heat/cool a place.
Choosing the one that will damage environment more is a luxury choice. It does sound weird to me that this is considered as the only alternative.
Possible? Yes, but not necessarily the best financial decision when cities seem to be allergic to increasing population density.
i.e. the assumption that the reduction in commuting would not be offset by changes in other areas is unjustified.
Even if it's on 8 hours a day constantly, 5 days a week, 4 weeks a month that's 320kWh or just over £100 a month at UK energy prices.
not sure if that makes your anecdote out of date or if it puts further shade on the parents comment.
Granted this is the US, and natural gas is considerably cheaper here than in a lot of countries in Europe right now, so you probably need to at least double what I said anyway for Europe.
I've never heard of anyone heating their home when not in it, given the other comments it seems like it's the norm, weird
OTOH, our houses are generally heavily insulated, so while heating a house is expensive, keeping it heated is relatively cheap. I'm always amazed at the lack of insulation when I travel abroad. I never freeze as much as when I leave Scandinavia (no joke).
I turn the heat down to 55 or so (the lowest the thermostat will go) when I'm away for a few days. But I've never heard of anyone not leaving their heat on some setting for this reason. Do you live somewhere that almost never drops below freezing?
And we only do that because smart thermostats exist and use our phones as presence sensors. Without that, we'd have to manually lower the heat and I doubt we'd bother/remember.
Or do you demand that they live in the cold while you're at the office?
Most people here would need to actively tweak it every time the leave the house and every time they come in. And do it separately for each room. Just from the way how heating works - you have valve in each room that you turn in order to adjust heating.
Of course no one does it every day twice.
I know at our workplace heating on Monday mornings has to start several hours earlier than on Tuesday because the office lost almost all of its built-up heat from the previous Friday. I also know that they continue to run the heating on holiday-Fridays/Mondays because if they don't by the following Monday/Tuesday, the temperature will drop too low and could damage equipment.
But I guess the answer would be that people can't abide the thought of one uncomfortable minute in their own home, and don't bother figuring out how to program the thermostat.
If you turned the heat off at 7am as you left for work, the house would probably be below 60 when you got home, and take most of the evening to reheat, only to be turned back down again at bed time. I don't know anybody who manually does any of this - at best, they have a smart thermostat that lets them schedule home/away time or uses cell phones as presence sensors. And even then, they'll lower the heat 5-8 degrees, not turn it off completely.
Public libraries are quieter than my office and coffee shop noise is background noise.
Lack of external monitors is a fair concern, but I found external monitors to be too distracting. I only need to look at one thing at a time. I don't want random things popping up on the screen next to me.
Also, I want to be around for relevant conversations. Context switching is not an issue for me as long it's not unrelated to work (or something unobtrusive like "hello").
To each their own I suppose.
If you leave the heat on during the day (and that can be a few degrees lower) then you can keep the structure warm and avoid all that evening heat loss and cycling. But only if you have good insulation. Otherwise you’re just dumping heat out into the environment. The other factor is how cold it is outside, if the temperature gradient is steep then it’s harder to contain hot air.
But thermal mass can be a big thing. My house isn't even all that well insulated, and when it is 0º F outside, it only drops about 10 degrees if the furnace is off all day.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/...
They tend to ignore things like the laws of physics.
When you live 40 miles away from your destination, there's no way that you'll get there in 37.7 minutes, unless you can do over the state speed limit, the entire time. And that doesn't even count things like congestion, traffic lights, and whatnot.
Frankly, I'm kind of amazed at the nasty reception that my post got. I do apologize for my choice of words, questioning where the person lives, but folks seem to have some kind of stake, in commutes being unnaturally short.
People live in the suburbs, so they can do things like raise families, send their kids to good schools, and enjoy the kinds of leisure pursuits that are only available to wealthy people, close to the city.
There's a lot of people, living out here. I know of several people that live in Wading River, and commute daily, to Manhattan.
This is a scientific community. Feel free to get your maps out, and figure it out.
So, most people don't mind their commute. Also if I was hypothetically an employer, all other things being equal, wouldn't I rather hire people who don't have hobbies/things they are so committed to that they justify living "out there"? ;)
It sucked. If the company doesn't shift and completely overhaul its entire culture from the ground up to full remote including junior mentoring, it's difficult to see, especially from the managers and senior perspective who already know the "games" of the organization and the know-how to get their work done and be productive while advancing their career, just how much knowledge and development potential I missed out on as a remote junior.
When I was in the office, I would pass by a coworkers and see some new development environment or tool on their monitor and I would ask them "Hey, sorry, what's that <thing> you use", "Oh yeah, it's a tool for doing X, it's very useful, you should try it.", "Oh neat, thanks". When we switched to remote I would have no way of seeing the tools others use that later help me also be more productive.
Or when two of the most senior colleagues who sat next to me would be discussing some very high level technical stuff together, I would sometimes listen in and learn something new and sometimes ask them questions later about it and even volunteer to work on that if they need help. With the switch to remote, I have no chance of hearing 1:1 technical discussion calls between the seniors and find out new things or challenges they face.
Basically, I was missing out on a lot of ideas, challenges, solution, technical development know-how, and became this anonymous avatar that needs to takes Jira issues as input and produce Gitlab merge requests as output, pigeonholing myself and stagnating my growth both as an engineer and inside the organization.
I suspect these issues might be less common in startups and companies that have been built from the start as distributed remote, but are probably very present for older organizations that have always ben in the office, and switched to hybrid or remote because of the pandemic.
Most CEO's absolutely stand out otherwise.
Here is John Chambers on Charlie Rose [1]
Jean Liu [2]
Just from those conversations you can see how way out from the norm they are.
My qualities would have me dead 200 years ago, but make me earn money and social status in 2022. It's not that I'm amazing, it's just the current context is very favorable to those qualities. So it's just a lot of luck, and being fit for certains things that happen to be advantagious in your environnement.
The myth is that the process is just and fair, according to some people moral standard. The universe doesn't care.
I'm not as conscientious or as laser focused as Elon Musk so my chances of getting there are lower.
And it’s mind blowing to me that money can’t buy a better iPhone, they all have to deal with fiddling with the cursor on HN, even princes in the Middle-East, no matter the height of the tower they’re at the top of, they use the same apps as us.
I started my carrier as a remote employee before the pandemic. Pairing helped a lot to learn how others are working. Most of the technical discussions where public. Usually on slack or on GitHub (via RFC PRs). If somebody scheduled a meeting usually included the whole team as optional and encouraged juniors to listen even if they can't contribute. We planned our sprints together so everybody know what the team is working on.
On the other hand I joined a new company during the pandemic which had similar issues. I wanted to help solve it, but they didn't even acknowledged it.
Many things in life and in the world shouldn't be the way they are, but the reality in the field is very different and most of the time there's not much we can do about it.
Pairing was never a thing in any company I worked (in Europe).
Your footprint is probably > 95% consumption anyway. I don't understand how high-density living seems to be so attractive to many here.
There are plenty of examples around the world where dense urban living can be rather pleasant. You can walk to get your food, kids can cycle around town, and you can sit and gather in public places that are designed for people instead of moving traffic.
Not from the US, but expect this story about high density areas paying for the others is a stupendous political argument to get people angry at those suburbians and not too much else. The distribution of funds is probably unjust, but the solution is certainly not to bring everyone into high density living.
If you live in the average suburb/town.
It's ok, it's nice for you, but you're just passing the buck to future generations.
And look at the discussions surrounding Boomers, who are blamed precisely for this.
Being able to live close to work is an incentive for living densely.
But living densely isn’t sustainable either, and is arguably less sustainable, so the point is moot anyway. It’s just an example.
Boomers are blamed because of younger generation ignorance. There is an almost a willful lack of understanding of historical events that boomers lived through that shaped their lives and their finances. Looking from a point of older age to younger generations, anyone with half a brain can see the stressors and forces making their lives difficult. Yet we also see the the same forces that shaped boomers doubling down on shaping you. While there are some bright spots of Gen Z pushing back on power structures and winning, those wins are skirmishes because those in power were caught by surprise. In the next conflict, history of social change over the past hundred and 20 years shows that the next conflict will not be won so easily.
From my perspective, the generational you need to take control of politics in your future and stop putting your hands over your eyes and saying you have no control. Get out there, run for office, learn how your constituents live in what's important to them.
Remember, if you do not get elected and take your seat at the table, you will be ignored and nothing will change in your favor. Don't count on others to fight your battles for you.
2) I provided a number for peak rush hour, worst possible commute (bridge + construction), that I've actually done a couple times. FWIW I can drive to downtown in 25 minutes during rush hour, 10-12 minutes without, and that also would involve a bridge so a bottleneck.
3) An hour after rush hour is very different than 3am.
As far as thermodynamics, you're always exchanging heat with the environment. Only the coefficients change with different insulation levels. And these losses correlate with the gradient between the inside and outside. When the gradient is zero, equilibrium means zero net heat transfer. When the house is allowed to drift towards the outside temperature, the total losses will be lower than if comfort were maintained through those same hours. The integral (sum) of these loss rates over time is your total energy loss and a good proxy for the total energy needed from the heating system to condition the space.
The whole tradeoff is about comfort and convenience to have the space conditioned when you want it and to have an appropriately sized system for the needed load. Whether oversized or undersized, equipment may not operate efficiently if asked to operate outside its designed load level and duty cycle. It can also become unreliable with the wrong duty cycle, i.e. a small unit asked to run too long and too frequently or a large unit asked to run too infrequently and for too short a duration each time.
That the equipment has to operate at a higher load during recovery does not imply that it actually uses more total energy in the daily cycle. That would only be true if the equipment is inefficient at the recovery load. An example where this is true would be a heatpump system with an auxiliary resistive heating element that engages in recovery. But, a gas furnace or a sufficiently large heatpump is likely more efficient in recovery since it is also working with a larger gradient until recovery is complete.
It is common for basic clock-based, programmable or smart thermostats to allow for daily drift to save energy. They use a more comfortable set point during morning and evening hours when occupants are most sensitive and then allow some drift towards ambient during midday and nighttime hours when occupants are less likely to notice. This is precisely to leverage this tradeoff to have less total energy losses per day. They don't completely turn off but vary the set point so that the building is kept within a range where the comfortable and efficient recovery is possible. Depending on the day, this might be equivalent to turning off or it might just reduce the duty cycle slightly.
Plenty of European and Asian cities are good examples of how one can transform modern cities to be better balanced and pleasant for humans to live in.
Grew up in a place that reaches -25c pretty often and never heard of that. It's in europe though so we probably have better insulation. I could leave my house 3 days and no pipe would burst, I've never heard of anyone having burst pipes now that I think about it. When I went to school and my parents were at work we'd shut down the heating completely, we were pretty poor so there is that, but I don't remember being cold
When I was in california we'd have to run heating full blast 24/7 to maintain 16c indoor so that my explain a few things
It's mostly a problem where I come from during power outages -- if you don't have power for 2-3 days, you might not be able to run even a propane-based heating system. But maybe the prevalance of water baseboard heating systems contributes; I imagine they're the most vulnerable pipes in the house to freezing, since they by nature sit closest to cold exterior temperatures.
One more thing I assumed was a worldwide problem, that it turns out is just a result of shoddy American building quality. Sigh.
If the suburbs were to be re-zoned for more dense development and mix-use zoning I don't think the urban areas would see any drop in revenue. They would probably see an increase.
> Of course no one does it every day twice.
Why not ? it takes like 5 seconds
Fortunately with modern technology, you can run your own composting waste disposal, water from rainwater or aquifer, electricity via solar panels and batteries and the entire package is surprising affordable. That is to say cheaper than in urban 2000 square-foot condo.
That depends.
HN seems to be a whole bunch of folks that are actually against the idea of living "out here" (not "there," to me). I find that interesting. I'm sure some demographic research would suggest why that is. I can tell you, from simply stepping out of my front door, that there are a lot of people, "out here," and I suspect that most of them work, somewhere.
> Also if I was hypothetically an employer, all other things being equal, wouldn't I rather hire people who don't have hobbies/things
Yeah, that's a pretty common mindset. "But why can't they all be slaves?" is what most corporate owners lament.
But if you want experienced, accomplished folks, you may find the pickings are a bit slim, in the immediate metro area. Might have to cast a wider net.
I lived in a city for a few years, and it was extremely convenient, but I was also unmarried, and ran a baseline stress level just below "squirrel on meth."
It seems that young people like being in the noise and bustle of a city, or close to it. Since tech has a real bad ageism problem, I guess that I shouldn't be surprised at the reactions.
But I am. I never thought of having a commute as something that defines an "old."
Boy, are some people in for a nasty surprise.
What hustle and bustle? Campuses of the likes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are surrounded by layers of suburbs, populated (purely due to prices, both current and over time, considering who could purchase when) by "experiences, accomplished folks". They probably live the closest to office and have the shortest commutes.
I've lived on the East Coast for my entire adult life, and have experienced three metropolitan areas, and Not. One. Of. Them. had a 37-minute commute between an affordable suburb, and the center of the city.
Not. One.
I have managed to find jobs in the suburbs, which means they are probably not as high-paying as they could have been, in the city, but they worked out OK. Even then, I had ridiculous commutes (like 45 minutes to go 6 miles, in MD). My daily commute here, on Long Island, was 35 minutes to go 10 miles (for 27 years). That was from North Shore Long Island, to the center of the island. If I wanted to go to the city from here, it would have been at least 90 minutes, if I left at about 4AM (which many people around here do). 2-3 hours, in rush hour.
The thing about most companies on the East Coast, is they ain't real big on flexible hours. You need to travel during rush hour. The companies in the city can be a bit more flexible (I know of many people that work from 6AM-3PM), but the drive still sucks.
It's really weird to see people saying that this isn't happening, when it definitely is happening, and has been happening for decades, and I see it, every day. Miserable commutes have been a regular topic for discussion amongst my peers for as long as I can remember.
I have to assume there's some kind of cultural gulf. I definitely know that the tech industry is pretty sick with ageism, so that's a good bet. The people that live around me, are actually fairly well-off. The ones further East are likely to be lower on the food chain, and have much worse commutes.
However, please don't state that "the right way is to have... not secluded lives." Some of us absolutely enjoy the seclusion, especially this WFH Alaskan.
The thing is, you do enjoy it.
Just like people enjoy alcohol and tobacco or having cars.
However, the real question is: is it really good for you, long term?
I'm not sure the answer is clear cut. Humans frequently choose things which are actively harmful to them, at least long term.
Not this FFS.
Who says remote work means you have to stay home all the time? Stay home to work and make sure you leave at least once, ideally two or three times a day!
In the morning for a walk or workout or coffee break.
At lunch just to breath some air.
At 5PM[1] sharp laptops closed to reconnect with some of your favorite humans, not necessarily the same ones you live with.
[1]: or whatever hard stop you craft for yourself.
Remember that "pandemic remote work" is not at all normal remote work. I have a social life outside of my coworkers. I can work from places that aren't my home office - a cafe, a coworking space, whatever - even if it's just a couple hours to get out of the house.
It need not be seclusion.
> better public transport and cheaper housing
Yeah, well, no argument from me here.
This. Even before the pandemic, when I had to waste two hours a day, every day, to go sit my butt in my employer's chair, all my "social life" was strictly with people other than my coworkers.
So being able to get those two hours back, even if not all of them but every other day, is a net gain for me. I can go for a walk, lift some weights, space out on the couch, whatever. It's also much easier to not always eat the same plastic lunch every day, or have to prepare things that are easy to reheat in a microwave.
Because "home", for me, while I've been working remotely since 1994, has been Indiana, to Puerto Rico, to Budapest. I go when I want, do a little schedule juggling maybe. And now I live in the tropics in the jungle on a mountain coffee farm - the best place to spend a global pandemic - and I still have an income.
I'll take my seclusion, thanks.
Not with that attitude :-)
Wasn't the US about a "go getter" attitude? I'm not even an American, but that's the general perception.
Otherwise your statement just doesn’t make sense.
Variable rate tolling on roads to disincentivize unnecessary travel by individual car makes more sense.
if companies are forced to pay for the time commuting people will choose to live 20 hours away
In Bob's life he is surrounded by sycophants waiting for handouts, never wanting to be seen to annoy Bob nor lose his favour. Bob does not know who to trust. He has had those that he considered real friends and deeply trustworthy turn out to be thiefs and liars. A former school friend was secretly living in one of Bob's holiday homes _for years_, successfully evading detection by Bob by using his friendship to know where and when Bob will be. He was using his ties to Bob (and Bob's success) to gain favour in his own business and was using some of this money to bribe Bob's staff into silence. Apparently the friend went full "villain in disguise reveals his secret vendetta" when Bob asked if the friend needs help. Bob was heartbroken.
Maids, servers, and other staff are stealing things all the time - Bob maintains and reviews an inventory of stolen property with his security detail, with monthly targets... theft of his belongings is an ever present cost to Bob. e Bob's own family live an excessively sheltered life. His young children's best friends are their personal body guards - former military personnel that must be present around the clock as a stipulation of their kidknap/ransom insurance. This isn't a perceived threat, either. Bob's eldest son was abducted on at least one occassion, by a policeman no less.
Bob's life is managed for him. His staff manage his diet, his wardrobe(s), his social diary, of course his work engagenments take him all over the world often with little notice. He is never entirely certain where he will be and when. He is a slave to his diaries.
Bob spends the majority of his birthdays alone, on the phone to my family member, often crying about how lonely he is.
All that for money seems like a lot to sacrifice. There's also a fascinating effect that happens when the cost of things are literally of no consequence. Sentimentality is the only measure of value and material objects are just.. nothing but utilities.
Anyway, I would safely assume being a billionaire is not all doom and gloom, but it certainly has a different set of life-problems.
I can solve this problem for Bob.
Live a more modest life and not have 10 homes with a million things in them. Maybe stick to first class flights, or even charter private flights when desired instead of owning a plane.
I doubt there is any law anywhere prohibiting a millionaire or billionaire from moving themselves and their families to a new place and living a middle class lifestyle under a new name.
Advertising one's wealth is a signal for "I seek validation" and "Please appreciate me"/"Be my friend because I am wealthy"
I doubt anyone is actually stopping Bob from quitting his job, moving to a new country, and living a quaint lifestyle.
Personally, I've up and moved and gone to live in a tent, just to see what it was like and essentially test myself and test the lifestyle of a vagabond.
It really showed me that, as a man, for the most part: you have no worth outside of what you provide for others. Men are expected to provide something for their community-- that is the basis of their social status: competencies (i.e. capable of productive things) and contributions.
in other words, don't be a billionaire. However Bob has evidently decided to keep being a billionaire which means he has to maintain and review stolen property etc.
The president of the Netherlands famously bikes to work, vs the US president who travels around with a security detail at all times.
> His young children's best friends are their personal body guards - former military personnel that must be present around the clock as a stipulation of their kidknap/ransom insurance.
A problem stemming from income inequality. Organized crimes, such as kidnappings, start to occur in societies so unfair that being part of a crime syndicate seems like a good life choice for people.
If someone with 10 billion wants to feel safer, spend 9 billion improving the QoL in their chosen city. In an society of stark inequality, no amount of money can buy peace of mind, as you point out, money just buys physical security, and being protected from bad things happening is very different than not having to worry about bad things happening at all.
> Bob spends the majority of his birthdays alone, on the phone to my family member, often crying about how lonely he is.
I've had a few "wealthy", not rich, but 8 figure, friends and acquaintances. Perfectly normal house parties. The house is nicer, and the works of art on the wall are real, but nothing crazy. They also didn't flash their wealth around, very low key, nothing special until you opened the door and looked around carefully.
That said, I'm sure another couple 0's on the end of the bank account balance complicate things.
Beyond a certain point, as a “known wealthy person”, you will never know if a romantic partner cares about you or your wealth. Same for your friends. Relatives. Anybody.
You will not be able to do things you’ve taken for granted - like go to the pub or to a restaurant or on a hike or ride your bike on the bike path - without additional effort and people.
Very, very lonely and depressing.
Warren buffet was once targeted by an armed gunman. The gunman burst into buffet’s kitchen where buffet, his wife (I suppose she’s also buffet) and another man were eating lunch. Little did the gunman know, the other man turned out to be buffet’s hired security. The bodyguard being good at his job quickly disarmed and restrained the attacker.
Why were they sitting and eating together? Because even though buffet was the richest man in the world at the time he behaves like a normal person and if there’s a guy who’s always around you invite him to lunch.
I assure you, I need to know nothing more about the relationship to tell you that Warren Buffet trusts and respects this man. And the feeling is mutual.
In conclusion: I recommend that Bob climb down off the high horse he thinks his billions require him to ride and join the rest of us in normal life. Connection is all around you, you have only to reach back out for it.
As for sycophants, if you want people to be candid you have to give them a safe place to do it. Musk will soon learn that the people who criticized him were right and he shouldn’t have driven them away.
As for people wanting a handout. If your money is a burden to you there’s an obvious solution.
Did you get lost on the way to reddit, or something?
I don’t think this is the average commute, but millions of people do this every day.
Their entire life, Mon to Fri, was wake up, go to work, maybe spend an hour with kids or watch TV, go to sleep, and repeat.
And they did not get paid enough to do it from age 30 to 55 or even 65. The only amount of pay that would be enough would be an amount that allows you to quit that nonsense life after a few years.
As a Vermonter kid, I had a lot of trouble getting my head around how he stayed sane.
That said, the actual train ride was approx 75 minutes.
Even worse, I drove to Westchester for a number of years and that was 120 miles a day (60 one way) including a trip over the Tappan Zee! At least on the train ride I could read.
I no longer live in the NYC area and certainly don't miss those commutes.
One starts to lose his sanity somewhere between the potholes, broken roads, construction, crazy drivers, freezing rain and no parking..
Many people that I know make this kind of drive in the Atlanta area, and that's not due to them all being in particular industries either. 1-2 hours to get across the city and into the suburbs/exurbs is a fact of life, and millions do it.
DC was even worse.
I know a couple people who have done it -- living in deep Brooklyn far from the subway and teaching in the Bronx, or living deep in Staten Island and commuting to the Upper East Side -- but it is extremely uncommon.
The average NYC commute is 40 minutes. And only 10% of NYC workers have a commute longer than 60 minutes. [1]
Easily 2+ hours each way from door to door. And let me tell you, the LIRR is vastly overfilled during peak. You're lucky to get a seat for that 90 minute leg of your trip, and if you didn't, you were probably sardine packed in the aisle.
Driving is 90 minutes, if you leave at 5AM. Train is 2 hours (including in-city time).
Many folks commute from even farther East.
Please don’t tell me that I’m “insane.” I would never have done that commute, myself, but have lived here for over 30 years, and have seen (with my own little eyes), people doing this every day.
Average commute time in NYC MSA is 37.7 minutes, longest of any major MSA in the country. DC MSA is 35.6 minutes. Only ~23% of NYC have commutes longer than hour, and ~18% in DC.
(Note: statistics are using 2019 data, so doesn't account for anything COVID related, and people who don't commute are excluded from the statistics.)
Out here, in the affordable section, it's not as easy.
When I lived in the DC suburbs, 32 years ago, I lived in Gaithersburg, MD. I worked in Rockville (1 exit south, on I-270). Six miles, as the crow flies.
My daily commute was 45 minutes.
I-270 is a charming bit of tarmac. It's a 12-lane parking lot, that stretches from Frederick, to the Beltway.
I have no idea where those stats come from, but they sure as hell don't reflect the reality, around here.
Reality has a nasty way of not caring what the stats say.
Therefore both employer and employee will be incentivized to locate in places with higher density housing to reduce costs.
The thing that makes it simple is that all the things Bob has are purely unnecessary. So if Bob feels overburdened by the task of securing them, then the simple solution is to jettison them.
We can put 2 and 2 together and figure out that physical isolation in environment where people live far apart from each other and drive everywhere is... isolating?
And by the way, there are studies that show that even for introverts, socialization (even forced!) is ultimately good.
We're not made to sit alone in a room in the middle of nowhere. We were born in caves filled with our tribesfolk, dozens and dozens of people living together in small spaces.
Also, who said anything about alcoholics? Alcohol is just bad for you. Anything except for very small amounts has a ton of bad side effects. It's just "grandfathered in" (just like tobacco) and seen as socially acceptable.
You seem to be implying that people's social lives revolve around work. A lot of us prefer to spend that effort on family, friends, and community during the other 72 hours of the week we are free instead.
I'm 43. Doing things with coworkers isn't even remotely appealing as it was 20 years ago, because at the end of the day they are coworkers and not friends (usually).
Facebook's one just turned into a meme because of how unlikeable he is
There's plenty of wealthy stealthy people around, who put a lot of effort into their business and not necessarily into themselves.
They'd fly right under the radar.
The following may not be a perfect example of the above, but just read up on the late Thomas Murphy and Daniel Burke ("Tom & Dan") of ABC. I find their no-nonsense no-bullshit down-to-earth frugal approach to business inspiring.
There are plenty of rich people who are completely unknown.
The inside of their house is a bit better decorated, and if they fly first class to a private resort, how are the neighbors going to know?
Wise people avoid the hedonic treadmill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill), independent of their level of wealth.
I also don't doubt there are long commutes. However, I will assert that that is not the typical experience in New York, or elsewhere. No one in my at-work peer group has a commute that long, and no one in my outside-of-work friend group has a commute that long.
Without kids, there is no reason for the commute. But putting kids in an upscale suburban neighborhood with other kids of similar earning parents is the reason that I saw people put up with that commute.
The money was good - I'm pretty sure that was the motivation. Also part of his personality - he grew up in serious poverty and was driven to climb the ladder. And climb he did.
His wikipedia page documents how he and his family have disowned his granddaughter for revealing family secrets in an interview. So.. yeah, he probably does.
You can bet he has kidnapping insurance on his family, too.