I worked in an office for a lot of years and I almost never, ever remember "commuting in anger".
I basically did a comp-sci degree on the train to and from work, contributed to opensource software, caught up on work, read books , talked to colleagues, napped etc. It was actually pretty productive alone time for me. Forced quiet time for 3 hours a day. I was young and I had a 1.5 train trip each way to work.
I built my career further and could afford to live closer to my office, but it was still a 30 minute cycle each way, that was still beautiful, my more recent office job, it was a 10 minute ride in a beautiful city.
I work remote now, while I think my personal life is for sure better, I'm not sure we're functioning as well as a group.
The spending time with the family bit, sounds good, but I'm honestly still working insane hours remotely. Had to sacrifice a lot of personal time of late to my work. I'm probably working harder and longer hours know than almost anytime I remember. It's 6am meetings, 9pm meetings. That never used to happen for me.
> I was young and I had a 1.5 train
> I built my career further and could afford to live closer to my office
> it was still a 30 minute cycle each way
> it was a 10 minute ride in a beautiful city
Almost none of these apply to the average American commuter. Public transportation/biking infrastructure is poor to non-existent in most of the US. And the places where it does exist are usually the most expensive. For 95% of American workers, a commute does not mean leisurely spending time on a train unwinding while they read or sleep, or getting outside for a nice bike ride through the city. It means bumper to bumper traffic on the highway for 2 hours every day.
As for the 6am and 9pm meetings, can you not just tell people to not schedule meetings then? My company made it clear that due to our distributed work force, meetings are only scheduled within core hours near the middle of the day so that no one is getting up early or working late.
America is a democracy and people should ask for public transport if they hate commuting so much. Which is interesting because people seem to hate driving but also not willing to demand better public transport.
Such a conundrum.
Interestingly, it seems working from home has largely killed the demand and focus on self-driving cars. I'm sure people are still working on it, but it definitely feels less important, at least on HN :)
Individually I think remote workers will be more productive.
But collectively I do not yet know. I find it plausible that the average in-person organization may turn out to be more productive than the average remote organization.
Which of those two employee types do you think will have have better work output? I'm have a pretty good idea, but am not totally sure.