3-days per week seems to fall into the category of a fairly awful daily commute is... still awful. I'd fairly willingly do a day or sometimes two of a two-hour commute each way into my city office (which I sometimes go into for customers) but not more often than that.
I wouldn't commute 2 hours to work, even once a month. Too much risk to my personal safety. There's no way I'm driving on a highway with semi-trucks just to do some meetings.
I work from home and would never work in an office even with a "normal" commute. Two hours on a regular basis is something else though, I think there's definitely an added risk to a long distance commute that doesn't get talked about enough.
I do work from home but I also go into an office to meet with customers and I otherwise drive on highways on a regular basis. I'm an hour drive into the nearest major city to see a play. If I commuted into my nominal office a few days a week I'm pretty sure my overall risk wouldn't be much increased.
2 days would definitely be better for the devs. That's how it works for lots of us even before mandate. So the significant change for lots of the ppl was from 2 days to 3 days ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. That's the cost of staying in the company I guess
It does feel as if there's a break point for me between 2 days and 3 days where a lousy commute is tolerable vs. one that's not. But there's also a big what you're used to thing going on.
I understand why 3 days is needed for certain positions. Even for ICs there are senior techleads who have less coding requirement but more design and pm requirements and they need to juggle projects with multiple groups and the same time. For them frequent communication with large groups of people is probably more efficient when it's done in person
Though at larger companies those people are probably pretty scattered around anyway. Not a single person on my (non-development) team is within hundreds of miles of each other.
I was going to say, what about those of us working for globally distributed companies? We should go to an office so we can then use a conference room to Zoom with some people in another office? I don’t see how the office magically creates better collaboration, actually it’s worse.
