[pawelwentpawel]

Once you add those numbers, the total is usually insane. While I do miss being in the office sometimes (mostly for the social life), it's just too expensive for me as a worker right now. It's not just the time spent on commute, it's also the money that you have to spend to stay within a commutable distance from the office.

Also, my profession is being a Software Engineer, not a train passenger.

I made a calculator for this a while ago: https://flat.social/blog/get-a-remote-team-back-in-the-offic... (scroll a bit down for the inputs).

[dgfitz]

> You spend around 8 hours on travel weekly which amounts to around 45 days of full-time work per year and will sum up to 450 days of full-time work (3600 hours) over 10 years. It's 4 years of full-time work days (9000 hours!) over 25 years.

Kind of wish I hadn't looked... :(

[chatmasta]

And if you're driving to the office, that's 450 hours where you can get into a fatal accident, with about half of them in the morning when you might be too sleep-deprived to safely operate a motor vehicle. Driving on four hours of sleep is the equivalent of drunk driving. And if your start time is the same every day, then it's likely you'll have many nights where you fall asleep too late, maybe even because you're preparing a presentation for your morning meeting...

[pawelwentpawel]

Or 450 hours of breathing with polluted air stuck in an outdated underground train system - https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/london-underground-pollution

[vidarh]

Money to stay within commutable distance, but also the cost of the commute itself.

E.g. my yearly cost of commuting when I did added equivalent to about $2.5k/year in after tax transport costs.

I've typically told recruiters about 20%, from a high base, and frankly that is lower than it ought to be when accounting for both the time and costs, but given I already live where I live, I feel I could justify it in terms putting extra cash straight into my pension pot and retiring earlier. But not enough to lower it further to find a point where someone is more likely to take me up on it.

[wharvle]

Yep, I prefer the office.

... but not even close to enough to car-commute more than about 10 minutes to it, given the option. That's roughly the cut-off. Under 1.5 bikeable miles (that's ideal!) or maybe 5 miles by car.

And to get that short a commute, I'd need all kinds of other compromises in most cities. Worse schools, more expensive and smaller housing.

Is my preference for the office worth hundreds of hours a year lost commuting, thousands of dollars a year in transportation costs, and all the extra micromorts from the commute? LOL. LMFAO. God no, it's not even close. No typical commute is a low enough cost that I'd pay it to be in the office. It's way off.

So, though I do in fact prefer working in the office... nah.