Job With Longer Commute

I went from a 15 mile commute too 40 miles and hated it. Now I have a 4 mile round-trip and love it 

A company would have to belaying me quite a handsome sun if money for me to go back to a long commute.

I have an 11 mile.round trip commute, 3 days per week. Work from home 2 days. Like $15-20k more per year.

Doesn't sound terrible compared with current situation 

It's another 1/2 of your time gone every day. Think what else you can do with that time. If it's worth it to you then go for it.

z31maniac said:

A company would have to belaying me quite a handsome sun if money for me to go back to a long commute.

I have an 11 mile.round trip commute, 3 days per week. Work from home 2 days. Like $15-20k more per year.

You need a more fun car to drive.

/commute went from 20 minutes to 40, income went up by double

/yes, my drove to work both sucks and is enjoyable

My commute was 15 minutes with a job I absolutely hated. My commute is now 40-50 minutes, but I love my job. Completely Worth it. I don't really mind the commute, it's just part of life. 

Yes, I have done it, yes I have regretted it.

If the further away job is the one you want, then move.  There is absolutely nothing good about a long commute.

I used to commute 100mi round-trip daily, but sometimes I’d drive another 200-miles on top of that. One time I did the math and realized I spent almost 21-days per year just commuting. That’s not how I wanted to live my life. 

I am a very firm believer in actively making your commute as short as possible.  As a renter, I moved from an apartment 15 miles from work to one exactly 1 point 4 miles from work.  Heavenly.  I could walk out my front door and be walking into my office in just five minutes.  When I finally purchased a house, it was about four miles from the office, and I could take back roads and altogether avoid main arteries in my commute.  

A lengthy commute costs a great deal of time, mental well-being, and money.  Avoid.

As many of you heard me complain about for over 15 years I had a 70 mile (one way) commute in NJ.   Hated everything about it.

So when we moved I put my foot down, Im going to be closer to the office.   

Weeeell.....no.   At the end of the day to find the house and property I wanted Im still driving just as long (not as far but equal time in the car) the upside is Im not camping out on a highway in traffic.  I have lovely little backroads to play on and 3 different routes I can take if there ever were to be traffic (thus far its just school busses and tractors which constitute traffic on my drive)   And to be honest, I don't mind, I like the drive, its a fun way to ramp up for my day or wind down at the end.  So its not so much about the distance or the time of the quality of the drive.

In reply to JThw8 :

The relative consistency of my NJ commute is what made it tolerable for so many years. About 20 miles on I-95 and then mostly 2-lane back roads through central NJ from Ewing to Somerset.  Some of them quite fun except for the deer-dodging and occasional speed traps.  Plus, on nice days I could hit a mtn bike trail system near the office and get a ride in after work - which was also great for killing time to miss traffic.  And the drive was just rural and slow enough to make taking one of my classic cars an option once in awhile.  But then in 2017 something changed and the traffic got a level of magnitude worse.  

Now my drive isn't as fun as it's now mostly on the PA TP, but it's shorter, which makes it easier to the office earlier, so I can leave earlier and miss most of the afternoon traffic as well. I do miss the mtn bike trails or road riding near the NJ office. 

In reply to Ian F :

Sadly I had the opposite NJ experience, it was 70 miles of mind numbing I-295 and all the traffic that comes with it.  But yes there can be some nice commutes in the right parts of the state.   Its why when we moved to NC I avoided the Raleigh area even though it was closer to my office and we have moved out into the middle of no where.   Ive gotta drive 20 minutes just to find a highway :)

Long commute sucks the life out of you, unless you really, REALLY enjoy a forced drive. I do not, it gets old. Fast. 

You only have so many hours in the day/week/life. Do you really want to spend it commuting? Remember, commuting isn't driving for fun. It would have to be a SIGNIFICANT increase in salary to make me increase my commute. I think about my life right now, with a 30 minute one way commute. I spend 30 minutes of my day getting ready (10 on weekends), 30 minutes driving to work, 9-10 hours at work, 35 minutes driving home. I have to sleep for about 8 hours otherwise my health takes a dive. So lets call it 11 hours a day devoted to work, 6 devoted to sleep. That leaves 7 hours devoted to family, chores, exercise/hobby (my part-time gig)... Just not a ton of time there in the day, and that is already with too little sleep. To think of taking MORE of that time to commute seems insane.

Took a Job in DFW 2 years ago. Went from living 3 miles and 10 minutes from work in Houston to living 50 miles and 75-90 minutes from work across the metroplex. My previous Houston commues had ranged between 25 and 37 miles and 35-50 minutes. I had a year of being 1 mile from work and it was just too close. 

I made my 100 mile roundtrip commute for 7 months here in DFW and then moved. 

As long as the commute is not taxing for you mentally, do it. And then you can evaluate moving at a later time. 

The wear and tear added up for me on a new car. 

In reply to Streetwiseguy :

Yeah.  To say the idea is daunting is an understatement.  The 200 mile route is longer, but it is all highway with only one or two choke points.  The only thing that would make it work is if they let me do it 2 days a week and work remote the rest.  Then I would end up with about the same amount of commuting as I do now (time-wise, distance would be a little better).

Fueled by Caffeine said:

What does this role gi e you that your current is not? 

Well, there's a lot to this question, but to sum it up, it would allow me to have the opportunity to support researchers in a multitude of science fields (I'm a Meteorologist by education and spent my first 6 years doing meteorological research for air traffic control weather info systems) using my HPC skills and knowledge.  I've been looking for a position like this for 13 years.  I've missed working that part of my brain/knowledge.  They do climate research, ocean/marine research, DNA Sequencing/bioinformatics on everything in the ocean, plus they build sea vehicles or many sorts.  It sucks that it is far away, but I talked with this institute 3 years ago and remote work was not possible and money was going to be a cut.  They've reached out to me several times over the intervening years, but it still wasn't time on my end.  This time, my current job had me pissed off enough to write back. 

While my current employer pays me very well, they haven't been willing to spend any significant money on their HPC environment (11,000 CPU cores, 700+ GPU units, 10PB of storage capacity) in the last 4 years.  Little bit here or there, but the environment is mostly 5-8 years old, some is 10.  And now they want to move this all to the cloud.  The vendors of the products we have bought have even said you don't do it at this scale, which is what I've been saying for 2+ years...  It is going to cost the company at least 5-10x what a decent replacement plan would cost for an on-prem new architecture to do it in the cloud.  But we are "not a datacenter company" and we need to be "agile".  So, with that, I've never really been able to get out of the role of top-tier ops support and image builder, and the fact that last summer, R&D dropped an a blurb into a company wide email that they were setting up their own HPC cloud team and would leave the existing team to hold down the fort until they were in the cloud within two years (they would like one).  That was enough to sign their own warrant.

OHSCrifle said:

In reply to dxman92 :

only once. Since then I only consider jobs with the opposite. A long commute is like a slow death sentence. 
 

 

In reply to Wxdude10 - Mike :

if the job is good, I would think MOVING might make a lot more sense than giving that job 3-4 hours of you life every day.

 

Yeah, I'm locked-in to my current location for another 5 years.  My kids need to graduate from their school.  My wife and I both feel very strongly about this.  We both moved at about 12, never really adjusted to it well.  I have twins who are juniors and an 8th grader.  I can suck up just about anything for them.  And long term, this could be an awesome fit for our forever dreams. But everything has to align right, because this is my first interview for this try at getting out.  I knocked it out of the park, so I need to see what they can do.  It is just taking a while to get a final decision...

Knurled. said:

z31maniac said:

A company would have to belaying me quite a handsome sun if money for me to go back to a long commute.

I have an 11 mile.round trip commute, 3 days per week. Work from home 2 days. Like $15-20k more per year.

You need a more fun car to drive.

 

/commute went from 20 minutes to 40, income went up by double

/yes, my drove to work both sucks and is enjoyable

All surface streets. 40-45 mph speed limit, tons of stoplights.

With the 135 I was constantly annoyed I couldn't open it up.

Today it took me almost an hour to get home just because of the snowstorm and people in front of me not being able to get up hills or drive faster than 15 mph. It normally takes less than 20 minutes. berkeley long commutes, even this one-off event had me frustrated as hell.

I went from a 2 mile round trip commute to a 90 mile round trip commute. It's awful, but I don't regret it. In my case it was a huge move up and I wasn't going to get the same type of opportunity close to home.

I've been doing it for three years now and will continue to do it for the foreseeable future, but at some point I'm going to want to work closer to home.

I have ZERO interest moving closer to Boston so I'm putting up with it.

I took the position and I start December 2nd. The position looks like a good fit for me and salary increase is legit enough to warrant it.

I went from a  22 mile round trip commute to a 105 mile round trip commute 1.5 years ago. It wasn't a lateral move and I wouldn't have a similar opportunity closer to my home. The drive is bearable with podcasts and music occupying my time, but I've had bad 1.5hr commutes that make me question it.

With that said, I am thinking of moving 11 miles from work and into the city (Philly), cutting my commute in half. The main driver for that is to have a better social life as Delaware is soul sucking for me.

MINIzguy said:

With that said, I am thinking of moving 11 miles from work and into the city (Philly), cutting my commute in half. The main driver for that is to have a better social life as Delaware is soul sucking for me.

Where are you in Delaware?  Im in Newark and we have a small but pretty active sports car club you could get involved in.  We do autocrosses, road rallies, and drift events, as well as some social stuff like museum trips in the off season.

In mid-1960's I was promised this.  Surely it will happen by 2020?  This will be coming soon, I believe.  
 

143 miles each way. 

Next job may be 305 miles each way.

Oh well...