I just skimmed it, I'd say what makes this atypical is he's trying to do it on a budget. A "normal" supercommuter would be working as a consultant or something and have travel baked in to their pay, so they would not have to skimp in the same way. It's actually (unsurprisingly) pretty easy to commute if you don't worry about your budget. Buy a flight pass, find a regular hotel, and expense your meals. Maybe some people also enjoy playing budget traveller, I think that would make it unbearable.
I don't see how you've come to the conclusion that what you've described is normal and not an outlier (though perhaps common in a particular elite field).
Isn't it the standard for basically the entire consulting industry? No consulting firm I've ever heard of is flying their people around (or feeding them) on their own dime when they're assigned to a project.
Especially since the company has to pay for it one way or another, so they might as well have it as a line item in their budget so they can control and expect the costs instead of just building it into salary.
It's not normal to be a supercommuter, but if you are one, it's pretty typical to be doing it on someone else's dime. It's not your own bed at home, but it's a lot more pleasant that doing all that moving around and having to pay your own way.
My dad and all of his coworkers (well, independent contractors in the same line of work in the same general area, they all knew each other) worked this way, as have all the people I know who have done this. Not as McKinsey consultants, just people with specific skills that were easier to contract for on a per-job basis. Work M-F up to six hours’ drive from home (need a car at remote sites, so not much flying), home for weekends, reimbursed for mileage, hotel, meals on the road. One month to one year per job, depending.
The only one who ever paid his own way was when he relocated for family but kept the old job for about a year. Inheriting a family-owned apartment in a relatively lower cost of living area while keeping a high-income job in HCOL area made it financially work for him — no rent, no mortgage, family to help care for young kids. But he got tired of not seeing them, so he didn’t keep it up.
Well, we've established that HN posters consider their experience with supercommuting consultants to be the norm. However, knowing that HN posters are also likely to name some multiple of the median income as "middle class" because of their experience living lives of relative privilege in HCOL cities, I'm inclined to suspect that your dad and all his coworkers and all the people you know are less representative of the average supercommuter than, say, your last example. Because my understanding is that the typical person with 2hr+ commutes is someone who is forced to take inefficient public transit, or who has to live far from their jobs in HCOL cities.
Thank your for your perspective; I am now asking you to be intellectually honest in questioning if it's correct.
I’m not averse to continuing this conversation but bedtime calls. Check again tomorrow, late, this is an interesting topic and I would very much like to talk more.
Also, as a side issue: I am not in computing or technology at all; I am a physician, an anesthesiologist, in the USA. I like and use computers, but I’m a hanger-on, at best, around here. Some of us like tech, and there are some (not me) who are brilliant programmers.
My father was a petroleum landman, and based on what I knew about our income growing up (which was not extensive, but I'm not blind), we were dead middle of the band for US household income (like, almost exactly at the median). My mother went to work as soon as my younger sister started kindergarten, and had had side hustles for years before that. So we were definitely middle class, and not in the same way that I'm upper middle class (i.e., I am UMC because I don't have fuck-you money, but I make a lot more than even most UMC people).
And I grew up in Mississippi. So, you know, not exactly a rich area.
However, I don't have any data on what public transit looks like in terms of commuting. So... who knows? But I'm not some scion of a posh suburb who thinks that having gone to public school makes them oh-so-middle-class. And the guy who commuted LCOL to HCOL for a year? He lived with his mother and grandmother in a small house in a rough neighborhood (i.e., you could expect to hear gunfire nightly) growing up. He just had a goal and some luck.
Dead middle-of-the-band for US household income, in Mississippi (particularly historically) makes you the scion of a posh suburb indeed. Note that a common characteristic of people of unusual means relative to their locality is that they insist that they're average; in-and-of-itself, it's not convincing.
I think my point still stands, regardless. No one has yet explained how they know that consultants make up the bulk of supercommuters.
Lots of friends of mine have worked as consultants where they get sent to distant cities for weeks or months at a time. Their lodging, meals, and travel back home every weekend were covered by their employers. At least once for someone straight out of college, so nothing particularly "elite" about his skills.
