I once rode a long distance bus in Vietnam that arrived in a remote part of Danang late at night. One of the people I'd met on the bus invited me to stay at his house for the night. Awesome experience, until he woke me up at 5:00 am.
He was in his suit, waiting for me to get up and leave so he could go to work. He'd already given me an hour to be polite, but now he was quite late for work and really needed to get going.
Contrast that to my experience trying to find somebody to sell me a cup of coffee at 9:00 am on a Monday in Finland. Nobody was even planning to open until 10.
As a hot country, do the Vietnamese have a "siesta" of sorts? Until recently, and still in some cases, Italian work hours were often 08:00-12:00, then 16:00-20:00. People would not start socializing in the evening until 22:00.
In my opinion I would highly recommend almost any part of Asia - my favorites being Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia & Indonesia.
A lot depends on what you want get out of it and how long you plan on travelling though. A two or three week trip is a very different experience to staying somewhere for a number of months.
Canada or Mexico. Keep it simple, affordable and doable. And just go. (Assuming by America you mean the USA)
Else English speaking first world, (UK, NZ) then change one of those things at a time as you gain experience.
Most of Northern and western Europe are pretty easy for someone who only speaks English too. An English speaker would have little trouble getting by in Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, or Sweden, and probably a lot more countries as well.
The languages are even similar enough that if you pick up a travel dictionary/phrasebook, you could probably even do it without bothering the locals too much.
As someone who has seen a little bit of the world himself, I will give my answer too:
It depends. Every country in the world has something that makes it worth visiting. We don't know what your interests are, what your budget is, what kind of comfort you are willing to sacrifice, how adventurous you are.
SF starting at 8:17 a.m. caught me a little by surprise. I work in SF and have a few friends who work at different companies (20-somethings and 30-somethings, working in tech).
Almost everyone I know comes in to work sometime from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. The Caltrains reaching SF from 9:05 to 9:30 are generally packed, so are the N and KT muni lines; so I am guessing it isn't only my social circle that starts their day early.
Of course I know a few people who start their day at 8:00 a.m. but it came to me as a complete surprise that the average is 8:17 a.m.
SF starting at 8:17 a.m. caught me a little by surprise. I work in SF and have a few friends who work at different companies (20-somethings and 30-somethings, working in tech).
Almost everyone I know comes in to work sometime from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
I think you've captured the essence of the HN bubble in three sentences.
since I am obviously not of that type, I am curious why the late start? I have always been of the sort to start early and finish early. There is so much wonderful time to spend outdoors and with friends, especially in summer hours.
We make jokes around here about getting out in time to get caught by school buses or beat the kids home which results in having nearly half the day in sunlight.
Not everyone is an early riser. I can guarantee you that being an early riser and having some time to kill in the mornings is less of a problem than being a late riser and never getting enough sleep because your stupid job mandates you get in early to keep up appearances.
You have to keep appearances everywhere. I have worked in tech for three years across two different cities now. An old grad school habit of mine that has carried over is waking up insanely early, getting to work and getting my shit done and getting out around five. I have never had a job where I haven't got shit for being the guy who leaves work on the clock at five when everyone is going for their first burrito of the night.
> since I am obviously not of that type, I am curious why the late start? I have always been of the sort to start early and finish early. There is so much wonderful time to spend outdoors and with friends, especially in summer hours.
I think it is a tech thing. When I lived in SF, I used to get out of home at 8 AM. The streets would be empty but for the blue collar workers going to their jobs (showing how much white collar is tech). In NYC, 8 AM is packed. Yet, at work there is an odd split with the tech folks wandering in at 10 AM or what have you and the others at 9 AM sharp. (Approximately of course.)
You can enjoy the outdoors more (especially summer) if you start your day a little later. You can go running or biking in the morning when the sun is getting up (6a->8a), go to work for the direct sunlight hours (930a->630p), and then you're free to do whatever you want until the sun is down and your apartment/house is cool for sleeping.
I'd say people tend to start early in Denmark for the same reason. Especially in summer, if you work a 7am-3pm or 8am-4pm schedule, you finish work early enough to have a nice block of 5+ post-work sunlight hours that you can use to organize a nontrivial post-work outing with friends/family. On sunny days it's pretty common for people to try to leave work by 3pm so they can go home, change, and then head out to the beach or a picnic by 4pm, while it's still warm and you've got some hours of sunlight left.
This could be influenced by the fact that it's rarely too hot in Denmark; a "very hot" day is maybe 27 C (80 F). So there's no need to avoid the hottest part of the day; quite the opposite.
I have the same anecdotal evidence, but I started thinking about all SF's other industries, and the folks I see already at work when I walk my dog.
According to http://www.bayareaeconomy.org/wp-content/uploads/San_Francis... there are a lot of non-tech sectors to balance out engineer working hours (as a PM I'd usually be in by 9). Construction, transportation (hi SFO), education, healthcare, some retail and some tourism jobs will all balance out those who arrive later.
In fact, the Caltrain schedule itself reflects peak arrive-at-work hours, I'd imagine. With perhaps some disgruntled folks who get up earlier just to get a faster train (7:59, I'm looking st you.)
SF is (or used to be until recently) the West Coast's banking center, and everyone in that industry has to be ready when markets open on the East Coast at 5am Pacific.
I wonder how much the financial services industry effects san Francisco's median since a lot of people have to get in prior to the market opening at 6:30 PST.
Agree, I think the financial market skewed these results in SF. Most engineers and startup employees I know generally get to work at 9:30, 10am, or even later.
My impression of SF is that 9:30 is definitely at the tail end of the rush-hour. You can see that in the Caltrain schedules (express trains run ~6:30-9:00am), and even if you just walk around the city. There's a lot of activity already by 7am, while the bustle is noticeably starting to die down after 9am. There are some workplaces that don't start the day until ~10am (some tech companies, restaurants that don't do breakfast, maybe some stores), but the city seems pretty up-and-running long before that.
The service sector generally starts between 7 and 8, and is pretty large.
I generally start working (on blogging side projects) around 7:00 but don't show up at my day job till 9:30. I'd have to be a partner/founder/MD/CxO level before I'd be OK with 7:00 meetings. Why would I give the morning hours away?
If I could get up at 5:00 without being too out-of-sync with the rest of the world, I would. It's insanely productive. I seem to be naturally creeping in the early direction by about 15 minutes per year I age.
The place I have seen with the strongest custom about work hours is Japan. I spent a few days in Tokyo, and everyone always talks about the famous "Tokyo Rush Hour", so we got up early and went for a walk through the city. My wife and I went and looked at the fish market at about 7:30, and had breakfast around 8 and the streets were empty. At about 8:20 there were a few people out, but not many. Then around 8:30 it started to get crowded. By 8:40 the streets were packed, people were cramming cheek to cheek on the subway, and we had to find an out of the way place to watch so that we didn't get trampled.
Then, at 9am, everything went silent. The intersections that were filled with people a few minutes earlier were vacant, and you could see just one or two other people on the street, like a women carrying her shoes and sprinting down the sidewalk, for example.
Japan has a very strict society, and it appears that part of that is 90% of the people have to show up at work at exactly 9am, and not a minute earlier or later. I would much rather show up a half hour early and enjoy one of the easiest commutes of any major city.
Interesting anecdote living in Sydney Australia. I'm from Canada, and was speaking to a friend who moved here from the UK. Going to work here people say "what did you do this morning?" seems like a strange question in most other places I've lived as the answer would be "I brushed my teeth and stumbled into work", but here, everybody is out doing something in the morning. Running, swimming, surfing, apparently even shopping. A very different beast in deed.
I recently moved to Melbourne from Christchurch, NZ. I've been living pretty close to the freeway to the CBD, and it surprises me how early in the morning traffic starts building. Two days a weeks I have to be up by 6:30, and by that time there are already traffic jams.
I wonder whether because of the warmer climate, people don't have such a problem with getting up early. In a Christchurch winter (I'm sure it's the same in most of Canada) it will certainly be below 0°C at 6:30. The record low for Melbourne city is only -2.8°C, versus -7.1°C for Christchurch.
At my workplace in Helsinki, Finland we have a flex time. You can come in between 7.00 and 10.00 in the morning and leave between 15.00 and 18.00. Meetings are allowed only between 10-15 if otherwise not agreed with the participants. The time spans are set by Finnish law which says that you need to be working at least 5h per day and max 10h, overtime must separately be agreed with your manager.
Some of our coders come in at around 8 in the morning, others at 10.
Interesting that this is basically the de jure practice of my company (in the US) as well. I think a few meetings are outside that frame, but only to sync with global offices.
New York is all the way to the east of its timezone, which may explain why it starts "late". There are two effects at play here.
1)the official time, which affects hours of operations for businesses
2)the mean solar time, which affects sleeping cycles
What you'd want is to predict starting time as a function of the difference between these variables and then rank the cities by their residuals.
I thought it would be interesting to see what the commute time trends look like for cities on each end of the arrival times (early vs. late), so I grabbed some data from the Census Bureau and guessed at rough metro areas (since Nate doesn't clarify what each one consists of, could be MSA, could be city limits, etc.) using county-level data.
I only took the top 5 metros on each end because I had to do a fair chunk of this by hand and I wasn't feeling doing any more. I also threw in a bar of relative densities just for fun.
Here are those results (pardon my excel, for it was not worth opening IDLE): http://imgur.com/a/qCmwB
A couple notes:
1. Big cities are certainly skewing this, both in terms of traffic issues and population density.
2. My metro areas could be totally wrong.
3. This is only calculating the commute of people within the areas I defined, while the article is talking about arrival time at work in (hopefully) the same areas.
4. Yes, I have the word "Average" too many times in the title of the first graph, sorry.
Still, I think the graph paints a neat picture of opposite trends.
There wasn't really any evidence provided in this article that the late-start cities 'sleep in'. Perhaps people in SF just enjoy a leisurely breakfast on the balcony, watching the Sun rise, rather than rushing into the office?
Personally I have to be up at 05:30 to take care of the dog / kids / housework / exercise / have some personal time but don't start work until 11:00.
Better to have the bright mornings to myself than the dark evenings when I'm tired.
It's be interesting to compare these results to apparent time, e.g. the offset between what the watch says and the position of the sun. I'd wager these distributions would overlap a lot more if you based them on apparent time, and I'd suspect a strong correlation between the outliers in this study and the offset between apparent time and wall time.
I wish the article went more in depth on potential causes.
I suspect the dominant factor is the expectations of the largest industries in the city, but that's only mentioned for military towns.
To give an example: as a Seattleite, I was initially surprised to see how much earlier the average starting time is compared to San Francisco or San Jose. However, I think the relatively early start times at, say, Boeing are an effective offset to the later start times at Microsoft and Amazon, and this likely accounts for most of the difference.
Interesting that it mentioned Bakersfield California as one of the early risers... I lived there for a while and worked in the oil industry, and the parking lot was full by 7:30. I had a ton of meetings at 7:00, and 6:00 ones too. My boss started work at 5:00 and left by 2:00. I figured a lot of it was because the operator shift change was at 6AM, so people were just used to the idea that the work day starts early. Plus it gets darn hot in the afternoons in Bakersfield :)
Those hours sound horrible. Over here (UK), 9 is fairly common, 8 is an 'early' common start, and many other people have 8.30, unless you work in retail or something. No way I'd do anything before 8 as that is a struggle enough.
Most jobs occur during the day, but would data on night workers reveal anything? It is still a significant slice of the workforce, often in vital areas:
Medical staff working long shifts
Firemen
Security guards, military personnel and police
Bar and pub staff
Cleaners
Heavy industry such as car manufacturing
Astronomers and astronauts
My grandfather worked as a steeplejack at Port Talbot in South Wales. The steel mill there followed the European shift: 06:00 - 14:00, 14:00 - 22:00, 22:00 - 06:00. There would have been very little variance in starting times, the work load was simply too high. Sometimes my grandfather would spend a whole shift working in the furnace, wearing a hot, sweaty protective suit. After the shift, if the pubs were still open, he would line up four pints of beer on the bar and down them all within about five minutes.
The problem is you almost need to consider 100% coverage jobs as a separate category. Late shift starting time is more decided based on when they want the early shift coming in than their own preferences.
Similarly for "after hours" jobs such as cleaners or pub staff. They are required to start after everyone leaves so kind of get limited based on that (although that is only a one sided limit, so you could see if some started later).
However I think you do have a point, there are a significant number of jobs where this is still valuable, such as those that want heavy coverage but overlap shifts enough for there to be flexibility, or jobs that want night time (vs after hours) such as astronomy.
A lot of new yorkers owe their life because they did not get too early to work on 9/11. This number includes a friend of mine that was in a subway train on the way to the towers when the attack happened. Luckily the train stopped short of its destination.
I always thought only the Germans are crazy to start work (and school) extremely early in the day. Turns out it's the same in the US but I've only lived in two of the top 5 cities on that list (Ithaca, NY and SF Bay Area)...
By starting the day early, Germans start 'Feierabend' earlier too. It isn't uncommon for people in full time jobs to finish at 4:30pm, giving them time to enjoy the end of the daylight.
That being said, I live in Germany but work UK hours, which means I start at 9:30-10am and finish after 6:30pm local time. I have a vitamin D deficiency. Go figure!
Yes, Germans are crazy regarding working hours, at my last job at an engineering shop many co-workers started at 6 am, some even at 5(!), making "Feierabend" at around 2 pm. Nothing unusual.
10 to 4 with a one hour lunch is my preferred working hours if I'm going to be selling my labor to someone else at least. Unfortunately, American culture doesn't agree with me. Perhaps I should move to France :)
I'd like to see this adjusted for types of work. Comparing the people sitting in offices to the people working in the service industry, flipping eggs or handing out newspapers, can probably skew things considerably.
I bet the industry makes a lot of difference too. I worked in an MDF factory in North Carolina for a while, and everyone there agreed on 0700 to 1530 for the standard work day. My impression is that people with desk jobs like to sleep in a little later.
Now, as a graduate student in Boston I get in by 0730 every day mostly to avoid traffic. If I sleep in by a half hour it takes twice as long to get to work.
In the old days, when any moderately sized city had at least two newspapers, it was common to find a conservative morning paper for the white collar folks, who read it over breakfast, and a liberal one for the factory workers, who read it once they got home. (Liberal and conservative here being defined economically.)
I wanted to point out out that the source of the data is pretty limited. There must be a better way to do this -- eg. looking at sybway traffic, internet searches? I dunno, something that would pick up signals from more people and do so on a global scale rather than the national scale. Surely we think the global variation is more interesting than the national one.
SF sounds so great ... get up late to a leisurely breakfast served to you by others before communing with nature. The rest of the world is really missing out.
I know he's talking about averages but his story can confuse you when he talks about when people start work and when they arrive.
I'm immediately suspect of his numbers when he says the typical starting time in St. Louis is 7:50AM. I've lived in St. Louis all my life and only had one short-lived job that started before 8AM. Every other job I had started at 8AM to 8:30AM. I don't know anyone who has a normal, every day job that starts earlier than that and I wouldn't even think to call someone at their business earlier than that.
There are plenty of restaurants, coffee shops, grocery stories, and schools in St. Louis that open before 8am, and they make up a substantial proportion of St. Louis's total employment, as do other early-rising occupations like construction and healthcare. I could believe that corporate office jobs typically start around 8:00 to 8:30, but the median could still be earlier than that if you include all jobs.
You were probably in white-collar jobs. Those tend to have later starting times. Service sector and blue-collar jobs (which make up a large portion of the workforce) frequently have earlier starting times.
I always find it bizarre to see harsh reactions to interesting data. It doesn't seem very hacker-like to me. Isn't it enough just to be interesting data? Maybe you can spot patterns here that help you understand the types of industry in a city. Or some kind of collective cultural phenomenon. Who knows? That's why data is fun!
Oh, and many people still go to work in a suit every day. They even like it that way.
See the titles of the charts "Not getting the worm" / "Getting the worm".
The data is interesting. For me, all other things being equal, I'd prefer a later start, 10am ~ 11am. Being in video games I've worked at companies that effectively started as late as 2pm :P
I figure it's one of those ego things. You know, the whole bit about needing social validation of ones' own choices. So any attention not in support of that person's views feel like a personal attack.
I once rode a long distance bus in Vietnam that arrived in a remote part of Danang late at night. One of the people I'd met on the bus invited me to stay at his house for the night. Awesome experience, until he woke me up at 5:00 am.
He was in his suit, waiting for me to get up and leave so he could go to work. He'd already given me an hour to be polite, but now he was quite late for work and really needed to get going.
Contrast that to my experience trying to find somebody to sell me a cup of coffee at 9:00 am on a Monday in Finland. Nobody was even planning to open until 10.