Andrew Rendon liked some elements of his commute, though many people wouldn’t. That’s because his commute entailed a roughly 2.5-hour drive and a flight to boot.
Rendon, a 31-year-old DevOps — or development and operations — engineer, and his wife used to live and work in central New Jersey, but within the past year the couple moved to North Carolina, where his wife found a job. His in-laws had also recently moved south.
Rendon and his wife had been renting in New Jersey but he says they knew buying a home there would be too expensive.
“The same square footage, the same type of house that we get down here would be easily twice the cost in New Jersey,” he says.
So they packed up for the Tar Heel State, where they bought a home, and Rendon began supercommuting once a week.
Waking up at 2 a.m.
Most of Rendon’s co-workers on his team were hired during the pandemic-era remote work boom and work remote to this day, he says. Because he was hired later, when return-to-office mandates started rolling out, he didn’t get the same flexibility. Rendon knew his move would mean he’d be supercommuting.
Once a week, Rendon would pack a suitcase and hit the road by 3 a.m., driving roughly 2.5 hours to the Raleigh airport. While there’s a closer airport, airfares are cheaper out of Raleigh, he says. And he’d gotten used to the long drive.
“I love to drive, so I try to find the best of it,” he says. “I listen to a podcast, so that kind of gets me by.”
After his flight, usually 1.5 to 2 hours, he’d arrive in Newark between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. and get on a quick train ride to his office. After the workday, he’d stay in town at a hotel overnight, work one more day in the office, and catch a flight back to Raleigh in the evening.
“I used to love flying as a kid so being able to get on a plane every week, that part is really cool,” he says.
But the constant travel had some negative side effects, too. He’d “gotten sick so many times,” he says.
“The lack of sleep takes a toll, it does kind of catch up,” he adds. “The driving adds to some exhaustion in waking up early.”
Between gas, airfare, hotels and other costs related to his supercommute, he was initially looking at around $1,200 a month. In the last few months, though, that climbed upwards, coming out to around $1,800 or $2,000 a month.
“Dying to find something closer”
After roughly 10 months of weekly flights to work, Rendon accepted a new job, no supercommute necessary.
Rendon says it’s “insane” that it worked out after a dispiriting monthslong search.
Though he liked the work and travel for his old job, he says he’d been “dying to find something closer” as costs rose and he thought about the implications for his home life. But there was “just too much competition” in the job market, he says.
“The job market has been insanely brutal; even for someone with 10 years of IT experience, it’s really bad,” he says. “Everyone’s looking, between layoffs and AI.”
In some ways, Rendon felt the supercommute was easier than the job hunt.
“I had so much burnout that I’d rather do that and just not have to worry about constantly doing the whole spiel, doing the resume, the interview prep,” he says.
In addition, “Employers are expecting a lot more out of you now than they did 3 years ago, for the same job,” he says. “The ball is in their court.”
In the end, though, a recruiter reached out to Rendon and he accepted a new position, with a roughly $40,000 pay cut, that’s in-office in North Carolina 5 days a week.
As for the move, Rendon says, “I wouldn’t second-guess this if I had to do this again tomorrow; I love where we’re living now compared to New Jersey.”
His commute now is much shorter than it was before — roughly 15 minutes driving.
“I get to come home to my wife every single day,” he says. “I will miss the travel…but for now I can live my life again.”
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