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The Value of You

During WWDC, I had dinner with a friend who held a senior position at a large company in the valley. We were chatting about various things but, as so often in this global village, the topic turned to air travel. I recounted the sorry tale of my uncomfortable trip to WWDC on some of Continental’s smaller aircraft - the 737-800 and 757. I explained to my friend how my schedule had involved travelling 18 hours into SFO and, in the next day or so, presenting my current and future work to most of the Flickr dev team. I then described my generally poor levels of energy and mental clarity in that presentation because of the travelling.

My friend was incredulous that I had not travelled business class.

I tried to explain how expensive it was - and it certainly is expensive to fly business to the west coast. My ticket would have cost £2000-2500 instead of the £560 I paid. My lunch partner was having none of this. His response, which I’ll never forget, was along the lines of: “Well, how valuable is a meeting with the best minds at your most important business partner?”

One of the most interesting things I find, when going between my various circles in Britain and America, is the differing values placed on the time and productivity of people. Google is, of course, famous for their provision of services at work to their staff.

Investing in the happiness, comfort and productivity of people seems to be a rare attitude in Britain. I’m sure it’s not universal in the US either, but it does appear to be a little more common.

Another anecdote: When I was a student, I did an internship programming Java at Eclipse Services in Philadelphia. One day, the lead developer’s dev machine broke down. I was expecting 2-3 days of downtime whilst it was repaired, but the boss said: “If you can’t fix it yourself this morning, go out and get yourself a new machine this afternoon”. Another lesson I’ve never forgotten, and that was approaching ten years ago now: the lead dev could earn more for the business in one day than a new machine costs.

I’m not saying that nobody in Britain thinks that way, but I have a hard time imagining the above scenario being played out in a UK business, outside of mission critical systems.

Thoughts from both sides of the Atlantic would be very welcome in the comments.

Europe-side of the pond. It goes certainly in the direction of how it’s done in the UK.

I don’t know. I think it’s very different depending where you work. At my work, a university, the rule is “as cheap as possible” and sometimes I get the feeling that it’s better that I spend 2-3 days trying to do something that I could do in 2 hours if I could buy X for $50. On the other hand, I also visited companies that reason in the same way as the Sun people in your example.

In general I think there is a difference between europe and the US, much in the same way as you describe. But I think there is a difference between Britain and Sweden also, with Sweden somewhere between Britain and the US.

I think there is a difference, but I think many people assume you have a corporate backer with a large travel budget, or you have many frequent flier miles that allow for a cheap ticket AND an upgrade to business class. Folks in the US, above a certain level, do get compensated for their Value, so to speak: business class airfare, nice hotel accomodations, a car service instead of a rental car. I think your lunch companion believed you to be in that class, where the bill is footed by someone else’s largesse and not your own pocketbook.

At my old company, that level often had VP in the title, and they were also the people allowed to “work from home” and had their cellphone paid for, plus their on-site parking.

The business-class anecdote troubles me, because it would still be a foolish waste of money, no matter how much it represents “valuing you.” At some point the “not bankrupting you” value has to be more highly praised

A good compromise - instead of spending $4000 more on a plane ticket, would have been to pad your trip with two extra travel days. For an extra $1000 you could stay in a very nice hotel for two nights, and eat at fine restaurants. Even get a massage, if it would help.

Would you be better prepared to meet your business partners after stepping off a business class flight? No massage.

Your friend sounds a bit of a tool.

I don’t see traveling business class as anything other than a nice luxury. The flight isn’t going to be any shorter. You’re still stuck in a tin can for N hours.

I’ve worked in the US for ~9 years now and I think the attitude varies from company to company more than it does between US and UK. I’ve worked at companies in both countries where if you need a new machine or piece of software, good luck. I’ve also worked at places where the opposite is true. I think it depends more on the mindset/culture of the company in question than anything else.

Not necessarily a tool, but your friend certainly sounds like someone accustomed to spending someone else’s money.

I’m all for identifying your own value ( http://niherlas.com/2004/10/01/what_am_i_worth.html ) but you also have to identify what resources you actually have. Sometimes you have a surfeit of time, a deficit of money, and no easy way to convert one into the other. Or sometimes something is right at the edge of your available resources (as it sounded with the flight), so you have to get by however you can.

I spent 14 years working for university. Time was generally viewed as an ample resource. If you didn’t have staff to do it, then get a grad student or undergrad on the cheap. “man hours” was viewed as an ample resource (although those making that decision usually didn’t take needed skill-sets into account).

For the past 2.5 years, I’ve been in a corporate environment. We hire a lot more consultants, and spent a lot more on travel. To a certain level, our time is valued more (save that IT in this company is often viewed as on-par with administrative staff). But we don’t have a pool of cheap student labor available…

@Daniel: The padding was pretty much what I did, at least with respect to WWDC itself - flying in late on the Wednesday before.

@Jonathan: He’s definitely not a tool, I assure you.

@Jim: As you know, I also spent a decade in the university environment and it’s perhaps the (not terribly pleasant) memory of that experience that makes me lean far in the other direction now.

Another angle on this is core competency: is it a valid part of my business to be doing this, or should I pay someone to make the problem go away? Example that comes to mind: our department in the University paying a senior sysadmin good money to do little else but battle spam all day. If ever there was a problem that we should have outsourced, that was it.

You have to take into account the different general working practices in Europe vs. USA. Would you trade 6 weeks leave and a 37-hour week for a few business-class flights?

The fact that you were paying for the flight suggests you couldn’t justify the cost for business class to yourself, so how could you convince an employer to do it? The notion of personal value is also highly flexible. I find that, in business, it is generally because employees don’t really want to make the trip that they make it harder for the employer by increasing the cost. However if they were very keen to go they would be happy for someone else to pay.

I think there is tremendous value in what your friend said. Now, does that translate into always flying business class? Of course not. I go to about two conferences a year and I work in higher education. Obviously I’m not spending an incredible amount of time on planes, so United Economy Plus is just fine (especially for somebody who is 5′6″/1.68 meters). But even when I’m not presenting I pad the trip with a day on each end.

Ideally you find a way to get what you need (a sane travel plan) without breaking the bank.

Investing in the happiness of employees is not unversal in the US. Not even common in most industries. It is certainly more common in software.

As for the comment about UK likely not replacing a machine outside of mission critical systems, they would be wise to realize - like Eclipse Systems - that for a software firm, a development machine is in fact a mission critical system.

I can second your observations. It is more clearly seen if you are a consultant and learn to plan your projects based on your hourly rate. Then you can put exact value on these few hours missed because, say, your wireless router broke.
It is even more obvious if you have more than one highly qualified person doing nothing because of $80 router. Just couple of hours lost for a team of 5 developers usually will be 10 times the cost of buying a new one.

The question is not how valuable is the meeting with your partners, it’s what is the opportunity cost of spending £2000 on an upgrade? In non-economics terms: What’s more valuable to your business right now — spending £2000 and having a flight that’s a bit more comfortable … or a new Mac Pro, two months work from a part-time secretary, or a small advertising push?

For larger business, the opportunity cost of £2000 is quite small — they have lots of £2000s. You presumably don’t, so deciding what you spend them on is more of a factor, and I’m betting there are better things to spend it on than a blue blanket and better in-flight movies.

After all, you don’t have a huge glass-windowed office and executive furniture either, do you?

I dunno… I don’t see much of it in the US. I work for a fairly famous university, and there’s no way in hell we’d ever get a perk like business class. And I’d generally say that I have far better benefits and “perks” than most of the people I know, especially people outside of tech — although I think the tech market is far more of a grind for the majority of workers than we think.

Google is a freakshow compared to 99% of US businesses (although they certainly aren’t known for top-flight salaries). It will be interesting to see if they can sustain this kind of thing in 10-15 years, or if shareholders will demand that they start maximizing profits when things “normalize.”

The problem with this type of thinking is not whether it’s right or wrong, but when do you stop? Why don’t you fly business class to meet your 2nd and 3rd most important clients? Why waste time hiring a rent-a-car when you can hire a limo for the week to ferry you between meetings? Why do your own laundry & dish washing when you can hire a butler? We’d all like to be “rich enough not to waste time” (Gordon Gekko, Wall Street), but the reality is that one has to balance resources against time. Heck, why fly commercial when you can take a private jet? Answer: Because you can’t afford it… A lot of people say things that are easy to say and difficult to do. Perhaps you could have avoided being tired for your meetings by resting before-hand. The most valuable commodity we have is time, but time management is the one skill they don’t teach you in school. Throwing money at it is never the solution to better time management…

My justification for going business class next time I travel to the US is that, aside from not going insane from the screaming kid next to me, I’m going to get a day’s work done. However, I hadn’t quite looked into the price difference before making that assertion.

Given that information, chances are I’d instead have opted to pad the trip out with a couple of nights in a decent hotel with wi-fi. I can work pretty much anywhere and, bizarrely, I can sometimes focus better in unfamiliar environments, so it wouldn’t be a loss of my time.

In general, however, I’m having one of these battles with one particular client just now. (I get way too involved in office politics, I think!) All of the staff in the office have recently been forced to switch to Thunderbird for their email. They all *like* Outlook. Outlook is *not* being a support headache (they’ve outsourced the mail server component to me). They already even have Outlook licences, so it’s not a cost issue. And they’re pissed off, so it’s affecting their productivity. To me, that’s a no-brainer, even if new licences for MS Office *were* required: “my staff are happier with Outlook, make it so.”

Outlook’s probably a silly example, but the general point holds well for me: in the long run, I’ll get a greater ROI from my team if they’re happy with their jobs. If that means spending £2,500 on a flight so that a member of my team perceives they’ll be well-rested and do their best, it’s a no-brainer.

Modulo having the cash spare, that is.

I don’t know where you’re getting your prices from, but it sounds like you’d be better off flying using e.g. Virgin’s Premium Economy service rather than whoever-you’re-quoting’s Business Class. It costs significantly less than the figure you quote to get to San Francisco from the U.K. (on a direct flight), and you’ll rapidly clock up flying miles doing it (which, if you go to WWDC at least once every two years, don’t expire), which makes the average cost much lower.

That’s how *I* travelled to WWDC on the two occasions that I’ve been, and I don’t view it as a waste of money—more an investment in my sanity Running my own small business, I don’t get a great deal of time off, so I don’t begrudge the business spending a bit more on my flight and on the hotel I’m staying in if it makes me more comfortable and gives me a chance to unwind a bit. Before going to WWDC I felt a bit burnt out, frankly. Having returned, I’m a lot more active again. It’s worth the money, for me at least.

(I would probably view Virgin’s Upper Class or BA’s First Class or similar as a waste of money right now. Though I can understand why busy people in transatlantic companies might not see it that way. It’s quite a complicated value judgement, I think; you have to factor in how much that person’s time is worth to the company, how long they’re staying, how important their goodwill is to the company, not to mention all sorts of other things. Also, don’t forget that a lot of larger companies get significant discounts on these kinds of things, especially if they have regular travellers.)

Alastair, I’m working from memory of BA’s Club World seats. Unfortunately, virgin don’t connect to flights through to Glasgow.