I travelled to Denmark for a recruiting event last week. The nature of the travel (2-hour flights plus an hour or so of ground transportation on each end) was not something I was used to; admittedly most of the flights I can remember taking are pretty long-haul ones (London-Singapore, London-San Francisco are by far the most common; London-New York exists too, though is less common). I had a great time, in any case – although being awake for about 24 consecutive hours especially when slightly ill was not too enjoyable, it was nice to meet up with students and flex some speed coding and debugging muscles. I think I still coded well even when really tired, though it did lead to some confusing moments as I tried to understand what exactly “PAY THE PRICE” meant in terms of a discount (it means no discount, but given that there was already “HALF PRICE” and a sliding reduction scheme, this did confuse me quite a bit).
This is just the second trip so far this year, though I anticipate there’ll be quite a few more. The two trips I’ve made so far were for business reasons; I’ve been hammering away at a major project at work that should be drawing to a close soon so there should be scope for personal time off. There are also likely to be more work trips in the pipeline – within the scope of my major project, for company events at large as well as for recruiting purposes. Of course, there would be even more trips if I was a Forward Deployed Engineer as opposed to a dev.
I remember reading an article in the BA inflight magazine en route to Billund, and noted that in some survey, 30 percent of people would accept a lower paying job if it meant that they could travel more for work. I think I subsequently found the survey they were referencing. I certainly would be in the 70 percent of people that would not, though it’s hard to draw an accurate conclusion given the way the question is framed (what’s the baseline here? I’d think people who already travel 50 percent compared to people who don’t travel at all might respond differently to being asked if they would do this to travel “more”). The survey was also commissioned by Booking.com, which might have a vested interest in portraying people as more willing to travel (so that companies would engage travel provider services more).
Of course, in business terms there are the obvious benefits of having in-person interaction between team members and/or getting the people who know what they’re doing on the ground, to see what’s going on. They can be really useful to get things done fast; communicating over instant messaging or even via a video conference doesn’t tend to be as effective.
I would say the upside of travel as far as an individual is concerned includes the opportunity to experience new places and see new sights, though I’m not sure how much of that you could achieve in a business trip. I find that many of the past trips I’ve had had been high-octan fire-filled affairs (though there have been exceptions – and not the programming kind). Other benefits involve meeting up with existing friends and acquaintances in the area (again, the tight schedules of many of my trips in the past precludes this). The article does make reasonable points concerning extending one’s stay, though – I actually did that two years ago when I stayed on in California for an additional week after one such trip – and fluidity of plans leading to last-minute bookings.
One of the things that makes me wary of travelling too much is actually long, unpredictable delays through security and customs – this might partially be a result of the routes I typically fly on (which go through major hubs with lots of traffic). I do have strategies to mitigate this (typically, I book an aisle seat near the front, and walk at a very brisk pace once disembarking from the plane; I also tend to choose flights that arrive at relatively unpopular times). This wasn’t a problem at LCY nor in Billund Airport in Denmark; queues were very short and handled very quickly.
To some extent this can be mitigated by Registered Traveller in the UK, the ability to use the electronic terminals in the US and the biometric gates in Singapore; it’s especially useful for me since I don’t typically travel with checked baggage, making the whole process of leaving the airport and getting where I need to go much faster. I did some computations to check whether the UK Registered Traveller scheme was worthwhile, and in the end decided it was reasonable. I used an assumed number of 12 trips per year with an estimated time savings of 25 minutes per trip (a crude estimate, but there are 20 minutes between the UK Border Force’s benchmarks for non-EU and EU passport queues; going by benchmarks ePassports are probably even faster hence the + 5) to figure out that the net cost was 14 pounds per hour saved post-tax (or 24 pre-tax). It could be argued that those specific hours might have unusually high value (e.g. stress at the end of a long flight), perhaps boosting the case for it. I’ll probably travel even more with Registered Traveller in place, actually.
I guess the other thing that has recently dampened my appetite for travel (at least on the personal front) would be the depreciation in the pound; relative to many people I know my proportion of overseas expenses is actually already fairly high (because of investments; 90% of my equities and 50% of my bonds are based overseas – and I hold much larger quantities of equities than bonds). To some extent I overreacted to Brexit (my savings, even in US dollar terms, have increased from the “Remain” case model I had) and there’s certainly still scope for travel around the EU where the pound has fallen more like 10 as opposed to 16 percent, though the length and luxury of such trips is likely to be reduced.
I’ll be travelling again soon, though it’ll be another of those long flights instead. Nonetheless, at some point in the future I definitely want to revisit Denmark. This trip was focused rather closely on executing the recruiting events in question (well, there isn’t really much you can do with one day anyway; I was in Denmark for less than 24 hours) – while I did get to see a little of the city, there was certainly much more to do.
