I go to the office for the bike, not for the office
14 km each way, four years, rain or not. What it does to my work, and why I stopped arguing about remote vs office.
Contents
Every few weeks there is a remote vs office fight in this topic. I want to give a different answer. I go to the office three days a week. Not because of the office. Because of the bike.
Context. I live in Utrecht, the office is in an industrial area at the edge of the city, 14 km. I go with the bike. 35 to 40 minutes depending on wind, most of it on a separate fietspad next to a canal. It is boring. That is the point.
What the ride does
- Morning: the design happens on the bike. No podcasts. Just ride. Around kilometre 6 my brain starts to sort out the problem from yesterday. I have solved more Postgres locking issues on that canal than at my desk. Last month: a deadlock between two jobs that both updated the same order rows, in a different order. I understood it at the traffic light near the bridge. Fix was to lock rows in a consistent order (
SELECT ... ORDER BY id FOR UPDATEin both jobs). Five minutes when I arrived. - Evening: the ride is the end of the day. When I work from home, the day never ends, the laptop is still there on the kitchen table. On the bike, the work stays at kilometre 0. At kilometre 14 I am a father, not a staff engineer.
- Fitness without "doing fitness". 28 km × 3 days × 46 weeks is about 3,800 km per year. I have never been in a gym and my resting heart rate is 52. I am not saying this to brag. Okay, a little.
Rain
People always ask about rain. It rains in the Netherlands, yes. But it does not rain all the time. It rains in showers. I check Buienradar before I leave, it shows the rain radar for the next two hours, and I wait 10 minutes if a shower is coming. In four years I have been really wet maybe 15 times. Good rain trousers (the ones that go over your normal trousers) and a jacket that is not a fashion item. Done.
Wind is worse than rain. Headwind on the way home in November is a personal insult.
Why I stopped arguing about remote vs office
Because the answer depends on the commute, not on the office. If my commute was 50 minutes in a car on the A12, I would be fully remote and I would fight for it. My colleague who lives in Amersfoort works from home four days. Correct for her. The office itself is fine. The coffee is bad and the meeting rooms are always taken. The ride is the part that is good.
So my opinion for managers: stop asking "how many days in the office". Ask how people get there. If the trip costs your engineer 2 hours of their life in traffic, you are not getting collaboration, you are getting an angry person who arrives at 10.
Okay. Now I go with the bike.
Written by
Bram Verhoeven
Staff engineer at a logistics scale-up in Utrecht. Distributed systems, Kotlin, Postgres. 14 km by bike each way, rain or not. Boring technology is a feature.
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