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The Tyranny of Distance: Part 2

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Another couple of reasons why it sucks to be an Australian geek. The first article covered the high costs of bandwidth, hardware, technical books, and everything associated with domain registration and hosting. Now let’s talk geography.

4. What time is it, again?

Timezones are the first problem. When I’m at work, the US tech crowd is kicking back for the evening. When I’m at home in the evening trying to hack on a personal project, everyone’s asleep. The vast majority of traffic in technical communities — mailing lists, forums, IRC chats — occurs while I’m in bed. Entire conversation threads can emerge, burst into excited discussion, and then die off without me ever getting a chance to take part in them. In the morning, all an Australian geek can do is read the backlog and, perhaps, post a belated response.

In one-on-one email conversations, discussions that should be a fast-paced back-and-forth can run in slow motion, taking 12 hours each way as each participant waits for the other to wake up. Opportunities for collaboration are vastly reduced. And telecommute jobs, while theoretically a great way to work for an overseas company, just mean that you end up working the graveyard shift trying to do your job.

5. You mean it’s not summer everywhere?

Meanwhile, the planet’s axial tilt means that when it’s summer in the US it’s winter here, and vice versa. This is a much bigger deal than you might think. For one thing, most US-based technical conferences happen over the northern hemisphere’s summer, when people are prone to take vacations. In Australia, however, June/July is the busiest time of the year, with the change from one financial year to another, and it can be hard to get away. We typically take our long vacations in January, when there are no major international conferences happening.

Events like Google’s Summer of Code exclude students in the southern hemisphere who don’t have long vacations around July and can’t dedicate the time required for an open source internship. It looks like they’ve got a handful of Australians anyway, but it’s certainly a barrier to entry.

Take a look at this map from SoC 2005:

(Thanks to Janet Haven for the screencap and link.)

Not many people south of the equator taking part, huh? And it’s not just attributable to the sparsity of people; the southern hemisphere (population roughly 700 million) had about as many SoC participants in 2005 — by a rough count — as Canada (population 33 million) OR California (population 36 million) OR Belgium and the Netherlands combined (population about 27 million).

6. Take out a mortgage for a plane ticket

In the end, the problem is that we’re just a fucking long way from anywhere. Seriously. I don’t think anyone really understands just how far it is. Every year I get people nagging me to come to OSCON, come to YAPC, come to whatever technical conference is going to have all my online friends and technical colleagues present. And I just can’t.

I’ve done the costs on it, and one of those conferences would typically cost me somewhere between $3000-$4000 in airfare, accommodation, conference registration, and other miscellany. Even the low-cost community conferences are well into four figures when you consider that a cheap airfare to the US’s west coast is $1500, and the east coast or Europe can head up to $2500.

Adam Kennedy, one of Australia’s top Perl hackers, tells me:

The only way I’ve ever been able to do it effectively, is to buy the airfare, get in for free by being a speaker, and stay for free with friends. No way could I pay for the conference, airfare, accomodation, and all the rest, not from my own pocket.

In addition to the cost of travel, there’s also the time taken. When merely getting from point A to B can take you 24 hours, it becomes impractical to visit for short periods. Anything less than a week or two just doesn’t seem worth the effort and jetlag, but taking a long vacation comes with all kinds of logistical overhead, from getting approval from employers to arranging house-sitters.

Australian workplaces typically won’t send IT staff to international conferences. If you’re lucky, you might get to a local one, but even this year’s local Open Source Developer’s Conference is about 2000km away, and would cost close to $1000 per person, including registration, airfare, and accommodation, if my workplace wanted to send someone from Melbourne.

On top of all this, local conferences often have to draw from a very small pool of local speakers. I don’t mean to disrespect the local conference organisers, because $DEITY knows they do a fantastic job given the distances involved, but the fact of the matter is that — with very few exceptions — only a handful of international speakers come to Australian conferences. It costs them $2000-$4000 to get over here, too, and conferences just can’t afford to subsidise those sort of costs. So, even if you do get to attend local conferences, you might find them a bit parochial.

Another small thing which shouldn’t be underestimated is the times the planes fly, mostly due to noise curfews at the airports I believe. Sydney to London is particularly interesting. (It stands in for Australia to Europe in general, but I know it best.)

Sydney -> London flights always arrive in the morning. So say you’re arriving for a Monday start: you’ll probably want a flight that gets in Sunday so you can sleep off 26 hours of travel in an actual bed, that means Sunday morning which has two negative effects: one, you can’t check in anywhere and have to wander around bleary eyed, and two, you’ve had to arrive (and therefore leave Sydney) 12 hours before you really needed to.

You finish work/play Friday afternoon and while you can get evening flights back to Australia, it’s a pain to cross London, but the next flights aren’t until Saturday afternoon and arrive back in Australia Monday morning. So you have a choice between rushing off from work/play in London on Friday, or rushing straight from the airport to work in Australia Monday.

If you try and cut the ends off this (arrive Monday morning, leave Friday evening), the 24 hours in a plane and the time differences mean that as nearly seven days pass for your body (leave Australia Sunday afternoon, get back Sunday morning), you only spend four nights (Monday to Thursday) in an actual bed, two more on a plane (I can’t sleep in economy class no matter how tired I am: I once stayed awake for over sixty continuous hours for this reason) and miss one entirely.

I suppose the upshot is: jetlag and long haul flights suck. Probably much more than you think even after reading this comment, unless you’ve ever flown from Australia or New Zealand to Europe.

Mary: Oh hell yes. That’s why I reckon it’s not worth going to the US or Europe for a single week. You blow 50% of the time in travel nonsense. Not to mention the nearly inevitable run-down-ness and post-travel bug you’re likely to end up with afterwards.

Yes it’s not just the boringness or similar as many people seem to think, although it is true that something has to be pretty special to make sitting in a narrow chair for 26 hours appealing. It’s that long haul jet travel and crossing lots of timezones is actively uncomfortable and exhausting.

Even going to the west coast of the USA is a pain. The 747-400 has the smallest amount of room per passenger across the entire Qantas fleet, and this is generally true of most airlines as well. Air New Zealand has more room: 34″ compared to Qantas’ 31″. And this is in the plane that we spend the most time in for any flight anywhere. The depressing thing is that even with the Airbus A380 having 55% more space but only 35% more passengers, no-one from any airline is making any actual commitments to economy passengers: “more legroom” is being promised but who knows what that will translate into? And with them talking about bars, spas and other perks for the business-and-above-only classes, who’d take a bet that it won’t be at the expense of giving Economy passengers more legroom?

http://www.geocities.com/profemery/entertainment/legroom.html is a good site for information on getting a good seat. I’d love to know how to pre-book your seat with Qantas, though…

I once went to California for a three day trip — it was a killer.

I can generally cope going to West Coast by leaving on Sunday morning and getting in Sunday afternoon. However any further (east coast or Europe) and I try and arrive on Saturday to get the extra rest.

However arriving in Europe in the early morning is another killer because I’m tired from travel and no sleep; and then I have stay awake for another 12 hours to try an adjust my clock.

If I fail to stay awake then it takes a week for my internal clock to adjust.

Plus the fact that I’m a fat bastard in an economy airline seat makes for a really comfortable trip.

I try and avoid eating before long flights and then only eat lightly. Having an empty stomach seems to make a big difference.

I also hate US airports. I always get marked SSSS for extra security screening :-(.

Bring back ocean liner travel I say!

Having whined about all that though, I’d still fly over for OSCON if I could afford it, and no doubt I will still fly for business (but only to Sydney today)

[...] Part 2: Timezones, Travel, and more [...]