Thanks for posting this insight, because a typical engineer, if they are worth their money, does not like the idea to launch something "unfinished" or "half-baked" or even "not yet perfect", but the business logic behind the MVP (minimal viable product) is clearly correct.
Have to disagree (although this may be a "no true Scotsman" disagreement).
I think a typical engineer is more likely to want to evolve towards mature software in small steps. In my experience the "complete it, then release it with a big splash" approach is more likely to come from marketing. "We moved the CTA up the page a bit" isn't the stuff of press releases.
It is definitely hard to break the "but... I'm a professional" mindset. It is good to remember that your code isn't you. If you get PMF, just re-write everything from scratch.
As an argument on the other side - so long as you're making enough to live comfortably enough, then there's no real need to abide the business logic though, even if you think it absolutely does maximize income in the longrun. If you spend years working on something and it turns out somehow nobody else likes it, well at least you have something that you're presumably satisfied with, and you often learn an immense amount in process.
Careers that aren't quite so commercialized regularly carry out this process. The obvious example being writers where you may spend months/years writing a book only to find out that nobody wants to publish it. Or perhaps you ultimately just don't like it. I know Andy Weir (of "The Martian" fame) wrote about 75,000 words on his next novel before deciding he just didn't like it, and scrapped the entire thing.
The video demonstrates a second common trick: making use of the black frame "outside" the screen buffer. Once the first demos showed it was possible it quickly spread and nearly everyone used it.
It's been a while, but I recall that you had to do some fancy interrupt timing stuff for that. To find where that was in the code, the same procedure applied that we used to find the handler for background in the code of games: search for 0x78 (SEI), which temporarily blocked interrupts so background stuff could be installed ("pseudo-multitasking").
We used to purchase a tape or 5 1/4" floppy disk with a game per month and instead of playing the game, we competed who could remove the music from the game the fastest (so that it could play in the background alone, e.g. while writing code). In the end that was a matter of just seconds for previously unseen machine code using a hex monitor/disassembler. The advantage of such a "teenage sports" is you will never forget that "169 = A9 = load accumulator" and the rest of the MOS 6510 opcode table, even after not using it for 40 years.
I wonder what today's kids will remember? (They seem to have to Google each Python keyword, and they can't do anything if WiFi is down for an hour, which worries me.)
Fantastic, well done! - I remember the Inmos Transputers (T800), and there was Occam, the curious language, from which I remember just two operators, ? and ! to read and write from the four(?) fast serial ports that connected one transputer with its neighbors.
Pascal was beautiful, clean, simple and fast, and computer science has never reached that height again, IMHO - look at how slow Python is, how unstructured many programs are, when python permitted nested functionsa and procedures (C/C++/Rust still cannot do that today). And the fast compilers, TurboPascal, TurboModula, and TurboC that made Borland famous and wealthy are in some sense also unrivalled: on machines 1000x slower than what I have now in my desk, you felt like you had the fastest PC money can buy.
For starters, I love the licensing, as it is very fair: I bought a personal license and I can take it to as many machines as I have (I do use many different computers). And you can buy it one time, no silly monthly subscription fees.
As a result, Sublime ist the only commercial (locally installed) software I still use, and it is always open.
There are situations, where I use macros, regex substitutions, or browsing the file system (using the keyboard only for speed) when I prefer to use my other editor, Emacs.
I recently played with Zed, which looks cute, but I immediately lost an important file, so back I was in the Sublime buffer. (Both Sublime and Emacs always auto-save documents without explicit "save" action, so you can never lose anything.)
I tend to have many Windows open (several dozens), some of them for several years, others for five minutes. The only two features I would like are:
- search across all open files and
- a list of edit buffers that is itself an editable buffer that you can walk around using cursor key and select a file by hitting RETURN like Emacs has it.
Generally, I prefer that I doesn't become a feature overloaded big monster of a program that can do everything (that's Emacs already, but I like both, I just want them to stay different).
Although for longer-term programming of bigger projects I prefer IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA or PyCharm CE, in recent time, I had to write mostly small programs, and both Emacs or Sublime fit that bill (no need for language servers for me for two screens full of a Python script as I also teach that stuff).
It's not a one-time purchase if you consider updates.
> Personal licenses are a once off purchase, and come with 3 years of updates. After 3 years, an upgrade will be required to receive further updates.[0]
Tbh I think this is fair, but it surprises me every 3 years when I have to pay up again xD
I actually like when I get the note that I need to pay for the upgrade. It's a good reminder that I still find Sublime valuable (so much that I use almost daily), and that I got 3-4 years of free upgrades for a fair price (vs. subscription models like 1Password, or version-specific rip-offs, like VMware Workstation).
It's one of my favorite piece of software. Obsidian being another one.
Sublime’s behaviour isn’t an autosave, it just never loses text in a window. You can upgrade the entire OS, start Sublime and your windows and text will be waiting for you, regardless of saved or unsaved state. I’ve got five-year-old scratchpad windows open that I’ve never saved.
I do this with Notepad++ and honestly I have mixed feelings about it. It's so convenient but I feel weird about constantly pasting semi-important notes and snippets into this unnamed, unsaved, unsynced doc that just sits there always open on my desktop.
Basically I just feel guilty that I'm not using a "proper" note taking application when so many of them exist.
I use notepad++ in the same way without guilt, I also have a paper notebook where I write things in the same random chaos. In the past I had at a time a LG monitor that had really large bezels and I used to glue post its to it all the time as my "temporary" notes.
Most of note taking applications I tried attempt to convince all my text is important and must be stored and if possible classified and that's just not how my relationship with physical notes is.
I resonate a lot with this. Like most of what goes into that system really is pretty disposable, but it would be nice if a note-taking app could just quietly swallow anything I didn't look at for a few days, while still making it available as an "also, this?" entry in full text search. Or maybe for a kind of context-aware search/browsing, if it were possible to do a query like "show me everything I added or altered around the same time I was working with keywords x and y".
I used to use a clipboard manager. It had two functionalities:
- The ability to scroll or search my clipboard history
- The ability to pin/favorite individual entries, which would then show up in the pinned/favorited tab
That thing was practically my extra brain before the database corrupted itself... (that threw me so off that I don't even remember anymore most of the time from back when I had it.)
Fair, and I have a whole-system backup (Backblaze), but if the unsaved Notepad++ files were lost, I don't even know what it is I'd have to download from BB to recover them. Obviously I can Google that and figure it out, but who knows... maybe the BB agent will consider them a cache and exclude them? The point is that I haven't really taken the time to consider much of this because step 1 would be to literally just hit the save button, and I haven't even done that.
More broadly, though, I don't know that I consider whole-system backups as important as I might have once. All my local important docs are in Dropbox, and all the code I'm working on is regularly synced out to git hosts. Other than some unimportant Fusion/Bambu projects, most of what I'd lose is honestly that same kind of ephemeral context that unsaved Notepad++ files are: terminal history, browser bar completions, my downloads folder, etc.
That was not my experience with sublime because it'd just spontaneously lose a session along with all unsaved data. Some other people would have similar problems too (just look up 'sublime lost session', and apparently people are still having these kinds of problems with them complaining even quite recently).
If you have multiple windows open and close them in the wrong order, you lose everything but the last one. Learned that the hard way and now never have more than one open.
I think you need to create a project file and then it stores things there.
For a long time I would get paranoid about accepting Mac updates which would require a reboot because then I'd lose my undo history and then I discovered that this is all I would need to do.
While I meant closing the whole application at once (which restores all windows/projects and unsaved changes when you restart ST), you're right that projects keep track of unsaved state on a per-project basis, too. So you can open and close project windows individually, but also do the same for Sublime Text as a whole.
It's important to take pride in one's work, but don't forget one second that the relationship is asymmetric; if you choose to be loyal, the company employing you won't be loyal back.
The worst thing you can do is to feel personally and emotionally vested in the relationship, and then be disappointed that "despite" you going full in and giving everything, going above and beyond the expectations, it still affects you.
As the OP correctly states, the decisions are made by others, and they may not know you. But while some people involved may know and value you (e.g. your direct line manager), they will not stand up and fight for you in 99% of cases, because they don't have much power, and they would like to keep their own job.
There are not just startups that become unicorns and startups that fold.
Investors' worst nightmare is if you just make enough money to keep going, but you don't grow ("lifestyle business" as they use it is a derogatory term).
That's because they prefer a sudden death where they can write down the investment and deduct their loss from taxes than an investment where they never see any money again.
And then there are "acquisitions" that are really "acui-hires" dressed up as acquisitions to get the people (more common) or to buy an asset in a limited shell package (less common) after things did/may have (but people were to tempted to take the offer) or did not pan/panned out. Some people consider anything <$50m as a "failure", because that's roughly the sum that many corporations can spend without calling the bigshots for a board meeting to decide.
Worse than becoming lifestyle company is becoming a zombie startup.
Zombie is when founders get rid of almost everyone except what they need to give the impression of effort, do little work, but draw an income and slowly spend down the money they raised until it’s gone.
I was one of the very few survivors at a startup that turned into a zombie in 2020 (went from 100+ employees to 10 in a matter of weeks).
In some ways it was a cushy job and a privilege, just wish I realized the founders didn’t truly care about success. Cause then I could have shared the mindset and better prepared myself and my skills for life after.
IMO that’s not a zombie because it has an expiration date (when the money raised runs out).
A proper zombie is a lifestyle company without the lifestyle — enough revenue to maintain an eternal startup crunch and trying to make a product work, but without the resources to actually grow. Doesn’t die, doesn’t quite live.
Hindsight is 20\20, the company probably would have been better off thawing itself until lockdown ended then going right back to what it was doing (that’s what their main competitor did, and while rumors of their demise always abound, externally they’ve grown and raised more rounds).
One of the founders is a niche big-shot in the VC world and well connected. I assume eventually they’ll be acquired for an undisclosed amount of $0. It’s been a year since I left and until this post I’ve been shocked it’s yet to happen. Now I wonder if they are waiting until they payed out all the money they raised as salary to play that card because otherwise they need to give the money up for no real benefit other than continued employment.
I question your read on what happens here. At most startups the investors control the board (there are a few where a charismatic founder manages to retain control, but that's rare).
If the board thought the founder was just transferring the remaining investment to himself slowly they'd fire him and replace him with someone to wind operations down.
Like most zombie startups, reason board doesn’t do anything is the amount of money is negligible to them. Even if it isn’t to you or me.
Plus the possibility they do hit it big is always there. It’s not like they aren’t putting in any effort and collecting a salary. They just aren’t grinding.
It's not inherently fraudulent to sell something for below market value.
If I sell something I bought for $1 million for $1 in an arm's length transaction, I'm realizing a loss of $999,999 even if the asset was worth $500,000. And it'd be a rational decision if it cost me $5 million in opportunity costs to do that $500k sale.
That's not how US capital gains tax law works. It's legal to sell something at below market value, but you have to use the fair market value when calculating a loss for tax purposes. Of course some people cheat.
> When you sell a capital asset, the difference between the adjusted basis in the asset and the amount you realized from the sale is a capital gain or a capital loss.
If VC investors have high income, they are the class of people that get audited the most. By a lot, like 25x more likely than someone with median income.
"Investors' worst nightmare" seems very off. Most SAFE notes give you dividends that are on par with how corporations issue dividends. Assuming there is cash flow, you should be getting dividends.
If the dividends are so low that you will never be reasonably paid back you can often negotiate to get out in some form. Very low cash flow only with no growth seems to be the only exception...which I'd guess would only exist if something such as high revenue or some unique IP existed to make the equity very valuable and therefore the company worth running.
With a convertible note as opposed to a SAFE, you either need to extend the maturity date or get paid back your note with interest.
Both SAFEs and convertible notes seems to have a path to exit in some reasonable form.
If there’s enough money to pay the founders salaries, but not so much for dividends, this doesn’t help.
There are two direct ways to return money to the founders - salaries and dividends. In the U.S. there is a tax advantage to dividends, over an amount anyway. This is not true of all countries.
Neat edge case! Perhaps SAFE notes or other dividend-paying instruments should account for this by capping executive salaries or trigger dividend payouts at a certain salary dollar amount. Though, admittedly, I've never heard of a founder or executive using their salary instead of taking dividends as an end run around paying everyone their fair share of dividends. It seems possible though.
There already is a cap. Founders have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders and can't pay themselves unreasonably. Lots of gray area, but there is a limit.
This is very typical in startups, where making revenue at all may be rare in many categories (social media for example), and a startup is either wildly successful or nobody uses it.
Hopefully, the startup is about to be wildly successful, but it's easy to end up in a situation where some funding was raised, the product has reached a dead end, but the founders continue to "try to make it work". Whether they are doing this to "draw a salary", are earnestly trying to make it work, or a little bit of both, there isn't much legal recourse for investors if they aren't doing anything worse than not being very successful.
Sure it is. If your business nets 3 million a year, it takes 5 people to run it, and your customer base is steady, that's lifestyle. Sucks for investors, pretty nice for you if you can keep it running.
In other sectors that's just called a "small business" and celebrated as the fullest expression of the American dream. I've always found it funny that tech treats the idea of a going concern with such distaste.
My favorite video game company is a little Japanese outfit called Nihon Falcom. They've been around since 1981, have about 65 employees, release exactly one new game a year, and if you've played any of their games, you can tell they're all made on absolutely shoestring budgets. They have also never posted a loss and have an absolutely bonkers amount of cash on hand (enough to keep the company going for several years on their current budget IIRC).
They also make the best story-driven RPGs I've played in my life. And they specifically went the story-driven route because it's cheaper to hire good writers than it is to wow people with AAA graphics or a giant open world or whatever.
While I do agree with you, if it took tens of millions of dollars in initial capital to get there, which hasn’t been returned, it’s quite a different thing to the standard small businesses model.
But the point is that a business model that is "profitable" but actually took millions in initial capital and has no provision for debt service isn't an actually profitable business model.
That’s what I’m asking. Most businesses take startup capital, but where do you draw the line?
If it takes 10mil of funding to get off the ground and it would also take any competitor that to catch up… then you have a moat and can basically make money forever.
Even if you wanted to get into money transfers, the licensing alone is around 1million, and you haven’t even written any software yet or gotten any infrastructure. You can also “rent” someone else’s license but then your margins go out the window.
So, I’m not sure what the point is here. Some types of businesses require capital to start, even if they never scale.
Having worked at those, they are shoestring to the core. Guests see beauty, behind it is paper mache and $8/hr college students whose wages are garnished for rent and class fees.
At Disneyland? Where there’s a union for food and beverage workers?
> We perform everything from preparing and creating treats like turkey legs and churros to serving grant and exquisite meals at the famous and exclusive Club 33. If you are eating in the parks, our members are making that happen.
I think people are overly fixated on the fact that a successful small business isn't a workable VC investment target (the winners have to pay for the losers, and even with a conservative portfolio of startups, most are going to lose) and they're working everything back from that.
This is kind of like tech sales at huge tech old-cos. Sales people there can pull down insane comp if aligned to the right account with way less work than a traditional sales grind.
Specifically investors, not "all of tech". And to be fair to them, if a company doesn't grow, your investment is wasted in that company, right? No shade to good small businesses, but they may not be worth investing in?
When you see how VC-funded AI startups market their products ("eliminate artists/editors/paralegals"), it's not surprising that they wouldn't be happy with dividends from a profitable business that employs people. Better to throw the money into a "moonshot" company that perennially loses money until BigCo buys them out to acquire their IP and fire everybody.
But in a case like that eventually (once the business has become "sustainable") we will be speaking of 1.5 founders (some full-time founder and some guy who just holds some stock because they started together/knows some know-how) and 3.5 Indians/Ukrainians at $40 an hour. With like 60% of cash going to the main guy, domicile in some tax haven and probably that principal founder living in some tax haven, too, pocketing some 1.5M a year after all (minuscule) taxes. Good lifestyle!
Is it sustainable, if it took millions to bootstrap? I mean I guess if it can just keep running, but the investors might not agree if they need to wait 15 years to make their money back.
Any startup investment that doesn't return, I don't know, like 5-10x "sucks" in the sense that it's not making the portfolio successful, but that's most investments in the portfolio. Beyond that: what sucks about this outcome? If your business has just 5 employees, chances are your investor doesn't have a board seat; it's not costing them much, they can just hang around on the off chance that you turn the knobs right and find a breakout success down the line.
It's true that investors aren't going to invest in your startup if you tell them that your likely outcome is a healthy, stable 3MM/year. And it would be unethical to tell an investor you were swinging for the fences when your true intention was to bank the money and bunt. But if you really do take a big swing, and end up settling in a comfortable spot, how pissed do you think investors are really? You swung, you missed, that's life in the National Football League.
3 million a year for 5 person is something like 400k/person after corporate tax. Which is pretty high and low at the same time(unless it is just freelancing). High in the sense that there would be competition and the other company will have more budget to reduce the price and make the entire segment unprofitable till you die. Low in the sense that you would likely make the same or higher in corporate if you are that skilled to net 3 million/year.
Once the competition has initially shaken out in a new category, minority players can hang on for years. Their product could be perfect for their customers in ways that the big guns don't accommodate.
The thing I don't like about the term "lifestyle business" is that it imprecisely mixes 2 very different things. It's like grouping students who were accepted at Harvard and chose not to go, with students who flunked out of school, as "not Harvard." Imagine if you were presented with a group that was 50/50 for example and had to draw conclusions about it. Really those are just two dissimilar groups that were lumped together, that shouldn't be bucketed together.
In the case of "lifestyle business," it includes businesses that tried their best to expand but hit a ceiling. They failed, basically, to return their investment in any meaningful way. Or to put it even more simply, they failed. At the same time, "lifestyle business" includes businesses that are tremendously strong and could be 10 or even 100x bigger, but aren't due to owner's choice. It mixes together businesses that are capable of being Fortune 500 with those that are almost the inverse. In that sense it's confusing and unhelpful.
Enough money to keep going doesn't mean just enough money to cover the costs. It means being able to continue paying yourself and all your employees their salaries, meet costs and make a small minimum profit.
The reason that is the issue is because that is not something they actually need to do. It's something the investors want but not generally required as they expect an exit of some sort.
IMHO There is a huge gap for affordable hotels for normadic workers and business people.
Hotel rooms suck when you need to use them for work. Typically there are massive beds and I travel alone if for work. There is no proper chair, no writing table at all or one too small, and the sockets tend to be in the wrong corner of the room.
If I was an entrepreneur outside of software looking for a gap, I might have invented a hotel chain for work stays. But I'm not, so here is the idea for you to get rich with it (so I can stay there one day).
I like the OP's idea of using ML models to gather intelligence from hotel photos. For years I took a photo of nearly every hotel room with my laptop on the desk so that I could go back and re-book the rooms that were suitable if there was a conference in the same city again in the future.
They know what they’re doing. Most hotels ‘are’ built for work, but they’re built for what most workers use them for: work travel. Though probably common for developers, I’ll bet it’s pretty unusual for the other like 96% of people to want to do deep work in a hotel room. Especially if you’re on the road for work, you’re probably the sort of worker that needs to physically be somewhere remote to accomplish a goal, which makes it even less likely you’re going to be doing deep work in your hotel room. Most have “business centers” where you can bang out a zoom call, rally the troops before a meeting you flew in for, print something out for a presentation, or whatever. I’m sure most professional use cases are far better served by those accommodations than amping up their rooms for the handful of people that need to be in a room by themselves sitting in one spot for long enough for the chair to be a big factor while they travel.
I think there's a simpler explanation: most people don't do work when they go to hotels, they do the work like you are discussing. Doesn't mean they are intentionally being hostile to remote workers.
One thing I've realized about the world is that a lot of people do things just because others are. "Momentum is a bitch." I will bet you very few people are thinking this way, at least very few that make decisions. And the ones that do probably think it is not worth the money. There's a ton of things where markets don't exist simply because the environment doesn't exist, so the people that can make the environment don't because there is no market. It's the whole "build it and they will come" thing. People are very risk adverse. People are hard to move. Would hotels benefit from this? Probably. I mean even not just considering nomads, most people work from their computers[0].
But it very easily could be one of those things where there's push because there's no market and there's no market because there's no push.
[0] The way people have been talking about working at CES has sounded silly. There was a LTT video where they mentioned how WiFi used to be better in some locations so those rooms were more desirable and the hotel's solution was to make it standard for everyone. They seemed to be suggesting that they brought down the quality rather than balanced.
I’m not sure how what I said could be interpreted as suggesting they are hostile to remote workers.
And I think there’s a very good chance hotels would not benefit from this. Maybe in a tech center, but that’s a tiny fraction of hotels. Good office chairs are designed to be very adjustable, but they do tend to break when people twist one thing too far the wrong way because they don’t know how it works, and it would probably take staff 10 minutes just to figure out it was broken rather than just misadjusted. They’re also expensive as hell, and charging a guest $3000 because their luggage got caught on and tore up the mesh seat is probably not going to fly. Small higher-res monitors are also more expensive than huge TVs, and as or more delicate. The staff would spend more time than is probably worth it telling gran and gramps that they can’t use the “little television” like that. All of this stuff has to be handled with smoothness and grace 24/7 by a desk staff that don’t regularly use these items in their professional lives. You can’t just say “it’s a computer monitor gramps don’t use it” and hang up the phone. Many people also consider office equipment ugly, and how the room visually hits when you walk in is a huge consideration. Some weary overworked travel-worn office drone would probably want to jump out the window if they opened the door to their safe place of respite only to see a the better part of a corporate workstation looking back at them.
Designing experiences can be complicated and difficult, and that’s even more true because many of the most important aspects of it aren’t even consciously perceived by the intended audience. They all just fit organically unto a unified experience.
The best solution to all these problems is to have a extra 'co working' room that any guest, or for a fee anyone, can use and just bill an extra $15/day to use it (or whatever) including the coffee machine.
Working and sleeping in the same room is actually not that great for you most the time.
Most that I've stayed in don't but often have pools and gyms. I suspect it comes down to if they're targeting a 'business traveler', for example it's definitely a thing in 'corporate' hotels or ones by a airport.
I’m pretty sure they either fall under “useless features that sound sort of useful when you’re booking a room,” or “alleviating your guilt for not getting a cheaper hotel room on someone else’s dime.”
Most of the hotels I stay at are on the east coast, so that might make a difference because of how much business travel there is there, but even the more family-focused ones in touristy areas have them.
> There was a LTT video where they mentioned how WiFi used to be better in some locations so those rooms were more desirable and the hotel's solution was to make it standard for everyone. They seemed to be suggesting that they brought down the quality rather than balanced.
This was from their podcast 'WAN Show' a week or two back, specifically about hotels in Las Vegas.
I agree with your point, generally, but after COVID-19, remote working is opening new use cases: I occasionally like to travel to somewhere nice, far away from the office, and work from there for a week, because I'm now allowed to.
So I too now care about a decent chair, desk and maybe even a tv I could turn into a second screen. Wifi can be there or not, I bring my own connectivity just to play it safe, this is now quite cheap. Bonus if the place is a couple time zones away from my office so I have my mornings or afternoons free.
I'm not a huge fan of AirBnB but it's been more reliable than hotels for a few of these factors: hotel TVs are locked-down and many won't accept an HDMI input, assuming there's a socket at all. Normally you're not offered (barring extravagant prices) more than just a bedroom, so the chance of table and chair being any good (or existing) are not so good), etc.
As far as business investments go, I’d need to see some really solid market research showing enough people were willing to choose a hotel for these amenities in-room rather than a one with a “business center” as many currently have, a coworking space, coffee shop, or even a public library. People wanting specialized private spaces like that don’t generally look to hotels to meet their needs, and considering how quickly hotel room outfitting expenses scale, it really has to be worthwhile. For example, an in-room stationary bike would probably be cheaper and more popular than a good office chair and monitor, but it just doesn’t make sense because enough people will be satisfied with an in-hotel fitness center. I think its really easy to assume our use cases are far more universal than they are.
As someone who has thought about this remote style, but hasn’t done it, I don’t think I’d want to be in the hotel room much. I’d much rather find a coffee shop to work from where I can get some of the vibe of the city while still working.
Otherwise, you’d only get a few hours per day in the evening of experiencing anything you couldn’t do at home, so what’d be the point of spending home rent +hotel +travel for the week?
I suppose it depends somewhat on why you're there and how well you can work in an ambient social environment. Mind you, I don't really disagree but, if I'm focused on a computer screen, I'm not sure how schlepping my laptop to a random coffeeshop is that different from being in my hotel room.
I usually stand at the ironing board (they're typically height adjustable). Keyboard goes on board, laptop goes on trashcan which is on board (just to get the screen higher). I usually bring some paracord so I can tie the whole contraption to something heavy so it doesn't wobble. Sometimes I'll use the cord to hang a second travel monitor from some nearby art--still working on a proper harness for it.
Costs money (which may or may not be reimbursed) and time. Providing an ironing board and iron are cheap and, while doubtless less common than it used to be, is probably something some number of people expect. (I've never personally used them in a hotel.)
Hotel laundry services of any kind are unbelievably expensive in my experience. Usually US$10-30 per item, or the local equivalent, with e.g. socks and underwear being at the low end, slacks and collared shirts at the high end. Dry cleaning, of course, is a significant premium beyond that.
I thought it was just a US thing when I was younger, but I've found it to be true even in other countries.
Yeah if the hotel is nice enough then usually you can have suits and shirts pressed for a fee. If they don’t have on-site “wash-and-fold” then they probably won’t press clothes either.
Hotel rooms are simply not designed to be places to do work in. They are places for you to sleep in, so of course, the bed is the centerpiece.
I took a look at business hotels in Japan. These are hotels explicitly designed for work travel and nothing more. Small rooms, bed, shower, but not much to actually work. And it actually makes sense. If you are on a work trip, why would you want to work in your hotel room? The whole point of a work trip is to visit a work place, that's where you are going to work, not your hotel room. In fact, from my limited experience of work travel, doing more work is the last thing I want to do when I am back at the hotel, it is often an exhausting day, and there is a good chance I have to get up early the next day, so the hotel room is for relaxation and sleep.
If you really want to work in your hotel room, or do anything other than using the bed and shower for that matter, you are probably better off with "apartment hotels" and short term rentals. If available, student residence rooms can be a minimal option for working and sleeping, that's what they are designed for. Note that there are also hotels with co-working spaces.
Maybe what you want, that is essentially a short-stay student room for grownups will happen one day, but I see many obstacles in making it a "get rich quick" investment. It may not be a great hotel for those who just want to sleep (or have other kind of fun). And if you want to eat in there, you will lack the amenities an appartement offers. And if you are not alone, a co-working space may be a better option.
I was going to say what I’m about to say as a reply to the parent, but then I saw your comment mentioning Japan.
The rooms in Clayton Bay Hotel in Hiroshima absolutely has a nice proper work desk and a work chair. So if anybody here is ever in Hiroshima Japan, you now know where to stay :)
Not sure if this applies to all room types though.
Disclaimer: I’m not related to that hotel in any way other than having stayed there one night some years ago.
You are assuming that the work place you are visiting is your own company. Most of my travel has been for consulting, demos, and such things. You go to someone else's workplace to meet with customers. It is not a place you can grab a desk and do your own thing. So when you need to prep for the next meetings, your hotel room is the perfect place to do such a thing.
I travel a lot and I agree that most hotels suck for work. But the primary function of a hotel is to provide a safe place to sleep. If I want to do work, my best bet is to stay late in the office where I spent the day, since most people will leave at some point. I get good chairs there, large rooms and monitors if I need. It's much better than trying to retrofit a small hotel room into something else.
There are usually plenty of "business" oriented hotels near airports, business parks, central business districts, convention centers, etc . (And that definitely reflects on the trip office map). Touristy areas have more tourist/traveller oriented amenities.
I used to travel a lot for work. Hit about 180 days one year. (OK, about a month of that was vacation.) I'm not primarily a developer but I do a lot of writing. Honestly, I've never felt particularly constrained from doing that on the road but, then, although I have a nice home setup, I don't need that nice setup to work.
And I like having a king bed even if it's just me. (I do like having a desk and some sort of office chair though even that isn't really critical most of the time.)
I think companies such as WeWork or Servcorp try to fill that gap. I don't like working in the same room that I sleep in - you have to keep the room tidy for video calls, handle housekeeping, and hope that the seat won't break your back. The rent-an-office locations are usually pretty well equipped with good desks and large monitors.
When I was traveling a lot that would have seemed like way more logistics than I would have wanted to deal with--and I doubt my company would have covered. Presumably if you're traveling on business you're in the location for some other reason than working on your computer for most of the day.
By the way I have also found that most hotels suck at draining water from the shower. Usually after only 5mins the bathroom is a complete mess. I suspect this is on purpose, so that guests don't use too much water.
For all the problems of AirBnBs and co., every single one I ever booked was better for working with a computer than every single hotel room I ever booked within 2x price.
That seems like nonsense. Hotel chains and esp business travel ones it'svery standard for hotels to have desks and a chair. Not saying it's that nice but those are way cheaper than airbnbs usually
I think the answer is the first word in your sentence. How many times have you stayed at a hotel? Now how many times have you stayed at a hotel because they promoted a good work space? Both cost about the same to run, and one has a much greater need.
Plus people that do like to spend much of the year travelling around doing deep work are (i) relatively likely to book short stay apartments instead of hotels and (ii) relatively unlikely to be particularly fussy about working environments since they're actively choosing travel over convenience and optimal working environments
If I think I just can't work without multiple monitors and a high-end office chair (and maybe printer), I probably won't travel or I'll get a co-working space of some sort. When I traveled a lot for work, it was some combination of the event/trip was my working and/or I just worked on my laptop wherever.
I'm semi-retired now but I'm temporarily staying in a Marriott property (Springhill Suites) that does have a usable desk and office chair which is just fine for writing at for me--though people with very specific requirements probably wouldn't like it.
>I might have invented a hotel chain for work stays.
That's basically what wework is. I know you can't officially sleep there. I don't know what they would do if you slept in one of the 24/7 access plans though.
Also you are vastly overestimating the amount of "work" people do in hotel rooms that are not in tech.
I worked for a mid-size tech company for many years and did a lot of travel (not as a developer). Sure I'd check email and maybe do some writing. But, while I liked having a halfway comfortable chair, I was pretty much content to work with my laptop on my lap if that were the only option. I wasn't great at focusing on writing an article for one of our in-house pubs say, but that had very little to do with work amenities and more with the fact that I traveling to attend an event etc. so I had a lot of distractions.
(For an extended trip to a single location where I was only intermittently at a customer etc., maybe I'd consider asking for a co-working space but I never did and don't think I'd have gone to the trouble.)
Thanks for posting this insight, because a typical engineer, if they are worth their money, does not like the idea to launch something "unfinished" or "half-baked" or even "not yet perfect", but the business logic behind the MVP (minimal viable product) is clearly correct.
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