Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

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I dunno. Working on a bike you want to use to ride to work could be stressful if it is your only bike, you need it to get to work, and your manager will be really mad if you don’t show up to work one day. If there was any slip available it wouldn’t be so bad.

Actually, I really like this analogy because

1) We can’t really work on non-trivial fixes for our cars because they are too complex

2) We’ve totally structured our living situations around these over-complex beasts

3) Sometimes they do just break down at random, and it becomes a mini-crisis for everyone involved, which can’t really be resolved without missing a day of work to go to a professional

4) The bike is in exactly the same situation, except you can actually fix most bike problems yourself with a little kit

And yet, it is seen as a serious adult thing to have a car, instead of a bicycle.

Some thoughts:

Outside of, like, customer service, most places are throughput-oriented and it doesn’t even really matter all that much if somebody misses a day.

If we really cared about “uptime” of employees, we’d all be living in bicycle range of our jobs, and able to fix our bikes. Maybe there’d be a bus route as well.

As someone who's stuck to owning a single bike for over a decade (tho I will probably change this in the coming year) for both athletic rides and commuting, I'll say the "it is seen as a serious adult thing to have a car" can sometimes make having a single bike worse.

If my bike flats and I'm out of tubes and I have a busy day planned, I have to take it to a local bike shop but those generally close pretty early. If I miss the window to take it to an LBS then I'm SOL. With a car there's generally a developed enough ecosystem that I can get a roadside assistance type service to put a spare on the car until I can actually get my car into a shop.

This is a good analogy for SaaS vs using a tinkerer tool. A tinkerer tool often can be customized exactly to your needs. I can work on my bike at 10 PM in my garage after dinner as long as I have the parts. But sometimes your tinkerer tool is going to leave you working all night or you'll be SOL. But SaaS is generally a full-time job for other folks. Sure you pay money, but there's fewer situations you're SOL.

(Personally when my bike is inop and I need to head to work I use transit.)

You've just identified the next unicorn: AAA for bikes.

> 1) We can’t really work on non-trivial fixes for our cars because they are too complex

Learning how to fix my own cars is something I’ll always be grateful for. They’re not that complex. Most of it is just bolts and a diagram reference.

Sure, if you crack a piston cylinder you just need a new engine, that isn’t really fixable.

Brakes/rotors/calipers, it is almost criminal what you pay a shop for in lieu of doing it yourself. Spark plugs are super easy. Even things like taking the intake manifold off a direct-inject car to replace the fuel injectors isn’t terribly hard.

What has made cars complex is all the electronics that tie into it. The mechanics of an ICE car are mostly about the same.

But,

1) the electronics often are what breaks

2) even if you are good at working on cars, bikes are really, really easy to fix in comparison (I mean, it is a silly comparison).

Of course, they do different things and the thing the car does is much more complex. So it isn’t really a fair comparison. But the fact remains!

> If we really cared about “uptime” of employees, we’d all be living in bicycle range of our jobs

And then reality hits. You're married and your partner's job is on the other side of the city. You just bought and house and now you want to switch jobs but you'd be limited to only jobs in biking distance. eTc....

I bike to work (was 4 miles, now 2), but it's unrealistic to expect people to be in bicycle range of their jobs.

I think reality had already hit my comment, the quote you’ve got there is essentially “if(false)…” haha.

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