How Can Remote Developers Fit Into a Team?

About this Episode

Have you been through a global pandemic recently? This episode is for you. Today we're going to talk about fitting remote developers into a team.

Transcript:

DAVID: Hello and good morning. Welcome to The Acima Development Podcast. Today we're going to talk about fitting remote developers into a team. And if you have not recently lived through a global pandemic, you don't need to hear anything that we have to say, so more power to you.

Today we're going to talk with...I'm just going to read through the panel, and then people can speak up and shut up as they go through. But we've got Mike Challis. We've got Kyle Archer. We've got Jason Loutensock. We've got Ramses Bateman. We've got Eddy Lopez and Mark...oh, Mark, I'm going to mess up your last name, Kendzior?

MARK: Pretty close, Kendzior.

DAVID: All right. So remote development, what do you think?

MIKE: This one is interesting to me. I have been doing remote development most of my career. At first, it was almost an accident. My wife was gravely ill while pregnant, and I wanted to be close to her. So I tried to be home as much as I could. But I was mostly working in the office at the time, like work through lunch and get home as soon as I could.

And after my son was born, I tried to be there to do what I could as much as I could. And around the same time, the company I was working at went through some change of management. And basically, nobody that I had been working with closely previously was there anymore, so I just worked in the office less and less until I just wasn't working there anymore. And I've never really gone back.

So I've been working remotely for a long time. And so I was well-positioned for this pandemic because I was used to it more than a lot of people were. I know that, for me, being remote has a lot of obligations on the developer that is remote that you don't have as much when you're in the office. You might want me to say, oh yeah, well, there are all these things that the office needs to do to support the remote people, and that's probably a lot of what we'll talk about. And I think the opposite is very much true.

If you're remote, there are certain things that you just have to do. You have to actively be more present in ways than if you were in person because you lose all of those visual and social cues that you would have otherwise. If you're on, let's say, Slack, you need to really be available there, make sure that you're around, and you respond quickly. And then, if you're in a meeting, you maybe speak up more than you would normally do to kind of push against your instinct to sit in the back of the class.

Because if you don't push against those sorts of things, then you tend to disappear, not just to the others but even to yourself. You lose some of that social engagement. As a remote developer, the things that have been most important to me are being really proactive in that way and really making sure that I am present. And I feel like that has helped quite a bit for myself.

DAVID: That is awesome. I think it's interesting that you've had kind of the opposite conversation as me. The last few times that I've done the how to fit remote devs into a team, I've come from the thing that you've just described. Like, all the previous conversations I've had have been in the context of the company kind of doesn't like remote work, so they're not going to give you an inch. It's up to you to make it work and convince the team in the company that it works. So, yeah, the last few times that I've been on this topic on a call, it is entirely been how can you fit yourself into a team when you're remote?

And 100%, there are things that casually happen at the office that have to be explicit, and I'm going to use the word premeditated because it sounds a little bit sinister. And it certainly is conscious and a deliberate thing. There are things that, if you don't pay attention to them, they will run away from you. There are things that happen at the water cooler that nobody at the water cooler thinks is part of the regular workday.

But if you're not part of it and you find out everyone is in on this story or this joke or has heard about the upgrade that IT did to the network entirely at the water cooler [laughs], and you're the only one who can't get on the network, right? If you don't consciously and deliberately inject yourself into certain conversations, those conversations will just quietly happen far away from you, and you'll get cut off out of that information.

So I'm kind of excited to explore both sides of this, like, what can we do to be better into it as when we're remote. But also, are there some things that we can say, okay, company, we're remote now. We really need you to start doing this or stop doing that.

MIKE: I think that's where we're thinking would be the biggest focus today. I don't know; we can talk about whatever you want; it's our podcast. [laughs] We conceived this idea from the company side. I think that there are some...I've read some things that other companies have said about this. And I've watched what people have done, and there are definitely some things that a company can do. And the pandemic has definitely pushed remote work forward, particularly in tech, where you've got a job that a lot of people can do remotely.

I haven't looked at statistics in the last few months, but last I looked at them, a majority of people in our industry were at least somewhat remote, and that's a major change. And the companies that are not accommodating then they're losing the opportunity to have people contribute that would otherwise not just losing employees but losing a portion of the employee that they have working with them. And that's unfortunate for everyone. I've got some thoughts as to some vital things that a company should do. But I've been talking some, so I'll be quiet for a moment and see if anybody else wants to pipe in here before I say anything.

JASON: I don't really have any thoughts about what the company should be doing but kind of just off-the-cuff thoughts. I find myself actually working more and maybe even feeling a little bit more anxiety about needing to be present, kind of touching on what Mike was saying how you have to be present. You have to keep your eyes on all the different channels. And recently, when I've had to go into the office, I've found it majorly distracting.

And there's a lot to be said for social interaction that's wonderful and great for your mental health, but I've just found it's really hard to get work done because all of your co-workers want to come and say, "Hi. I haven't seen you in a while." Or otherwise, maybe you see them every day, and they just want to chitchat. I just find, in general, especially with a development-type of job, I need my focus on what I'm trying to do.

It's kind of funny; I found myself working more and checking my phone even more, and being concerned about our team's projects even more simply because I'm there. I always have access. I don't have an excuse for not trying to pitch in and look.

MIKE: I relate to all of that, [laughs] which is a topic for another podcast. But maintaining boundaries [laughs] is something that we should talk about sometime. You have to say, "You know what? It's the end of my day. I need to sign off, even if that means absolutely nothing." If you're still sitting on the same couch or generally going to the office, you got to say, "Okay, now I'm putting down my laptop, and I'm going to go do something else," because otherwise, it will just consume all of your time.

DAVID: There's a really good concept that I learned years and years and years ago that was based on something a doctor told me. There was a problem with my health that was being...and I don't want to get into too much details. But what was happening is I was pushing too hard into one direction, and that was sort of setting a pendulum effect where I would swing back to the other side, and I would crash to the other side of the pendulum. So you can imagine not getting enough sleep, like staying up all night to push on a deadline, and then you swing back the next day, this pendulum effect.

The pendulum itself isn't bad. In fact, there are certain things where you need that pendulum effect. I realize this is an obscure, abstract metaphor. I'm going to make it concrete here in a sec. There are times when the pendulum can get stilled, and that's just as bad as having it swinging out of control. And for remote development, this notion that I can get up, I can take 17 steps from my bedroom to my office; I can put my butt in a seat, and I cannot move for 16 hours straight really stills a pendulum.

And one of the ways to force that pendulum to pick up and swing again is to have a schedule to say I'm going to get to work at 8:00. I'm going to quit work at 5:00. I mean, you don't have to be rigid about it, but having a set thing of, like, I'm going to get up, and I'm going to get this done before work o'clock starts. And I'm going to do this after work. And I am; I'm going to log out.

There's a separate idea I have about being available versus being present in terms of being available on Slack and that sort of thing. But for me, my days just turned into this bland gray smear just one day after, and the days blurred together because I would work through the weekends. And there was no punctuation to my life. It was just get up, work, sleep, get up, work, sleep, get up, work, sleep.

And then all of a sudden, I was 38, and I was like, where did my 30s go? And it was all just one big blur. And it wasn't until somebody said, You have to push yourself." I could have said this all very, very succinctly. If you want to sleep better at night, go exercise during the day. Swing that pendulum, push it hard in the opposite direction, and you can make it swing back on you in the other way.

MIKE: So much truth there and even just that last piece. I don't sleep well unless I exercise during the day. [laughs] That's a very real aspect of my life and that schedule as well. I try to get some exercise in before work. As I mentioned before we started recording, I went out and mowed the lawn this morning.

It sounds like you thought, oh boy, that sounds awful, but that means I have sleep tonight, and [laughs] not only that, but I'm much clearer headed in the day if I get some exercise in the morning. If I do something that's not work in the period before work...and I do, I usually get up pretty early and get a lot in before my workday starts. And I feel like that makes me more effective working on this.

EDDY: Mike, that's funny. I mowed my lawn earlier this week. And there was something fulfilling about putting all that cut grass in the garbage, and you're like, yeah.

MIKE: [laughs] Yeah, change your pace. I know a lot of developers who are musicians, a lot of them who are gardeners. They have a hobby that's very different than software development. And I think they're kind of mutually reinforcing I need to switch that pendulum to the other side to let it swing and do something else. It's refreshing to your mind. Switching to one side and then the other allows you to go back with a cleaner head than if you just, I don't know, watch Netflix.

DAVID: A slightly related tangent to that is I have found that if I can't get my head unfoggy, getting up and walking away from the desk for 10 minutes, just walk out the front door and just start walking, getting some sunlight and some fresh air and getting your quadriceps moving, largest muscle mass on the body, getting the tiniest hint of cardiovascular can really jumpstart your brain. So whenever I need about ten more IQ points to bring to a problem, I will get up and go for a walk. It's that contrast of activities that really, really helps.

EDDY: And I am curious, though, coming from someone...myself, right? This job is their first experience in the remote work area. I wonder if other people experience this phenomenon to where I found that it took some discipline at first to keep myself accountable while getting my job done because suddenly, I had the liberty to get up whenever I wanted to go to the bathroom or pick up my phone suddenly because someone sent me a message. And before I knew it, I was going through YouTube videos or a Twitter feed. Also, I tend to forget to eat. So I found myself setting a reminder to, like, hey, get some food, you dummy. I'm curious if people can relate to that.

DAVID: I think you just revealed both sides of that sword. It's like, sometimes, I get distracted, and I look at things that I shouldn't. And other times, I forget to eat. You have just revealed both sides of that sword, right? Your attention is going somewhere that you don't want it to go. But in both directions, there are times when you need to be taking care of yourself, and you don't because you blur over into work, and that, again, it gets into boundaries and into sharpness. And you not only have to be disciplined to focus on your work, but you have to be disciplined to focus on yourself when it's appropriate.

MIKE: I have the same responsibilities that it's like, you got both sides there, [laughs] and they're related. I tend to struggle more with the forget to eat side or working too late, or checking the phone at all hours. I think, oh, okay, I got to take care of this problem. It's still on my mind. And almost reflexively, I'm checking and keeping my mind on that, which doesn't give the mind a chance to rest.

But that's really not much different than getting focused on something that's not work and letting the work slide. Both of them are about a lack of boundaries. You're cutting off your freedom a bit when you set up a schedule, like, hey, I want to be able to do whatever I want. If I have a schedule, well, that makes me work for the man, right? That's really not how it ends up working. When you set that schedule, well, you're the one who set the schedule.

DAVID: Mm-hmm. You're the man. [laughs]

MIKE: Exactly. You're the man or the woman. You make yourself in charge, and you're the one setting those guidelines. You're still in charge. You're just doing it consciously rather than by the seat of your pants. And if you do it consciously, you're probably going to do a better job like saying, "This is the choice I want to make, so I'm going to make it." When you make that choice with foresight and thought, you're probably going to do pretty decently and set yourself up well.

If you let it slide a little bit around the edges because, you know, I feel like sleeping an extra five minutes a day or whatever it is, fine. But having those guidelines that you set for yourself is empowering. It isn't somebody taking something away from you. It's you giving yourself your best efforts at time management when you are conscious about it. And it works out. Yeah, I'd strongly encourage anybody who's doing remote work to create a schedule that they'd like to have and then follow it because it's surprisingly liberating.

DAVID: That is amazing. I just had an epiphany as you were saying that. I find it endlessly fascinating that you take an office job where you are required to go to a certain place, and you're required to sit in a cubicle or in an office. You're required to get work done from this time to this time and then take a break at this time and then work from this time to this time. And we give that back to you when you're remote.

You can fudge when you show up to work. You can decide where you want to sit. You can decide how you want to work. You can decide how you allocate. You have ownership over all of these details of your job. And the first thing you lose is yourself. Isn't that interesting? All of a sudden, I'm in my office doing my work on my time, and I lose myself. That blows my mind a little tiny bit.

MIKE: Yeah, it's a big discussion about freedom and what that consists of. So there is a metaphor I like to think about regarding this idea, which is semiconductor manufacturing. So the current generation of chips that they make of processors, what are they? Under three nanometers nowadays? Something unbelievably small. And if you ever see any video of those facilities where they make those chips, it's crazy. Everyone is walking around in what looks like hazmat suits, the bunny suits they have to wear, so they don't get any particles off their bodies anywhere in the building.

They'll have a building the size of a big-box store or bigger. It's all laminar flow, like, you've got fans in the floor and the ceiling that keep all the air moving vertically rather than horizontally, so no dust moves from side to side. And they get exceptionally pure crystals of exactly the right chemical makeup and slice them into these incredibly thin wafers. And then, they go through an amazingly precise photographic process to etch channels in them.

And here's just where I'm going with all this, the level of precision that is required to make those chips is mind-boggling. And the billions of dollars in investment to build the facilities to get to that degree of precision is mind-boggling. Sometimes we perceive freedom as being able to do whatever we want, and I'm thinking here in the context of remote work. Hey, I'm remote. I can make whatever schedule I want. I can do whatever I want.

And we think, oh, whatever we want means whatever our whims are at the moment. There is a kind of freedom that says I can do what I feel like in the moment. But the freedom that we have to do things because of those semiconductors is phenomenal. I can carry better than the Library of Alexandria in my pocket all the time. I can search all of the world's knowledge and get back results in less than a second. I can look at cat videos.

There's just this vast quantity of things, a pool of information that's available to me, not because people did whatever they felt like in the moment but because people abstained, right? Found the very exact set of steps to follow and followed it. And that precision, that resistance to moving away from the exact set of instructions, actually was incredibly empowering for the companies that make the chips but also for everybody else.

Technology is not based on doing what we want in the moment but on precision and following a very precise set of instructions. Thinking about freedom in that sense, in terms of empowerment, empowerment doesn't come from following the whims of the moment but by hard work and precision. And in that definition of freedom, you gain power. You gain the ability to do, not by removing constraints but by adding them, the very specific constraints that you have chosen.

DAVID: I just closed another loop in my brain here as well that, ostensibly, the topic that we were going to talk about today...and I love it when the podcast goes slightly in a different tangent. But we had started off talking about what can companies do to help fit remote devs into a team better? And I realized that we've actually circled back around to that very answer, which is the big resistance to remote work 5-10 years ago was, well, you might just go home and sit on your thumbs and do nothing, and we have no way to watch you and that kind of thing, the whole Overwatch Overlord kind of thing, which isn't great.

But when you're remote, I definitely feel this pressure to...I got to get stuff done; I got to get stuff done; I got to get stuff done. And every time I think about my output at work, I think about it in a very static way of like, oh, I only moved two tickets today, or I only moved this much work, or I only did this much work. And so anytime I think about what do I need to do at work when I'm at home, it is, oh, I got to do work which, again, is a very low contrast kind of idea. It's just, oh, just push on this.

If I take the time to step away from the computer, get some contrast, go for a walk, get some oxygen, do these things that I don't like doing...I'm not an exercise-loving person. I'm wildly sedentary. What can an employer do to help fit remote devs? I think it might be to remind and encourage those remote devs to get some contrast in your life. Maybe the best thing you can do to move this project forward is log out and go to bed. Get your head down; get eight hours of sleep under your pillow.

Step away from the computer. Go for a walk, go eat lunch, go out to lunch. Get away from your house and go out to lunch. Rather than just sitting down and saying, "Well, the Jira burndown chart shows that you've only moved 17 points of velocity in the last two sprints," or whatever. Instead of just making everything homogenous and uniform, encourage contrast, both in and out of work.

MIKE: I like your references to the contrast. Keep your life colorful. That seems like good advice, not just remote work but in general. [laughs] It sounds like the kind of job you'd want to have, colorful rather than dull.

DAVID: And maybe that's not for everybody. My wife and I have wildly different personalities that complement each other very well. She kind of keeps me anchored, and steady, and stable. And I'm the creative, flighty, occasionally disastrously non-foresight having. [laughs] I'm the dangerous one in the marriage. But she likes things with regularity. She was studying to be an accountant when we got married, and, I mean, that was about as much adventure as she wanted to have in her life was adding and subtracting numbers all day. Like, that's her idea of a good time, and, for me, it's mind-numbing. It's terrifying.

I say this because there are people who may be listening to this podcast who are listening to our stories of get contrasts, do these wildly disparate things. And you may be thinking, I don't want to do that, and that's fine. You don't have to do that. Do what you want to do. The whole point is to choose for yourself what is going to make you effective and happy.

MIKE: And if you've been spending all day adding, maybe you can spend some time subtracting.

DAVID: That's right. That's right. That big multiply and divide, whoa, whoa, whoa, let's not get crazy. Let's not get crazy. [laughs]

EDDY: I actually have a question; for those who have found comfort in working remote now, would you ever consider going back into the office?

MIKE: I think I'm the most remote person here, and I'd definitely consider it. Yeah, I enjoy interacting with my colleagues. The biggest downside, to me, to being in the office is probably the commute. There are distractions as well. But the commute takes some time every day. I have other reasons in that I live nowhere near the office. [laughs] And it's non-trivial for me to move for various reasons. But I would definitely consider it. I have no particular animosity toward the office.

DAVID: I hung out my shingle. We had a big tech recession in 2002 out here in Utah, and I got laid off from a government contracting job, and I hung out my shingle to do development. And I ended up landing a temporary gig, and then a remote gig, and then another temporary in-office gig. And I cycled. I would work from home for three months, then I would work in an office for six, and then I would work from home for nine months, then I'd worked in an office for four weeks.

And for me, it's all blurred together. Like, I have habits that I have learned to adopt, and it's just like changing your code. If it's raining, you put on your raincoat. If it's sunny, you put on a short-sleeved t-shirt. And there are certain habits that I have developed for in-office that I can't do when I'm at home. And there are certain habits that I have to adopt at home to be productive, habits that I cannot use when I'm in the office. And no, it's not just the whole wearing pants today. That's the standard joke about remote, right?

It's things like I don't have to be as conscious about socializing. I'm a naturally gregarious person. I like other people. Ironically, I'm an introvert. I don't seek people to recharge. But I'm a naturally gregarious person. So when I'm in the office, ironically, I actually have to check myself a little bit so that I don't end up being the distraction for everyone around me because I love being that guy. And when I'm at home, I don't have to worry about that.

But when I've been home long enough, you have to start seeking people out, or else you start going funny around the edges. You realize I have not stepped outside the front door of my house. And then you realize that your answer is the name of a month instead of hours. So, to answer your question, Eddy, yes, I absolutely would consider going back. I enjoy going back.

It's kind of like saying, you've been eating brownies. Would you ever consider going back and eating salad? And the answer is if you've eaten nothing but brownies for 18 months, you start gasping for salads. You're like; please give me a green vegetable. Please give me something with some structure and some fiber. And that, for me, is switching environments. There's definitely a sense of, like, if you're trapped in an office or if you don't know what it's like to get away from the office, you can be like, ah, I really, really want to try the greener grass on the other side of the fence. And it certainly...a change is great. And the grass is greener on both sides of the fence.

But having hopped the fence multiple, multiple times over my career, especially when I was freelancing, I had some customers who wanted me to freelance at their site and other customers who wanted me to freelance at home. So yeah, I've switched back and forth enough that, for me, it's just a change of wallpaper. There are coworkers in my wallpaper sometimes, not a sentence I thought I would say when I woke up this morning.

EDDY: I think I'm a little bit more on the other side of the fence. I wouldn't push back per se on going into the office, but I'm very comfortable with being remote right now. And I'm actually making plans to strive more in that direction rather than plans I'll ever have to go back, you know, just kind of got into my routines. It's definitely...I think I would look for the benefits companies that provide that remote work as a benefit type thing.

JASON: It's kind of funny. Anecdotally, my father in law in the pandemic...he's a very sociable person. When the pandemic hit, he was forced to work from home and was miserable. He was palpably irritable, just did not like it. He's one of those people who's got to be around other people. And I know a lot of people do this, but he, I mean, he already had a home office setup. But he went out and rented a space. We all kind of pitched him and helped move his office over so that he could still have a place where he could be...and he was still isolated and was as responsible as he could be with going through the pandemic.

But now it's kind of funny. He's since switched companies, and that kind of broadened his horizons. He has his own office now, and he ended up taking a remote job and still has that external office. He needs to get out and drive and get out. And I think it's for that mental health reason, you know, you need to contrast.

DAVID: Kind of a best-of-both-worlds situation.

JASON: Yeah, absolutely.

DAVID: Which, I mean, if you do it badly, you could turn it into the worst of both worlds, right? You could end up with a long commute to an office where you're lonely anyway. So yeah, if you do pick a co-working space, pick one that's close by. [laughs]

MARK: Yeah, I think for me, so I'm kind of like Dave. I've had both types of jobs. But I think over the last couple of years, where you've just been at home, it's still nice to go to the office, but I like the ability to do both, so combined. And I don't really push one way or the other. I do feel when I do go to the office, because it's not very often, it's a lot of catching up and talking, so I don't get a whole lot done at all. Then I go home and work for a couple of hours just to get some work done.

So if that's more consistent, I think that wouldn't happen as much. But I definitely like the ability to work from home. I got a dedicated office at home. I go in. I still kind of try to do, like you guys talked about, my same routine. I get up in the morning. I get ready for work, and it's ten steps down the hallway. And for me, it's not a commute. I'm five minutes from the office. So I don't have that excuse that it's a long way to get in there, but definitely like the ability to do both for sure.

DAVID: You just said something, Mark, that really hooked my ear there. What you said was you go into the office, and you don't feel like...you're socializing, and you don't feel like you get much work done. And, yes, in terms of advancing the project and meeting the deadline, that kind of work doesn't get done.

All the side things that we do that support work that are work-adjacent, like socializing with your co-workers, that might not happen if you're full-time remote. You do end up getting those things done when you're in the office. It doesn't come up in your performance reviews like, well, 20% of your raise is based on how much time you spent at the water cooler and how contributing you were to the conversation. That doesn't happen. But I think it's really, really interesting.

I had an event recently where I said something that was accidentally offensive to someone else in the conversation. And the timing of me saying it and the way I said it made it sound like I was intentionally trying to mock this person. And fortunately, I had spent enough time...I had not spent enough time with that person for them to know that I was completely not trying to embarrass them. I was not trying to point a joke at them. It was literally there were two completely different ways to interpret what I said. And I didn't realize that the offensive context even existed.

And they kind of took it as like, oh, that was intentional, or maybe you deliberately set up the double entendre because I use those in my humor all the time. So it sounded like I was setting it up. Fortunately, there were people in the room who went, "Dave." And I'm like, "What?" And they're like, "Did you..." And I went, "Oh my gosh, no, no," and I was able to back it out. But if I had not had socialization time with the other people in the room, they would have run me out of the group. And I think I would have deserved it, I mean, not in terms of my intention but in what I had done.

And all of that was due to time spent not doing work with these people but instead bonding and gelling with them and getting to know them and them getting to know my sense of humor. And also to know, I'm not super proud of this, but I will tell a joke with dirty words in it, and I will tell filthy jokes, not at work. But I don't like to tell jokes that are mean to people. And even if they're perfectly clean, I don't like to tell mean jokes.

And the double entendre that I made was mean in its other interpretation, and there were people in the room who went, "That's not Dave. Dave did not mean to say that." So they grabbed me by the ear and said, "Stop that. You need to go say you're sorry. Don't ask why. Just go say you're sorry." I'm like, "Okay." Sorry, that's kind of a weird tangent.

But what you said, sometimes we go to the office...what I would say is it's not that you're not getting work done, it's that you are doing different work-adjacent things. And when we work from home, there are other work-adjacent things that we can do. We can refill our emotional batteries by having access to our families or by being able to take the dog for a walk that we don't get when we're in the office, especially if we've got, you know, your commute is what? Like three and a half days if you jump in the car and head west?

MIKE: Right there. [laughs]

DAVID: Yeah. So, I don't know; I guess what it is is there's a contrast at work that is imposed. But there are other activities that we think of as, like, this is not part of the work. It's not officially part of your job description to get along with people and contribute. But it certainly shapes the direction of your career if you know how to socialize with people, if you know how to interact with people.

MIKE: Well, I would take that a little further. One of the things that I've seen be very effective at fostering remote teams is actively scheduling time, scheduling time to do, I would say, non-productive but to do things that don't create code [laughs] but are just there for social interaction. On our team, we've talked to some leadership about how to do this, actively been looking. What are some things we can do to let people have some fun together?

And that sounds maybe like a very forced way of making people feel like [laughs] it's a good place to work. That's really not the purpose. I mean, sure, we want it to be a more fun place to work. But, you know, if you want to go play games, you could do that at home too. Sometimes you got to have fun together because that actually has some real social utility. You get to know each other better and to trust each other sometimes by activities that are not just coding, and you have to make space for that.

Now, what that looks like for different people may be very different. There's a range of things that people may find appealing, and maybe some of the activities you do aren't what everybody would consider as fun. [laughs] It may feel like work. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have utility and value. Having every person on your team tell some interesting story about their background or playing some sort of group game together, not everybody enjoys those things.

Being put on the spotlight to tell something, and maybe you have a very troubled history, and that's very difficult for you. You don't want to put somebody in a really bad position, and so you talk to them first. But it's a level of uncomfortable and not painful, that's still uncomfortable. It may not even be pleasant. You may not be doing it for fun, per se, but it still provides value to the team.

DAVID: Yeah, finding that line between what is normal and safe versus what is slightly risky versus what is [laughs] way over the line, finding that. Having something that is just slightly risky or slightly vulnerable that you can share and if your team reciprocates that with empathy and compassion, that is a great bonding experience. If you never share that, your relationship will be kind of...I think antiseptic is the right word there. It's a little bit of wordplay, but it's completely true. If your work environment is emotionally antiseptic, you can never grow a culture.

JASON: Yeah, I know some of the social things that we've done on the Atlas team was, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago; I don't quite recall. We played a round of Codewords and just getting to know some of the interns that we had. And hearing them in kind of a new light and getting to socialize outside of the context of here's an answer to your question or some strictly informative conversation was fun. Like Michael Webster, one of our interns, he's hilarious.

I wouldn't have gotten to hear or understand some of the humor and jokes if we hadn't been socializing. And that's fun just to reach out and talk if you need something. It really kind of opens things up, makes things easier to even reach out to people in general when you have that social context or kind of friendship context.

DAVID: Absolutely. When you have a problem that might not be important...I shared a story before the call. I won't go into all the details. But TL;DR, I was having a problem that everyone else was having and was minimizing. And it was really making me crazy. And I finally compared it to someone else, and they went, "Oh my gosh, you have a terrible problem. Go take care of this." And because I knew somebody in the IT department, it was so much easier to just reach out and say, "Hey, Mike, what's going on with this?"

And to ask them is this, you know because this might be a low-priority thing. I don't want to go to the help desk. I don't want to open a ticket. I don't want to have, you know, full tracking on this. And he looked at that and went, "Oh yeah, that's serious, go open a help ticket. And I will jump on it for you." And I'm like, cool, we can follow the process and also have that monitoring and meeting.

Sorry to dovetail two stories back to back, but there's a pattern that's emerging from what we're talking about. We're all talking about time that we have spent in kind of play meetings as remote developers, which meant we had to make an appointment with each other. We had to schedule some mandatory fun, which just sounds like a death march, doesn't it? Doesn't it just sound terrible?

But my boss, Zack, isn't here today, so I can talk a story behind his back here a little bit. He invited me to come work on the data team. And he said, "We've got a really, really great team." And I said, "Great," and I came, and I joined the team. Now, we're coming off the back of the pandemic, and we're all full-time remote. And I dove into the data stuff that we needed to learn. And then, three months later, I realized I'd still not met anybody on my team.

And I had kind of a one-on-one with...not kind of I had a one-on-one with Zack. And I said, "You keep telling me this team is really great, but I've never met them." And the next day, there was an appointment on the calendar. For every other Wednesday for an hour, we're going to get together and just play games. And so I've been able to meet with my co-workers and hang out and tell stories. And find out, you know, some teams everything is straight-laced and starched collars, and other teams are, you know, the humor is very colorful. And I'm getting to find out what colors of humor are okay on this team. And it's been super, super, incredibly awesome.

So what I would say to any employer that's trying to figure out how do I grow a culture when everybody's remote, and we're unintentionally pouring, you know, antiseptic on places where we were growing culture, schedule some time. Don't make it mandatory. If somebody's pushing a deadline, don't force them to stress out about their job by putting down getting work done to go to some stupid meeting where people are going to joke around and shoot the BS when I really need to get, you know, don't make me do that.

But if you do say this is a meeting and if you come, you get credit for being at work, and you don't have to do work, right? We all, you know, sometimes like to take a fun break like that. Because he scheduled that time, I've been able to hang out with my co-workers. I'd still like to hang out with them a lot more, but I've now actually met them. I could tell you their names without [laughs] having to look up an org chart. So that would be my advice (Way too long of a story.), but yeah, schedule some time. Don't make it mandatory but make it fun enough. Make it attractive to people to want to come to the somewhat mandatory fun.

JASON: I think that's huge that you said, "Don't make it mandatory." I was going to say that that's a key component, in my opinion, of making it fun is they are there...people are participating because they want to be there and can be there. And they've never been mandatory, and I've never felt like they were mandatory. And most of the time, I haven't attended because there were other things that were going on. But knowing that it was there and the opportunity I always want to now, especially the last couple that we've done, it's been fun to be a part of, you know, if you can make it.

DAVID: I worked at a shop way too long ago, gosh, 1999, I think. They had a thing called beat burnout. And the fact that we needed it was a solid demonstration that they were...it was in the video game industry. We were working 100-hour weeks, except for when they wanted us to work more. [chuckles] And they would have beat burnout. And they would do big things. They were always off-site. We would rent out a movie theater and then go to dinner at a nice restaurant or go to lunch at a nice restaurant.

And we'd rent out the room at the place. Every summer, they would rent out the amusement park. There's an amusement park near here that is very expensive to go to. It's taking you and your wife and go to this thing is going to be, you know, or you and your partner and go to this thing it's going to be 100 bucks to go do that. And they're like, "No, you get in for free. We're going to run a tab at this restaurant inside the park. We're going to run a tab at this cafeteria where you can get snacks." Go have fun, and you get an all-access ride pass. And that was fantastic. It was really, really cool.

And I was way behind on a major deadline that was going to cost me my job, [laughs] so I stayed at home, and I worked through it. And there were a couple of other co-workers who also stayed at home because they don't like amusement parks. And they didn't show up at the office, and they got reprimanded. And we got an official note from the CEO saying, "If you are not at beat burnout, you must be at your desk working." And attendance at beat burnout fell through the floor.

Even though they were doing great, fun things, after that, people were like, "Screw you, guys. I don't want to play this game." I do not want to be handcuffed to the roller coaster, which in this case is a literal roller coaster at an actual amusement park where you're supposed to be having fun.

EDDY: Basically, all I've gathered from talking to you guys [laughs] is that people can be less productive while in the office. So my question is, how the heck were any of you guys getting the job done before the pandemic?

DAVID: Oh, I wasn't. I wasn't.

EDDY: [laughs]

DAVID: The reason I had so many jobs is I'd go to a place, I get fired. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It's different work, right? It's a different way of approaching. When I go into the office, I don't have to structure my day anymore because I have to be there at a certain time. That means I've got to get up at a certain time, take a shower, get dressed, eat some breakfast. I've got to commute at a certain time. And that structures out my day. Lunchtime is a certain hour; go home at a certain hour. And that gives me some of that necessary structure to my day, some of that necessary contrast to my day.

But when I work from home, there's this wonderful thing where sometimes the structure has sharp corners, and that corner is going to gouge straight out of my eyeball. Instead of supporting me and giving me a framework to support my day, it's an overhead beam that I smack my head on. And it's just emotionally taxing, and it takes ten times as much emotional energy to be present during this particular hour of the day where if I was at home, I could...you know what? I really need to just go take a nap. And I can't do that in the office, that kind of thing.

So knowing what things you have to build for yourself in each environment is crucial. Knowing what things can support you in each environment is crucial. And they are different things, and you can be productive. There's a book called "Peopleware" and a software called Peopleware and a company called PeopleSoft, I think. But there's an old, old book...I can't remember the names of the authors. But the book is called "Peopleware." DeMarco and Lister, I think, might be the authors. They wrote this book in the '90s, and it was all about how to be productive, how to manage people in a technological environment.

And their premise was technology does not solve any people problems. It doesn't solve any human problems. It just makes them happen faster. And there's just one sentence...they were walking through studying this great big cube farm. And the boss was giving them a tour of the place, and he was saying, "I like having everybody here in the cube farm," and they had low-walled cubicles. "I like the low-walled cubicles because I can look out over and I can see who's working and I can see who's not because I've got to stay on top of these people to keep them busy and keep them focused and on task."

And as they walked, they noticed...they looked into one of the conference rooms, and there was an engineer in the conference room with papers strewn. This was before laptops. This was in the '90s or '80s, sorry. He had papers strewn all across the conference table and was poring over them intently. They took note of it, and they continued to tour. They dropped the CEO back in his office and said, "If you don't mind, we'd like to tour your office unsupervised." And he said, "Sure, go on. I got nothing to hide."

And they went straight back to the conference room. And they poked their heads, and they said, "Sorry for disturbing you, but why are you in the conference room?" And he looked up, and he said, "Oh, I'm hiding in here." And they're like, "Why are you hiding in here?" And he said, "So I can get some work done." And that became kind of the spark for these guys to go write this book because they realized there's this boss who thinks all of his employees are lazy and distractible and work-shy peasants kind of thing.

If that's true, why does he have people that are sneaking off to quiet rooms so they can get work done? Maybe we need to think about work in terms of maybe employees actually want to get work done. Maybe if we want to accomplish things in whichever environment you're in, we need to empower that and make that happen. So that was kind of a long, wild, rambly tangent. I highly recommend the "Peopleware" book if you haven't heard of that or haven't read it.

To give you an idea of how...I want to use the phrase eternal truth. [laughs] It's a phrase of, like, how long-lasting their advice and how evergreen their advice is. They wrote the book before the internet existed. And when the internet came out, they went back to them and said, "Okay, okay, you studied those people without computers in their offices and all these things. Now that the internet is here, we need a version 2.0 of the book that changes all the things that you've learned about how people are productive and how they think and how they work."

And they went back and went through their book, and they compared everything to the internet age. And they added half a chapter on dealing with the distraction of email. And they said, "Other than that, the internet has done nothing to the things that we said back in the '80s. People want to get work done. And if you throw technology at them, it just distracts them," which I thought was fantastic and fascinating.

KYLE: I'd like to throw my two cents on Eddy's question too.

DAVID: Please do.

KYLE: What I've kind of noticed is when I was in the office, I would get work done, but there was the quote, unquote, "water cooler time." And this kind of goes back to Mark's concern when he goes in the office. I think, yeah, I do get more work done when I'm at home. But I think that water cooler time you'd have everyday kind of builds up to where if you're going in every once in a while, it appears as though you're not getting anything done in the office because all that water cooler time has built up, and you're getting it done in that day or in the few days that you are there that would normally naturally just be getting done day by day if you were there in the office every day.

I've also seen, too, a lot of the older offices don't have them, at least from my experience. But the newer offices, like when I was at InsideSales or the new building that we went to at Acima, they've got these isolated self-cube rooms. I'm not sure what to call them, like, solo conference rooms or whatever. And part of those, at least from my understanding, is if you need to get away, if you need to be isolated, you can go into those rooms and work, and those are there for a reason because there are distractions in an office. You need somewhere where you can just go and be heads down.

And I think that's just a trend that has kind of taken off in the technology space. I don't know how common that is in a normal office environment outside of technology, but I've definitely had to use those a few times just to, okay, I need somewhere where I can't be distracted, which is something I don't need at home. I can just close my door, and nobody comes and bugs me.

DAVID: I've worked at a couple of shops where they moved to an open floor plan or what, agile with a lowercase a, what agile refers to as a bullpen environment. And the idea in the bullpen is to make it so that everybody overhears everything because it's valuable. It's like, "Oh, man, I can't connect to the database. Can you connect to the database?" And somebody two seats over goes, "Oh yeah, they changed the connector from eight-bit to seven-bit. Turn on parity, and you'll be fine."

There's like this side-channel thing. And they just saved you three hours of debugging, and it's fantastic. The problem is that you're trying to solve this problem that's like seven layers of recursion deep. And the person three chairs down says they can't connect to the database. And you know the answer, so you're going to tell them. Well, you just got distracted.

And in places that have bullpens, the chief complaint is you don't have any place where you can go to think, and especially you don't have any place where you can take a phone call without disrupting everybody around you. And so what I've seen are open floor plans with little three-foot by three-foot or four-foot by four-foot cubicles. They have a door. They have a big, tall window so you can see if it's occupied. And it's just enough space for a laptop and for you to put a sheet of paper next...and it's tiny. It's a tiny, tiny room. There are no monitors in there.

But notably, there's also acoustic foam on the walls so that if you want to take a phone call or if you want to jump on a podcast with somebody and you're in the middle of a bullpen, you can go to the privacy rooms, booths, really like little phone booths all along the side. I thought that was a fantastic way to make it so that you could elect whether you wanted zero distractions for an hour or whether you wanted to take a phone call without distracting your neighbors. I thought that was a neat way to deal with that.

JASON: It's kind of funny how ironic that is that you build offices to get people into the office to work so they won't be distracted, and now we have to build sub-offices essentially where people can go to be alone and work.

DAVID: [laughs] Was it George Carlin that did the joke about humans didn't like it was cold, so they built a box to live in where it was warm? And then their food went bad, so they built a box inside the box to keep things cold. And then, the butter kept getting too hard, so they built a box inside the box inside the box to keep the butter warm. Those booths are basically the butter dishes of our office complex. [laughs]

JASON: True.

KYLE: And I've always thought the idea of a bullpen was kind of funny because you build the bullpens so that the communication can be heard, and then they complain about it being too noisy. And, at this point, I've never been in a bullpen that hasn't had a white noise generator.

DAVID: Oh.

JASON: Well, you and me were both in sales, Kyle. And it's funny because you have everybody in that environment, and you have merchants who are getting this or retailers rather that we work with who get some background noise. So it's kind of funny. I'm sure that's changed since the office is larger and you have those white noise generators. It's kind of ironic, I guess.

DAVID: I will say that in my experience, bullpens don't work well once you've got more than about ten people in it, also, if it's a focused team. If you've got 30 people in a room, and you've got the IT team, and you've got the sales team, and you've got the engineering team all working in the same room, then the things that you're overhearing have nothing to do with your job, and they're just pure distraction.

I believe that white noise generators are of the devil. They're just the most evil thing in the world. The auditory processors in your brain cannot shut off. And any species that shuts off their auditory processors while they sleep are now extinct because they get eaten in their sleep, and humans are no different. That part of your brain never ever shuts off. And so if you put on white noise to sleep or put on a fan to sleep, it doesn't give you as restful sleep as having total silence.

And trying to think about an engineering problem...I have ADD. I love having music on. I love having people to talk to. I love having stuff. And I had to train myself to sit in silence, and when I did, I noticed I had an extra 40 horsepower in the brain engine compartment. That's a weird metaphor. You can think better when you free up those neurons. If you have an open bullpen to encourage communication, and then you turn on a white noise generator to jam communication, fire your floor planner, please. Just, yeah, give people offices at that point; give them silence when they crave it.

MIKE: So, as we're finishing here, I'm noticing a recurring theme about being deliberate about things, scheduling time, creating spaces to do things. And this applies not just to remote work but in-person work. And it's been about the need to have some structure that it's...I'm going to say mandatory, but it is not the best word for it. If you want to be successful, you need a surprising amount of structure. And it can be completely and probably should be self-imposed. But you're making that choice for yourself so that you can be effective.

DAVID: Absolutely. When I try to schedule my exercise, I hate doing that. So I look at it from the thing of, like, I want to fill up this bucket with this much quantity of exercise over this amount of time, which makes it nice because now if I fall down the rabbit hole and I start chasing this really interesting problem at work and all of a sudden I accidentally seven hours, I don't feel like, oh, I missed my workout time. It's like, oh, no, I wanted to do some walking today, and I've got a minute now. I'll go for a walk.

And at the end of the week, if I haven't done much walking that week, I can say I need to do more walking this week. That's my way as a very fluid kind of eclectic person of saying I'm going to own my schedule because I can say I want to put this in my schedule, and I want to get it done. But I don't actually need to make an appointment for it. And if somebody else makes an appointment for something to happen, I absolutely am going to resist that because of just the way my ego works.

MIKE: Either way, though, you did set some time aside to yourself. You did it in the way --

DAVID: Yeah, yeah. I am 100% agreeing with you that what we're touching on here is owning the schedule, and owning your life, owning your career, owning what you do in a day, 100% agree, yes.

JASON: Can say I love how Acima has done things, kind of putting the ownership on the engineer and the employee.

DAVID: Yeah, trusting people to get it done, and then people get it done. And it feels great. Well, fantastic. Ramses had to drop off a minute early. But Kyle, Jason, Eddy, Mark, Mike, thank you so much for coming. This was a lot of fun. And I'm looking forward to our next episode. And we'll see you guys soon.