Remote Work Vs. In-Office

About this Episode

In this episode, we talk about remote work vs. being in the office. Pros and cons! Ups and downs!

Transcript:

DAVE: Hello. Welcome and good morning to the Acima Development Podcast. We are going to talk today about remote versus in-office work, and that's going to be kind of exciting. I'm your host, Dave Brady. I've been programming at Acima for a little over a year. And I started out on the Atlas web dev team building the website that the merchants use, and now I'm over on the data engineering team. And it's a lot of fun. Today on the panel, we have Eric Martinez.

ERIC: Hello, Hello. Eric Martinez, Product Manager. I've been at Acima for one year, and I'm excited to engage in this conversation with you all.

DAVE: Awesome. We also have David Solano.

DAVID: Hey, guys. I've been here in Acima for one year too, and I'm a developer.

DAVE: Right on. David, where are you from?

DAVID: Costa Rica. [laughs]

DAVE: Costa Rica.

DAVID: Ya.

DAVE: We want everybody to know that we're not all in the middle of Utah. So it's kind of nice. Speaking of people that are not in the middle of Utah, we also have today Marcos Yu.

MARCOS: Yeah. Hi. I'm a new developer in Acima.

DAVE: Welcome. Where are you from, Marcos?

MARCOS: I am from the Philippines.

DAVE: Awesome. Welcome. We also have Ramses Bateman.

RAMSES: Hello, hello. I am from Utah. Full-time developer for about six months now.

DAVE: Right on. And, you know, if the Philippines and Costa Rica wasn't far enough away, we also have Aniket Tiwari.

ANIKET: Hi, everyone. I'm a contract developer, and I'm currently working from India.

DAVE: Right on. Welcome. So we have people from pretty much every time zone. Well, I mean, not literally every timezone; we'd need 24 people here. But yeah, we've got pretty good global coverage, which is actually a pretty good introduction to the topic today, which is the benefits and trade-offs to remote work versus in-office work. I kind of want to just kick things off with a question, which is just to ask everybody on the team or everybody here on the panel what's your opinion? What do you think, bad idea, good idea?

DAVID: Well, I've been in both scenarios. Right now, for Acima, I work remotely. But I think right from my side; I like to be at home working or busy working from a different location. It has its benefits, but I think that it also...sometimes you miss to see people just kind of networking or contact with others stuck around the office. So I think both sides have pros and cons.

DAVE: 100% agreed.

ERIC: There is an argument to both, right? Work remotely versus coming into the office, and I think a lot of the national conversation regarding this topic has intensified because during the pandemic, obviously, working remotely was a thing because we couldn't gather. And I think a lot of benefits came out of that, good and bad. You have a segment of the population who probably it took a mental toll working remotely and not being able to connect with their peers at the office, not being able to have those connections with people outside of your home environment.

Then you have people who reported they were more productive. And then they started to see like, hey, I don't have to go to the office. [laughs] I don't have to get up at 5:30 in the morning, try to get a peloton ride, shower, and take the kids to school, then drive 20 to 30 minutes to the office, and then drive back. So it became more efficient for those individuals.

And then you have someone like me where...so when the pandemic happened, I was kind of doing some contract work, you know, there were some jobs. And when I came to Acima, it was kind of towards the tail end of the pandemic, but I think that we were still kind of starting from...a lot of companies had shifted to completely working remotely. And this is where I felt like in order to start a job; I think it will be really, really hard to start remotely. Now, that's my opinion based on my experience.

I don't know. Maybe there are others here in the panel that might share a similar feeling. For the type of role that I have...so I partner with a team of engineers who manage a lot of the financial transactions and all the systems that manage all that money when you send it out with accounting. And a lot of my job for me to be successful is, I need to have personal relationships with accounting, with lots of people that I would have found a little bit hard to do remotely in a fully remote environment.

Is there a straight answer? I think I'm kind of standing in the middle of the line with one foot on one side and one foot on the other. But now that I have built those relationships, I'm starting to like, hey, I want to work from home, maybe a hybrid model where I don't have to come into the office as much where I have built those personal relationships that now I can work with individuals remotely, right?

DAVE: You actually make some really, really good points. I love this; can you start a job if you're 100% remote? We have some people on the team that did not come into the office [laughs] to get started, right? Aniket, David, Marcos. Like, how did you get started at this gig? How did you get started at previous gigs where you were 100% remote? Have you ever had jobs where you go in for the beginning and then roll out, or do you...oh, wow, my boss just joined the podcast. Welcome, Zach.

ZACH: Hey, how's it going?

DAVE: Are you here to join the podcast, or are you here to tell me to get back to work?

ZACH: Join the podcast. I've been meaning to do it for a while.

DAVE: Oh, thank goodness. Thank goodness. So awesome. Zach, you are the...what do you do here?

ZACH: My official title is Senior Data Service Manager managing the data services team.

DAVE: Nice. So that would make me a senior data service.

ZACH: Senior data engineer, I believe.

DAVE: Just, I mean, you are the senior data service manager. So if I'm a senior engineer, then you don't manage me, cool. I'm sure you'll set me straight later. Today we're talking about remote work versus in-office work. And Eric just raised a really good question of can you be 100% remote? And we've got three people; we've got a Costa Rican, a Filipino, and an Indian on the podcast today. And those are all 10-hour flights or more. I wanted to throw out to you guys, David, Marcos, Aniket, what is it like getting started in a job where you're 100% remote?

MARCOS: Maybe I can share my experience around 2015.

DAVE: Sure.

MARCOS: So this is not actually my first time working remotely. So I was working under a UK client. So the time zone that I work with is very different, so that was a very different experience for me, for instance. So this happened way, way before the pandemic, so I was pretty happy back then, the productivity surge because I don't need to commute and stuff. And also, I feel that I'm accomplishing many things on a day-to-day basis because I feel that I could work six hours straight rather than at the office that I need to consider the traffic to go home to my family, so everything was good.

But then it was also my worst working experience. That's when I learned the importance of communication, especially with working remotely. While working in the company, there was no feedback loop in terms of the work quality that I'd been delivering and stuff. In my head, at that time, during those two years, I'd been doing great. I've been contributing well because I have this bunch of code that I've been pushing on our codebase, and it gets deployed.

Then one day, they told me that they're going to stop working with me because the project is almost ending and stuff. So I was the first one to have been let go. I can understand the situation back then that it is kind of like a project basis and stuff. While looking for a job at that stage, that's when I noticed that my skills haven't grown for the two years, maybe because...I could factor in the lack of communication with my teammates also. You're not able to check the code quality that you're delivering and stuff.

I would agree with the sentiment earlier that it works both ways. Yeah, you're being productive and stuff. Still, you need to communicate with your client and your peers. That's one of the most important points because that will show you where you are currently and if not, you might get lost working alone by yourself.

DAVID: When I started working as a developer, I didn't have work from home, so I needed to travel two hours from my house to work. And from time to time, I could ask like, "Hey, can I work from home this day?" I need maybe to go to the doctor at the end of the day, and it's easy for me to go after job and be here in the house. Then I switched to another place, and I'd go two days, and that was a big change for me. I could rest a little bit longer. I could still network with the guys, with my partners, and that was great.

And then, I switched to another place. And I was in a project where they weren't used to having work-from-home people. But I was completely remote because I was here in Costa Rica. And this client and this project was from the U.S., so it was extremely hard because they were not used to having tools to communicate better. Slack was something that they were barely using.

And even though you tried to communicate with them, the team was not like in that way of facilitating everything for the remote guys. And I was not the only one. So it came to one point when they decided that they couldn't work with people working remotely. So they started to finish contracts because it was not working for them.

Then I switched to another one where remote work was the thing. No one was at the office. Actually, there was no office. And it was pretty fun because they encouraged communication. It's easy for everyone. And then I joined here at Acima, and I think it's kind of both scenarios when you can go to the office; some people love to go to the office.

But for us that are working remotely from a totally different country, it's just awesome because here in Acima, the communication is just great. If have questions, you ask, and you get answers. If you have problems with the things that you are doing, you can pair program with your co-workers. And that is great because everyone here is willing to help you. So I think this is just amazing. For me, this has been the best experience of all time working remotely because I think Acima is just prepared for remote work.

DAVE: I love how you talked about the existence of communication channels. I had forgotten this, but you're absolutely right; I've had that experience where eight of the people on the team were in the office, and two of us were remote. And we absolutely got starved for information because the team that was in the office all their communication channels were implicit, locally-convenient channels.

It's like they would go stand by each other's desk, or they would go hang out at the ping pong table or play foosball or whatever, or they would go eat in the lunch room together. And if you're outside, it's really hard to force your way into that communication circle, and it's actually seen as an annoyance or an intrusion. [laughs]

There was a team that I was on, and we had really good remote communication. And so at one point, we actually started doing telepresence where I would literally come in the morning, and I would jump into...it wasn't Skype but before Zoom existed, but it was one of those get on and do a video call. And in the office, they had a spare machine. So they could just turn that machine on, put my face on that screen, and then they could carry me around like a little disembodied head around the office.

It sounds really cool, but in practice, it's kind of, eh, it wasn't great. All the people that are like, "This is not a good idea," they turned out to be right. But the hallmark, worst moment with that came when a couple of people on my team went to do a special side project with another local team that was entirely local. And I wanted to join with as well, so I'm like, cool, yeah.

So I had them take the telepresence laptop into the conference room where this other team was working. And they sat me down at the end of the table facing down the table, and it was pretty good. And immediately, nobody talked to me because the laptop the sound isn't that great. And I'm getting 12 people's audio slamming into me and that sort of thing. And I kind of got quiet, and I just started listening to everybody, and they started ignoring me.

And at one point, somebody bumped the laptop and turned it like 90 degrees, 120 degrees, so I'm staring into a wall. And I'm like, "Guys, hey. Guys, hello? [laughs] Can somebody turn me around?" And either nobody could hear me or nobody cared. And after 10 minutes of waiting to see if somebody would notice that my laptop was turned around and nobody doing it, I'm finally like, eh, fine, I'll just drop out. And I ended up not doing the rest of that special team project because I literally could not force my way into the communication channel.

DAVID: I was in that position a long time ago, same scenario. It was a webcam. The whole team was in the office. I was remote. And if you talk to them, they were not paying attention. So I decided to drop off, and no one even noticed. [laughs]

DAVE: Yeah. That was the same experience I had. I dropped out of the thing. And I had to go find somebody and tell them, "Hey, you might want to get the telepresence laptop out of the conference room." And they're like, "Oh, is it still there?" I'm like, "Yeah, it's still there. [laughs] It's still pointed at the wall."

DAVID: Yeah. And I've been in the other scenario where they don't have webcams with laptops and all that, but they just have this speaker.

DAVE: Oh, like a conference call, yeah.

DAVID: Right. And it's fine because sometimes, if there's someone who is able to facilitate how the conversation is going, it's easy for the one that is remote. And I actually like that he asked questions, "Hey, David, what do you think about this?" And so everyone listens, and everyone keeps silent and listens to what you have to say. And this enables you to participate in the, even now, in the meeting that is happening right now. But yeah, I think it depends on how the team is behaving at that moment. There's someone who facilitates that kind of communication too.

DAVE: You've touched on an idea that I've tried to communicate for a while now about remote work, which is that for remote workers, there's no communication channel for...I call them priority four communications. So, like, priority three work is work that is in the backlog, and you do it when you can get to it. Priority 2 work is work that's at the top of the backlog, and you need to work on that right away.

And then priority 1 is stuff where they're like, "Don't go home until this is done." It's like we have to have this in place by tomorrow. There's also priority 0, which is don't go to the bathroom until this works. The server's down, and we're losing $100,000 a minute. You don't have time to go potty.

But priority 4 is communication that is not strictly necessary. Like, if somebody came in and said, "Hey, keep it down and get back to work," you would probably be having priority four communication. And to be clear, I'm not talking about socialization or talking about the ball game last night, or any of that. I'm talking about actual work discussions. I'm talking about the thing where somebody sits down and says, "So, how come we don't use SQL Server instead of this other data lake product?"

And the other person in the room can go, "Hmmm, yeah, the CFO hates SQL Server." That's not going to be in the prospectus for the company. That's not an official doctrine. That's not something somebody wants to commit to in an email to tell you. But it is nonetheless a guiding factor for the entire company. So if you're like a database guy and you really, really love SQL Server, then you need to be aware that this is never going to fly here. You're going to have to do this. And that's what I call a priority four communication.

And what I've noticed is that...oh, the other way you can define a P4 is it's something that if you had a question, you would never write an email to your team starting with, "What do you think is the best way to...?" You would never write this email, right? It's like, "What do you guys think is the best way to store data? What do you guys think is the best web framework?" The company already has a web framework. We already have a data storage solution. We already have networking vendors. But these are communications that, as a team, you need to have.

And what you said was really, really important, David, that if there's a facilitator on the call to say, "David, what do you think about this?" They can drive a wedge into the conversation and create space for you to float into the conversation. But it's really hard. Without that facilitator; there's almost no way for you to engage in P4s. Nobody's going to sit down and say, "Oh, by the way, everybody knows that the CFO hates SQL Server." Nobody's going to start that conversation with you. But it's an important conversation.

These are things that I call the lore of a project, the lore of a team, or the lore of a company, things that are not written down anywhere, and they're not official records, but nonetheless, they are very strong guiding rules to how the company is run. And I don't have a solution for that yet. But I think as we see more and more teams move to 100% remote, I think we're going to have to tackle this. I think we're going to have to find ways to get people rubbing elbows virtually, if not physically so that these communications can take place because I think they're actually pretty important.

MARCOS: I kinda like what Atlas team does before their meeting. They set a time in the beginning of a meeting where people could talk about anything under the sun, let's say. So that's something that might come up or something that someone could share.

DAVE: I like that. I've walked in on many conversations on the Atlas team and people who had been in there early...and people are talking about their kids. They're talking about their hobbies. They're talking about what they did over the weekend. And that's a lot of fun to walk in on that and to basically have human beings that I'm hanging out with that I don't have to get anything done with, and it's really nice.

There's a...ooh, don't quote me on this. They call it the FROG mechanic. If you need to communicate with somebody socially and you're socially awkward like I am, so, I mean, I literally had to Google how to make small talk with people. And the acronym that they give is FROG, F-R-O-G. If you can't think of anything to make small talk about, use the FROG acronym. You can talk about their family, their recreation, their...I can't remember what O is...occupation, which I mean with co-workers, is obviously...and I can't remember what G is...goals maybe, I can't remember.

But these are like safe topics that you can bring up with pretty much any stranger, like at a cocktail party or the equivalent. Yeah, walking in on a conversation where they're talking about FROG is awesome because you know that you can jump in and be part of the team and discuss. Eric...and oh, and Eddy Lopez has joined the call. Welcome, Eddy. I see some hands up on the call.

ERIC: Yeah. So I'm happy to hear that those conversations are happening with engineers, especially on the Atlas team. And I'm not surprised that those conversations are happening there. You know, obviously, I work with the Founding Fathers' team. When I first started working with them, that team, this is how I describe those guys; they will never kill a fly, but they're very intimidating [laughs] at the same time, very smart individuals, very straight to the point, very senior developers.

And I do remember those first conversations. They were kind of awkward. I was trying to figure out the balance between, like, all right, here are things that we need to focus on. Here are things that I'm looking at you guys for directions. But going back to the point to, you know, working remotely versus working from office, so two members of that team are local here, and I remember having conversations outside of work, topic-related things helped build rapport, and then eventually build some trust in terms of projects, when we worked on projects. We have another team member who's based in Texas.

One thing about me that I think some of you guys know is I love to travel, and I like to find any excuse to go any place, from going to Panguitch, Utah to Russia, [laughs] any excuse that I can find to go somewhere. So Tyler Hall...and I think a lot of you guys know, he prepared for a year mentally, physically to do...what was it? MMA fighting. And I went to...a pretty cool story about how he started and his journey of preparation.

So I went to his fight. And even though I've only met Tyler once, when I went to the fight, personally, I feel like we have built a long-time relationship if our professional careers take us to different places; same with Adrian and Jordan, Matthew is in Virginia. And during our meetings, we do set some time to kind of shoot the breeze a little bit because that replaces something that happens naturally at an office workspace.

Earlier, you mentioned the cooler water cooler. You have those small conversations that really do have an impact on work relationships, on personal relationships that are missing when you start fully working remotely. So I'm kind of happy that Marcos and David that you guys have found ways to kind of replace that in a remote environment to continue to have those connections, even though we're not physically present in the room, because I think that is one of the many factors that makes a successful team anywhere.

DAVE: That's awesome. Thank you.

EDDY: This is something that's been on my mind for the past few months. And this question is more catered to people that have experience in working remote and in office. The question is like, how would you compare Acima's productivity as the company embraces remote work? Is Acima more or less productive in comparison to other companies that you worked for that don't have remote work?

ERIC: I feel like Acima has been, in my experience, one of the companies that has been...we are more efficient. David, what would you say the percentage of all engineers that Acima employees are remote?

DAVE: On the average team, it's close to 100%.

ERIC: Yeah, I was going to say I'm like, it's going to be pretty high because -- [laughs]

DAVE: It's pretty high. Zach, are we...on the data team, are we 100% remote? I mean, I know you go into the office about one day a week. I, about every other week or every third week, will come in for a day.

ZACH: We're mostly remote. Kenton likes to be in office. So he's probably in the office the most.

DAVE: That's an interesting take, though. It's like we're not requiring people to come in. But we have desks with computers and comfy chairs and sit standard electric desks so that if you do come in, you've got a nice place to sit and work. It's not like you have to come in and sit on a folding chair in a conference room and hate the environment.

ERIC: The environment, yeah. Going back to you, Eddy, which, by the way, I miss seeing your face in the office. Whenever you come to the office, it brightens my day.

EDDY: Aw-shucks.

ERIC: [laughs] I would say that yes, in my experience, we are a pretty well-oiled machine, if you will if you allow me to use that metaphor. We get things done. We don't have to be all crammed in one room office space to get things done. And I think we have proven that. I mean, Atlas, how many engineers do you guys have? 20? I've lost count. They're a pretty big team. And they are a team that, without that team, we wouldn't have Acima and, of course, not to diss on other teams, right? All of the teams that we have are very integral to the success of Acima.

And I think our success is because of you guys, engineering. We're very efficient now. That is my experience from other companies that I have worked with. And I wouldn't necessarily say it is the environment, whether you're working remotely or from home. I also think that it is the people that work for Acima are very good at what they do, and they're very competent individuals. That's also a key aspect that makes this company efficient and successful.

DAVE: I have a question that I want to throw out. I want to kind of address the billionaire elephant in the room, which is a couple of months ago, Elon Musk bought Twitter. He made the news last week by going and addressing the employees of Twitter and saying, "You need to get back to the office." And a lot of people were saying, "Why?" I'm more productive at home. I can write a line of code, and then if my kid wants to walk around the block, I can go do that with my kid. I can't do that when I'm at the office." Elon's response was that...he phrased it very interestingly.

He said you need to have...I'm not quoting, but he said something along the lines of you need to have a mindset of collaborating for innovation. And he definitely phrased it in a way that he was; basically, I think, addressing this kind of communication scarcity that happens with remote that if we don't have people together in the same room, we miss out on the breeder reactor reaction of having everybody in close proximity where they can bounce ideas off of each other at an increasingly high frequency. And he phrased this in very strong terms, like, I, as your employer, I don't get that benefit if you're not in the office. And I'm very curious to see, especially if --

ERIC: He's just a control freak. That's all it is.

DAVE: Yeah, I mean --

ERIC: [laughs] That's all it is.

DAVE: I've worked with a couple of...that's where I was going to go next. I've worked for a couple of CEOs that didn't like remote work, and they both used the word vibe. They're like, "Oh, I like the vibe when people are in the office." And I'm like, you know, is there --

ERIC: That's translation, for I like to control you and making people come into the office. It's like, where are we? In kindergarten? Do we not have that trust? Do we not have that trust in our people? And I think this is something that...culture here, right? There is trust all around. And you guys are engineers, and we're able to deliver things. And we're able to ideate from people who work remotely. We're able to do things. And I just think Elon Musk was, you know, he's just a control freak. [laughs]

MARCOS: I think I could also argue with that statement. So let's say we have this scenario, right? There are people in the office, but they're all looking at their computers doing each of their own stuff. And let's say they're doing it also remotely. So we could probably say that they have no interaction altogether, right? So working remotely and working in an office doesn't have any difference at all.

So it boils down to the people and the culture that the company has. So it's not about the physical interaction. I mean, this is my personal opinion. It boils down to people and culture of the company rather than physical presence or the setup of your company or working remotely or working in office.

DAVE: Yeah. As you were saying that, I realized that there's a communication channel that is present or not a communication...I'm going to say communication channel, but what I mean is like it's almost like a nebulous like a psychological...we all have Slack. We all have instant message. We all have video calls. But we made a conscious decision. And we've set an example on the Atlas team to say, we're going to ask really dumb, low-priority questions or questions that you might think twice about asking or you might consider, oh, this question is noise.

And at the Atlas team, we ask those, and they get answered, and it's super beneficial. And the key example that I have cited over the years...and this is purely anecdotal from my experience. I love remote work, but I step back, and I say, "Well, are there advantages to working in the office?"

And I've had the experience of working with a pair programmer, and we're talking about, okay, we got to run this. We got to get this test working. And all of a sudden, the database goes away and stops working. And we're like, wait a minute, why can't we connect to the database anymore? Something in the connection pool. Wait, we don't use a connection pool.

And because I'm talking with my pair and I'm talking with them out loud, the pair programming team sitting right next to us heard us and turned and said, "Oh, you guys, we just pushed up a connection pooling thing. You just need to pull and synchronize. And then you just need to touch this file, and you'll be good to go." And we immediately got up and running. And that could have sidelined if we were remote and none of that was overheard. That could have sidelined us for a long time.

And I've had that experience as well where I've been sidelined by something nitpicky and stupid that somebody did and then didn't tell everybody else on the team. I think Atlas has done a really good job of addressing that by having one of the team channels be a place where it's absolutely...we have like a company-wide channel for our team where anybody can come and go that wants to have interaction with our team.

But the Atlas team, in particular, had a private engineering channel that they could go into. And that was a place where you could just go, "Oh my gosh, I'm getting this error message. Does anybody know anything about this?" And you get kind of that same feedback where another person on the team will say, "Oh, yeah, I did that to you, sorry."

The nice thing is that they will usually follow that with a link in the Slack channel to the conversation that they kicked off four hours ago or in the middle of the night last night or two days ago, depending on how long you've been out of sync with the repo. They'll come back and say, "Here's the conversation where I said this. These are the steps that you need to do to correct this." That's something you can't do at the water cooler is you can't be in the middle of a conversation with somebody and then hand somebody a link to the conversation that was had at the water cooler three days ago. That's kind of a fun sidebar.

There are some efficiencies that you can leverage of remote work that I think we address the entire conversation around is remote work good enough to replace office work? And I think we overlook some things that remote work is very, very good at and very especially adapted to. So that's kind of a side tangent.

MARCOS: Yeah. And to add to that, I think you can encounter this many times. Like, there are some devs that ask a question, then there is someone that's going to reply to that thread. And he said that "Yes, I've been encountering that for many days," or something. And then there's going to be another dev which, "Oh, I introduced this some time ago." So if you could see that, there's that individuality of a developer that they do not tend to ask questions because not all developers are equal, so some ask questions, some don't. So they tend to just adjust to that scenario without asking.

So because of that channel, they could surface their question, or they could say, "Yeah, I also experienced that." So now that there's a commonality with that, we could actually address that since it's a common problem for all. So that's one thing that I noticed very differently in other companies and here in Acima is that collaboration is really a priority. Everybody has a ticket, right? Everybody's busy. But everyone always checks the message and sees, oh, someone is having trouble. And if they knew or something came up to mind, they're not afraid to just chat it there. So that encourages you also to ask questions rather than keep it to yourself.

DAVE: That's awesome. Thank you. I think there might still be some meat on this bone to talk through. But we're coming up close on our hour here for record time. Do we have any parting shots, any closing thoughts? I'm assuming everyone in the room is pro versus against remote work. Any other shots?

DAVID: I think this has been a great conversation. I just wanted to finish with something that just comes to my mind. If you're working remotely, remember that you also need to be open to feedback. I think that's important. If you want to grow up there and to find the way and the standard of the team, that's something you have to keep in mind.

DAVE: Yeah, that's a nice circling comment to what you said at the top of the call where the necessary feedback was lacking that you have to go...and what I'm saying is if you're remote, you have to go after that feedback sometimes so people that will just like, oh, well, if I don't talk about it, maybe the problem will go away and --

MARCOS: And maybe people will forget if you don't chase that feedback. [laughs]

DAVE: Yeah. And that feedback can be essential to keeping your job. So you can accidentally let some information go by that you absolutely need. And if you were in the office, you would just pick it up and absorb it because it's kind of in the air. And if you're remote, you have to go digging for it sometimes.

EDDY: I have a question for those who prefer to go in the office or aren't opposed to. How can you be productive when it's really easy to reach over someone's shoulder and start a conversation? I don't know about you guys, but everyone in Acima is really nice. And it's really easy to start a conversation. I'll go on record and say if I'm in the office, [laughs] it's hard to get more work done as opposed to when I'm at home.

DAVE: Yeah, that's a really fair point. We've been talking about the communication channels purely from the viewpoint of communication carries sideband information that's really, really valuable, and we lose that when we're remote. But the advantage of being remote is that you lose that communication channel. That communication channel doesn't come find you and distract you. Having peace and quiet and time to think is kind of nice working remote.

EDDY: Yeah, being secluded, for me anyways, I can be more productive. But I'm just curious to gauge other people's opinions.

MARCOS: I've been someone asking someone in the office for some help. So that actually, like request timing also, like, let's say, what if the person is busy? So that's one thing that I encounter most of the time in the office when I was working in the office. So that actually sometimes discourages you to ask someone a question.

So what I typically do is, even though I'm in the office, I just leave him a message. If that person is known to be like the busy guy, because there's always the busy guy that always stares at his computer, so I just leave him a message. So that kind of works the same way with working remotely. You can leave a message to the people and let them take their time to do the stuff that they need and just wait for them to reply.

DAVE: Yeah, that's actually a really good point that when you are in the office, it's very, very easy to have highly urgent conversations, not necessarily important conversation but urgent conversation. And when you are remote, it's much more easier to have asynchronous communication where you fire something off, and then you wait for a little while to get back.

And when you're remote, you can kind of get a little hamstrung where if you're like, "Hey, I need help with this," because you're down, right? It's like if your machine isn't working, you can't write software today until this gets fixed. You don't want to be in an asynchronous situation. You don't want to just like, oh, by the way, if anybody sees this sometime today or tomorrow, could you maybe get around it? No, it's like you need help right now, right? So it's kind of like urgent.

One of the things that I have lamented this multiple times in the past but one of the things you can't do when you're remote is you can't go stand at somebody's desk and just be silent and awkward until they give you what you want. I love that about working in the office. It's just being awkward at your desk until you make me go away. And you can make me go away by giving me what I want, which is nice.

ERIC: And it's more efficient. [laughs]

DAVE: Yeah.

EDDY: I'll tell you this because it brings up a pretty interesting point that we ran into a few weeks ago in the QA team where we're like, "Hey, should we update our laptops? Is it safe to update or not?" And we never got a concrete answer from IT. And I'm going to bring Zsolt in, and I'm sorry, Zsolt, to hear this, like, hello. But he's the only one really on the team who prefers to work in office, like in an office setting. So we just messaged, and we're like, "Hey, can you go bug IT really quick and just ask them a direct answer? Like, this would be nice to have." And he's like, "Yeah, sure. Give me like five minutes."

And so he's like, AFK. And then he comes back about 10 minutes later. And he's just like, "Oh, I have an answer. This is what it is." And I'm just like, well, that was fast. So you can be more efficient, I guess, and you can get your answers quicker [laughs] if you're in the office.

DAVE: Yeah. It's important to remember that when the shoe is on the other foot, it's the exact opposite. Like you just said, it's nice when you're remote to have that solitude and get your head down and get some work done. And you can't do that if David Brady is standing at your desk being awkward, waiting for you to babysit him. It's like, I got to get work done too, man. It's an interesting balance. And that's what I would say is it's a balance. Sometimes you got to lean hard to one side versus the other.

ZACH: So there's a quick story I wanted to share from my last company of how we got, like, limited the hovering over the desk, especially for questions. And I think all of us as developers have done this before where you go and ask a question, and as you're talking through it, the answer just pops in your head, and you didn't actually need to take somebody else's time.

So we were on a project that was just a big time crunch. And our VP of data science actually brought in like a six-foot stuffed bear [laughter] with a Jazz jersey and a hat, and he sat him in a chair at one of the desks at the beginning of our aisle. And before somebody was allowed to actually come talk to us, they had to talk it through with the bear to see if they got their solution from that or not.

DAVE: Nice.

ZACH: I mean, it limited the distractions, and we were able to get the project out in time, half because I think a lot of people don't want to go sit and talk to a stuffed bear, and then the other half just basically they figured it out on their own talking to the stuffed bear.

EDDY: Kind of rubber ducking.

DAVE: I've heard that referred to as teddy bear debugging, or rubber ducking or teddy bear debugging, yeah.

EDDY: Rubberducking, yep.

DAVE: And yeah, like, by the time you serialize a problem in your brain to be able to stream it out as words, that's usually enough to reframe the problem in your head, not usually, but there's a fair amount where that's enough to solve...yeah, you said it already. I'll just...I'll shut up. [laughs]

ZACH: And on the flipside of that, I think that when you work remote, it's more conscious effort to reach out to somebody than to turn your head and say, "Hey," right?

DAVE: Yeah.

ZACH: Or just walk three feet away, five feet away. And so I think a lot of people actually kind of do that internally when they're remote.

EDDY: Zach, I'd argue that maybe there's been times where you'd you start to type a message to someone because you can't figure it out. In the middle of typing that out, you're like, oh yeah, that's the answer. It's kind of like a similar concept.

ZACH: Yep.

MARCOS: And it happens most of the time.

[laughter]

ZACH: I just noticed since we've gone remote, when I get questions, they're hard issues. I mean, some of the time, it's something that I just know because of my experience here. But a lot of the time, it's something where I'm like just researching with one of the team members on how to get past it.

DAVE: Yeah. That is awesome. I want to thank everybody for coming out today. David, Marcos, you're still here, Zach is still here, Eddy is still here. Thanks for coming out today. This was a fun chat.