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We figured out how to work remotely by necessity. How will that change how we work in the future? Is remote work here to stay? Is it for everyone?
Show Notes
Oxide and Friends Twitter Space: March 7th, 2022
The Future Of Work
We’ve been holding a Twitter Space weekly on Mondays at 5p for about an hour. Even though it’s not (yet?) a feature of Twitter Spaces, we have been recording them all; here is the recording for our Twitter Space for March 7th, 2022.
In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers on March 7th included Lucas Ives, Dan McDonald, Steve Tuck, Ian, Matt Campbell, MattSci, Jim Rybarski, Austin, Aaron Goldman, Jake Demarest-Mays, Jason Ozolins, Tom Lyon, Timon, Matthew Amdur, jasonbking, and Horace. (Did we miss your name and/or get it wrong? Drop a PR!)
Some of the topics we hit on, in the order that we hit them:
- [@8:15](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=495) Lucas’ story
- Remote before pandemic, comparisons
- [@16:29](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=989) Sidebar chat, backchannel
- [@22:49](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=1369) Pre-recorded talks, speaker commenting in chat engaging with questions
- Multitasking during meetings, different from in-person single-threaded meetings
- Recording meetings for later review
- Holding onto a thought may detract from fully listening to another’s point
- [@34:40](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=2080) Oxide’s full team meetup, what did they focus on?
- [@38:01](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=2281) Austin’s remote experience
- [@44:30](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=2670) Dan’s question: remote employees “pilgrimage” back to home often, how often?
- [@50:23](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=3023) Disadvantages to full remote?
- [@56:15](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=3375) Jake’s experience, asynchronous work style
- Meetings as unprepared group think sessions, not valuable as decision making
- Requests for discussion, as decision making tools
- [@1:02:29](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=3749) Jason: service delivery vs product delivery
- Class devision between “the desked” and “the un-desked”
- [@1:07:17](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=4037) Is “back to office” about command and control?
- Other factors: big tech companies receive substantial local subsidies
- [@1:14:00](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=4440) Timon on working in different timezones
- Recorded meetings/discussions as valuable content
- Pandemic boosted remote work tool quality
- [@1:23:32](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=5012) Difficulties with remote?
- Building rapport, judging emotions and nuanced communication
- Organic, unplanned communications with in-person office spaces (watercooler)
- [@1:33:24](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=5604) Matt: remote work as cost savings?
- Value of “down time” communication, unstructured
- [@1:43:50](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=6230) Starting career, making connections, in all-remote world
- [@1:47:58](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=6478) Future of remote work since pandemic
- [@1:51:30](https://youtu.be/GTluipbKeII?t=6690) Horace’s experience with remote work
If we got something wrong or missed something, please file a PR! Our next Twitter space will likely be on Monday at 5p Pacific Time; stay tuned to our Twitter feeds for details. We’d love to have you join us, as we always love to hear from new speakers!
Creators & Guests
What is Oxide and Friends?
Oxide hosts a weekly Discord show where we discuss a wide range of topics: computer history, startups, Oxide hardware bringup, and other topics du jour. These are the recordings in podcast form.
Join us live (usually Mondays at 5pm PT) https://discord.gg/gcQxNHAKCB
Subscribe to our calendar: https://sesh.fyi/api/calendar/v2/iMdFbuFRupMwuTiwvXswNU.ics
Uh-oh.
Speaker 2:Just got a bad feeling about this. No. Adam, I hope you can hear me. This does not feel like we're off on the right foot. Oh, Twitter Spaces.
Speaker 3:LeBron.
Speaker 2:Hey. I can hear you.
Speaker 3:Wonderful. Could could you
Speaker 2:hear me, concerned about bad omens?
Speaker 3:No. I think I came in in in, like, the last syllable of whatever you're saying about that.
Speaker 2:Oh, it is your buddy, Lucas, who is joining There
Speaker 4:you go. Hey.
Speaker 5:Hello. Hello.
Speaker 2:Oh, Lucas Adams said, hey. Do you mind if my buddy, Lucas, joins us? He's at Apple. I'm like, are we talking about the same Lucas that I've known for 20 years? It feels like we're why would you introduce him that way?
Speaker 3:I was like, he's not Cher or Madonna. Like, I don't know if Lucas is a sufficient naming, but I guess okay. 1 Yeah.
Speaker 5:It only works with one word for the kid from the, like, 1985 movie, like, the ball helmet.
Speaker 2:1st, I was gonna make a Lucas reference. So thank you, Lucas, for beating me to that. 2, I feel like I just felt like you would be a bit greedy with Lucas, and, like, you can I mean, like, I I like, Lucas, we're, like, we're friends? Right? I mean, are we?
Speaker 2:Is this an intervention?
Speaker 3:Lucas, you're Yes. No. We're muted. Sorry. I couldn't find I
Speaker 2:couldn't find the mic button. Oh, it's the, it's the old I couldn't find the mic button. Boy.
Speaker 5:I'm also going through a tunnel.
Speaker 6:I'll go through a tunnel. You
Speaker 2:you you one thing I missed is that hanging up has lost its social currency. You know, you said hang up on somebody. Absolutely. And now that means unite nothing.
Speaker 6:Now you, yeah, now
Speaker 3:you have to be, like, I am intentionally hanging up the phone.
Speaker 2:I I'm about to do it. Oh, damn it. Where's that? I can't find the button here to hang up. It's like, where is the app?
Speaker 2:I gotta return the call. I'm trying to I'm gonna hang up on you right now. And as a result, like, my my 17 year old now hangs up on me all the time. And I'm like, you know, that used to like, I don't know. It's just like he has no sense of, like, how a call should end.
Speaker 3:Oh, totally. We had a whole session at my house called the way you end a call is by saying goodbye. It it it did not stick. Because I like
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 3:No. The way you end a
Speaker 5:call is by, like, slightly manipulating the capacitance across a piece of glass on a rounded rectangle.
Speaker 2:Alright. Forget it. Okay? Alright. Well, we are, Adam, do you need to check the recording or do you
Speaker 3:Recording looks good. But but let's go ahead.
Speaker 2:That's usually my little time when you go off and check the recording, and then I feel I've got the, button. Okay. So, we are here in part because we had this great meetup last week. We had the Oxide team, in town last week. And, Adam, that was basically the first time I that's the first time I've been with that many people in the same room.
Speaker 2:But yeah. Before the pandemic.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, for me, it was the most people I've been in a room with that was not also an airplane.
Speaker 2:Yes. And we had originally I feel like we did postpone this once. Right? Didn't we have planned this probably have planned this slightly earlier or did
Speaker 3:I don't know. I think planned is sort of I think it was sort of like, we had, we were all ready to go and then, didn't feel like the right time and then it was sort of suddenly the right time, and
Speaker 2:so you went for it. Yeah. And I think that it and Omicron kind of, died down at exactly the right moment. We did have one false alarm with a what turns out to be a false, a true false positive. So that was good.
Speaker 3:It should be noted with a Canadian test kit. I just wanna I just wanna for patriotism sake, I wanna note that.
Speaker 2:You know, it's funny. I was actually not gonna mention that because I was concerned that Canadians would be upset. But it is the Canadian himself who disparaged the Canadian test. So I feel like, yeah, I feel that's an important detail. It's the Canadian test.
Speaker 3:That's right. That's right. And they don't have HIPAA, so I didn't violate something just now, I guess.
Speaker 2:That's right. I mean, Trudeau seems to just kinda let anything fly, honestly. He's he's he's he's he's he's the cool with that. We we talked Trudeau. He's cool with it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I feel like the 1st prime minister of Canada that Americans can name in a long, long time. I mean, how many prime ministers of Canada can you name, Adam?
Speaker 3:Adam? Like a Jean Chretien.
Speaker 2:Are you doing that for my benefit?
Speaker 3:No. No. No. I I really enjoyed, I really enjoyed saying Jean Chretien for many years.
Speaker 6:It's very impressive.
Speaker 1:The you
Speaker 3:know, I think that may be that may be it actually for me.
Speaker 2:Oh, well, Jean did I tell you walking walking on the street past Jean Cartier? No. The I I was in I worked in Ottawa, and I was just walking down the street, and John Quintana walked past me the other way, which is, like, no one no one around him. I'm like, wow. I guess that's that's the difference right there between being a prime minister of Canada.
Speaker 2:No kind of on the road. I know. Other sorry, Canada. Other than the, the the the defective test, we were totally clean from a COVID perspective, which is great. So everyone muffed up, obviously.
Speaker 2:But, great to meet everyone. How to be in person? And I think I was kind of thinking about, like, boy, this is kind of what it was like, I guess, all of the time. Yeah. So and talking about a little bit about remote work, I feel that we are and just to not bury the lead, remote work, I think, is gonna be continue to be our dominant mode.
Speaker 2:I think it it certainly for oxide, if not in tech. So there's not some hidden call recall to the office here. Did you see that Google did this? The the and and so and, actually, Lucas, I wonder if Apple is doing this? Apple doing this kind of recall to the office that we're seeing out of Google and Meta, which Adam has decided we call them Meta as to to punish them.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 5:That's I mean, it's kind of an own goal. But, yes, I think I can talk about this because any email that Tim sends to the company is instaleaked. And so, yes, we announced last week, that we will be returning to the office, starting kind of titrating up starting April 11th and then eventually hitting a 3 2, in the office, optional remote work model.
Speaker 7:It's already on MacRumors. It was on there 3 days ago.
Speaker 6:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3:Look, is it firewall? I need to tell you that's term. Cause I
Speaker 2:heard it's,
Speaker 3:it's sort of starting with one day building up some resistance to wearing pants, I guess, and then, like, going up to 2 days and doing that over a few months is so I understand it.
Speaker 5:If that's what the illegal
Speaker 2:Is that a me thing or a Lucas thing?
Speaker 3:That's not
Speaker 2:a guy.
Speaker 1:He is
Speaker 2:in the tunnel. He he doesn't really have ambivalence about our relationship. That's fair. So, Lucas, is titration is is I I latch on the titrate too. It's a great term.
Speaker 2:Is that actually in the email, in the language of Apple, or is that is that a a Lucas system?
Speaker 5:It it yeah. In the in the leaked email from Tim, that's, that's always been the plan to kinda ramp back up. And, you know, they they refer to it as a hybrid model. I think, you know, corporate is still, is still learning, and still kinda gauging internal reaction. And that's what I hope we get into tonight because I agree with you, Brian, that things have definitely changed.
Speaker 5:I think if the pandemic had been, like, a month, we all would have been, like, that was weird, and kinda gone back to business as usual. But, you know, people have people have moved their families. Yeah. They've gone to live the place they've always wanted to live. And enough companies are like, yeah.
Speaker 5:We we can give you a job that's pretty similar to the one you were doing, that you've got a lot of leverage now. And, you know, and getting those commute hours back, I think a lot of people have looked at and said, woah. That's super meaningful to me. And maybe I can't work at the at my dream place, but I could work at some place that's, like, 85% my dream place and be happier. So it'd be really interesting to see what what happens in the next year or 2 as we all kind of hopefully, you know, things start to wane and, and we head back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, Lucas, maybe it's worth sharing, like, your story a bit in terms of working in an office versus working remotely. Because you are now working for Apple, but from Maine. Right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. That's right. So I was remote before it was cool, I guess. So, the the basic story here is, in 20 the the end of 2011, beginning of 2012, I joined a start up. And, we eventually like, very long story short, we eventually, exited to Apple and became part of, became part of Siri.
Speaker 5:And, I did that from the Bay Area. I've been in the Bay Areas since 2001, with a with a gap in there where I I moved to the East Coast, but then was back. And did it for about a year, and then for family reasons, my wife and 2 kids and I moved back, across the country. But I had it worked out that I could continue to run my team, from the East Coast. And in the in the before times, that that required, I well, I actually, I guess it still does.
Speaker 5:It required, like, director or SVP level kind of approval, in order to do that. And Apple in particular, puts a lot of emphasis on oh, I'm getting an echo of myself. There we go. Puts a lot of emphasis on, you know, kind of the water cooler conversation. You know, obviously, there are parts of Apple where you need a soldering iron and a lab bench to, to do your job, but a lot of people that do software too.
Speaker 5:But the the same emphasis on in person collaboration has been there, you know, regardless of what part of the company you're in. And, but be that as it may, I kinda carve out a, you know, a niche for myself where I run my team. My tea there are about, I think, 13 people that work for me. And we, are split mostly between the Bay Area and Seattle with me kind of as a as a singleton, on the East Coast. And, again, in the before times, I would I would fly back west, probably every 5 weeks for for a business week or so.
Speaker 5:And it seemed to be a model that works pretty well. You know, and for the past, I guess, 2 years now, we've all been an identically sized rectangle on screen. But it'll be interesting to see what happens when, you know, folks are co, you know, collocated again. But but it was always the case that somebody was dialing in from somewhere. Either somebody was at Apple Park or somebody was in Seattle or, you know, going into the San Francisco office.
Speaker 5:So we've kind of been in this hybrid remote work model for a while, and I think folks are coming kinda coming around to to realizing that.
Speaker 2:Alright. So, look, I'm dying to ask you this because I was similar hybrid local remote at Joyant for many years. So we had, about a quarter of the team, a third of the team, in San Francisco, 2 thirds of the team, 3 quarters of the team remote. And definitely a lot of our growth was remote. And I really thought I'm like, a part of the reason when we started Oxide, we were hybrid local remote because I knew like you, I had done that model.
Speaker 2:I knew how to make it work. Post pandemic, though, I realized, like, oh, wow. There were so like, I thought it was true hybrid local remote, but there were so many things that we did post pandemic that really truly enabled remote work that we were not doing before that. That when I look back at the before times, like, it was a lot harder to be a remote worker. And the remote experience at Joyant is very different than the remote experience at Oxide.
Speaker 2:Is that your experience as well?
Speaker 5:I don't have a ton of, stuff to compare it to, I guess, now that I'm thinking it through, because we were always split. Right? So I was always dialing in to somebody else's, you know, video session
Speaker 4:anyway. Right.
Speaker 5:So and it was very rare that more than 2 people in a, you know, in a 3 or 4 person meeting were were collocated. So I think we were kind of doing it from the beginning. And, honestly, the thing that makes me I see a couple of other Apple folks have joined as well. Something that makes me a little bit, concerned going forward is really the conference room booking situation. That was, like, the toughest part of all of it.
Speaker 5:Like, right now, I can just say, you know, dial Brian and Adam, and we can and we can have a meeting. But when you're in an, you know, in open floor plan office situation, you actually need to, you know, secure real estate in order to have those meetings. So I think I think it's gonna be harder.
Speaker 1:And how
Speaker 8:much and how much worse were those meetings? Just to be clear. Like, when some people were dialing in from a meeting room and they were approximately 20 pixels worth of face on your screen, and they were talking to a microphone that was on the other side of the room, ring. How much worse were those meetings for you?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think that's exactly right, Ian. Like, because, you know, the nuance and and and, kind of sub subtext that goes on when you can see somebody's face in, you know, sufficiently high resolution is a is a very different thing than, you know, one of 3 people in a you know, they're not directors of photography setting up these, these teleconference rooms. And the lighting is bad, and, you know, you can't yeah. It's it's super not ideal.
Speaker 5:You might as well you're better off on the phone, I think.
Speaker 2:Oh, and so I'm not sure if I'm following Ian's point or not, but and maybe to clarify, I'll offer my own position on this. The one thing that I am never going back to is just meetings in conference rooms. Especially once the number of people becomes even modest, it is way harder to read everyone's body language at once in a conference room. And it's it's much, much easier on a mid screen. Maybe this is a controversial opinion.
Speaker 5:No. I think I agree with that. I I don't know. Well, Ian, you speak for yourself, but I think your point was more like, hey, just the sheer geometry of the camera and the amount of space somebody's occupying on the screen. It makes it impossible to Oh, I see
Speaker 4:what you're saying.
Speaker 5:Figure out what they're taking.
Speaker 8:Yeah. That's that's definitely a big portion of the of the complaint, and or the observation. The other the other piece is just when you have, one person who is on a television on the side of the room and everyone else is in a meeting room. There's a really present and part of the the flow of the conversation. Present and part of the the flow of the conversation.
Speaker 8:But it's it's still, you know, even if you have 1 or 2 people in a meeting room and the rest of the people are on a screen, it's still worth degraded experience. It's just not it's not as good as just having those people dialing from their laptops at which point you're like, what the fuck are we booking a meeting room for? This is silly.
Speaker 2:Totally. Why do I feel this way? So so Steve's on and Steve is often at the office. And I actually find it easier when he's dialed in from the conference room. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's so the the pixels are so small. It's just harder to harder to get a read on. And I I also find that we've now adopted the and out of my way, I'm dying to ask you if you found this as well. We now adopt, like, really exaggerated motions, like the exaggerated thumbs up. Like, surely, this is not just an oxideism of people, like, really sticking their thumb, like, right in the camera to know, like, I agree with you.
Speaker 5:Or the, like, can you see my screen? Right? Can you see what I'm sharing?
Speaker 2:Casey, I'm sorry. Right. But but but in terms of, like, when I agree with someone or when people agree, they give a thumbs up in a in a meet. Adam, did you find yourself doing this in person?
Speaker 3:No. Uh-oh. I oh, you mean, like, last week when we're in person?
Speaker 2:Last week. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I don't know that that's carried over into my normal life nor do I like wave goodbye if I'm exiting
Speaker 2:a conference room. Are you spamming me right now? Are you saying
Speaker 3:No. No. Did you wave goodbye at the end of a meeting?
Speaker 2:I didn't wave goodbye, but I gave, like, 2 thumbs up during a meeting. And then I kind of, like, discreetly tried cover up my, like, my my, like, my my my braids and thumb.
Speaker 3:You tried to, like, fold your Fonzi gesture into something?
Speaker 2:Well, and also, like, neat style. I'm, like, trying to put my thumbs up, like, right next to my cheek. Right? So it's, like, in the frame and, like, what am I doing?
Speaker 3:You know, I'm pretty sure this is an oxideism, but the thing that I was missing on the in person when we started when we had these meetings in person last week was the sidebar chat because yes, every meeting at oxide is actually 2 meetings. It's like the, the live video and audio meeting. And then the, the commentary meeting in the chat sidebar, like, which is sometimes on point, sometimes just kind of poking fun at folks, and then sometimes actually just a totally orthogonal but equally valuable, meeting, which makes it extremely hard to follow. But I found that not having that in person was sort of, like, distracting, and I I needed to reach for, like, up.
Speaker 6:Right?
Speaker 1:Pardon
Speaker 5:bunch of small teams and kinda work cross functionally a bunch. And so there'll be a sidebar going on on Slack with kind of, like, your side and, ostensibly, a sidebar going on on the other side, side, with with the other folks about the stuff that's maybe a little bit too, too direct, to or, like, how do we wanna phrase this ask or or whatever. And that's something that's also very tough to do if you were all around the same conference room table.
Speaker 2:Okay. So that's a yes. There is the the back channel. There is the, and so, Lucas, in your back because we actually have one
Speaker 9:of these too. I guess this
Speaker 2:is like confessing to something. That when we are together on a call with a third party, we are in our own back channel. Is that a great confession, Adam? My, like
Speaker 3:I don't think that I think everyone assumes that, but I would say No. That is not a
Speaker 7:confession at all. Lots of people do it. MST 3 k mode.
Speaker 3:That's well, I I I also really enjoy when I'm only seeing the back channel and, like, not not participating in the in the meeting.
Speaker 2:We did have to put the back channel in its own channel because if you only see the back channel, it can be at times just perfect.
Speaker 3:It's Yeah. It's like everyone's having a shared hallucination.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right. It's like we need to actually put the back channel in its own clear back channel where people know it's the back channel. But I don't Adam, you say everyone knows it's a back channel. We've definitely had meetings with people where, based on their conduct, they must think we don't have a back channel.
Speaker 2:I I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't know what that means, but that sounds scintillating, but I assume assume that you've said too much already.
Speaker 2:I probably have. I probably but this seems to
Speaker 5:be the back channel between you 2 right now.
Speaker 2:Oh, the the the back channel is on fire.
Speaker 3:The back channel between us during these calls is always the same. Brian texting me, oh my god. Twitter's died. Can, like, can you still hear me? Has it collapsed?
Speaker 3:What's going
Speaker 2:on? That is basically all of the back channel is like, I'm trying to get back in because Twitter has done.
Speaker 8:So
Speaker 10:so since you guys were talking about, gestures on the camera and sidebar chat, I just wanna mention that, for for, people like me, blind people, dropping emoji in the chat would be more accessible than than doing gestures on camera.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like I mean, I think that it it well, yeah. And then and I think that that's that's a good point. I mean, it is, definitely a, a challenge in that regard that you're but, I I mean, that's an omnipresent challenge, right, in terms of being able to to discern body language when you can't see it.
Speaker 10:Hey, Matt. Absolutely.
Speaker 5:Quick question for you. Sure. We use a lot of people outside of Apple are shocked to learn that we don't use FaceTime internally. We use Webex a lot of the time. And Webex has this, like, ML powered thing where if you make gesture, like a thumbs up, it will notice if you do it, you know, in the quote, unquote right way.
Speaker 2:Oh, neat.
Speaker 5:And and kinda transliterate that. I don't know
Speaker 10:if you've experienced that. I I had never I've I I can't say I've used Webex in many years. So but it it it You're good. It had occurred to me that that, that kind of problem could be solved through machine learning analyzing the video. So the I don't wanna derail your main conversation though.
Speaker 2:Well, so I think but, I mean, it's a little bit back on point in terms of, the side channel. So we you've got the back channel. Okay? The back channel is not part of the meeting. But the side channel that is, like so in the Google Meet, we are, we are having that side channel chat.
Speaker 2:And is this an oxideism? Again, oxide it'd be in in oxides culture, it is not rude to be having almost a separate discussion in that side channel.
Speaker 8:This is probably pretty universal. Universal. I do
Speaker 11:not know anyone who doesn't have back channel meetings.
Speaker 6:Does that chat during
Speaker 11:the meeting or whether that is chat during the meeting or whether that's electronic chat during a physical meeting, which is kinda hard to pull off.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Sometimes there's, like, a follow-up that happens, right, in the side channel where somebody is like, oh, yeah. And I'll drop this link in, you know, the side channel so folks can go look at it. Then that happens in their questions about that. But people don't wanna derail the main conversation.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's right. I mean, that's how it's that's how it's basically used. It's used as, like, hey. You know, someone may have mentioned something and they drop it in.
Speaker 2:And then when and I know Steve's here and can speak to this, but, you know, when in in all hands, it's actually convenient for people to kinda drop in their questions or comments. And then Steve makes sure he's, you know, going back through that to make sure I got make sure I have addressed. It's like, okay. 95% of this is snark and and is relatively easily
Speaker 3:yeah. The signal to noise ratio can be, you know, a little off.
Speaker 5:And so you are you using this devolving into the Twitch chat stream, just the fact that you're all compensated adults?
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Who said we don't devolve into the Twitch chat? Sorry. I I'm not sure where you got that. I mean, thank god you like, Twitch, the whole, like, avalanche of hearts. What does one call that?
Speaker 2:That thing. Is that a does that have a name?
Speaker 1:I'm just
Speaker 5:to know the answer to that question.
Speaker 2:It's like this swirling tornado of hearts as people are liking things. It's I the no. We don't have that. But if we if we did have it, we would use it. And then abuse it.
Speaker 5:So that's pretty cool. The person who just joined a speaker with a Rick and Morty avatar knows that. Oh, I was
Speaker 12:I'm I'm a biologist, but, one of the neatest innovations was, someone gave a prerecorded talk, but then they were in the chat while everyone was watching the talk, and they were able to answer questions without stopping the flow of the talk.
Speaker 2:Yes. Okay. So I've done this too. I've also I've it has also allowed me to heckle myself, which has been interesting. So the I've done now 2 conferences where the the talks were entirely prerecorded, and then I was asked to be in the chat while watching my own recording.
Speaker 2:I tried to heckle myself to get ahead of the hecklers. I don't know, Adam, what do you think about the strategy? I'm sure you
Speaker 3:I think that's smart. I think that's smart.
Speaker 2:I I it's you you gotta be a heckle forward strategy. If you don't heckle yourself, someone else will have.
Speaker 3:What a handsome point this guy just made.
Speaker 4:Exciting. So are you intending to extend this
Speaker 11:and present a prerecorded hologram Cantrell in the future, so that you can also be in the audience at the back of the house screaming insults at yourself?
Speaker 2:I I am getting close to to to my fantasy of actually becoming 2 headed and having both heads begin to berate one another. So yes, that's the trajectory we're clearly on here. So that's actually been really interesting. I've liked it, but I also have hated it as a speaker. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I've got such mixed feelings about it. I I really, really like aspects of it. As someone attending the talk, it's I really like it. I actually think it has kept people Jim, I'd love to know your take on this. I think the audience has been more engaged in the talk when they can have this side conversation that is germane to the talk.
Speaker 2:So I think it's actually better for talk engagement and for people absorbing what's going on. But The there are way
Speaker 9:more questions than you normally get. The speaker actually is that you, he was more thrilled with it just because of the questions and, like, it it was just it was one
Speaker 12:of the best lectures I've ever been to.
Speaker 2:That's really interesting. And it was one of the best best lectures because people were asking questions that they wouldn't have otherwise asked.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Especially ones that are, like,
Speaker 12:of dumb, but, like, it wouldn't be worth interrupting a talk for.
Speaker 2:Totally.
Speaker 9:That was the confused.
Speaker 2:Totally. And especially if you if you have someone who actually has actually a question that they think is dumb that they are not gonna ask. But actually, it's a really good question. It's nice to lower that yeah. That's a really good point about and and that's probably true in the meetings that we have as well, just in general, that that side channel.
Speaker 3:Oh, totally. Especially, we we have such we have so many different domains of expertise and even, you know, where our requests for discussion number up to like 250 now. And so when someone just drops like a 3 digit number, someone else being able to bring people up to speed at least what the subject of that is or what the topic of it is to kind of keep people in the flow of the discussion?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think so. And I I think it is it's it often, I think it is has really augmented and aided the discussion. And I don't wanna go back to not having it. So, like, just like a it feels super weird to go into a conference room and just
Speaker 1:have a meeting. It feels like
Speaker 13:It was disorienting
Speaker 3:last week to just be like, I am in a meeting. And also, like, I guess I I get sort of itchy too, like, needing to do something or type something or look something up. I don't know. Maybe this is my own problem. But, just I I found it, I I again, very foreign to be in a meeting with, no with, like, a single thread of conversation.
Speaker 5:I feel like my meeting resentment has gone down a bunch since full time remote work because you can do that if you are stuck in something that you like. It would be perhaps impolite for you to drop the call or, you know, in real life to, like, get out and walk get up and walk out of the room. But I can, you know, take care of some other stuff that needs taken care of while, like, keeping half an ear on what's going on in case I in case I need to jump in. I feel like it's a better use of my time.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I and I also so this is as good as segue as any to something that we have done that I think has been transformative that I understand may be very controversial for some. We record every bidding. And that's been really, really interesting. I don't I mean, do you go back in the enlistment recordings?
Speaker 3:So I don't that often. Honor that. And I think it's great that we do record it. And I do go back, often to beatings that I had participated in but didn't have, sort of, like, I I'd forgotten some of the context, or it was months ago or things like that. But I don't listen to a ton of meetings.
Speaker 3:I don't know. I guess just sort of, like, passively having it wash over me is different than, like, experiencing it and being able to interact with it.
Speaker 2:I don't listen to a ton of meetings, contrary to the perception you might have. But I do relisten to, I when I need to go relisten to a meeting, I find it to be critical. Either it's and how often do you relisten to a meeting that you in?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most of the time it's meetings that I was in. And to to your point, I think, like, it is invaluable and something that I just kind of never did before or it wasn't part of the culture of what we did. You know, if you have 5 people in a conference discussion 6 months later about what determinations you came to.
Speaker 3:You can just go back and and figure out what happened.
Speaker 2:It's been really useful to figure to do that. It's been the other thing that I have learned about myself that was actually, honestly, disconcerting, but also an unavoidable conclusion is that listening to a meeting that I was in, if I am trying to get into a conversation, if I've got a point that I'd like to make, when I am, you know, waiting my turn and waiting check it, just as we are here. Everyone's being very polite. Waiting their turn is great. But when I have a point that I wanna make, it I also could even though I thought I was listening at the same time, it is you are listening at a reduced capacity.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, like, we should buy brain. The the the the brainpower required to keep that thought hot and ready is sapping some of what I would normally use to listen. And I would go back and realize, like, shit. I actually missed a really important point here because I was waiting to make my point my my dumbass point 2 minutes later.
Speaker 14:And I thought you were gonna mention the thing you always do with your hand while you're waiting, your tell.
Speaker 2:Why you're
Speaker 15:not doing this? Can we
Speaker 2:eat him? Do we out you know? How how did he even get in here? Poker next. Wait.
Speaker 2:Wait. What? God damn it.
Speaker 3:I didn't approve
Speaker 2:him. I yeah. I know. I know. Okay.
Speaker 2:I know. We're victim blaming now. That's fine. The thing is, like, I don't even know if he's being if he's pranking me or not right now.
Speaker 3:I know. It's just we're we're through the looking glass.
Speaker 2:We're through the looking glass. He's not gonna be On the plus side, you can
Speaker 8:go and watch a recording and find out. Right?
Speaker 15:Well, on the plus side
Speaker 2:on the minus side, I have to now go watch all of my recordings to find out. Steve, unmute yourself and clarify. Damn it.
Speaker 14:No. That's that's not real. I
Speaker 2:I was just gonna say the, I I did I did think
Speaker 14:I mean, a couple couple of points think we're out of it. Last week, we had the whole team from Oxide out to Emeryville. And we we hoped we were gonna have the full team and for circumstances that are beyond folks control, there were a couple of people that couldn't make it. And, just back to, like, how do we record as much of this content that we're all here together for so folks that can't be here can can participate, can listen. And it is true.
Speaker 14:I can't imagine another, having in person meetings anymore where you don't have that side channel opportunity. Where you're not you're not just having a meet or whatever the the device is in recording. In addition to enhancing the content, I think what I found valuable is, as Adam mentioned earlier, when conversate like, conversations are in chat or kinda going in a different direction. Something that normally would be a question in a meeting that would derail the meeting. Someone else can take on that question and drive that to ground all while the rest of the meeting is ongoing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a good point. Yeah. We where someone actually and then someone could be caught up or no. That's a very good point.
Speaker 2:Something that normally would have and, Lucas, maybe this drives to your point of, like, feeling less meeting fatigue. Maybe the side channel is part of that where some of the things that would be that would have derailed the meeting now don't need to.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, the whole, like, this meeting could have been an email. This email could have been a Slack. Like, you can handle those things in real time now if they come up and just say, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 5:We'll we'll pick that up in in Slack. Let's let's keep things moving.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's it. That's interesting. And the other thing I would like to just put a a shout out for because I found it to be very useful. So we do our all hands on Tuesdays.
Speaker 2:I found it to be hard in to be in the office for the all hands because I was so accustomed to being to to being in that side channel. And when you're, like, sitting on the couches, you're not in the side channel. And the the thing that I that, I found actually to be great and, Steve, I don't know if you're using it all. The companion mode for Google Meet is actually pretty great. Google Meet is actually I dare I shouldn't, like, jinx it because I'm sure they're gonna end of life it tomorrow if I say this, but they've been adding actually some really useful features.
Speaker 3:Well, I'll tell
Speaker 14:you, they make they make going back to Microsoft Teams extraordinarily painful. You have to join someone else's meeting.
Speaker 11:Microsoft Teams makes Microsoft Teams extraordinarily painful.
Speaker 2:Well and one of the things that Google Meet does, is when you do record a meeting, that recording is attached to the calendar invite of the meeting. And that is part of what has made recording every meeting be really viable because we can go back to a meeting. It's like, I remember remember it was very hot during that meeting. It's like, alright. I'm going back to the August calendar, and I can find the meeting pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:And then listen to it at accelerated speed, which has been, so it's another Google Meet feature that's pretty good. Sorry, Matt. Go ahead.
Speaker 10:I'll tell you, though. One one thing Microsoft Teams has done lately that that is, really useful for for people like me is, if someone is sharing a PowerPoint slide deck during the meeting, they can now run the PowerPoint slide deck directly within Teams, and it transmits the actual semantic contents of the slides. So it's accessible on the viewing end as opposed to screen sharing.
Speaker 3:Wow. That's very cool.
Speaker 10:Now presumably, Google Meet could, could could cop could copy that feature using Google Slides.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 10:But, Zoom is probably at a bit of a disadvantage there because they don't have that vertical integration.
Speaker 2:But I find Zoom to be unusable. Am I the only I I find Zoom to
Speaker 1:be a
Speaker 2:real problem. I mean
Speaker 10:but the point being that that this, you know, remote, that that's another advantage, at least potential advantage of remote over on-site.
Speaker 11:But, like, there's also the the analog version of that where you print out the slides and just, like, hand them around to everybody in the room. I mean, as much as we like to all, like, dump on Teams because it's
Speaker 3:Oh, sure.
Speaker 10:I could I could ask the presenter presenter to give me the slide deck ahead of time, but that doesn't allow me to be synchronized with where they are in
Speaker 11:So, I mean, for Go ahead. In person presentations have like, is that not a common thing to just print out a copy for everybody in the room?
Speaker 2:That is not common. It
Speaker 5:used to be. I think back 20 years ago. I remember that for sure.
Speaker 7:That that is It sure
Speaker 10:didn't it sure didn't happen when I was at Microsoft.
Speaker 2:Matt, is Bob Dole running for president right now? Well, you know
Speaker 10:Oh, I
Speaker 11:have a Matt. May may maybe Reagan is. I
Speaker 2:don't know. Exactly. Right. Ian, you've had your hand up.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I I had a question about your your, on-site meeting, that you had last week, where you've managed to get the the whole team together. Congrats, by the way. I'm I'm glad that you're able to do that, and do it, within safe boundaries and all that kind of stuff. What did you prioritize with that time that you had together?
Speaker 8:Was it moving forward work projects, or was it socializing as a team? Because the trailer team when it would get together once a year as an entire team, like, all the teams together, we would be prioritizing social time. We would have, like, a 1 hour all hands, and that was the extent of all of the work that we would do, and the rest of it was all social time.
Speaker 2:That's a great question. And, obviously, both are really important. The we and we were trying to do both. We were trying certainly to get peep people who had been working together for 2 plus years and never met one another in person, which also led to what do we call this, like, body dysphasia we have when you got, like, some Lucas, did you ever have this happen or maybe you knew your team well enough, like, echo where it's like
Speaker 8:No one no one knows how tall you are if you're not gonna be not big.
Speaker 5:Like, I've got 4 people on my team that I've never met face to face. And now, you know, thinking about heading back and and going to meet them, maybe, like, in a park somewhere or something. Yeah. Those things start to you start looking at, like, you know, where's the banana for scale? Right?
Speaker 5:Like, okay. Like, who are you, and what do you what do you actually look like? Because the perception that you may have, you know, put in your head over the past 2 years may be very different from reality, which is actually kinda cool.
Speaker 2:It is kind of cool. I was I definitely and then again, I've been working with people's heads for 2 years and just making up bodies for them. And as it turns out, due to reasons of camera angle or what have you, I was really wrong in some cases. And then I was really concerned that, like, I'm giving this person a super weird look right now. And they're kind of giving me the, like, little weird look back.
Speaker 2:Like, are you giving me weird looks? And I'm not like, this is I'm so sorry for all of this. I just needed to get, like, a full body this sounds awkward, but can I get the full body photo before we meet? Brian, did you have to say I
Speaker 3:had a problem even with angles because everyone I'm looking at is straight on. So even some of my colleagues who have been looking at on the screen for, like, literally 2 years, just 15 degrees off center, they were unrecognizable to me initially, well, and with masks on. But, you'd you'd think I could have put it together.
Speaker 2:Well, and then I made it much, much worse by getting the worst haircut of my life on Monday morning, And people being like, I don't really recognize you. Like, actually, I don't recognize me right now because this per I apparently, someone who has a a blood feud that one out there. Enough people have
Speaker 5:asked me if I'm not
Speaker 2:You just tweet the photo, Adam. No. That is not that is an inappropriate escalation of hostility. I okay. Adam, I wanna remind you that I've known you for a long time, and I have a lot of photos.
Speaker 2:And if you wanna escalate, we can escalate, but it's not gonna end well for either of us. It's mutually assured discretion. Austin, you got your hand up. Let's go to Austin. Let's get out of here.
Speaker 2:Austin, what's up?
Speaker 4:Trying to unmute. So I I've been working remote probably for on and off. The first remote job that I had was about a decade ago working for an economic think tank that was fully remote, believe it or not, pretty avant garde. And, yeah, I've been working for years with people who were, you know, due to Internet connectivity and stuff like that. We didn't do video meetings.
Speaker 4:Right. And, you know, it's been interesting to sort of watch the escalation in the last 3 years, right, of everything that that's become possible. I think that doing it as long as I have, you kind of realize that some of the face to face becomes less important. I also work in information security now, and half those people have duct tape over those cam their cameras. Right?
Speaker 4:So you're pretty comfortable just Oh, it's
Speaker 5:like, yeah. Right.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Talking right now. I think the technology has gotten amazing. I think what something that was mentioned earlier about call recording is really interesting. I've worked in companies where it's gone both ways.
Speaker 4:One of my favorite things about call recordings that both teams and Meet have. Now it depends on the version of workspaces that you implemented on whether you get this or not, but you can decide to have a recording transcribed. And we actually have someone who's sort of like our technical writer of of record in our team, and they will usually go mine important meetings that we have for documentation we wanna create out of a meeting and using we use leverage very heavily leverage meeting transcripts to create documentation for things that we're doing. And Google Meet probably has the best version of this because Google's transcription is really excellent. Voice to text is really excellent.
Speaker 4:Teams does a pretty good job, though. Teams does a very good job identifying speaker, for transcription, strangely, in a way that sometimes Google Meet is not perfect at. But then, you know, within that, what I've also found, especially as, like, workplaces have started to recognize neurodiversity, in teams. I've worked with remote teams in the last 3 years where we actually had a meeting in a team's room and it was requested by a, neuro diverse team member that we not use the dial in. And so we use the meeting to screen share, to whiteboard, to do different things, but the meeting was conducted entirely in text.
Speaker 4:I think that's an interesting thing about the, like, sort of rocket ship improvements in these technologies that, you know, make it a lot easier for different kinds of team members to interact with each other and to sort of not be forced into that space. And the last one as a point is to say, I've also found over the years, the team behind me that as a primary speaker in conversations like this, having a team flow through that will share links that maybe I didn't think of to put in a document or something like that in the chat. That's always been really powerful. Right? When we're coming to a chat as a group to face a different audience, and we're sort of all aware of the topic and somebody goes, here's this thing that's not in the PowerPoint that Austin's talking about right now, right, that may give you a point of reference.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's interesting. And it's now the time to mention that Twitter spaces if you can you please add a side channel to Twitter spaces? Because I feel that we I I I miss it in the Twitter space. I would love to have a side channel here, and it's annoying I don't have it.
Speaker 11:Is is the side channel to Twitter Spaces just Twitter?
Speaker 4:It's vaguely comical because I worked with Jim about 8 years ago and got the notification that he was in here and was like, this is interesting and hopped in. So we've been texting the side channel
Speaker 1:a long
Speaker 2:time in the conversation. It the Twitter wants the side channel to be Twitter, and I can for reasons that are not a 100 100% bad, they're only, like, 98% bad. But we actually need a side channel. I feel we need a side channel in the space for the
Speaker 8:I mean, you could make the shared channel in the outside Slack and then share it out with whoever wants to join, you know.
Speaker 2:The yes. If
Speaker 3:there's some obstacles to that,
Speaker 2:but yeah.
Speaker 16:So we'll call that a feature request for a DM group for the speakers, a DM group for the listeners, and then just general Twitter?
Speaker 4:But then it's also not part of the conversation of record. Right? There's an interesting thing about that state those spaces too. There's the meeting recording, and then there's the conversation of record associated with the meeting. So having it in a different technology like Slack or somewhere else, it's good.
Speaker 4:But it's like, that's a that's a stopgap. Right? That doesn't solve the problem of saying, well, if Twitter Spaces wants to create something valuable, then, like, they should wanna create something that leverages the ability to have the whole conversation in the present.
Speaker 2:I absolutely and I think that the way Twitter Spaces plays the recording. I love our recordings obviously. But I don't know if you listen to any of the Twitter spaces recordings.
Speaker 3:Yes. I have. Yes. I have.
Speaker 2:I like the the fact that they can feature the speaker is really nice. Actually.
Speaker 3:No. That that they're good.
Speaker 4:Well, it's alright. If they
Speaker 1:if they
Speaker 4:replay the tweets at the same time. Right? Like, if the tweet if you could watch it and have the tweets play out as the people were speaking in the conversation that went along with the conversation, that would be really neat. Right? As if it was flowing on the screen in front of me.
Speaker 2:So I yeah. So I wanna go to Aaron. I know Aaron and Dan both had their hands up for a long time. So Aaron, I wanna go to I I wanna go to you.
Speaker 16:Yeah. So we were talking about not knowing how tall your coworkers are. This has real inclusion and diversity effects. At some of the larger companies where we've done a lot of research on what determines pay negotiations and bonuses, There used to be a statistically significant correlation between height and starting salary and between height and performance reviews, and that has largely gone away as people have moved to remote. No longer do you get a exceeds expectations partially based on the fact that you are taller than the person who is evaluating you.
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 16:Which is probably not helpful signal anyway.
Speaker 2:Oh, I I think as a as a as a taller person, I would heartily disagree.
Speaker 3:Although although you're, like, average of the team.
Speaker 2:I I am I'm the lean way tall. Crazy tall.
Speaker 8:Crazy. I would say I would say briefly that it does cut both ways to some degree in that you get less office water cooler chat about the fact that this person thinks they might be underpaid but they feel uncomfortable about raising that in any of the company authorized communication channels. So they don't really have an outlet by which to discreetly ask a colleague or a coworker like, hey. Is this in within the, you know, bounds of or am I getting screwed here?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that's a great topic. Not not even just on that note specifically, but I think more general that kind of water cooler conversation. Before we get into that, I know Dan's had his hand up.
Speaker 7:Okay. Lucas said something very early
Speaker 1:on
Speaker 7:that reminded me of no. This is a good thing. It it's a parameter that remote employees have to sort of tweak depending on their job and the situation. Lucas, correct me if I'm wrong. You said in the before times, you would visit Apple Park every 5 weeks and spend a week there.
Speaker 7:Right? Did I hear that right?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Give or take, but, yeah, that's about right.
Speaker 7:Okay. I have that as I have a word for that. I've been a remote employee of varying degrees for the last 20 years. I call that a pilgrimage. How often do I pilgrimage back to the mothership?
Speaker 7:When I moved out here to Massachusetts, that was Sun Menlo Park and then it became Nexenta and then it became OmniTI and it became Joyant. But every remote, whatever level of remote I've been, I have to figure out how often am I pilgrimage ing to somewhere. Now for Ant, that pilgrimage interval was 6 months, which I was kinda surprised that I would I normally expect quarterly.
Speaker 2:But Oh, that was okay. That was too infrequent, you
Speaker 7:felt? It was less frequent than I was used to. I didn't think it was a bad thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's like It's
Speaker 7:just a parameter. I it's a parameter I need to negotiate and or discover. Right. And
Speaker 16:Who do you synchronize those pilgrimages with? Just your team, some wider org?
Speaker 7:That's a damn good question. That's another thing to think about when you're doing that. Is it just your team? Is it a greater company thing? Hell, it might be both.
Speaker 7:Maybe your greater company thing does something once a year, and you gotta make sure that the quarter pilgrimage for that one coincides with that. With that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then I so we at Joynt, obviously, we we tend to have a folks come we tend they would do a meetup. I think, actually, 6 months is it was probably more, like, 9 months to a year that we bought that kids for for meet up. I think you'd be overly generous to join. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which and those times were great. Just like this this time, this past week was great.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:They do tend to be exhausting. I mean, they are a 100 percent on. And I don't know how you felt. I mean, I definitely
Speaker 3:I'm dead. I mean, it was just fuck. Every night, I was just as tired as I've ever been. I mean, like, 4 days in a row, putting on pants, leaving the house, like, it was crazy.
Speaker 7:Not even that, but, like, the intensity of conversations, the intensity of fun afterwards. Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Now I would also say that and I felt this way too at Joint, definitely oxide. The it because there was a somewhat infrequent cadence to it, it does end up being a great and intense experience. Like, people don't squander it. And and, you know, the there was I think the the earlier question about how much work did we wanna get get done.
Speaker 2:I mean, for us, it's
Speaker 13:very we were
Speaker 2:we're doing something very aggressive. It was very this could not be exclusively socialization. Ian, you were saying that at Twilio, there's this emphasis on socialization as well, which we obviously wanted to do. But we definitely wanted to get people actually working together. And out of I don't know.
Speaker 2:After the 1st day, I was like, are we actually going? How is this are people gonna be in, like are people actually gonna, like, work versus this all this other importance stuff that we need
Speaker 3:to do. You know, it's interesting you say that Brian, because I think I entered the week thinking, okay, these are the tactical things I want to get done. These are the things I want to demo. These, you know, these are the specific collaborations I want to have. And then almost immediately, like, almost when I walked into the room, you know, full of, you know, 40 plus other folks, I just wanted to, like, grab onto these humans and talk to them.
Speaker 3:And it's Is
Speaker 2:it is that because of my haircut though? Isn't the the first thing you grabbed onto to me? And the first question you asked is if my 9 year old had
Speaker 1:cut my hair?
Speaker 3:No. The first question I first of all first of all, that was not the first question
Speaker 4:I asked.
Speaker 3:That was only, like, the 3rd or 4th. And, actually, initially, Brian, I just did it. I I was like, who is this colleague of mine
Speaker 6:who I've never met before? Oh,
Speaker 3:no. But but I I think immediately it shifted not to, like, you know, just hanging out and getting coffee with folks, but a different kind of work. Like, the kind of work that that was small groups of people meeting in rooms and then grabbing other people saying, Hey, you know, who else we need to include in this conversation? And that's something that I, I think that we are not good at. Certainly it's something that I'm not great at of just reaching out and, you know, yanking people in, even though arguably it's easier online because folks are at their desks, but I think there is a hurdle towards interruption that takes some time to to get over.
Speaker 10:That I think
Speaker 15:oops. Sorry.
Speaker 4:Go ahead. I don't know.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I sorry, Dan.
Speaker 17:Go ahead.
Speaker 7:No. Okay. But it it's that sort of jumped up activity that's different. And that's why I a 5 week interval between pilgrimages seems a little intense to me, but that's because I know myself and I know my team and I know my situation. It's probably very different for especially in a everybody's at the everybody's at the office culture like Apple.
Speaker 7:But I'm curious if other people have different ideas of pilgrimage intervals or maybe like, oh, one out of the 4 I do in a year is really intense, and then the other 3 aren't so bad.
Speaker 5:For me, as as an engineering manager, my a lot of it is about the one on one time, and and being there and not about, like, a big summit that we're all trying to get together for, although that happens too. But it's really about the the personal connection, which I just I feel better about, in a room room with somebody. Now, again, we've managed to make this work for 2 years, the other way. But, actually, I mean, I guess one question I wanna ask, I don't know if this is the time for it or if we're gonna go there, but it seems like everybody's been pretty pro remote so far here. I wonder if folks wanna play devil's advocate for a minute and comment on what we think we're losing by being, you know, by trying to be more and more remote.
Speaker 5:And for me as, as a manager and trying to help people, you know, kind of, shepherd their careers as, as a big part of my job, the 1 on 1 FaceTime is different for me if I can if I can be in a room with you than I can, you know, even over a a one on one Zoom.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a great question. I know Jake does you've had your hand up for a while. Tom, I don't know if you want to weigh in on that exact topic. But I I think that is that is interesting in terms of like, some of the things we're losing.
Speaker 2:I definitely or, Adam, you might I know you have to think of the side of this. Do you wanna
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I mean, I I see a bunch of hands up, but I do wanna speak to this specifically, which is, like, I don't like remote work. And I I I like it better now that I have childcare. There there was a Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say. Right.
Speaker 3:There was a long period of the pandemic where, you know, at any given moment, a possibly naked 3 year old could come wandering into frame, including, like, during interviews where, you know, I needed to apologize to candidates.
Speaker 2:Just be like, look, I can't
Speaker 3:get rid of them until you wave hello. So,
Speaker 2:like, I'll
Speaker 8:You're looking
Speaker 5:CNN guy, but, like, so much
Speaker 3:better. Yeah. Be like, look. I just gotta, you know, keep the camera up high and and hope that things, you know, stay reasonable. But, like, last week being in person with folks just filled up my cup in ways that like it has not been filled in a long time.
Speaker 3:Like, and I'm also, and I think it took me a while to figure out some, some tricks for working remotely. For example, I don't work on anything now, unless I can, unless it really can't be avoided. That is a one person project. Cause I just like die on these little islands.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think that some of the nature of our work tends towards islands, but I've just realized that, like, I just get stuck there and I just need someone who is in the shit with me on some of these topics. Because, you know, previously, you go into the office and at lunchtime, tell people what was bothering you, tell people what was working, what was not bounce crazy. I, you know, see someone wandering off the coffee coffee and know that you could follow them and not be interrupting. And it's taken me a while to even feel sort of comfortable. But, you know, I'm not sure I would have voted for conversely, you know, the whole week I spent worrying that my dogs were going uncuddled and, and, you know, needed to, like, look presentable several days in a row.
Speaker 3:So maybe I'm just not cut out for work full stop.
Speaker 2:That's right. Exactly. It's actually just working from work that's the problem. Tom, yeah. Go ahead.
Speaker 12:Yeah. I I I call, wandering around, you know, physical people and sort of sensing the zeitgeist, and, you just don't get that remotely.
Speaker 2:It's different. Yeah. It's different for sure. I think you've gotta create it to and it's hard to get the yeah. I agree.
Speaker 2:I I don't know if it's impossible.
Speaker 15:It's hard.
Speaker 12:But but my my first, experience with that kind of thing was working for Nokia 20 years ago. And, you know, the center of gravity was Helsinki, so it was really remote. So I ended up going to, Helsinki, you know, 5 or 6 times a year just to keep up with what's going on.
Speaker 2:Well and I do think and, you know, just in kind of the way that you phrase it and, Dan, the way you phrase it earlier, Tokovich, I I do think that one of the one of the challenges that you always have, and I don't know. Hopefully, you don't have to stop with Oxide, but it's hard to tell, is this kind of asymmetry between those that are those that live close to the office and those that don't. And it's just it it's very easy to kind of create an other. And, Lucas, you must I mean, you must see this with with kind of different geographies. And it's like people wanna recreate geographic based civil wars.
Speaker 2:I I think that that can be a challenge to get is to kind of not to allow some of these things to transcend geography.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, especially when you're dealing with time zone extremities too because we've got folks in in Europe and folks on the West Coast. Right? So it's like a 9 hour swing between them. So, like, finding where you can align there is a, you know, kind of a scheduling trick in and of itself.
Speaker 5:But also, like, the times you can't align there, what can you do to keep, kinda like, I don't know what the right word is, but, like, the the confluence of things that need need to happen to make everybody feel like they're part of the same whole, basically following the sun, is a whole is a whole other thing. Right? Those people will even if they're in offices, they'll never be together. So what is, you know, what needs to happen there?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Are
Speaker 5:you tickets or is it just being smarter about how you organize?
Speaker 2:Well and I think actually time zone is a huge issue because that is something that you can't no amount amount of technology is gonna solve that. We are diurnal people. And, I I mean, for us, we are we're Pacific based. So even for it we I try to be respectful of folks on the East Coast, but we've definitely had folks interested in oxide from Europe. It's not impossible to work for oxide from Europe.
Speaker 2:But we've tried to make clear, here's what it will mean. It will mean that you you're gonna have to be at some level nocturnal. It's not like, you know, I don't think we have meetings to death, but it's gonna be you're gonna have to be comfortable.
Speaker 5:No. But, like, the 9 or 10 or 11 o'clock at night meeting happens
Speaker 6:frequently Yes.
Speaker 5:At Apple, for sure. But, like,
Speaker 3:and had to be on a different call at this time, like, a work a work call at 8 PM EST, you know, without, like, having dinner with his family and tucking his kids in and stuff like that. So it's pretty tough.
Speaker 2:So I wanna get to to Jake and Jason. Guys so Jake, you've had your
Speaker 13:hand up falling tough. Yeah. Apologies, there for going down and up. One thing that, like, it's a little awkward for me listening to a lot of this, because it feels like so much of the conversation is just based around meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings. And what I like it's funny because over the course of the pandemic, I feel like I've gotten actually worse at this, possibly because of so many new people to the remote style.
Speaker 13:But the thing that has always been, the most successful on most of the remote teams that I've seen the most success is transferring to much more of an asynchronous work style where honestly your ability to write and your ability to document and your ability to Yeah. Bring things, you know, like like bring people together in a way that does not depend on time zone
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 13:Helps a lot. And this isn't just so that for example, you can work with people, you know, on the side of the earth, it's also quite simply for the case of like you know maybe you're planning on getting some of your work done that evening because you plan on picking up your kids at, like, 2:30 in the afternoon. And does it actually matter whether, you know, you're are present for that meeting? You know, like I personally feel at least that the vast majority of decisions that are made in meetings, one probably weren't decisions in the 1st place, like they were probably already made and it's mostly just, you know, getting the information out to everyone.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 13:And then also on top of that, it just often feels like frankly people kind of come to meetings not prepared. Like like, they haven't actually thought through what the work is that needs to get done, and so that happens in the meeting. And and, like yeah. So that that that's where I I to be honest, I almost feel like the future of remote work, you know, going to the title of this isn't around the meeting at all or or anything like that. It's how we we almost like like, potentially, it's it's all about asynchronous communication becomes the primary and how do you become more effective at asynchronous communication.
Speaker 2:Totally. So a bunch of terrific points in there. I I think you're right. We are absolutely over indexing on meetings. They are leaving kind of the also leaving the implication that we do decide things in meetings.
Speaker 2:We actually don't deliberately do not decide things in meetings for all of the things you're talking about. So, we've got a process. We've blogged about it in the past. Our request for discussion process, RFPs, definitely inspired by IETF RFCs, inspired by the RFT process that we developed at Joyant. But we believe really emphatically, arguably to a fault, in writing down ideas and not deciding things in meetings.
Speaker 2:And just and I actually think that there's a right now, there's a bit of a gap in the universe, in that there we are kind of kind of cobbled something together that's kind of between GitHub, and, we would we would like something that has the rigor of Git as a back end with an ASCII rendered back end that has the the the collaboration of a Google Doc. Adam, correct me if you
Speaker 3:Absolutely. I mean, I think Google Docs are great for getting multiple people on multiple keyboards and pointing out specific areas of concern and commenting around those. But then, you know, the the sort of GitHub, having the blockchain of having the immutability of of GitHub, and being able to go back and see a an archive of, of comments and discussion, although GitHub kinda gets in their own way on this. But, yeah, there there's there's something that sits between those 2, which is actually what we need.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:actually what I mean. It's missing the discussion right now. I feel like we I feel improved on the way we did discussion at joint, which I felt was a problem in the RFG process, where the discussion was only in the issues. The discussion now is in the pull request, which is a little bit better, but it's still it's it's not doesn't it's not right, I don't think. I think there's something better that is just doesn't really exist right now.
Speaker 2:For us, it's very important to ultimately have that, that blockchain, I apparently need to call
Speaker 3:it. The
Speaker 2:but that's been a I mean, I and I feel that's been a critical tool for us.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Super important. And I think, the other, you know, a couple of comments about, documentation rather than live decisions. And also neurodiversity, you know, I've worked with some folks who just kind of are very uncomfortable, shooting from the hip in any way. Like, they really want to look at the documentation and pour it over and then come to a recent decision, which I think, like, when I was younger in my career, like, was frustrating because I I kinda like, you know, that that live discussion and that live dialogue.
Speaker 3:But, but I realized it was excluding for some folks who just couldn't participate or or didn't feel comfortable or didn't, you know, didn't match their learning style or their discussion style. So I think it's a it's a way of involving more and different people in the conversation as well.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:And then I think that the the other challenge that we have now created for ourselves is, you know, you kinda mentioned earlier that we're, you know, deep into the 3 digits on our fees. We're, I mean, hitting about to hit 300. And that has created, on the one hand, this kind of massive corpus of thought process. Some of it needs to be pruned and so on, but it also makes it really hard, I think, to ramp up in the company because
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean, we're we're reaching escape velocity. We're, like, more words are going to be written than can be read. Yeah. So so knowing, like, knowing all there is to know is going to become untenable insofar as it's currently tenable. But that I think that becomes a problem of then, as you're alluding to, curation and sort of summary and, and and different ways of educating people about the contents of those things.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Jason, you've had your your hand up for for a while.
Speaker 18:Yeah. So this might sound a bit bolshy, but I would just like to ask if people have considered that whether they think the tech industry extends to the service delivery organization as well as the, product creation organisation because it was interesting for me coming from an academic environment, which was a bit of a sheltered workshop, where I was surrounded by people with post grad degrees. I got a bachelor's degree in CS and, you know, philosophy and stuff. And, you know, so we'd have these pretty intense discussions sometimes, and we'd debug stuff, you know, looking over each other's shoulders and walking past people's offices in the corridor, seeing 2 people huddled over a terminal, you would sort of say, hey. You know?
Speaker 18:What's up? But, then going to SGI, which was a very thin organization in Australia with most of its engineering presence in the US, you weren't necessarily remote anyway most of the time. But then having been swallowed up by HPE and sort of pigeonholed in Pointnext as a screwdriver monkey because that was the bid I could do for them was to maintain the legacy install base. What you got to see was pretty much looked like a class division between the desked and the undesked.
Speaker 2:The table the executive director
Speaker 18:who actually were expected to be pretty much on uncontactable in Canberra a lot of the time because the DCs don't let you take the phones in in their Faraday cages anyway. And the people who actually ran them were all remote from Canberra. Even the team lead was remote. So in fact, the only collaboration that happened in the office was when we would drag ourselves into the hot desk because we were told, oh, you gotta turn up at work, you know, if you're not actually on a job. And, you couldn't actually do the bookkeeping parts of the job there anyway because it was like you wanna drag 2 system board boxes into an office space through a 100 meters of car park and stuff to so that you can write some numbers down that you couldn't transcribe in the field and then take them to the depot.
Speaker 18:No. So it was really only about command and control and basically calculating the load average of their of their biological work units. So
Speaker 2:Is that a I just feel like biological work is that was biological work unit on a slide so far?
Speaker 5:That's So much better than meat space.
Speaker 2:So so and that's what I'm trying to do with the technical communication
Speaker 18:just to point out that, actually, that in that required a huge amount of really conscious, technical leadership, which I didn't actually see, which was that we were really atomized. And for instance, you know, there's an obvious thing that came out was a Flashware problem on the HP health processes, which, they were swapping motherboards right, left, and center on blades. And this thing came out where, hey. Now this is a new orderable spare part. It's tiny.
Speaker 18:It's $25 or whatever instead of a whole system board replacement because we acknowledge that we've clobbered the flash on a whole bunch of our iLOs on a whole bunch of blades of this wall. And, literally, the way that that information came to our team was me finding it on the HPE tech resource, and then the way the information got to the other teams in Australia was my team lead or someone basically spreading it. There was no top down thing, And then we never actually got sent the right part from Bangalore, and I would be forwarding this back up to them, and they'd be ignoring me each time. I was never sent that ordered that part from the local depot. We kept it locally.
Speaker 18:Every time you got a case, you'd have to look in the back end case and then order the part yourself. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's actually I mean, the I I think I guess the the question is whether remote work and I think that, you know, for us at Oxide, at the stage we're at, we're still obviously growing these functions. We haven't added them yet. But whether the in all remote workforce will democratize some of this where you are you know, you may be function. Yeah.
Speaker 2:As a right. Yeah. And and I I think also, I mean, directly
Speaker 6:and
Speaker 1:You were
Speaker 18:kind of frowned on, though, if you went outside channels, and that was the part the other problem was that the very hierarchical nature of it meant you were supposed to escalate things through your chain, and then they'd come down through the chain from above. Right.
Speaker 2:Well And you didn't you
Speaker 18:didn't have a bolshy kind of Slack that you could say, hey, guys. No one else is saying this, but do this so that you can save yourself, you know, a huge amount of time every time you're supposed to change a blade motherboard.
Speaker 2:Well well and so it's gonna get a little bit dark. I mean, is this what is behind these big tech companies? And, Lucas, you definitely don't need to speak for Apple, but, you know, Google's obviously doing the same thing. That is doing the same thing. Is the desire to get people back into the office part of this command and control?
Speaker 2:I mean, is it because people actually work more effectively, or is it because I actually want to be physically present with the people that
Speaker 13:confident in the dynamics of the economy. Things.
Speaker 18:Yeah. This is a thing where every time you suggest this, you people say, well, that's ad hominem. And the problem is that because you're in especially if you're in a small place like I am, all you can just talk about is what you've seen. And you it's a very fine line between actually being, you know, a troublemaker and being constructive when you start raising those discussions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fair enough. Austin, you you feel like in there. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I think I think on that point and I wanted to go to one of the other things. But to the point that you just made, I don't I don't think it has anything to do with that. I think that one of the things that everybody forgets is that, you know, the FAANG company is all these really big companies, big companies all over the world. They're the beneficiary of massive locally funded tax subsidiaries.
Speaker 4:Right? So, you know, Google is beholden to tax agreements they have with the city of Mountain View. Apple is beholden to tax agreements that they have with the city of Cupertino. And all of those cities right now are in a panic because people being in the office fund restaurants that exist, right? Fund other businesses that exist because people are driving to the office.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 6:I think that's very real.
Speaker 4:You think that's, like, you can Oh, I
Speaker 2:think it's very real. I think no. No. I'm not laughing at real. I'm laughing at it because of the number of VC dollars we have spent on Ruby's can't fail diner, the the diner next stop.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. Absolutely. And there are We do appreciate this for guarantee you that Google and all the municipalities in which they've been given these gigantic tax breaks, the municipalities are coming back and saying to them, hey. I don't know how PG we wanna be, but what the frick. Right?
Speaker 4:And and that I know for certain because I know some companies I know certain companies that I'm bound by NDA, not to mention the names of, that have experienced that directly in their cities, not in the valley, but also
Speaker 5:think a $3,000,000,000,000 comp so speaking as a private citizen now, but, like, a really you think a $3,000,000,000,000 company is is bending over for Cupertino?
Speaker 2:I yeah. I get it. I'm not sure that's true.
Speaker 1:Not not
Speaker 2:I've been yeah.
Speaker 4:Necessarily believe, but, like, in a certain way. They also own tremendous swaths of real
Speaker 6:estate that are not I
Speaker 2:still I I gotta tell you, I I hear the point, but I think the city of Mountain View is beholden to Google and City Cupidino is beholden Apple much more than the other way around. I mean, I I think that they would be delighted. I mean, I I do kind of like this alternate reality in which the the
Speaker 1:these cabal of small cities are actually
Speaker 2:controlling big tech. But they are beholden only, small cities are actually controlling big tech.
Speaker 4:But they are beholden only if the scenario in which people in the office exist. If people aren't in the office, then they aren't beholden to them. That's the whole point. It's a critical purpose for these companies.
Speaker 3:I'm much more likely to chalk this up to officious middle managers than this cabal of of real estate, as Brian was saying. I don't know. I mean, I I'd be interested to understand, you know, what the even for small companies, what the impetus is for bringing people back. And if I think there are probably a lot of people who want to be back in the office, but there needs to be a critical mass to make that worthwhile, even for the individuals.
Speaker 2:Well yeah. And I think that that for these companies we're talking about, they have spent a lot of time and money on a campus. And I think I mean, what I wonder is if, like, if they think, well, crap. If we're gonna if we work just as effectively remotely as we do from the campus, like, what does a campus even mean? I wonder if it's, like, if it's easier to recall people than it is to actually look your identity, eyeball to eyeball and actually try to figure out what we're about.
Speaker 4:So one theory I've heard answer.
Speaker 6:I'm sorry.
Speaker 5:One theory I've heard that is is interesting, and, again, speaking as a private citizen here, is that if you're a if if you're a leaf node, in an org chart, you may have a very different vision of what it means, to to be effective at work than if your entire life is meetings. Right? Where you're like, I would like to be in the same room with all these people all the time, and that's the way to get our job done as opposed to what I need is, like, uninterrupted flow state time in order to, you know, make happen what I need to make happen. And is that the disconnect between, you know, larger companies saying, hey. Return to office, and, a lot of rank and file folks saying, no.
Speaker 5:This is actually better.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I want you at some point, Lucas, I would be speaking I would used to be speaking as a private citizen. I'm very curious to know what the tenor is inside of Apple. If there are things that have already been leaked that you can report about what the tenor is, I'd be curious to know how that's going down.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I mean, I I I obviously can't speak to things I've heard directly inside, but I I don't think it's all that different than what you've heard about, you know, more generally. And especially at the at the big companies, where folks are really questioning, you know, what is what is my quality of life in this world versus what it was in the before times, and what what do I really value? And is, you know, is taking a bus for 2 hours from Livermore every one way every day, like, really what I wanna be doing with myself.
Speaker 2:And does that make me more effective? I think people are gonna be really asking
Speaker 5:for the bus. Right? Like, let's say you even you only get half of that, back as working hours. Is that you know, that's probably worth it if you do the if you do the calculus. And, again, a very different calculus if you're, you know, a leaf node versus, you know, the top of an org chart.
Speaker 2:Are you use do you use leaf node? That also feels like attention, biological leaf nodes. You are now being titrated.
Speaker 3:Well, a lot of those leaf nodes, like, may live in a 1 bedroom apartment or whatever, trying to have multiple Zooms Zooms at the same time. So, I
Speaker 2:suppose Right. The old, the working multiple jobs. Time
Speaker 3:No. No. No. No. I don't mean I mean, like Oh,
Speaker 2:you don't mean
Speaker 3:They've got a part they don't live by themselves. They have multiple people in the house trying to share the kitchen kitchen table
Speaker 1:with Wi
Speaker 2:Fi. Right. So so those leaf nodes, that's where they wanna be in in an office. Yeah. At one point and I'm not sure if this is but I heard this from multiple people that Google was calling the the the movement to get people back on campus the recall.
Speaker 2:Like, people are being recalled. Like, they're like a defective carburetor.
Speaker 5:They need a better carburetor. It's in case.
Speaker 2:Like, attention. You've been recalled. Taiman, you've had your hand up for a while or is it Timan? How's that pronunciation?
Speaker 15:Sorry. No. T t one is good. I just wanna give a a quick perspective on
Speaker 6:the whole time zone issue. So, like, I'm
Speaker 15:I'm in Germany. It's, 3 AM right now for me. And, I have a very shifted biology clock. Like, I am a night person. Like, this whole shift to remote work, like, enables me to work in my natural time.
Speaker 15:It's great for me. Like, I I see that it it presents an issue for a lot of people, of course. But, like, for people like me and I know a lot of engineers who have that kind of philosophy of talk like Sorry.
Speaker 12:So you
Speaker 6:learned that
Speaker 5:now before this shift.
Speaker 15:Yes. Like and for me, it's a huge issue working in Germany for, like, traditional companies, especially Germany. Like, you start at 8 AM. That's, like, quite normal times. And that that has always been an issue for me.
Speaker 15:Like, I've tried, like, the past 10, 11 years that I've been working in in tech. It's it's always been kind of a struggle. Like, the company I'm I'm right now, it's kind of accepting that, but there's always, like, this kind of, okay. In 2 days, you gotta get up at 7 AM to go to that place or something like that. So it's always been, yeah, difficult to to adjust myself, to these norms and being able to work.
Speaker 15:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You must be loving it right now then because you I mean, it's Yeah. It's easy for you. I mean, it's it's 3 in the morning there. You appear to be lucid. You can actually Very much.
Speaker 2:Easily work for a Pacific Time company. I mean, that must be a Yeah.
Speaker 15:I actually applied for Oxnard, for that very reason. It's I I try to, yeah, shift from Germany to US time zone because I live more of a US East Coast time zone than I live a German time zone.
Speaker 6:Still He has a great excuse because I'm
Speaker 4:just a giant weirdo. Right?
Speaker 6:Living in Germany, you can
Speaker 4:have this very constructive reason to say, well, I'm I'm offset. I'm just a nice person. Or you could just be weird and just wanna, like, work at very random times where you find your productivity in strange moments. And so being able to have that flexibility is like this is definitely been probably the most productive 4 years of my life, I would say, like, in the most recent times from a professional perspective.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's interesting. I'd be interested and I I Twitter doesn't allow us to easily pull folks, but I would be curious for for whom how for how many people is that true? Mean, it's obviously, our experience has been distorted being at a start up during that period, but it has been for me, I I mean and in part because of circumstance, I don't have a belligerent 3 year old. I mean, not he's not always he's delightfully he's delightfully belligerent
Speaker 4:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Which I
Speaker 2:which is, you know, I It's great. The the what I I he's delightfully belligerent, which is a
Speaker 1:a
Speaker 2:may have been how I thought your treatment of my haircut was also the life of. Right? The, but I so I think that that and if we I feel like my feeling would be very different had we were on a we were we remodeled our house and made it larger, honestly. And brutal, I think. I don't know what we would have done had we been on that.
Speaker 2:Having everyone working from home slash school from home, I think the pandemic would have unfolded really, really differently. So and, Adam, you were making this point earlier about about the leaf notes when we were when we we were considering leaf nodes.
Speaker 3:Some of my best friends are leaf nodes.
Speaker 2:Right. Biologically, notes.
Speaker 4:I think and the thing that I've had my hand raised for is sort of, like, peripheral to that, which is this idea that I think, you know, before this notion of people who were remote, it was because they had to be or they were specialized or they were something. Right? Now we have this gigantic global social experiment. Right? And I think that one of the first things that's gonna happen, we talked about the notion of meetings earlier.
Speaker 4:You know, a lot of the work that I do today, we build things sometimes, but most of the reasons that we meet with people is to talk about architecture, to talk about policy. And the reality is when I have a week full of meetings, I could recategorize 100% of those meetings as, you know, chalk, talk, conference talks that are just, you know, NDA driven for a company. Right. And so from that perspective, when we record content, we're having a conversation with someone, you know, back to the notion of asynchronousness. A lot of the things that we're talking about are to educate team members, to talk about different strategies for using different technologies and do different things.
Speaker 4:And that content can be leveraged to for anyone at any time. Right. Can go back to have those, those conversations. I think there's a thing that I've found in the last 3 years that I've been doing more and more, you know, I don't know if everyone's I found more and more that like, there are, there are exactly recordings of meetings that I have like kept today because they were fantastic examples of teams working together to explain a concept, to go into an in educational capacity. Right.
Speaker 4:And I think I think one of the things that I really hope that comes out of this time period is that we start to develop new vocabulary. So that it's not so that, like, a meeting is a base abstract class that we, you know, derive new types on top of.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. That's interesting because and I feel like it we I like referring to this content too because, certainly we do this a lot where we've got meetings that have been recorded that we direct all new hires to, for example. That we, it's been really useful and neither for new hires when they come on board to be able to go listen to some some past key meetings. I love the fact that we record all of our demos. I think it's great.
Speaker 2:You can go back and and relive those or rewatch those. We are creating so much content and I do feel like the way we think about what we create at work is shifting to thinking about that as content And, yeah, why are we talking about all this content creation? It's just meetings. I think that's a good point. Like, we need a different taxonomy here.
Speaker 4:I mean, the other part is you're gonna drive your your corporate counsel crazy when they realize how much stuff you're recording or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We we don't know. We don't bring this up with the corporate counsel. The the Wait.
Speaker 2:Is this
Speaker 4:the same job?
Speaker 2:The this so no. This this actually and this actually is a good example of the, corporate counsel definitely knows that we record everything, and they definitely think it's a terrible idea. And we agree and disagree. Because it is to me, when yes. Obviously, it's discoverable.
Speaker 2:And it's like, by the way, what are what are you talking about that you're concerned that it's gonna be discovered? Right? I mean, I
Speaker 4:But let's let's let's be honest because this is also a point where we've actually seen in the last 2 two and a half years. Listen. Like, I've tried to work remote for a decade. Some people on here more, the tools have been tremendously lacking. And then we've seen an evolution in the last 24 months that it's just been, like, incredible.
Speaker 4:I mean, Microsoft Teams was a garbage pail on day 1 compared to, like like, it was a I don't know. Like, maybe a nuclear waste dump on day 1 compared to the, like, flaming trash pile that it is today. Right? And so, like, we can see that, like, really what it is is that there is now this evolution where companies are recognizing the value in which there needs to be this idea of saying, Hey, like here's a meeting that should live in perpetuity. Right.
Speaker 4:So that meeting should like escape audit trail in some way to survive because of its value. Right. And that's this, these tools currently lack some of these things, but you know, who has actually been really really avant garde on a lot of, like, audit capacity of
Speaker 6:a lot of these kind
Speaker 4:of collaboration tools in Slack. Slack done has done a ton of work in these kinds of audit spaces. Right? Slack was, like, 5 or 6 years ago when it came to corporate audit trail and the controls that you had as a corporation over what's stored, how's it stored, what stored, what are the channels, you know, how, what do we, what do we store from private communications between parties or not, and these different things. And the reality is, is that your corporate counsel and your security team need to have a dashboard that allows them to sort of go, okay.
Speaker 4:We don't want most stuff to stick around to be discoverable. Right. But you do have levers that you can push because there are some meetings where, you know, you don't say the terrible stuff about haircuts that you guys apparently talk about all the time. Right. That that that it would offend a lot of other people.
Speaker 4:Right? That maybe that's not in the meeting that should be stay saved forever, but it's in a couple other meetings that should fall off the cliff at some point, hopefully, in less than 12 months from now.
Speaker 2:I I do love that in this world, my my haircut has made me, as, like, protected class or something. I I I've got this all
Speaker 1:the time.
Speaker 4:This is perfect. I'm always looking for good audit trail corporate counsel examples, and this is going in my little notebook to bring us with my you know, the next, you know, corporate counsel discussion that I have, which is
Speaker 2:at least 2 or 3 a week. There you go. Jeez.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's a tough existence. Oh, no. I love my job. It's great.
Speaker 2:So I we've hit on a bunch of topics. Lucas, did did this go where you wanted it to go? I mean, you were had some some hopes going into this. What are some of the some of the points that we we've not hit maybe?
Speaker 5:Oh, I don't know. I still I still feel like there's a really heavy emphasis on remote good, in person bad. I I feel like it's it's more nuanced than that. I'd be curious for folks to opine a little bit on what they they think they're missing. And I realize I'm saying this as a full time remote employee.
Speaker 3:Well, I can tell you that, I mean, even as we get into text more, that it's it's even it's hard to form rapport on video chats or phone calls. It's even harder in, like, GitHub issues to make sure that the the words you're typing are interpreted in the manner in which you intend and to build that rapport with your colleagues where if you are imprecise or if you're callous by
Speaker 1:accident that, you know, you
Speaker 3:don't offend, that that people know, hey,
Speaker 2:bad example.
Speaker 3:I I'm I'm grasping, you know. But, but it's it's so much, you know, it's or in my experience, it's so much easier to build that rapport in person. But, you know, and that doesn't mean over over beers or whatever. That even means in the room and technical conversations where you can see if someone's getting hot. And if if someone if you need to take a different tack, and that can be possible in video chat, but not always.
Speaker 2:So, Adam, let let me ask this though. The I find that once I have spent time with someone in person, like, our relationship kind
Speaker 1:of advances to a
Speaker 2:different level. And then it it different level, and then it it it is easier for me to get those nuances when we get back online.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I I definitely out in a 30,000 person organization.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 6:Fair.
Speaker 9:Yeah. Well, I
Speaker 2:mean, I mean you're not on a
Speaker 8:in a 30,000 person organization, you're not interacting with all 30,000 people on a regular basis. You really have probably a core of max 300 people that you actually interact with. And I think that the the big thing that we did that has been a big difference for Trello in the past 2 years compared to the years prior to that. The things we're missing out on are the in person in the 1st week where new hires would all come out to an office. Someone from their media team would come out, and we would onboard them in person in the office, which give them an opportunity to meet some people who are regularly in the office as well as some on their team face to face and start to develop those in person connections.
Speaker 8:And then the other piece is just this yearly get together where we would all come together as a team, as a as a broader product group, and then be able to just hang out for 3 days and meet everyone face to face. This would help so much with the problems that you're talking about where it's like you you don't really compute that there is a human on the other side of that GitHub issue comment. They are a reasonable person. You have met them face to face, and you do understand that you're a part of the same tribe. If you've never met face to face, it's really hard to be able to break that wall of, oh, there is actually a human there, you know.
Speaker 5:I mean, this is the problem with social media and the Internet in general. Right?
Speaker 4:I could imagine some kind of, like, Slack or Teams feature where you got to randomly hear someone else's dreads for 5 minutes.
Speaker 3:What Or just popped
Speaker 4:up on your desktop? Because I can't tell you how much, one of my favorite organizations to work with, when we talk about this notion of pilgrimage, they were on agile. They had a 6 week
Speaker 1:cadence where every 6 weeks, they had
Speaker 4:a week of a full week in that 6 weeks of Right? In agile. And that's when I would make my pilgrimage to their offices. Right? And during that time, I can't tell you how many times in an open plan office, I like stood on one end of a floor and heard the wired I frames from the other end of the floor and ran down to see what terrible security thing someone was about to implement,
Speaker 1:you
Speaker 6:know, into the into the core
Speaker 4:of the product. Right? And that kind of like chaos, I think there's this chaos notion of in person. Right? There's this chaos notion of you're walking down the hall to get a coffee and someone you hear someone say something relevant to what you do, but who's someone you the whole group.
Speaker 4:Like, you talk about this notion of so many people in a product group, but it's a whole product group where, you know, to to that was a reference to a particular conversation in which I injected myself and was like, you know, you guys should really talk to info sec. Okay. They went, that's a great idea. How do we do that? And I said, hi.
Speaker 4:I'm Austin from info sec.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right. Right. Right. And so and I definitely I mean, just definitely, I felt, Adam, you probably felt this too on that especially on that second day.
Speaker 2:I felt like a pollinating bee going around to the the these various
Speaker 1:groups
Speaker 2:of folks that that that were that were huddling. And it was great. I mean, I thought it was and the office, I felt was like I thought there's gonna be a din in the office that was gonna make it really unworkable, but it really wasn't. I mean, Adam, correct me if I'm wrong. I don't know if
Speaker 3:you No. No. It was it was, it was sort of I mean, the office is such that having more than one conversation isn't really possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Like, especially through masks. Like, I'm not complaining about masks, but I just mean with the Vero Eck Vero echoey office made it very challenging. And people were basically respectful of that or recognized that and took their sidebars, you know, elsewhere and outside and other places.
Speaker 2:But so, Austin, you mentioned, like, this spark on the way to coffee. This is a Lucas, you are desperate for the straw man that you can assault on someone defending the the so we the the I because this is kind of a fair and
Speaker 5:balanced, Brian.
Speaker 2:Fair and balanced. Thank you. Thank you. One America Network. The I I feel that, like, this is the argument for, like, the spaceship.
Speaker 2:Right? That you've got, like we've designed that these, you know, these coffee game trails are designed such that the wildlife will cross and will will cross pollinate the brilliant ideas. How often does that happen in practice is my question.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Well, I think are you over indexing on
Speaker 5:the water cooler? Oh, sorry, Austin. Just are you over indexing on the water cooler conversation? Right? That's what everybody talks about.
Speaker 5:Yes. Is it actually happening? How many light bulbs are invented because of that?
Speaker 2:Yes. Well,
Speaker 6:let's let's let's talk about who.
Speaker 2:Well, so hold on. Before that, I I actually the the like, in that water cooler conversation, can you think of great moments that happened at the like, literally at the physical water cooler?
Speaker 4:Because I That's a terrible example. I'm always walking to the bathroom.
Speaker 2:Sure. That's so embarrassing.
Speaker 4:I'm always on my way to pee, and I hear a group of people I've never met before about to do something really terrible and stupid, and I'm compulsive. That's how
Speaker 2:the story goes. So so but percent of the time. But so and maybe it's just part of your job function. But, like, that's not the spark of innovation. That's the spark of enforcement.
Speaker 2:I mean, that is that's like a different kind
Speaker 1:of No.
Speaker 3:It's almost the opposite
Speaker 6:of engineering. It's like the opposite of the
Speaker 4:I'm sorry. Listen. I'm I'm a big data engineer also who turned to security because the platforms are bad. Okay? Like, plenty of those things have to do with me listening to someone describe schema that is not gonna scale and it's gonna break.
Speaker 4:Right? It's not about enforcement. It's about education. It's about being like, you're wrong. You don't know you're wrong, and you're all Dunning Kruger the crap out of this moment.
Speaker 4:I can hear you done doing Dunning Kruger as a group together.
Speaker 2:Right? But but but would would it be
Speaker 4:better stop this.
Speaker 1:In this
Speaker 2:group, but if you actually had that group, actually, instead of deciding that or plotting their Dunning Kruger ism an adventure into what have you, wouldn't it be better if that was documented in a document that you could then see and weigh it on? Be like, hey. I saw this document that you created in our centralized repository of artifacts. And Yeah. Hi.
Speaker 2:I'm the expert, and I can actually weigh in on this and help you not do the wrong thing. It just feels that, like,
Speaker 4:we're super genius pre series b. Right? Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'd it be but, Adam, I gotta tell you, like, I'm, like, going back through, like, the mental spark moments. And I feel like that one that you and I particularly And okay. Where were we when that happened?
Speaker 3:I think enough time has passed that we can admit that we were in Shanghai. Right? Because if we invested it in Shanghai, I think the Chinese government owns it.
Speaker 2:We were okay. But, no, seriously, where were we? I think The Chinese government wants to own it. I I I actually don't know
Speaker 4:where Shanghai.
Speaker 3:No joke. But okay.
Speaker 2:I actually think I know where I think I was on the phone with you in my apartment in North Valley.
Speaker 3:Okay. Okay. Cool. Were
Speaker 2:you in Shanghai? Maybe you were in Shanghai.
Speaker 3:Well, I definitely have a piece of paper, like, from a Shanghai hotel that describes the whole mechanism, and I showed it to the patent lawyer, and he said, I did not see
Speaker 2:that. It's like but if you could please just record yourself saying that after that's expired. Record it. Right.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:That that actually we're we we are so goddamn old that that patent is actually gonna be close to expiring. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly. It's fine.
Speaker 15:It's fine.
Speaker 3:Sure. Brows. Right.
Speaker 4:I see this kind of purpose as, like, staff engineers at large at the Apples. Right? There's people on here who worked at the Apples, who've worked at some of the the big hosts. Right? When, like, staff engineers show up in meetings, and they show up in meetings, and people don't often know why they show up in meetings.
Speaker 4:So they just felt like showing walking into a meeting. Right? And their opinion was valued.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I that's called crashing a meeting. I saw that. You you I I've got Matt. Matt, you've worked remote for quite some time.
Speaker 2:Like, I think you were on a a a call remote language. What's your perspective?
Speaker 6:So first off, Brian, longtime listener, first time caller. Thank you. I I actually had a question for for Oxide, and, Lucas as the corporate representative of Apple. You you talked a lot about, remote work and, and sort of why meeting people in person actually helps build relationships and actually makes it much easier to work with folks remotely afterwards. And I totally agree with that.
Speaker 6:One of the things I'm interested in is I I feel like a lot of companies are looking at remote work as a cost savings measure. And so they're both telling people to work remotely, but also then cutting travel budget and saying, yeah. You work remotely, and we don't pay for you to come visit. So as you look at it from Oxide's perspective or Luke's, I don't know what it looks like from Apple's perspective, how do you see that evolving? As it moves to remote work, is there still a notion that companies are interested in bringing people together, or does this become strictly a cost savings measure where if you have to fly people from point a to point b, it doesn't make sense and remote means actually remote?
Speaker 2:For, I mean, for us, it's definitely not cost savings. So, and we view it as really important to bring the team together. I don't know what the cadence will be. It will you know, of of the the the quote, unquote pilgrimages, getting the teams together. I don't know what it's gonna look like in the future.
Speaker 2:I actually think that part of what made this past week really special is that there will be another one exactly like that one. We got 50 people in the company. It's it's, it is well below Dunbar's number, but I feel that there is at, like, some restaurant number. We are, like, right the cusp. Well, not only that.
Speaker 2:Restaurants.
Speaker 3:None of that, but it it was like I mean, it just had not happened.
Speaker 4:Right? It was it
Speaker 3:was it was not only a return or like a, not I was gonna say reunion, but it was not only the first gathering, but there's sort of like an air of of maybe a new era, like, globally. Maybe this is too optimistic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, absolutely. It it was a very, like, unique, and we don't know what it's gonna look like going forward. But I think it is unquestionable that we will be getting people together on a regular cadence, and we view that as as a it it's a cost. It's expensive.
Speaker 2:It definitely is expensive. And but it's worth it. And it we I think it actually you know, I I don't know. Steve dropped on the listener, but it may wanna weigh in on this. But as we were kinda thinking of the calculus about, we we and we actually can't get through this without mentioning that we work with an HR services firm that tries to help out on things, and can be very helpful.
Speaker 2:They tried to be a little too helpful. And in particular, they wanted to organize some, like, off-site team building activities, which we really did not wanna do. That time was too precious. They went ahead and booked, and I'm not making this up. I don't think they booked a Squid Games themed escape room
Speaker 6:for That's complicated. The
Speaker 2:so okay. Steve is gonna Steve can actually attach to the the the veracity of this. And Steve had to had, I think, had to explain to them that we are actually not interested in anything Squid Game's name. And by the way, have you watched Squid Games? That's the by your contractors?
Speaker 2:That's right. No. We they we can have our our well, we don't yeah. We don't actually our partners. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Not our vendors. But I I think that we also just, in general, viewed that time that time together as really, really precious and trying to figure out how to balance it between socializing and the actual work product, but then not wasting any of that time on things that would take away from it.
Speaker 14:Yeah. I was just gonna say, I think, not cost savings, actually highly, highly valuable. Like, folks left the week really energized, and I think, this is gonna pay dividends far into the future. And, yes, expensive. Thankfully, we avoided said squid games and Lego team builder exercise exercises and a few of the other things.
Speaker 14:But, no. I mean, just coming out of this week, it's an easy justification to go do this again in 6 or 9 months. And, it it it's high, high, high value getting everyone together.
Speaker 2:So I think unquestionable that we're gonna continue to do it. And I think, Matt, from to maybe the question of, like, alright. So why is Oxide remote? Because we just knew that that is that is where we were going to find talent. We're gonna find talent everywhere.
Speaker 2:The Bay Area does not have far and away does not have and I think it was actually it was, company changing for us to actually, and honestly, we may, in the fullness of time, view the pandemic as being essential for oxide because it made us it it forced us to develop things so early that were so amenable to remote development. And then that remote development was in turn absolutely essential. We have so many load bearing folks across the company. I mean, it feels like everyone's load bearing. But in so many different geographies that we had not had never hired out of.
Speaker 2:And, honestly, this is where also, frankly, social media made it easier to find those folks. Because the other question is, like, well, how do you find the remote folks? And, historically, Matt, I'm not gonna know your
Speaker 1:take on this. You've been remote for
Speaker 2:a long time. I mean, you were in you're in the Bay Area and then remote. Do you feel that that Bay Area time was really essential, at Amber for to to kinda build that network that you could kinda build upon going to the next gig?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Absolutely. It's one of the things that I actually found a little bit weird, which is I've been on the East Coast now for, I think, 15 years, or more. And my network is still primarily West Coast based, which is the folks that I met in person there from engineers to VCs to everybody else are the folks that, for whatever reason, I've kept more in touch with. And so I I live just outside of Boston.
Speaker 6:It has actually a a pretty, you know, comparative to other places in the country, a pretty thriving start up scene and and technology scene. But my connections and understanding of it are quite weak as compared to everything on the West Coast. And I think it gets back to what folks were were bringing up before where the in person meetings and the folks that you can spend some time with and build a relationship with becomes much easier as you go remote to follow-up with as opposed to, you know, starting fully remote and getting to know people that way. So for me, it's been a challenge where, you know, I'm someone was talking earlier about being German time zone. I'm West Coast time zone.
Speaker 6:My day is very focused around the West Coast. I don't know a lot of folks who who sort of experienced the East Coast technology as their primary place of focus. Matt Matt,
Speaker 3:I have a question, though. You've been remote a long time. And as we went into the pandemic and everyone became remote, did you find that that it was sort of easier for you as everyone was remote? In particular, you know, I can imagine these water cooler conversations may be great for inspiration, but also exclude anyone who wasn't at the water cooler, which you tautologically weren't. So did you find that, like, fewer decisions were sort of made in invisible ways?
Speaker 6:I think what I would say is, first off, like, if there was any upside to the pandemic, it was being a remote employee and watching everyone else have to struggle through what you'd struggle through for years before. Like and I I it's like shot in front. I shouldn't find happiness in it. But the first time I had to watch folks on the team give a tech talk remotely over Zoom when no one had their video on
Speaker 2:how's it going? Yeah.
Speaker 6:Like, I don't understand. Like, does anyone have any idea what the hell I'm saying? Like, does everyone say that? I'm
Speaker 7:Welcome to my world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah.
Speaker 6:And and so, like, listening to people complain after that, I was like, oh, that's really hard. Like, I feel terrible for you. Yeah. Like, you know, welcome to the last decade. So I think the pandemic actually made things easier in some respects because everybody had to suffer together and learn that being remote or when people don't mute their phone or when their microphone doesn't work, it's harder for everyone.
Speaker 6:What I found in terms of the decision making is that, unfortunately, I think a lot of the folks that were local that moved remote sort of kept talking to the same set of folks. And what was harder was to convince people to to break outside of their social circle. And social, I don't mean, like, you know, friends. I mean, people that they work with on a daily basis or collaborate. And I think it gets back to that notion of the the the people that they'd worked with previously in person and had a relationship with tended to be the people they'd reach out to and talk to when they were remote.
Speaker 6:And I I'd say it took us at least 8 to 12 months to get people to think about, hey, like, when you make a decision after a small conversation with people, send an email or write it down or let other people know or any of these things. And so after a year, I think it did get better, but it it didn't improve at the pace Adam, that I had sort of hoped or expected it would.
Speaker 3:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And to me and I feel we we had an advantage, honestly, being in a formative stage when we were doing that. We were we didn't have to tell people to write it down because that that's kind of the culture that we were in the process of already building when the pandemic hit, which I think made a lot of stuff easier. One of the things that we added that, right as the pandemic hit, a couple of things. One of them was a daily water cooler that is deliberately non work related timeboxed conversation that is a 100% optional.
Speaker 2:And some folks opt in, some folks opt out, some folks opt in some of the time, and opt out some of the time.
Speaker 10:So when I was at Microsoft, so my team was a 100% on-site before the pandemic. And then once the pandemic started, our manager, put it an optional, weekly, water cooler chat on the calendar so we could just, you know, hang you know, spend time hanging out and chatting like we used to do in the cafeteria at lunchtime.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think that that that's been interesting. I mean, that that to kinda have that that that daily unstructured time has been has been fun. It's allowed me to get to know the colleagues that for whom that because I think we what we found is, like, some people people really needed that, and some people really don't. And that's fine because we've got you know, it kinda depends on where how introverted versus extroverted versus, you know, how kind of important that stuff is to you.
Speaker 2:But I have really appreciated the folks that are there on a regular basis. I've gotten to really know at different levels, and I've I've really appreciated it. Another thing, Matt, that you mentioned that I think is really, really important, and Lucas, maybe this will it will really satisfy the other side of this, is I really don't know how people start their careers in an all remote world. You know, you graduated from college. You're 22 years old.
Speaker 2:You know, you you get you get your dream job. And now what? Like, do I move back to my home city? I mean, so much of a part of being a young adult is that experience of moving to a new city and, you know, you you've, I I feel like that is it's the Tootsie shot, right, of the from the movie Tootsie. You know, you've got that that long telephoto of of Dustin Hoffman walking in the city.
Speaker 2:I feel like that's a really important aspect of being young in your career, and, like, that I don't know. Like, how do we deal with that? Maybe I'm being am I being fusty here? Is that not required?
Speaker 3:I that's gonna be brutal. I mean, being, like, 21, 22, or whatever, graduating from college, starting a new job, I guess moving back with your folks, like, Zooming from their basement, needing to, like, get on someone's calendar in order to ask them your kind of dip shitty first day of work questions. It's gonna be brutal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I and yeah. Fair enough.
Speaker 5:I was just gonna say one thing I've noticed, from folks around that age cohort that I've been working with, no judgment here in either direction, but they, in general, have a very different, risk assessment of COVID than, I do or people I know with young kids do. And so I feel like a lot of those things that we all went through in our, like, early twenties moving somewhere and, like, making a friend group and going out and doing stuff. Like, that stuff is still happening. And then other than that, it's kind of like an international relocation in that, it's like you're talking to them, and eventually, you they're gonna get where everybody else is, and you're just kind of like that's the target in the future that you're just kind of aiming for. And it seemed okay.
Speaker 5:And, again, because everybody is an equally sized rectangle on your screen, the the playing field is pretty even. And, yeah, when we start going back to the office, I think that that might change a little bit.
Speaker 2:Well and I wonder if they those companies because clearly, they're gonna be those companies that are gonna be office dominant, like those companies that recall their employees. They're gonna be clearly those companies that are not, that are remote. And it is it going to be a kind of career progression that you go work for an office dominant company for your 1st couple of years and then you go work for a remote company? Another
Speaker 6:I I mean, I I think as a boomer, you know, I'm uniquely qualified to comment on this. I I think one thing that that you
Speaker 2:How dare you, sir?
Speaker 6:I've I've been surprised is that for folks who are graduating college in the pandemic, they don't know anything different. And I think if you don't know anything different, it actually makes this a lot easier. The people that it's been hardest for, I think, are actually those who were like 2 to 3 years into industry after college when the pandemic hit. Yes. I do that.
Speaker 6:Job. Yes.
Speaker 1:What I
Speaker 6:found is that the folks coming out of college were sort of like, this is the world that we live in. This is what I do. This is normal and didn't have anything to compare it to, and so figured out how to make it work. Everybody else is sort of like, oh my god. This is bizarre.
Speaker 6:I don't know what to do. And so the longer it's gone on, I think that's gotten easier. But for folks who are really just starting, I think they don't know any better. And in some sense, that's made it a lot easier.
Speaker 2:I think you're exactly right, and I think you have people for whom the music stopped. They went to kind of first job after school. They've been there for 2 or 3 or 4 years. They are just beginning to maybe set some roots down in the city, but not really. And now they wanna change jobs, and now they're in a remote job.
Speaker 2:I think that is a really as I said, everyone in the pandemic had their own challenge because, they lost that variety of life. It clearly goes with toddlers, especially delightfully, ones, all had their own challenge. Those with with older kids had their own challenge, but those those folks living alone had their own challenge. And I Matt, I I totally agree. I think that that is the that is the demographic that got really, really nailed.
Speaker 2:And I think it's getting its probably feet underneath it now, but I think it was a big adjustment. Brighter, dimmer, or the same since pre pandemic from your perspective?
Speaker 6:So, I mean, like Lucas, I'm here representing a big company, I guess, but I'm a private citizen. So, for disclosure, I work for VMware.
Speaker 2:You dickens. You are all official spokesperson. Both both people for your companies.
Speaker 6:I I think every company is different. What what I've been happy about is that, at least at VMware, they they formed as any big company would a future of work committee. And so, you know, like, big companies do. We have process. We have committees.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:Okay. Wait a minute. Okay. Hold on. Hold on.
Speaker 2:Stop. This is like you want this committee? Yeah. The oh, wait. First of all, this is like Adam's Sharpen Faster from last week that I still am still adjusting to.
Speaker 2:Sharpen Faster, I had so many questions on. Or Sharpen Fast.
Speaker 3:Sharpen Fast. Matt Matt Matt won the Sharpen Fast award, but that's a story for another space.
Speaker 2:Okay. So the the the the the committee to decide the future of work I mean, clearly, there is a talk about, like, what size is the table, what is the shape of the table in that room. I mean, clearly, how does that committee work? Is that a remote or is that in person?
Speaker 6:I mean, first of all, Brian, is the future of work committee, not the committee for future work. 2 very different committees.
Speaker 2:Right. We'll change this.
Speaker 6:For the future of work committee, it's basically for remote they picked a bunch of people at various levels, people who had been full time, people who had been full remote, people who had just started and threw them in a room and said, hey. In 5 years, do you wanna be working in an office? Do you not? What do you think work should look like? And, you know, I think one of the positive signs is that what came back was, there's no one answer for everyone, and the company wants to figure out how to accommodate that.
Speaker 6:And so what the company is pushing towards is saying, you you pick, you can be fixed, or if you're gonna be in the office 4 days a week, you get a dedicated office space. Pick what you want. You can be flexible where you have hotel space, you know, and there's an expectation that you come in a couple days a week, but you set your own schedule, and you can be full remote. And depending on the job and the group, there's some constraints in terms of, you know, if you're working on fixing switches in the lab, it's hard to be full remote. But for other positions, if you're doing, you know, software development, you can pick what works best for you.
Speaker 6:And so I I think the future of remote work is actually brighter today than it was prior to the pandemic in that it's way easier. We have way better tooling. People have suffered through phone calls. You know, it's still 2 years into it, and I have to tell people mute your mic if you're not talking, but I have to say it less than I did before. And I think people have seen the value of having that flexibility.
Speaker 6:What I hope happens is that it continues in that trajectory, and people don't look at it as a cost savings measure, but as a how do we hire the best talent? How do we spend the money to bring people together to get the benefit of in person and allow remote to be successful? But it's yet to be seen.
Speaker 8:Yeah. I mean, I think that the the big option for anyone who is remote, of the past 2 years is that there are significantly more employers and significantly more opportunities that are open to people working remote than there were 2 years ago. And that I think is a trend that will continue just because every company is realizing what Trello worked out about 5 years 5 to 10 years ago, which was if you open up a position to allow remote, there's just a significantly larger hiring pool because not everyone lives in the city that you have your office or offices. There's just a huge amount of people who don't live in whatever major center you you set set your base in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Absolutely. Very good point. Horace, I think you're gonna have our closing thoughts here as we wrap up. What's on your mind?
Speaker 17:Yeah. Hey, everyone. Yeah. Long time listener. First time, Peter.
Speaker 17:Yeah. Thanks for having me. I kinda just wanted to say something because I was in the demographic that that was spoken about a while ago where I was out of college for a couple of years and right when the pandemic hit. And, yeah, it was pretty spot on. It was so I graduated college, started at Microsoft, had an amazing onboarding experience, got a career started realizing that college taught me nothing about how to work in industry.
Speaker 17:And so was having fun learning how to do all that stuff. Spent like a year in the office and then spent a year, remote during the pandemic. And then I switched jobs, and that was that was a big shock. Like, even having a couple years industry experience, you could see that it was markedly different trying to onboard, remote remotely at Google versus what it was, being in person. And it's like, I would I'm the type of person.
Speaker 17:Like, I I loved when we were, being remote because, I'm naturally kinda introverted and, I don't always like to be around people. But I realized when it comes to tech, when it comes to, getting my work done and stuff like that, I did value those quote unquote water cooler chat because it does help. It it it helps me tremendously when I can just overhear 2, like, senior engineers or 2 principal just go at it arguing, or just discussing something that I would I would never have heard that conversation if I was just remote, and they're remote, and they're just messaging each other 1 on 1. But now I can just listen and overhear and learn so much. And that's, like, one of the biggest ways I learn.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a really good point. And so did you in making that yeah. You you say you're right in that demographic we're talking about. In making that transition, it sounds like you were ultimately able to make it, but it's what kinda got you through it?
Speaker 2:Was it just a matter of a longer adjustment? Or
Speaker 17:so good the good thing is that for me, for at least my team at least, they onboard a lot of persons during the pandemic, so they got good at onboarding persons during the pandemic.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 17:They had, like, really good docs, really good, like, recorded, recordings of how our code base and stuff like that works. So there's a support structure, and you have a mentor and stuff like that. But, so it it that definitely helped. And the fact that I already had a couple years experience in working in the big tech, that helped. But you it could it shouldn't I could definitely see that it definitely wouldn't have been as hard if I was in person.
Speaker 17:And it definitely would have been more fun because, like, Google makes a big pre pandemic, Google made a big deal of, like, Nooglers and stuff like that. No.
Speaker 6:That's right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Percent of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So and did you and so and what were some of the onboarding things?
Speaker 2:I mean, you mentioned a couple of them, and maybe that's it was kind of that kind of content that was helping you get caught up. And, obviously, we were all getting better at it as the pandemic continued. Did you have you met your coworkers at this point? I mean, have you gotten to the point where you've been able to get back together with them?
Speaker 17:So my entire team, we had, like, kind of a a meet up last August. We were just, like, at the outdoors at the picnic, like, picnic event. Anyone who wanted to show up could show up and so most persons did. That's the so I met that's the one time I met them. And then Google offices have basically been open since, like, last summer, so you can go in if you want to.
Speaker 17:And I've been going in, most days of the week, but only, like, 2 members of my team also did that. So they're, like, 2 people that I see pretty regularly but, also don't work with, like, closely. They're not in my pod that we're working on the same project. So it's basically been I've seen a bunch of Googlers, but not Googlers that that I would say work with on a day to day basis. It's just Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's related to the license. Yeah. And I assume that that picnic in August must have been a lot of fun to actually get with folks in a purely social setting.
Speaker 17:Yeah. That was the beginning of August was pretty good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interesting. Well, I think that is I know we've this is obviously a topic that that a lot of us are thinking a lot about, and, Lucas, Matt, it was great to have the old friends join us, and Horace and and other newer faces. Great to hear your perspective from folks that that are working remotely. I mean, I think that remote work is is here to stay in our domain, and we're gonna have to figure out a way of getting the the best of all worlds here and, getting some of that spark that we get by being together and not, you know, having folks especially early in their career that don't have that opportunity.
Speaker 2:Of course, I love the way you described, like, overhearing that's that conversation between 2 senior engineers and learning so much from that. How do we create opportunities for that while still recognizing that it's gonna we're not all going back to the office. We're not all being recalled like defective carburetors.
Speaker 17:Okay. I have never I have not heard anyone at Google call it the recall. We just call it RTU Okay. Referring to offense.
Speaker 2:But I'm not gonna
Speaker 17:say no one at Google has ever said that. I've just never heard it. Everyone just calls it RT.
Speaker 3:And you're speaking, obviously, your role as the official spokesperson of
Speaker 2:your role already. Thank you very much for that. Thank you very much, Horace. You hey. You other chickens at companies can learn something from Horace who's willing to actually speak for his company.
Speaker 2:That's alright. So that that makes more sense, Horace. I I heard I heard maybe it was, like, 2 or 3 Googlers call it the recall. Maybe they were still calling it prejorative the recall. RTO still sounds like a defective part.
Speaker 2:It still sounds like an r the parts being set back for RMA, but it it's, it's at least less overtly defective.
Speaker 6:Brian, as a biological leaf node, thank you very much for having
Speaker 1:me.
Speaker 2:You're welcome. I I hope you can titrate successfully, with with your other with your biological superiors or whatever Lucas Lucas is. So I don't know I don't know what I don't know what I don't know what he calls his the, the the non lead notes. But, thank you, everyone. Adam, thanks thank you very much.
Speaker 2:It's a great conversation. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Brad. This is a good topic.
Speaker 2:Alright.
Speaker 5:Take care, everyone. See you.