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Honest conversations with the engineering leaders, CTOs, founders, and engineers building real software with real teams. No fluff, no hype — just the messy, human side of getting great products out the door.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (00:06)
Hello and welcome to this episode of Build by Humans where we talk about the human side of things, what it takes to build great products outside of the right tool, the right technology and the latest and greatest thing that somebody might be talking about today. Today we're talking to Cody. I'm going to turn it over to you. Introduce yourself, tell us a bit about you and we'll jump in.
Cody Rogers (00:29)
Cool, thanks for having me. Yeah, so my name's Cody Rogers. I have the privilege of leading ⁓ the product team at Hubstaff. I've been there about seven years and we build software for global teams, mainly around time and productivity tracking. And then things like workforce management, understanding when they're working, what they're working on, getting them paid, all kinds of stuff like that.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (00:49)
Cool. So you've been there for about seven years. So that puts us before COVID, which I would say you've seen the transition of understanding, transition of acceptance of remote war.
Cody Rogers (00:55)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (01:04)
I talk a lot about remote work because I run a 100 % remote company. So the company I run is called Mirigas. We're a team augmentation services company. We help our clients hire people and we're 100 % remote. When I 100 % remote, so we have our internal people that run the company and we've got people that work for clients. Well, everybody's remote. So everybody who works for clients are remote and everybody who works for Mirigas running the company is remote. And we've been remote since day one.
And our day one was 2014, so way before COVID. We do not have an office, we do not have central location, we are all in different countries, different continents. It's remote that's all it is. So I'm curious, what's your take on the transition on how things changed before COVID, COVID, and now after COVID?
Cody Rogers (01:54)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good question. Now Hubstaff is similar too. So I've been here seven years. We started about 12 or 13 years ago. So well before COVID. And same thing for us, fully remote since day one, never had an office or headquarters anywhere. And what's interesting is yes, COVID ⁓ sort of taught the world they can work from anywhere. They can hire remotely all over the globe, which is great. And we've seen a bump in customers since that.
But actually the bigger trend is understanding that you can hire contractors globally. And so specifically not having to hire full-time people, but just being able to quickly ramp up contractors when you need them. So instead of spending the time and money to hire full-time people, especially locally, which is very expensive, ⁓ if you need developers, great. There's really talented people in Spain or Poland or pretty much anywhere that you can find.
And our tool helps people, you know, find and hire and get working with them.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (02:53)
That's awesome. Yeah, I actually think there are few factors that COVID helped us as humanity together. Right. So we, everybody accepted remote as part of norm, right? It's okay. Right. That's fine. I always use this example. My wife works for, she's completely not an IT, different medical field.
Cody Rogers (03:14)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:15)
⁓ most of the real large corporate company where nobody could ever work remotely. Like if you wanted to work remotely, you couldn't like even for one day, right? That's just wasn't allowed. And, ⁓ very, you have to dress up to work, even though they're never see people or it's not customer facing, but they're just very business type of. Well, COVID came, they all went home and guess what? Nobody ever came back. Everybody's remote and they love it. And the company says it works better. So everybody loves it.
So that's the obvious one. The none obvious one that I see and I love that is yes, it's easier to hire. It's easier to fire because you know, you can do it. You get contractors remotely, you have a lot more control. It gives you access to talent that is not local. I'm in LA. Yeah, you know, if you have to hire in your like, know, fine. You're in Silicon Valley, you have a lot of talent. You're in LA, you have enough talent. But if you're in some...
Cody Rogers (03:56)
and
Mm-hmm. It's just huge. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:12)
place where that may not be the case. I mean, I was talking to a company yesterday there in Cape, in Florida, where they launched the shuttle. And I was like, how do you, and they're all local. I'm like, Cape Canaveral, yeah. Like, how do you hire people? Where do you get people? They're all local, 100 % local. And the last one, we opened access to highly paid jobs.
Cody Rogers (04:29)
Yeah. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:41)
for people in other places in the world. Which is, think, the best thing. Somebody living in Poland, somebody living in Argentina, somebody living in Philippines, whatever the country might be, they're not limited by local market. They can be a great engineer and work for any company here in the US and be as productive. So that's my big thing and I love
Cody Rogers (04:43)
Mm-hmm. Which is awesome.
Awesome.
Yep. Yeah. And that's always one of the best things I, when people ask me what it is I like about Hubstaff. The first one is, you know, will forever be, I get to work at home and see my family whenever I want. But the second one is like, I get to work with really talented people all over the world. And like you said, yes, they're very smart, but they're also like very unique, which just brings a cool kind of atmosphere and culture to the company. On my team alone, I have people in Canada, Poland, Romania, Brazil.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:28)
Mm-hmm.
Cody Rogers (05:36)
Uruguay, like all over. And yeah, and we get to work together and yeah, we only get to hang out in person, you know, maybe once or twice a year, but it's still pretty fun.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:38)
Bye. Yep.
But you still get to know them. You still have this personal relationship that it's granted, it's different. You don't have lunch every day or once a week, but yeah.
Cody Rogers (05:53)
Yeah. Yeah. And you have to be
intentional to do those things. even if it's not in person, we do like a hangout, we have like a, know, happy hour. We'll do like, we play hot seat when new team members join. Like you have to be pretty intentional about building culture when you're remote because you don't have those like hallway run-ins. There's no water cooler or lunchtime to hang out and chat.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:58)
Absolutely.
We chat, we chat, use one of the chat, we use WhatsApp, but it's just easier because it just works better. But we just chat, right? And we talk and we joke and we talk about things that are happening and somebody gets frustrated, they'll go and it may not even, nothing to do with work. It's just like, my God, this person just did this, I can't believe this. And that's how you get to know people. That's how you build that. And then you jump on the call and now there's continuity, right? It's not just.
Cody Rogers (06:23)
Yeah, yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:47)
once a week, one hour conversation or whatever it might be.
Cody Rogers (06:50)
Yeah,
that was a tough lesson I think we learned a couple of years ago, which was having teams have autonomy and build trust together. And so that when they go through challenges, which inevitably they're going to, they understand, like they know each other, they trust each other, they know that they're on the same team and they share that goal together. And so yeah, one of the things that we do like messaging wise is just we use Slack and we have these,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (06:59)
Mm-hmm.
Cody Rogers (07:15)
personal channels to share adventures and personal updates and you know tonight I'll go out trick-or-treating with my kids and probably share a goofy photo of all dressed up. yeah, get to even though it's you know still online we get to share that stuff together.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:29)
Exactly, We're actually finishing an article that we're going to publish, which talks about another aspect of differences, right? People are different, people are unique, different cultures in here in US. And this came up over the last few months, a lot in conversations. I everybody talks about it. It just somehow came up. I'm ⁓ finishing an article on that. don't like young people here in the US don't want to work, right? The culture of like they get out of college and they expect everything.
just the whole bad thing. Well, it's true. I have an 18 year old son. I can testify it is true. But it's not true all over the world. There are still places where that culture is not in place. They people get stuff done. And I think that's very valuable. It's very, very helpful.
Cody Rogers (08:12)
Mm-hmm.
I'm sure it's one of those things that's like, can find people on both sides and we don't like, I don't know if we have any 18 year olds, but we have some young people and I'll tell you, and this is probably part of our just hiring process, but like we have people that grind, like they work hard and it doesn't matter if you're 20 or you're 45. Like we, you know, we're, looking for a players that work hard and you can find them. It might be harder depending on where you look or you know, who you're talking to, but they're everywhere.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:25)
Hmm?
absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I agree. So one thing that I want to ask you, this is, I sort of know what software, the business that you guys said, and a lot of it has to do with enabling remote teams or enabling the tracking and productivity in remote teams. And that to me comes a bit of a cultural difference or cultural possibly misunderstanding.
I'm talking about teams that work for me, right? Inside mirigos So I got to differentiate that. I don't track them, right? How do you track your team? I don't, right? That's literally, that's the answer. They understand what needs to be done. understand their goals, they understand their timelines. And we agree to that and they get it done. I don't care if they work an hour a day or 10 hours a day. I don't care. If they work 10 hours a day regularly, I would hope they tell me that there's something wrong and we have to fix it.
Cody Rogers (09:31)
Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (09:41)
But if somebody needs to take half a day off because they just don't want to work, they're just tired, I just don't care. At the same time, yeah, we're all hooked on our messaging, right? So if somebody texts, we expect a response. It doesn't have to be that second, but we expect a response. So if somebody's like, I'm not working today, respond and say, not working today. Don't just ignore it.
Cody Rogers (09:46)
Mm-mm. Mm-hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:06)
There's some software and some cases and some companies that manage things very, very, very actively. How many hours, what time do you show up? How many hours do you sit? Whatever it is. How do you feel about
Cody Rogers (10:19)
Yeah, so it's a good question. There's a lot to it. One of the things that we've tried for years is to make it clear what our, there's sort of this brand perception of as soon as people hear, ⁓ your software can take screenshots, like, your big brother, spyware, like, I don't want any part of it. It's an easy, like, assumption to make, and we understand why people feel that way. It's one of the 15 sort of features and values that Hubstaff offers, right? So
understanding where your team spends time is incredibly valuable, not just for you internally, but also if you're working for clients and understanding how much billable time people are spending, how much you're building clients. And then even if clients want to have visibility into some of the work that's being done by your team, right? The other thing is like, not everybody is hiring, like I'm sure your process and a lot of people like you have a very thorough process for hiring.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:54)
Yes.
Cody Rogers (11:12)
very high skilled, probably high paid individuals working. It's a very wide spectrum between skill, job, pay rate, right? And so hiring globally, because not everybody can afford that super in-depth process or be locally to get to meet people and know them. There is this sort of unknown about like, I'm taking a risk on hiring this person and having them do work for my client. So like, shouldn't I as the business owner spending money?
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:13)
Yes.
Cody Rogers (11:39)
have some way to know that you're not taking advantage of me. And so, you know, sometimes it's, ⁓ it is things like, let me see where people are spending time and collect data or turn on screenshots so I can see the project that you're working on throughout the day. A lot of these are hourly workers and so they wanna be able to check in and see what they're doing. But again, it's all like, it's really based on the culture of your company. And if it's something that's good for you, your culture, your clients, great, we have it. And then if not, okay, turn it off and use.
you know, the other 10 things that we have in there. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (12:10)
And
I 100 % agree with you. So I will 100 % support that not everybody... We hire engineers. We hire, as you're absolutely right, highly paid engineers or product development people, engineers, data, whatever it is.
It's different than if you're hiring data entry, virtual assistants or people like that. In our world, I understand that somebody who is running marketing for my team may not feel like writing today, right? It's not that you have to write this many words per day. It's, you know, I'm just not able to, right? And it happens with me, right? I got to do this. it's just not working. I'll do this tomorrow. I'll do this day after.
And it's very different than if I have somebody who needs to make 50 phone calls per hour, right? And it's like, you got to make 50 if you're not making 50 calls per hour while you're here. So absolutely agree with that. I just want to make sure that like one thing that we tell clients and people that work for us, we want to make sure we track and measure what matters. Because this is another thing we just, I just published on Monday.
Cody Rogers (13:17)
Hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:23)
People will give you what you measure. If you tell them I'm going to measure how many phone calls you make, they're going to make that many phone calls. Good calls, bad calls, that's different. Unfortunately, I have a story and it's a bad story. I'll make it very short. I was offered a job by a company and then before taking the job, I met with some people there and the CTO that was leaving and I was supposed to come and replace him.
And so they sort of, you know, I met with them after having an offer while thinking if I should take it or not. And what I learned that CEO of the company, it's a tech company, right? It's technology. He would get weekly data of when people pulled in and out of the garage in the building. And what people did, they knew this, it wasn't a secret. So like, yeah, we pulled in and out all the time, like on time.
Cody Rogers (13:58)
Mm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:17)
what we did was we pulled in and pulled out. That's different. So you're going to get what you measure. And so that's my big thing.
Cody Rogers (14:27)
Yeah, yeah. And I definitely, I agree with you. And there's, to be honest, there's a lot of different use cases. We have a lot of customers who they hire overseas. They have virtual assistants. They do client work. We also have customers that are US based companies with full-time employees. And they, they run tracking in the background just to collect data. And so you can turn it off. like, I can't even see your individual data, but like at a team or a department level, I can see this is an engineering team.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:46)
Mmm.
Cody Rogers (14:53)
And I can see they're spending 62 % of their time in communication, whether that's Slack or Teams or whatever, right? Like, is that where we should be spending time? Like, shouldn't this team be writing more code maybe? And so like we try to aggregate some of that level up a bit. like, if you're concerned about privacy, great, hide that stuff, go up one level. And then as a department manager, see if you're in too many meetings, see if your teams are spending time in the right places. So there's a lot of places you can use it that are not like,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:58)
Okay. Right.
Yeah.
you
Cody Rogers (15:22)
micromanagement, unhealthy, you know, two hands on. And we try to educate customers about here's a really healthy way to take the data that we collect and look at it. And also, like you said, don't forget about the output. Like they're doing work, they're making calls, they're closing deals, they're closing tickets, they're writing code, whatever it is. Look at that too. Like we're not saying replace that, but like in tandem with that stuff and...
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:38)
Right.
Cody Rogers (15:49)
look at it together, it's a whole picture. There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle and we give you just, here's more data points.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (15:54)
And I think I want to ask you, very few people that I talk to have team members in different regions, right? So a lot of people have remote people, but it's, yeah, we have everybody in Latin America. We have everybody in Europe. We have everybody in Asia. We have everybody in US, whatever it is. You mentioned you have Poland, Europe. You have Latin America. You mentioned Uruguay and few others. Do you find that there is a
cultural difference in how people work, communicate and expectations that they have from you.
Cody Rogers (16:27)
Yeah, it's a good question. The expectations we try to make clear just as part of like, you know, management, every team lead and manager tries to make that clear. The communication is probably the, kind of laugh because it's a funny one and we talk about it internally. We have a handful of people that are Eastern European, you know, a few guys from, well, a few people from Belarus and then Romania kind of all over. And there's a much more like,
bold, straightforward way of communication. And even when you respond to them, they don't want you fluffing through, like, just give it to me straight is how they want to be, which I love. And like most, some people are, they're like a little taken back, like, oh, okay. And then like when they realize, they're like, it's actually really nice to talk this way. Like, we're just, very straightforward and we say what we think. And so that's one that I've seen is like, it's definitely different than, you know, what I've worked with in the past.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:04)
Exactly.
Cody Rogers (17:22)
But in general, yeah, it's not a problem. You have to sort of understand some of the differences. ⁓ The Hubstaff team in general is all spread out and you kind of figure out like the time zone things and the culture things. it's also just fun. Like when we end our all hands meeting, we do one every month now. And when we ended, everybody says goodbye in their native language. ⁓ And so just like kind of fun stuff like that you get to experience together.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:46)
Yeah, it's, when I said expectations, right? It's not so much what you expect of them as what they expect from you. I remember I was running, ⁓ an engineering team for a large, ⁓ company and we build the team or I was running them locally and we extended expanded the team in Ukraine. And I remember the first few times, you know, Monday morning, there's the meeting and everybody's, Hey, how are you? How was your weekend? And because people know each other, we know spouses, we know kids, or at least we know of them and names and stuff.
And the first few times the Ukrainian guys were like, why are we wasting this time? Why are we talking about stuff that's not important? I'm in the meeting. I'm here to talk work. And that was hilarious. I get it. I'm actually originally from Ukraine. I was born there. So I get that, but I've lived in US for 35 years. I've adopted.
Cody Rogers (18:23)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is funny. We have some of that too. It's good.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:39)
Yeah, I'm sure. ⁓ But one thing I do see, there is a difference in how people communicate and what they expect. Like, for example, you're right, Eastern European guys are very direct. You tell them, hey, this what we need to do. They'll turn around and go, nope, not gonna work. Where Latin American guys are more like, okay, let's see this, right, we'll try this. And they may come back and also say it didn't work, but it's just not as direct. It's more...
Polished, if you will. yeah. Cool. Do you guys work like, do you have teams in Asia? I'm just asking for time difference, like how that's working out.
Cody Rogers (19:07)
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we don't go past, generally past sort of Eastern Europe just because the time zones get to be pretty difficult. So I'm actually the furthest West in Oregon and we have maybe two or three other people in my time zone and then everybody else is ahead of me. So my mornings are busy and then afternoon everybody's gone, which is kind of nice. But yeah, we have a lot in on this side of the Atlantic and then a good amount in Europe too. And they're in, you know.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:23)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Cody Rogers (19:46)
Poland, Spain, Portugal, Romania, kind of spread out, but it's still pretty much all over.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:49)
Bye.
But
I find Latin America obviously easy, right? Because you have the most four hours with Pacific. I'm in Los Angeles, right? So we're in the same time zone. So you got four hours, it's it's no brainer. But even with Eastern Europe, you've got nine, most of the Europe, some places with 10, it's still very, manageable because, and the Europeans like to work later. So that's, yeah.
Cody Rogers (19:57)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Nothing, yeah.
They do, yeah. It's not even really
an issue. And we make, that's another expectation thing that you mentioned. It's like, we just tell them, hey, we have people, you know, a lot of people in Eastern time zone. Can you make sure you at least overlap this much? Right? And they're like, most of the time, sure, happy to.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:30)
Yeah. When I ran my team, what we did to make it work was actually very, and it worked for everybody. Everybody loved it. They would show up in the office pretty late, right? Because nobody cares. This is years ago, so we still had an office and everything.
Cody Rogers (20:42)
Hmm.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:42)
like nobody cares if they just show up at nine or even 10 because we're asleep, right? Like literally nobody cares. So they would show up pretty late, work till about five, six.
then they would leave, go home, have dinner, go out, do whatever they wanted to do. And by nine, 10 local time, they'll join back from home and stay in for a few hours. And so we never felt they're out of touch. We're like, ⁓ they're just out of light, right? They're gone for a couple of hours and then they'll be back. And that went really well. And they loved it because that gave them flexibility of spending time with family and doing their own stuff without feeling, you know, feeling.
So cool. Interesting, very, very interesting. Yeah, and I don't do Asia for the same reason. Time difference just doesn't.
Cody Rogers (21:27)
Yeah, yeah. How far east is your team?
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:29)
Well, so my team our internal team is now Eastern Europe, right? It's all I actually know I have somebody in Azerbaijan So that's 11 hours, but she works night. She doesn't sleep By her own choosing without it hasn't don't blame me her own choosing So she's yeah, she's she's up. But yeah, it's Europe Eastern Europe We had a lot of people in Ukraine because of the war they all moved to so they're all over Europe
Cody Rogers (21:41)
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (21:57)
Spain, Poland, et cetera. But it works really well.
Cody Rogers (22:02)
Yeah, and do you guys ever meet in person?
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:04)
Yeah, so we do. ⁓ I travel to meet with them. I was just in Latvia at a conference doing presentations there, just speaking. So the lady from Azerbaijan, we flew her over. So this was the first time I met her. But we spent three days together. It was great. It was very productive. Again, we worked together for over a year. So we know each other pretty well. We have pretty good relationship. We're very small team. So it helps.
But this was very useful, know, spend three days together going for dinner, lunch, and you know, doing stuff and now, you know, we're friends.
Cody Rogers (22:38)
Yeah, that's good. do a once a year, we do an in-person retreat and we try and switch on, you know, sometimes we'll do this side of the Atlantic and then we'll go over to Europe. But ⁓ this past year we did Costa Rica and we try to get as many people there as we can, but it's just fun to hang out in person, you know, and everybody, everybody leaves there with like just an excitement and just new level of like, I don't know, the culture just like takes two.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:56)
Yeah.
Cody Rogers (23:03)
steps forward every time we do that.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:06)
We don't do big gatherings where everybody gets together because we've tried and it, for us, was sort of superficial, right? Because people, it becomes odd. So we do very small, like I'll go, I'll fly, right? And I'll spend time with somebody, you one, two, three people and, you know, do it together and separately, and then I'll go somewhere else and do the same thing. And, you know, they'll meet sometimes. And so, yeah, I mean, everybody, everybody knows each other. Everybody has seen each other personally, obviously, but.
not necessarily, we don't need this big get together with presentations and meetings, know, where larger companies do.
Cody Rogers (23:42)
Yeah,
yeah, which we're not like large. think we have 130 or so, but that's a little bit more our style. It's like we get as many people there as we can. And then everybody breaks up and like I hang out with my whole department and we spend time together and have meals and you know, but we do a few other presentations too and talk about here's the plan for next year and all that stuff.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:51)
Yeah.
We are way smaller, we're under 10 people. I'm talking about internal operations, right? This is the internal operations. We're under 10 people, so we're still where everybody talks to each other every week, everybody knows each other. At 130, you need a controlled environment to do that. We don't.
Cody Rogers (24:07)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah,
yeah, it's a lot.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:21)
All good. Well, thank you so much. This is very interesting. It's great conversation.
Cody Rogers (24:25)
Yeah,
it was good to talk. Thanks for having me join.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (24:27)
All right.
Absolutely. Thank you.