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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)
Josh, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Build by Humans.
a podcast that we're doing. We talk about building products, but not from the technical engineering point of view, but from human people point of view. It takes a lot. There's a team, there's a team in engineering, there are other teams, communication, all of that comes to play. And there are plenty of people that talk about the best technology, the best latest and greatest tools.
Josh Carroll (00:10)
Absolutely.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (00:33)
They do way better than I would ever be able to do that. So, you know, I get to focus on the part that I leave and breathe every day and that's people and getting them to do really good, cool things and feel good about it. With that, I'm going to turn it over to you. Tell us a little bit about you.
Josh Carroll (00:50)
Sure. My name is Josh. I've been in technology one way or another since the late 90s. So doing this for a long time. And I've been full time in team leadership and management since about 2018. Doing that remotely, working for different startups in particular. I'm currently at a company called Skylight. We make the Skylight Frame, the Skylight Calendar. And I'm helping to lead a team of about 23 engineers today and rapidly growing.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (01:17)
Yeah, people have been in business or in technology for more than a few years. We've seen different side of things, right? We've seen everybody in the office, everybody literally standing around the same table. When I started in early 90s, everybody was in their own cubicle with, you know, like six feet high wall and you're sitting there like, ⁓ I don't know where I exist. And then that went away. And today, obviously everybody's remote.
Josh Carroll (01:23)
Yeah.
Ha ha ha
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (01:42)
I know when we were talking regionally, you mentioned you've been doing a lot of remote even before COVID, before it became mainstream. How did it feel? How did it feel back then when it wasn't the everyday thing?
Josh Carroll (01:54)
Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I just needed that for my personal life. I've got a family and we had some situations going on at home where I just needed the flexibility of being able to work from home, which is why I went into this at all. And I joined my first startup. It was a company called Creative Market. And I was very nervous, especially once they asked me to be a manager there, which was about six months in.
I came on as a developer and then went into management. I was very nervous because I had managed engineers previously in person. And there was, I mean, we ran into hilarious things like trying to look busy so you would have a game going on on one screen and then quickly switch over and I'd catch engineers doing silly things like that or taking ridiculously long bathroom breaks. I don't want to police that. But we had to.
or people falling asleep at their desk. It was just ridiculous. And so there was a lot of fear, like, how am I going to know people are actually doing their jobs in a remote setting? And what I quickly learned, and maybe I've just been lucky the places I've been out, but I don't have any of those problems. And in fact, I don't need to even worry about those issues because what I tend to deal with is engineers who are trying so hard. All you have is your productivity. All you have is your output. ⁓
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:06)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Carroll (03:07)
Are you making an impact? Are you doing something
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:08)
Yep.
Josh Carroll (03:09)
meaningful for the product, for the company? And nothing else matters. Do you want to take a nap in the middle of the day because you're tired? Great, please do. That's awesome. And just let your team know and come back when you're available and let's get it done. If you need to go for a walk, you want to sit and play a video game for 30 minutes. I genuinely don't care. Whatever it takes for you to be at your best, that's what matters. Are you showing up for meetings? Are you available to your teammates?
Is your code getting written and is it good? And is it contributing? you being more than a code monkey and like actually bringing your energy to the table? These are the things that I care about. I don't, know, busyness is not the metric that we're watching. Being at your desk is not the metric that we're watching. It's just your output.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (03:45)
You mentioned something you said people switch from one screen to another playing game. I'm really going to age myself. But before we had Excel, we had Lotus one, two, three. And I remember, right, there was the spreadsheet program, DOS and then later on Windows. And I remember there was a utility, a hotkey that you would push and it immediately puts up the Lotus one, two, three screen. And anybody who walks by, it looks like you're looking at a spreadsheet. Wow. That was a long time ago and they still.
Josh Carroll (04:09)
way.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:11)
I still remember that. But you're absolutely right. Engineering, and we sometimes forget, engineering is development, is creative work. It's not measured by minutes. It's not measured by lines of code. It's not measured by any of that. It's measured by how well you're doing your job. And when you're creative, you can be creative. From nine to six, I'm going to be creative. And then from six to nine, I'm not going to be creative. It just doesn't work.
Josh Carroll (04:37)
Yeah, and I've got engineers on my team now who take time to go deal with, I do this. If my kid's having a meltdown and my wife needs help, like I just go take care of that. I have engineers on my team who do rock climbing in the middle of the week and they make up their time elsewhere. We're not tracking their time, we're not doing any of that. And we're putting out some of the highest quality, best code I've ever seen. The thing that I'm, the conversation that I am constantly having is.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (04:46)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Carroll (05:00)
How's your stress level? Are you taking enough time off? Are you scheduling your PTO? Are you in the evenings checking out and getting to do something that's just for you? Are you stepping away from work? And I think that's actually the biggest danger of remote work is when you don't create those healthy boundaries, you don't have a place where you are going to take care of your social needs, your downtime, your whatever creative outlets or hobbies that you have, like making space for that. It's very easy.
⁓ especially if imposter syndrome starts to creep in a little bit and you're working without, yeah, am I as good as everybody else on the team? Is I, is my job security good? people start to really lean into overwork and, try to prove themselves by, pushing in ways that actually make them less productive in the end, right? You're not at your best when you're exhausted and you're not at your best when you're stressed out. And it does nobody any good on the team if you let yourself burn out. So.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (05:29)
Very much so, yes.
You mentioned something that I want to sort of circle back. You said family. So initially you mentioned you switched to remote because you had some family things and you need to do that. And that's understandable. I have a lot of anecdotes just from friends, people that used to work in very much time driven businesses and not necessarily IT. They went home, productivity increased.
And when you talk to them and you talk to their team, you I know some team managers, team leads, I know actual individual contributors and they all say the same thing. We got flexibility and we got more time to dedicate to our family or more flexible time to dedicate to our family. And in return that improves productivity and actually improves the amount of work we do. There's a lot of conversations today. Like everybody used to be in office remote was.
sort of sometimes here and there, COVID came, everybody went remote for several years, everybody was remote over the past year or so we keep hearing some companies, there are two sides of the coin. We will always be remote and know everybody's coming to the office and if you're not in office in the next two months, you need to find another job. What do you think wins? And I have a strong opinion on my own, but I'd love to hear your opinion. Like, what do you think wins? What do you think the future is?
Josh Carroll (07:04)
Yeah, I think two things. The productivity goes up when you're at home because, you do have access to your family. You get to be a little bit more of a human instead of just like context shifting between being my work self and then my home self. And there's pitfalls to that, right? But I think that the big thing is, especially if you came from cubicle world, right? Like the last place that I worked in before I came to my first remote startup.
It was just loud salespeople walking through the office, ringing bells and being loud and telling dumb jokes. And it wasn't just sales, but it was primarily sales. And or, you know, I'm in the middle of a flow state trying to write some code and then an engineer comes up with questions and they're right here behind me. I got really good at like just throwing the finger up and being like, hey, one minute, let me finish this thought.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (07:29)
Mm-hmm.
it
Josh Carroll (07:47)
And you just don't have that. You can close Slack. You can hide that for a little bit and just come up for air every few minutes whenever you get to a good spot. So getting into that flow state is much, much easier if you have a good dedicated space in your home to do that. So I'm a big believer in remote. That said, I don't think fully what remote means in some places. Like I was interviewing somebody the other day who said,
They worked at a company where they went months and never saw their manager's face because all of their, their whole culture was not this where it's face to face. was cameras off, quick meetings, and then we're going to leave you alone. Very minimalist interaction. it was pretty lonely and it was hard to collaborate. ⁓ and there was never any in person time. What I like, and we do a version of this here, ⁓ is
lean heavy into FaceTime. If you can get on a call to answer a question, like, slack somebody, if it can be handled async, great, slack that question. But if you need to be unblocked, you need somebody to rubber duck with you, you need somebody to think through a complicated question, let them manage their own time. Ask, hey, you happen to have five minutes to just help me think through this, can we just hop on a call and talk this out? Is always better. And then the other thing is, you supplement that with in-person time.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (08:44)
You
Josh Carroll (08:53)
Travel we if you're not as a company, you're not spending money on having to keep a huge office to house all of your employees five days a week Spend that money instead to bring people together in person as much as you can for us. have Most of our employees are in the u.s. But we have some international we fly them in two three times a year We try to get the whole team together and then we allot budget for
If I've just got two engineers who are working on something and they're like, this would be so much easier if we could just share a screen. They can just tell me, I don't have to get permission. I can just approve it. Get a plane ticket, get a hotel, one of you go to the other and sit down, get it a wee work or somewhere at a coffee shop, whatever. Get that whiteboard, get that laptop out and sit down and work through the thing together. Our backend team here.
We have a few of them that are in Portland. So they just get together in Portland every couple of months just to have some in-person touch base time. And I think it's been really helpful and really healthy for them.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (09:45)
I think you touched on something and I don't hear this a lot. People talk about in person and people talk about, so there's some people that say in person, they do Zoom calls or whatever, video calls, and then some people will do once a year, twice a year, the whole company gets together. But there's something in between. And...
Josh Carroll (10:03)
Yes. ⁓
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:05)
Before I had Mirikas, before I ran my company, I was still running engineering teams. I was a VP of engineering for a large engineering company or a large company was large engineering team. And we had a remote group that was, they were collocated. So they all were in the same office. This is way before COVID, right? So everybody was in the same office, but they were in Ukraine.
Josh Carroll (10:25)
Sure.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:27)
When I put the plan together and I set this up right I got this going hired them and everything we actually budgeted that every three months two people from the US team will spend one to two weeks in Ukraine and two people from Ukraine will spend two weeks in the US and That rotated right and usually I would go and I'll take one of the team members
Josh Carroll (10:41)
cool.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (10:50)
And two sort of random people from Ukraine office would come here. Created two things. Create a connection. Because people knew each other. They went out, they had lunches, they had dinners, they hung out together. It was no longer that remote person I never have to think about. It's somebody I know, it's somebody I've seen, it's somebody I work with. They just happened to be in a different office. It was so much easier.
to transfer knowledge because you didn't have to wait for a question. You could overhear somebody talk about things and go, wait, what are you talking about? Because I didn't know. And the last, but I think one of the most important things, what do you think the best benefit of working for us was for the Ukrainian team? They got to spend two weeks in US on a company dollar.
Josh Carroll (11:29)
Right. Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:34)
cheap. It was very cheap for the company, but it was huge and went such a long way because people didn't want to leave. They wanted to be hired. We were the employer of choice where we were, right? People wanted to work for us before we ever opened positions. And people don't think about those things today.
Josh Carroll (11:49)
I that.
Yeah, absolutely. It's really smart.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (11:53)
Yeah. When you're hiring remotely, there are technical skills, obviously, right? And whether they're remote or local doesn't matter. You got to know whatever language you got to know, whatever skills you got to have. But then there are soft skills and there are traits that a person has. How do you think that changes? How do you think that moves from everybody's in office to everybody's remote and even more if that remote means overseas?
Josh Carroll (12:19)
gosh, hiring the right culture fit or culture stretch is an art and it takes time. The way that I like to think about it is in two areas, values alignment.
Are the ways that we have our values set up as a company and the things that we care about, does line well with your personal values? Like, are you going to feel like you're being asked to stretch into something that doesn't really fit? Or is this going to be just very natural for you? And second is like, are you genuinely enthused and excited about something that we uniquely have to offer? Because that's gonna be the thing that's gonna make you pour your heart into this. It's gonna make you wanna stick it out.
And so when I'm thinking about hiring, that's the two things I'm dialing into. I don't want a homogenous team. I don't want a bunch of people who look and sound and talk the same. I want a lot of diversity, but I want in that diversity for us all to be pushing in the same direction, be really excited about it. And so when we are hiring and we're looking at our remote employees, things that we're really leaning into are like, can you communicate well? And this doesn't mean like,
Can you speak perfect English with no accent? Like that's obviously, that's not a deal. But what does matter is, can you get right to the point and explain in crulier crisp language the information I'm asking for? And can you do it in a way that addresses the specific audience that you're talking to? And so that's gonna matter. And honestly, it doesn't matter whether they are, you know, just.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (13:25)
Mm-hmm.
Josh Carroll (13:44)
a few blocks away from me or halfway across the world. Those are all the things I'm still looking for. And then I also want to make sure they're going to be somebody who enjoys and is happy doing remote work because some engineers don't like that. And I, know, they may just be so desperate for a job that they're willing to take it, but they're not going to be happy in a remote role if that's just not what they're wired for. So that's the other thing I kind of look for.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:08)
It's funny, you're bringing up so many memories from my previous lives. People do equate communication to English knowledge accent, and it's not. I've seen plenty of native English speakers that cannot communicate a single thought. And I'm laughing because I used to work with the guy and he was a brilliant engineer. He would walk into my office and start talking.
Josh Carroll (14:18)
It's not.
Yes.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:33)
And I literally had to establish the rule with him. He starts talking, I raise my hand. He stops, he thinks, and he starts from actually the beginning. Because what was happening in his mind as he was walking, he played the conversation in his head, and he would just continue while in my office. And I'm like, I don't even know what you're talking about. Like you literally started mid-sentence.
Josh Carroll (14:44)
What?
Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (14:57)
I have no clue what this is in reference to. And it was very playful. was a brilliant engineer, but that's something that I had to work with him on. And it wasn't English knowledge, it was communication.
Josh Carroll (15:11)
Yeah, it makes me think of, so when I was in college, I went to a small school and they did this thing, the Dean of the Computer Science Department did this thing where twice a year, they did a big social event. In the fall, it was like a pizza party and a LAN party and they would invite all the engineers or all the engineering students to come to this. then in the spring, it was a paintball tournament.
What happened was if you showed up and you socialized and you did the thing, there was a lot of like you had to rub elbows with people, you had to talk and engage in conversation. If you did all of that, you made it through the whole thing, you got to drop your lowest test score from any computer science class. And so of course everybody came. And I remember asking the Dean of the department, was like, this seems really generous. Like I'm grateful for it, don't get me wrong, but like, why do we do this? And maybe the most valuable advice I got in college.
came from him right in that moment. said, look around at all these brilliant people around you, really smart engineers, programmers, networking types. These people are brilliant. And many of them are in this field because they don't really like people. They want to just sit behind a computer and do technical things and be left alone. And that's not the way the world works.
And he said, there will always be somebody who is smarter than you and better than you at some technical thing. But if you can be really good at the people side of it, you will get promoted faster. You will grow better in your career. You will go further. So lean into that. Do that. And that's what I want everybody here to at least have some exposure to trying to do that.
⁓ And that's just become like a thing that I think about all the time, both for myself and how I've gotten to the position that I'm in today, but also when I'm hiring, like, and it's advice that I give to my engineers. I'm looking for people who can do the people side of the job as well as they can the code side. Because if all that you're doing is setting yourself up to be a code monkey, I've got bad news for you. AI is coming for you.
⁓ And if you are, but if you are really good at the people side, if you're good at understanding what people need and really thinking through a problem, engineers are brilliant problem solvers and problem solving and creativity are basically the same process in your brain. Just one has a lot of constraints and one doesn't. And so you can use that creative problem solving skill to get to what is the thing we're actually trying to do? And what is it about the thing I'm building?
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (17:02)
You
Josh Carroll (17:25)
that can do that, but you have to understand people almost always. It doesn't matter if you're building a B2B SaaS tool or you're building consumer electronics. There's always a people problem at the heart of what you're doing. And if you don't understand people and you can't communicate to people and you can't listen and also explain things in a way that other people can hear, you won't bring that part of it. And I think that's maybe the most valuable thing that a really good engineer brings. It's not.
their ability to write Java or to write whatever programming language it is. It's their ability to understand people and then to define, to design really elegant technical solutions and communicate. it.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:02)
I think this is so brilliantly said and I'll add one thing to it. It's not only to understand people. Understanding people allows you to understand the actual business objective of what it is you're building. We're not building code for the sake of writing code. I've heard engineers to say so many times, I don't deal with customers. Yes, you do. Product owner is your customer. Project manager is your customer. Sales guy is your customer.
Josh Carroll (18:14)
Right.
Thank ⁓
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:26)
You're dealing with the customers, even though you may not be directly talking to the end user, you're dealing with the customer who comes in and says, we're building this feature, we're modifying this feature because of X, Y, and Z. And if you don't understand this, that's why we end up with, yeah, next six months, we're not going to put in any features because we have to refactor the code.
Josh Carroll (18:44)
Right. And those people that are your customers, they have their own customers. And so if you can get to like, what is it? It's not just like, what is my project manager or my product manager, whoever asking me to do? What are they trying to achieve and how can I help them achieve that goal? That's the same question that a good entrepreneur or a good PM is going to ask. What are my customers actually trying to achieve? You don't just take a list of things that customers ask for because they often come to you with solutions. But engineers,
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (18:48)
Of course.
Josh Carroll (19:12)
understand the problem underneath that and solve the problem elegantly. And so if you can figure, if you can approach people in a similar way to the way that you approach code, you think about the problem, you try to understand what is it we're actually trying to accomplish and let's solve that together. It's not that different. It's just people or the interface instead of your computer.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (19:35)
Absolutely. Cool. I think I'm gonna ask one more question and that I want to talk a little bit about time zones, cultures, different, different regions. You mentioned you have a lot of people working in the US and you also have people remotely Latin America, Brazil you mentioned. Do you think it's important that people are aligned in the same time zone or similar time zones or do you think there is an
easy and a good way to have teams more distributed, more dispersed across the world.
Josh Carroll (20:04)
Sure.
I mean, you can make anything work. First of all, obviously. We have some partners that are in East Asia that we work with and we make it work. But it means that I've got a couple of people who are up on meetings at midnight sometimes. And it's not ideal. When I first came to work here, our only QA engineer that we had was part-time.
working for us from Turkey. And brilliant guy, love him to death. But it was creating this weird situation where an engineer would start building a thing and then would pass it to QA. And then QA would have a question and they'd have to pass it back. And a thing that could, if they were aligned, could have resolved itself in a few minutes, a quick call over Slack. Instead took several days. And so the best thing that happened was when he reached out to me and said, I really want to move back to the US.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (20:34)
snowy day.
Josh Carroll (20:44)
If I come, will you hire me full time? And I said, yes, please come to the US because getting him here aligned with our time zones so that he could be in more meetings and also available more, back to full time was amazing for us. like getting him in those meetings, thinking strategically, hopping on those calls to solve problems in minutes that would otherwise have taken days, easily paid for the difference in salary there. And so I am a big fan of trying to have time zone alignment where it makes sense. Now we also have
some partners that we work with that we just pass work to and they do the work overnight and then it comes back to us. They manage their own team. That works pretty well, especially for discrete projects that can kind of be run separate and don't affect the main product. But for the larger things, I personally really like to have my team's time zone aligned. It doesn't have to be perfect, but there has to be enough overlap. I've also seen...
Some teams that do the thing where like maybe they'll hire a team from Belarus or somewhere like that. And those engineers will work at night, their time to be on the same time zone as the team. If that works, that works. It is, but the thing that I think matters is the same thing I said earlier, like I don't, if I have an engineer who wants to get up and work from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. because that's when they're the most creative, please do.
But I need you to be available and genuinely helpful in these core hours in the middle of the day also, because that's when people are gonna have questions, when we need to have our standup meetings, when we're gonna do project kickoffs and retros. If you're not there for that, you're not really part of the team. And so for my core, I wanna have them generally in the US or at least on US time zones, so that that's really easy for them, because I don't wanna ask somebody to work in the middle of the night unless that's just what they want to do.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:01)
Ryan.
I have personally, and I've tried this many times, I've personally never seen successful handover, right? Where they say in theory, the US team works during the day, the overseas team works at night, and they pass it over. It just doesn't work. There's no friction. There's also, you passed it over, they had a question, that means they just lost the day. It's just not gonna move forward. But ⁓ I think what you mentioned is,
Josh Carroll (22:35)
Yeah, there's always friction.
Right.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (22:48)
different regions also have different native work hours, I would say, meaning like in Europe, it's Eastern Europe, people tend to work later and that creates enough overlap from what I've seen that allows for that core hours, enough hours in a day where there is enough communication and then everybody's happy. So, but I'm with you.
Josh Carroll (23:02)
Yeah.
Yeah,
and I do think that you can get by with just a few hours of overlap. You don't need your entire schedule to overlap for most projects that I've been part of anyway. I think maybe if it was like really early startup and everybody's just scrappy all the time, like, let's get every, then I might even say like, don't do remote, like get in the same room. But because you're just going to need to be able to respond to things really quickly. But for most things, I think that works really well.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:36)
Well, Josh, thank you so much. I think this is an incredible conversation. I think very interesting, your experience. So much alliance with mine. It's almost unbelievable.
Josh Carroll (23:44)
was great talking to you. Thank you for having me.
Zhenya Rozinskiy - Mirigos (23:46)
Thanks.