Is There Benefits from Working From Home with Will Gant - AiA 428

In this episode of Adventures in Angular, Will Gant, author of Remote Work talks about working from home and working outside of the client's office. He and Brooks share their experience with working through the challenges, benefits, and methods of working remotely.

Picks

• Will  - Follow Will's work on > www.simpleprogrammer.com
• Brooks - NGXS
• Brooks - Tiger King

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Hi, everyone, Welcome to Adventures and Angular. I'm Brooks Forsyth
filling in for Chuck today. Also we'll be filling in
for other panelists who were busy, I guess. And today
we have our special guest is Will Gant. Why don't
you introduce yourself? Tell us why you're famous?

Speaker 2 (00:23):
And I don't know about famous, but you are now well.
I am half of the Complete Developer podcast started that
with a friend of mine going on five years ago,
which is time really flies. I also wrote a book
that was released last August on Surviving Developer Whiteboard Interviews.

(00:43):
Then that's published through a press. Additionally, I have an
upcoming book that's coming out at the end of April
or early May. We haven't completely got the date finalized yet,
and that's Remote Work. The Complete Guide. Started this book
last fall, before everybody got forced to work remote, So
I thought it'd be good to kind of come on
the show and talk about some of the things that

(01:05):
you can learn about remote work that might help you
do it a little bit more easily and maybe make
it so that when you can go back into the office,
you don't necessarily.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Have to awesome. So you predicted this global pandemic, and
you started writing a book about remote work, which is
a fresh of on its own.

Speaker 2 (01:25):
Not really. Actually the genesis for this was trying to
sell the idea to management and doing so successfully at
a previous job after watching other people fail doing it.
I had a coworker who went into upper management and
talked to him and was just like, oh, well, this
will you know, I can take care of my kid
during the day instead of you, instead of putting them

(01:46):
in daycare. And he's got like a two year old
and just talking about all the time and effort it'll
save him and not selling the idea to the company.
And it was just a completely ham handed approach and
it didn't work. He was not allowed to work remotely
very much. There's another interesting story on that one. And
so I started thinking about how it's a sales process

(02:06):
and how developers really need to be approaching this when
they try to convince management. And I ended up pitching
the idea and you know, getting started on it, and
it took pretty much all Fall to get it done.
And then there was a little bit more after the
first of the year that I had to do. And
it turns out that coronavirus just sort of showed up

(02:27):
on its own and kind of changed everything for everyone. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Absolutely, I think everyone's probably everyone listened to this is
working remote still so and I'm sure some people are
enjoying it and want to continue doing it, so that
is it's definitely timely. I have worked remote for the
last year and a half plus, but I failed at
convincing two jobs to let me work remote and just

(02:53):
left them for jobs that would let me work remote
out of the gate, right, So yeah, it would definitely
be interested in learning more out how you go about that,
because maybe I did it wrong or who knows.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Well, I think if you were successful, you didn't do
it wrong, but there's always a way to do it better.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah, that's true. Well, and I was successful only because
I left the job and found somebody who would kne
who hired remote.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Workers, right, So yeah, well, I mean my job is
one hundred percent remote. My previous job was two days
a week, and I've had several off and on before
that that you know, were partial remote, and I think
I had two that were fully remote. I bounced around
a lot, you know, doing contracting, and yeah, it's it's
a skill like any other, right, Like if you remember
when you first got out of college and went into

(03:37):
the office, there was all kinds of stuff that you
just didn't have your head around because they don't prepare
you for, you know, just all the junk that goes
on in an office, you know, like having to understand
political currents or understanding when communication is necessary and when
it's not, and what to talk about and what not
to talk about. You know, everybody learns this stuff the
hard way pretty much when they go into a regular

(04:00):
work environment. And it's the same thing with remote even
if you've been in a standard environment, you know, for
twenty years. It's just a culture shock.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
Yeah, it's it's definitely a different especially on the communication front,
which I think is something that people are at least
somewhat a wear and hopefully but you know, you have
to over communicate when you go remote. And I'm sure
there's there's other things to it too, but that's a
that's a good point. It is, and I never thought
of it like as if now you're going into a
totally different office.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
Yeah, and it's much worse office probably for as far
as your productivity, unless you planned ahead, so you know,
for instance, you know, I've worked at companies where they
wanted you to use your own personal computer for doing
the work stuff, and of course they wanted corporate it
to control that computer, and so all the developers would
buy like a four hundred dollars laptop and it's like, well,

(04:51):
I can wait thirty minutes for a build. I'm not
dropping money into that. And you know that doesn't work
very well. You'll have all kinds of ergonomic things, things
that you don't think about. You know, a lot of
people go, oh, I can just sit on the couch
and watch TV and code, and it's like, you're gonna
script your back, You're going to scrip your neck. You
know your your site's going to be bad. You don't

(05:11):
have a second monitor.

Speaker 1 (05:13):
You know.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
There's a lot of things like that. There's also issues
with you know, now your your own it department. If
the network has an outage, you don't call somebody. You've
got to go fix it unless you can get somebody
out there real quick. That was probably the worst thing
that I learned when I first started doing this was,
you know, it turns out Comcast they don't really feel
like they have to show up for a few days,

(05:36):
and that can be that can be a real pain.
You know, you have to have a pretty much a
decent laptop to work on. And if your internet connection
is out, you need to know the owners of the
coffee shops nearby, right guess where you're going, or you
get on your neighbor's WiFi, you know, if they don't
secure it on occasion, that's that's been helpful too. But
you know, you have to think about all this kind

(05:57):
of stuff and you have to have plans for you know,
how am I going to handle it? If you know,
the power goes out or the internet connection goes out?
You know what am I going to do? If I'm
on a conference call and my neighbor is you know,
it's got a leaf blower running right outside my window.
That happened to me right after Nashville had tornadoes, like
the next morning, at like seven o'clock in the morning,

(06:17):
they were blowing leaves off their sidewalk like we've been
up all night with a tornado and that now you've
got to clean the sidewalk first thing.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (06:24):
Yeah, It's like man, you know, and so you'll just
run into all these issues with noise, you know, problems
like you know and having kids in the house. You
know they you know, they'll run around underfoot, and right
now is not normal, right, you know, everybody's home with
their kids. But even the rest of the time, you know,
you have to kind of set appropriate boundaries with the
other people that you happen to live with. I've even

(06:45):
been on a conference call with a guy that had
a roommate that for some reason decided blasting in you
at full volume in the middle of the day was
a great idea, and so we'd be on a conference
call and here it goes. It's like, this is like
meditation and we're in the stressful conference call. It's really surreal.
You know, the number of things that people don't think

(07:06):
about until they run into them is pretty substantial, and
a lot of people are finding out a lot of
those things. But there's stuff that doesn't come up as much,
or that management is not as worried about right now.
Right like if if your kids interrupt on a conference
call at the moment, it's like, well, you know, we're
all stuck at home. It's a disaster. And management is
stuck at home with their kids too, so they're gonna

(07:27):
be a little bit more understanding than they would normally.
So you just have to think through all that kind
of stuff and try to figure out what can go
wrong and try to limit it before it occurs.

Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah, that's a that's definitely a good point. So with
with kids. I mean, I think for me, at least,
I've always had like a basement right with a door,
and then you know.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
That's exactly what I have. I have, you know, have
a door that locks. Like if you go up the
stairs to the main part of the house, there's locks
on both sides of the door, right, which, now that
I think about it, I don't know that I overly
like the fact that I could be locked down here.

Speaker 1 (08:05):
Better be careful what you say before you go downstairs.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Yeah, exactly, I didn't. You know, I think about that
maybe as carefully as I should. But you know, I
have a door that locks. I have an additional room
where like I used to have like a server rack
and all that stuff, you know when I did consulting,
and you know, all my equipment is down here. I've
got most of what I need. I don't have a
coffee pot downstairs, but other than that, I don't really
have to go up much. That's one thing I noticed

(08:31):
at my old house when my office was right in
the middle of the house. Is that every time somebody
had to go from one end of the house to
the other, they would walk through. Every time I had
to get up to go get something, you know, somebody
start talking to me. Oh so if you're like thinking
about a you know, it's like, okay, you know we're
in the stack. Is this problem and you're going through
that in your head and somebody comes at you talking,
you lose that and so you don't want to do that.

(08:54):
So definitely, the basement office is probably the best thing
in the world.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Yeah, do do you have I don't have a bathroom downstairs,
so I find when I'm drinking a lot of ice
tea or something, right, and then I have to go upstairs.

Speaker 2 (09:07):
I have a bathroom with a shower. Excellent, because this
was like a mother in law's apartment.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
They really could lock you down there.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
I have a separate have a separate thermostat Okay, separate,
I mean, like I really do think that it was
somebody's mother in law that right, Yeah, it's fixed for them.
My garage has got you know, all my weightlifting equipment,
and so you know, I can get frustrated with typescript,
which I promise never happens, and go, you know, swing
kettle bills. Yeah. Now, if I swing kettle bills every

(09:37):
time I ranted the problems with typescript, I would be
extremely strong, right now.

Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, yeah, definitely, okay, yeah, yeah, So I definitely can
relate to the interrupting when you have to go, you know,
get something or do something.

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (09:52):
That's I've held my you know, p for a while
just because I don't want to have to. I want
to finish something, get that thought down before I can,
you know, let myself relieve myself.

Speaker 2 (10:02):
Yeah, And that's that's the worst feeling. And it's so
it's it's just so restrictive. I also say that, you know,
one thing a lot of people have noticed working remotely
is you kind of have a different flow of time. So,
you know, if it takes you a minute to wake
up in the morning, that's okay, because you know, even
though I have the world's slowest coffee pot, I could

(10:22):
still have a pot of coffee and have probably two
cups of coffee in my system in the amount of
time it used to take me to drive to work.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
Oh yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2 (10:30):
And you know, that's that's really helpful. I also think
that a lot of times, you know, a lot of
people are going to be surprised by how much money
they have saved working from home because you don't think
about all the times you go out to lunch and
you know, you spend twenty bucks at lunch because it's
an expensive area, which is where all development shops seem
to be. You know, they don't never, they don't ever

(10:50):
put them in the hood with a crystal next door.
You know, it's right, Oh, you're going to the you know,
twenty five dollars top place, so you save a ton
of money on that. You know, the average commuter spends
twenty six hundred dollars a year on other commute including
you know that's gas, vehicle maintenance, you know, all that
kind of stuff. That does not include the cost of
biscuits at the gas station when you're on the way

(11:11):
into work, or the fact that you eat you know,
more expensive meals, or the fact that you've lost all
this time you know, in transit going both ways, it's
extremely expensive. When you start thinking about the opportunity cost,
you know, you're probably getting somewhere north of ten thousand
dollars a year by the time you count, I could
just work during that time and get paid for the hours. Yeah,

(11:31):
that's worth a lot. You know, when I at my
previous job and you know, dealing with Nashville traffic, just
how screwed up everything is because they overbuilt and then
they didn't build the infrastructure to support it, and so
you never knew how long it's going to take you
get to work. I got up to intermediate level and
spoken Russian in like a year and a half on
my commute and like, and you know, it's it's funny

(11:55):
because you're like, you're going through this traffic and it's awful,
and you're you have to worry about getting in a
car crash, and so you're not like completely on point studying.
It's like, you get up to intermediate level, Like how
long does that actually take?

Speaker 1 (12:07):
Yeah, that's scary.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, just the amount of time that you've lost, and
it's like, yeah, I made good use of it. And
you know, that's actually helped me out once or twice,
but it was mainly just because I was tired of
listening to podcasts on the way in and the way home,
especially since I worked with old technology and I couldn't
use any of the new stuff that they were always
talking about on the podcasts. It just made me mad
every day. So right, right, but the time sink is

(12:29):
is a real it's a huge cost.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
You know.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
The other thing is is for companies, right, this is
something I get into in the book. Your company is
actually losing out because they're not allowing remote work there.
And there's several reasons for that. You know, there's recruitment
and retention of employees. Right now, if you're hiring people
to go into the office, Well, you're not hiring them
to go into the office at the moment because that's

(12:53):
not a thing because the whole social distancing thing. But
normally they have to be close, right and more than Like,
you're in an expensive office park, and so all the
homes in that area are expensive around that office park,
and so your developers are either spending an hour trying
to get there or they're paying through the nose, and
either one of those things means you have to pay

(13:14):
them more for something that doesn't provide value to you
or to them. It just provides wear and tear on
the road and pollution. You get a larger hiring pool
if you hire remote, right, you can get people from
across the country. The company I work for is in
Indiana and I'm in Nashville. I have to go up
there once a quarter. I didn't get to go this quarter.
You know, it's a six and a half hour drive,
and I'm there for a week and then I come back.

(13:35):
But the rest of the time I'm at home. They
were able to get me because you know, hey, they
have remote. They wouldn't have been able to if I
had to move up there because I can't drive in snow.
I'm from Nashville. Not a skill we have. It doesn't
look like it's going to ever develop here either, I
mean really, you know. Another thing is organizational resiliency, Like

(13:57):
if you have a pandemic, you're workers can work from
home if you're already set up to do that. If not,
you're going to be scrambling around at the same time
as everybody else is scrambling around. A lot of organizations
got nailed by that. Frankly, you know, they they lost
uncountable hours to moving everybody home. You know, your office
space costs if you look at what what it costs
to rent, you know, per square foot in a major

(14:19):
metropolitan area, like three or four cubes you know, will
get you a you know, like junior QA engineer's salary. Yeah,
it's like I could have more people to throw at
this thing, so it's expensive.

Speaker 1 (14:32):
You know.

Speaker 2 (14:32):
The other thing is is you can hire people from
other towns. Now the place that I work for, their
actual average salary is lower than what's here in Nashville.
But usually it's the reverse, Right, you have somebody in
New York they hire out to Nashville. They'll they'll pay
the Nationale people what is a ridiculously high salary here
and up there it's low. And I've been on that

(14:54):
that one before that was great the amount of money
I made. It's like, I don't mind working extra hours.
You guys are paying me like you know what I
would get like for time and a half here. Sure,
and so it can really it can really help a lot.
I will say that they're you know, the main reason
that a lot of these companies don't they don't really
want the remote work thing is that they have a

(15:16):
lot of misconceptions, some of which are getting addressed rather
harshly right now. So you know, there's there's stuff like
the quality of life you know, you'll see people that go, oh,
if I work remote, I would never be able to
stop working. It's like, well, your body will enforce that,
you will fall asleep. At some point, you will be
able to stop working. It's just it's whether you're disciplined
enough to do it before it becomes medically necessary, which,

(15:36):
by the way, happens in offices too. It's just now
you're further from home.

Speaker 1 (15:40):
In that now you have to drive home instead of
walk upstairs walk your bedroom. Right.

Speaker 2 (15:44):
Yeah, well, I mean I got a recliner down here.
I don't have to do that. It is six steps
away from here, and I can make that no matter
how tired I am. But yeah, the misconceptions are really bad,
and there are some things that are that are worrying. Right.
There's stuff like career growth, Like if you're working remote,
you're not seen by the senior executives. How are you

(16:05):
going to move up? You have to think about that.
You have to plan. There is stuff around, you know,
company culture. You know, they do want people to be
friends that work together and all that. I will say
that I've formed some pretty good friendships with the people
I've worked with, and I've only been there since November,
we actually communicate, you know, And it's I think that
that's probably a thing that a lot of companies don't

(16:28):
really know. They overvalue what they think culture is, and
they think of culture as the forced, top down integration
of people into groups versus the organic integration of people
into groups that happens anyway because they're working next to
each other or virtually next.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
To each other.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
I will say that if you want to talk about
corporate culture, that's one of the reasons why they send
everybody home right now, is because we turns out we
were culturing a Petri dish of viruses in all these buildings,
right with the open floor plans and all that stuff,
where some guy sneezes sixty feet away and you're in
an open room with him.

Speaker 1 (17:04):
Yeah, oh, open floor plane. It's like they didn't mind.
It boggles my mind.

Speaker 2 (17:09):
That they that's a good idea, But I think I
think when Dante wrote The Inferno, he could not have
visualized an open floor planet. I'm just gonna throw that
out there. Is like that kind of tells you about
what I think about it. You know, it's probably just
purgatory because you do eventually get to leave rights. Not
as bad as it could be, but it's you know,

(17:31):
it's on down there, you know, and there is there
is other stuff that will happen, right, Like when companies
start thinking about letting people go remote, they probably aren't
gonna let everybody go remote, or maybe everybody can't. Right,
Like where I work, there's a production floor, you know
they do. They have these printers that are massive, you know,
and their you know envelopes, you know, insert machines and
all that kind of stuff. Like you know, Joe Shmo

(17:53):
is taking that back home and plugging that thing in
in his garage. Right, it's got to stay at the
factory floor. So how do you keep those employees from
being jealous of the ones who can work remotely? And
you know, conversely, how do you keep the ones that
work remotely from looking down on those people? And you
know that's something that managers will bring up. But the
thing is is you have that problem in the office.
Oh yeah, the office workers are in an air conditioned

(18:15):
office with you know that's not really loud and they're
not getting interrupted all the time, whereas it's crazy on
a print shop floor. The amount of stuff that's going
on and it's noisy, and you know, it's hot half
the time, and it smells funny, you know. So a
lot of this stuff is really kind of it's cop
outs to say, hey, we don't want to let people
work remotely, And so I kind of talked through some

(18:36):
of those in the book and how you might consider
overcoming those when you're discussing it with management, because you
do have to kind of phrase things in a way
that makes it clear that the problems they think that
remote work is going to cause mostly they already have
and have already fixed. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
I mean, one of the things that always kind of
drove back to me was like, listen, if I'm working
remote and all of a sudden the world, world starts
falling apart, like just ask me to come back, or
there's something else going on with me, right, like right,
like just let me go at that point, you know.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, I do think it comes down to a lot
of companies evaluate performance by butts and seats or some
measure that's roughly equivalent, right, Like, Okay, he participates in
all the meetings. Well, it's like he could participate in
all the meetings by throwing out non sequitors and starting
arguments but he participated. You know, definitely give that guy raise,
promote him into management.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
You know, that's how they do it.

Speaker 2 (19:31):
I thought, yeah, it's you know, it seems strangely conserved
a lot of across a lot of large corporations. So
sounds fair to me. But you have a situation where
employers are not evaluating what business value somebody brings into
the organization. You know, if I have a developer who

(19:52):
can do eight hours of work in two hours and
do it well, either I can get another six hours
out of the dude and compensate him appropriately for that
added time, or I need to start thinking about why
the rest of my team can't get it done in
eight hours. So there's a lot of stuff like that.
Like one of the things I heard from one employer
was well, if we let people work remote, they'll work

(20:14):
for somebody else and build both of us. Yeah, And
I'm like, okay, do you know not have systems in
place to catch that? Well, what if we can't catch it?
I'm like, so you're saying that they can only work
half a day and you can't tell how you need
to send every employee home right now because you're losing
fifty percent of your productivity.

Speaker 1 (20:33):
Yeah that I've heard that before as well from no
One when I was trying to work remote. But I
have heard that fear before, and it's well, then they
wouldn't be working as much. Like how does that Either
they're not working a full day now or you would
see a huge drop off on their workload. So yeah,

(20:53):
which one is it?

Speaker 2 (20:55):
And you know the thing about it is, I've worked
in offices, like I worked with a guy that March
madness would roll around. I'm sure he was a wreck
this year now that I think about it, because like
he lived for basketball season, you know, and so March
Madness would happen and he would stream the games to
his work desktop and just be sitting there watching them,

(21:17):
and he would just you know, and he was constantly
doing all the stuff and you know, watching you know,
watching that, reading articles about it, not getting any work
done during the month of March. And so it's like, well,
he could do that at home and at least he
wouldn't be chewing up your bandwidth, you know, slowing the
network down, right, Yeah, And so it's always really it's

(21:39):
really strange, and most of what you have to do
is you have to figure out, Okay, what is the
hole in their logic and then put them in it,
because then they're going to realize that, Okay, this person
has actually thought about this, and it gives you more
credibility and you can go, okay, we need to think
about how we're evaluating developers, because then you win because
then all you got to do is actually do your
work when you're at home.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, right, which some people find challenging. Right, I mean,
but after this, you you you should know if you're
cut out for work from home or or enjoy it, right, right,
So that that's kind of been answered for everyone.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Yeah. Well, and I will say that right now is
not normal.

Speaker 1 (22:15):
No, it's not. It's easier when when all the kids
aren't home and you know, and you can buy a.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Toilet paper, right, you know, and you're not like I
think I can go to co op and get corn cobs,
Like that's not a good place to be trying to
do an office job from you know. We do have
some interesting things going on. But even so, there's a
lot of people that are like, man, I really like this.
It's like everything is falling apart right now and this
is still an improvement, Like how this topiing and messed

(22:41):
up is the office.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
That's a that's a good point. Yeah, that's a really
good point because this is even just the stress of
it all is making things hard, right, and and if
you're still working and getting work done, well that's that
that's impressive. And you know, hopefully companies realize that and
let people continue to work from home.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah. Well, and you know they may get forced, right,
like if enough people are like no, I want to
work remote, Like, it's going to be to the advantage
of the companies to figure it out just so that
they can get employees. I mean, especially in tech jobs.
You know, it's hard to get people, you know, for
like a dot net senior developer. I mean I can
remember going through and interviewing dozens of people and there

(23:22):
weren't any that were actually senior.

Speaker 1 (23:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:25):
In my experience, it's like, Okay, you got three years
experience and you're a senior. It's like, dude, I've been
using it since the beta in two thousand and two,
and I feel like I'm barely a senior about half
the time.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
Yeah, well, that's a that's a different discussion. What is
a senior developer anyways? Right, Like some guy with more
gray hair than me. Yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
That's that's the working definition I'm going to go with
because anything else reminds me of how old I am.
So so, you know, just yeah, it's it's hard to
get good developers, especially you know, if you're using a
tech stack that's really you know, complex and you know,
specialized if you're dealing with you know, my previous job,
there was a lot of low level Windows GDI stuff

(24:08):
that we had to do as part of the app
because we did printing related stuff. And the number of
developers you can find when they're predominantly web devs that
knew that stuff, you know, it's it's basically non existent.
When I interviewed at that place, they you know, I
went through a recruiter and I left from there, and
I was like, I think I'll take this job. And
I tried to call my recruiter and couldn't get hold

(24:30):
of her because she was already talking to management because
they had said they wanted to hire me. Yeah, right,
right right, And so companies jump on that real quick.
And I think that that kind of scarcity is going
to force them to allow remote work. I also think
it's in their their economic interest.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Yeah, it absolutely is.

Speaker 2 (24:47):
You know, there's plenty of boards of directors right now
that are like, Okay, we have to let this happen
in the future, because if we don't, you know, something
that happens a world away can suddenly bring our business
to a screeching halt.

Speaker 1 (24:59):
Yeah. And who used to say, you know, until we
get a vaccine, and we're still going to have lockdowns
and until you know, even if they're not worldwide, they'll
be area wide. Right, So you're still going to have
this up and down for at least a year. So
there's definitely the big thing to me that's that always

(25:19):
if I was a business, is the applicant pool. Like,
all of a sudden, you don't have to be in
commuting distance to New York City or wherever, right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:29):
And it really opens up a lot of other opportunities
I think some of these companies haven't thought of. Like,
for instance, a lot of companies have difficulty hiring diverse candidates,
right they want to, and they can't for whatever reason.
You know, for instance, probably ten years ago, the hiring
pool of software developers in Nashville was predominantly white men.
If you have a company that can't, you know, and

(25:50):
they need to for whatever reason they want to. It's like, well,
what do you do. You know, well, if you're hiring
from across the country, you've got more options and you
can probably find some body. Or you know, look at
people that you know they've got medical issues. You know,
I worked with a guy who was blind who was
a software developer. His wife would drive him to work
and drop him off. And dude was a really, really

(26:11):
good developer. But if he didn't have a wife at
home that could drive him to work, he had no options.
And so this has the potential to lift a lot
of people out of poverty. You know, I grew up
at the end of a power line outside of a
small town in Tennessee. You know, I've literally seen people
cook possum because they were broke, and you know, money's

(26:31):
not coming in till the end of summer, right right,
And you know there's people out there that have high
speed internet connections, believe it or not, but they're broke. Otherwise.
It's like, if they can learn how to code, you know,
that could that could really help those people, or in
the inner cities for that matter. You know, we have
lots of little spots in the country that are not
close to real estate where software developed development companies like

(26:53):
to be. But you could hire people from there, you know.
And then you've got people that have other medical issues.
You know, I've worked with people that had answer and
you know, their immune systems were compromised and they were told, hey,
you cannot go into an office. You know, they were
on lockdown before it was cool, not that it's ever
been cool, but you know, they're in that situation. You know,
you got people with gastrointestinal issues is a fun one, right,

(27:14):
somebody's got irritable bowl syndrome and they can't figure out
what's going on. Well, when they're in an office, everybody
who's also not working is looking going, hey, this guy
goes the bathroom five times a day. Right, Yeah, You've
got people knowing your business in a way that's really uncomfortable,
and this, you know, the remote work can potentially remove
that and really, you know, create a normal life for
a lot of people that maybe couldn't have one otherwise.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
Yeah, definitely, I think it'll be really interesting when these
lockdowns get lifted and to see how how many companies
just stay remote and sell real estate. You know what
I mean, Like there's companies spending millions of dollars for
you know, in these New York City and you know

(27:58):
San Francisco right like.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
Or just I mean crap here in Nashville. Even some
of the junkie real estate here is ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (28:06):
You know.

Speaker 2 (28:06):
I worked for a company they kind of got in
on the Microsoft Exam stuff early on, like you'd know
the name. And they had this crazy explosive growth and
then the two thousand bubble hit and so they had
they leased all this office space, just a tremendous you know,
really posh offices. Like my first job out of college.
I worked there and I called my dad on the

(28:29):
phone the first day. My dad owns his own company,
and I said, hey, Dad, my office is bigger than yours.

Speaker 1 (28:34):
Right.

Speaker 2 (28:35):
They spent all this money on this, and I was
replacing a more qualified developer who had been in that
office and had been let go. And one of the
things that really sunk that company was at least yeah,
And so there's also you know that risk. You know,
it's not like you pay month the month on a
business lease. It's like, you know, you're doing twenty four
months and if companies have to try to go with

(28:58):
demand for their services. You know, it's the same kind
of thing as a cloud environment, right, instead of getting
two rax space servers and trying to go, okay, let
me balance load, let me fiddle with this, it's like no,
let me let me just get more instances when I
need them and then spin them down when I don't.
And companies can do that with office space if they
allow remote work. And so that's an optimization that might

(29:18):
be really useful now there. You know, there are downsides
to it as well, right, Yeah, companies do have to
think about security, and there's lots of little gotchas in there. Right.
A lot of companies have got this attitude that I
have a firewall, that's all the security I need, and
they don't have anything internally. I've worked at a couple
of places where some salesperson came back from a conference

(29:40):
with a laptop and the whole network got hit with
a virus. You have those kind of circumstances in the office.
You're going to have to fix it to allow remote work,
but you got to fix it anyway.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Right, Yeah, you can't have that definitely, right that that
problem still exists, whether it's remote and right because people
bring their laptops home and you know, and you want
them to work the weekend anyways, right.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
So right for free?

Speaker 1 (30:01):
Yeah exactly, because their salary, you know, so they're they're
still uh, you still have that risk.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, and you know, and they talk about, you know,
well we want a content filter and we want to
do all this stuff. It's like, okay, well I get it,
you don't want viruses get loose on the network. But
half the time they say, well we don't want somebody
goofing off, right, yeah, you know, reading sports are worse
on the clock. It's like, well they brought a they've
got a cell phone here that's more powerful than the
first computer I worked on.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
Yeah, probably more powerful than the business when you gave
them anyway, exactly, you know, I mean, because you know,
I've worked at places that they'll give you an absolute
potato of a computer and then think that something else
is hurting your productivity. Yeah, yep.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
It's like I can type four keystrokes and visual studio
wait a minute and a half for it to show up.

Speaker 1 (30:49):
You know. Yeah, yeah, saving money on it equipment for
developers is not a good strategy.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Well, it's not saving money and wow, that's that's true.

Speaker 1 (30:58):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:58):
You know. The thing is is a lot of times
there are you know, there are traps, right, there's pitfalls
with security that a lot of companies maybe have their
stuff together, but they don't think about Like if you
have a remote employee and they've got a laptop company
issued laptop in their home and you terminate them, so
you got to get that laptop back, you cannot trust it. Yeah,
until you know you've vetted, probably wiped the OS and

(31:21):
you know, done all that kind of stuff, and so
there are costs. I would argue that you still have
those costs in an office environment unless you're not you know,
unless you have completely locked everything down. All somebody has
to do is bring in a thumb drive. But there's
just a lot of stuff that you know, the it
security people will say and it's like, well, you kind
of already have that problem anyway, this just exposes it,
and by the way, exposes it in a fashion that

(31:43):
is cheaper to fix than you might have otherwise, because
you know, like, for instance, if you're doing the whole
you know, eggshell thing of well, my firewall protects everything
and everything's fine inside the firewall. If you have a
remote employee and you suddenly learn that, hey, this is
not a good idea, which you should have learned any
of the past twenty years. Right, If you have a

(32:03):
remote employee, that's it's coming in and you go, I
got to deal with security situation. Well, that's fairly cheap.
I deal with the security situation. However, if you get breached, that's.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
Not more expensive.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Yeah, and so you can almost think of remote employees
as a pressure test for your security systems, a continuous one.

Speaker 1 (32:22):
One of the big pushbacks I've gotten in the past
has been, well, what developers work remotely? Other people will
get you know, upset, right.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Right, Well, and there's you know, there's some truth to that,
right people. You know, people get jealous of each other
in office environments all the time. You know, do you say, okay,
well developers get their own office, Well why don't I
get my own office? For instance? Like, well, you know,
we're we're demanding that these people provide value that increases

(32:54):
the value of the business, and automation is a huge value.
There's a reason developer salaries are as high as they are.
It's not because you know, we're all great people. And
you know, neck beards are in fashion. It's because we
provide value and excess of what we're getting paid, and
so you know, dealing with interpersonal type stuff like that,
it's gonna happen anyway. It's it's like the network stuff.

(33:14):
You know, most of the problems that you run into
with distributed teams are exactly the same problems that you
run into with local teams. It's just that there's the
communication channels are slower, and you have more problems that
show up as a result of that. One other thing
that comes up a lot is employers will be like, well,
we can't get everybody together for a quick meeting when
we need something. And most of the time that really

(33:36):
comes down to, you know, it's it's poor management practice.
You know. I've worked at companies where you never knew
what your day was going to be like at all.
It's like, well, my best coding time is between this
time and this time, you know. And you know, by
the way I've proved that, Like I had like a
log of you know, everything in one hour blocks, and
I would go in there once an hour and write
how I felt and what I was working on. And

(33:58):
I did that for a few weeks and tracked it.
I know exactly when my best working time is, and
invariably they would stick a meeting right in the middle
of it, and the meeting I had five minutes warning
that it was coming. Well, if you've got that kind
of environment, every developer is now trying to protect their
focus and they're trying to make sure they don't lose
their place to go to some crazy meeting. And so
you've got managers doing this, well this, this makes it

(34:18):
impossible for them to do that because they may not
be able to get ahold of everybody that quick. You know,
I see that as a win. It gets rid of
a lot of broken managerial practices. It also does a
few other things. The way that it changes communication channels,
people have to over communicate, They have to overdocument or
document it all, which a lot of developers don't or
they you know, their documentation is really really limited or useless.

(34:42):
And when you have a distributed team, you're going to
have to do that because your team, you know, they
may just be in the local area and you may
be fine, but after a while they're going to spread
across the country. People are going to move, you know,
and be several time zones away. You know, like my
team has got people in Eastern, Central Mountain and Pacific time. Yeah,
we've got we got all the way across. And you

(35:04):
know some of these people like they they get to
work at six point thirty in the morning Eastern time. Well,
if they need something from the guy that's on the
West coast, you know, yeah, they're gonna they're gonna wait
a minute. And the same thing for the guy on
the West coast later in the day. Yeah, you know,
those people have gone home, except for the one or
two workaholics that you can always ask. But like that
that's a real thing, and it gets rid of this

(35:26):
this notion that I'm going to pull for the information
I need, and it's like I'm going to make sure
the information I need is there so I can just
get it when I need it and not involve another person.
It also forces asynchrony in communications and you kind of
run into a lot of the same problems you run
into with code right, Like if you have and I
know you do node, so like this is kind of

(35:47):
built into node right, like is yeah, it's all a
sinc like file io and stuff like that. But I'm
a bit more old school developer, like you know, I
started a while back. Just leave that out as far
as how far back, but let's just say that let's
see Clinton had just been elected and so like when
we did file, I, oh, it was all synchronous, right,

(36:07):
and we can make assumptions. Okay, this happens before this, right, Yeah,
make assumptions in the code because it was enforced. When
you switch to ACNC, you don't have that anymore, and
so you either have to know when something's done and
get a result, you know, kind of like a promised
type thing, right, or you have to be really careful.
You have to have some kind of interlock type thing. Well,
the same thing happens to your communication flows in a

(36:28):
company that has gone remote. You know. Now it's like okay,
well I can ask for something, but I can't ask
for something with the assumption that the timing of when
I get the answer is going to be immediate. And
you know, and I can't sit there dead in the
water while that happens. I have to ask before I
need it so that it's here when I need it.

Speaker 1 (36:44):
Yeah, Yeah, that's always a challenge. Yeah, I agree with that.
I've been in places where I've worked remote, and I
mean worked in an office and we have a remote
team in India. Right, Yeah, that's always a challenge itself,
with the time zone and getting information back past back
and forth.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
And the language barrier. I mean, even you know, even
though you know most of them that you would be
dealing with do speak English, there's people that just can't
understand foreign accents well, you know, for whatever reason. And
by the way, on the other end, they can't you know,
they're not going to understand my Hillbilly accent half the
time either, right like that that's completely fair because other
people in Nashville sometimes don't, So you know, I can't

(37:27):
expect somebody in you know, Kerala to to do that either.
And you have to think about those communication barriers and
how you're going to overcome them before you have them.
You know. Basically, what all this does is it forces
people to be proactive all the way up and down
the organization, and that that's a little bit of a
culture shift, right It's it's sort of again like the

(37:48):
ACYNC thing. It's like, if your code is a sync
at a low level, it probably can't be synchronous at
a high level. It has to go all the way
up yep, right, the same you know, it's the same
kind of structural setup, and so that's something that you're
going to have to deal with. Now, there are a
few things that you do need to know as far
as convincing employers on this, because again, you're putting this

(38:11):
cost on them. Right, Hey, you got to rework your
process is to act like you're not a parts manufacturer
in the eighteenth century, right. You know, it's not how
many which its apparaduce, how many lines of code, it's
you know, we we have to provide value and access
to what we're doing and have systems that can actually
determine that value. So you got to sell the idea

(38:31):
of remote work to you know, whoever you're talking to.
And it's interesting how developers will do this because a
lot of developers, including developers that should know better because
they do business apps, they'll they'll try to sell it
based off of what it does for them. You know, well,
I can take care of my kid. I don't have
to put the kid and take care It's like if
you've got a ten year old and you know the

(38:51):
ten year old's going to be sitting upstairs playing Minecraft
while you're working. Okay, you know, and management knows that.
But when you've got a screaming toddler at home, they're
not going to go for that, right because it doesn't
help them, it hurts them, and you just have to
think about how you're going to sell it. So I'll
relate a story that this was. This was one of
the most messed up things, especially being at a conference room. Okay,

(39:14):
So we had this developer who tried to sell remote
work to management, and he did it because his wife was,
you know, trying to get business thing going, and he
thought that he could avoid having to pay for childcare
while she was doing that if he was just home.
And you know, he's he had little kids. So they
let him work remote one day because he think he

(39:35):
said he had a doctor's appointment or something and it
had to be at the house or I forget what
the deal was. So we're on our scrum meeting nine
o'clock in the morning. You hear Sesame Street and children
fighting in the background. He's periodically having to mute his
microphone and you can still see him on camera, which,
by the way, if you're going to have to yell
at somebody on camera, kill the camera and the mic
and then do it and then turn it back on,

(39:57):
because then people will think it's a blit with zoom
instead of your fault. They won't know that you're screaming
at your young uns, right, Like you just got to think.

Speaker 1 (40:04):
About that point.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Yeah, I mean, so that happens, right, it's like, okay, well,
you know it's first thing in the morning. He's probably
getting settled. That's fine. We have a board of directors
meeting later. And I wasn't on the board, but because
of my position as a software architect, I was in
those meetings a small company and we're all lined up
around this table. You know, it's a conference room table.

(40:25):
We've got like the sixty inch TV yep at HD
decent quality TV at the end of the room. We
also had a horrible audio setup with like crazy echoes
and stuff. But you know whatever. So dude has to
present something to the board of directors and he's talking
on camera about to do that, and they're like, oh,
he's working from home. It's like he had to work

(40:47):
remote today. The board kind of had a back and
forth about that, and then he gets on and as
he's talking, his cat jumps up on the keyboard and
presents its backside to the camera.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
Wonderful, Yeah, wonderful at yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Sixty inches And it was close. And so every time
we talked about working remote from then on, that story
came up.

Speaker 1 (41:11):
You know.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
It's like, you know, it's it's the concept of anchoring
in sales. It's like that that is now anchored to
the back quarter of a cap. Yeah, it's really hard. Now.
I did manage to get the ability to work remote
like two years after that, but.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
I set you back there, huh yeah, And.

Speaker 2 (41:28):
It was just like, dude, you know, And the thing
is that he was sitting on his couch coding all
day and really didn't get a whole lot done. And
so you can't sell it that way either. Like, one
thing you want to make sure you do is that
you're set up so that when you work remote, you're
successful the first time and you're more productive than normal, right,
you want you want that to hit the numbers that
management actually uses to evaluate things. So the first thing

(41:51):
is to figure out how are they evaluating me, and
if they aren't evaluating me in a way that makes sense,
try to push them towards a more reasonable way. Of
evaluating me and then go work remote and prove it
versus the other thing of you know, deciding well I'm
going to work remote and then oh, well they don't
think you were as productive. You think you were more productive.
But now you have to argue about the system they're

(42:12):
using to measure you. Like that's back, right, you know,
there's a power differential there, and you want to set
it up so that you're on the good side of that,
not the bad, you know. And the way to do this,
you know, besides that part is you kind of set
up a trial run, right, Like you don't go the
first time and go, oh hey can I work you know,
four days a week from home, you know, come in
for you Friday for the free lunch, because I would

(42:32):
totally do that. You don't want to start there, right,
because that's like that's like going on a first date
and you know, proposing, right, that's right if if it
works well, that works poorly, right, you know, like that
is not going to win the situation. So you want
to set up a reasonable test, like a half day
or a day and have a good reason for it.

(42:55):
So you have a doctor's appointment close to your house, right,
That's one thing that God did do right, is he
was like, hey, I'm you know, I'm forty minutes from
the office. My doctor's five minutes from the house. I've
got an appointment, and you know, he set it up.
I think that way where his wife had an appointment,
there was some reason he had to be home, right,
that was like the only smart thing he did. And
that's what you're going to want. And you're also going
to on that day, you know, make sure you over communicate,

(43:18):
make sure you really participate in meetings, you know, be
super productive. And also you're using this as a test,
not just for management, but you use it as a
test for you. You find all the stuff that's wrong.
You sit there and you go, you know, like one
of my big problems right now, especially with podcasting and
being on video conference calls, is the chair I'm sitting
in is really noisy. So if you notice I'm trying

(43:40):
really hard not to move, well, like, you notice stuff
like that when you're you know, basically in that environment,
you don't want to notice that and go, oh, well,
you know, I've got three more days of working remote
this week, and then we're evaluating it. When I go
in Friday. Yeah, you want to have it them in
a trial because you can't anticipate all the stuff that
will go wrong. I've learned so much about my neighbors

(44:02):
since i started working remote, one hundred percent. I know
that the neighbors, you know, straight behind where I'm sitting
right now, for instance, their landscaping crew comes out and works,
and so there's loud arguments in Spanish right outside my window,
and then the homeowner will come out and talk to
the head person on that crew, but they don't get

(44:22):
anywhere close to them, which is you know, it's corona
season right now, which is actually reasonable, but they don't
do it anyway. So they're yelling, and there's leaf blowers,
and there's there's certain times a day that you're like, man,
you know, I can't get anything done during that time.
You need to know that before you decide to work remote, right,
because you've got to be able to get enough work
done to be productive. But you might find out, you know,

(44:43):
stuff like well, you know, the internet speed drops off
in the middle of the day out here for some
reason because there's maybe somebody else in your house running
a torrent and you don't know it.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Yeah, or I found when the kids, you know, the
school buses come by, right, the high school bus, right,
you'll get you'll get to drop down.

Speaker 2 (45:02):
That that is at ten after three.

Speaker 1 (45:06):
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (45:08):
I know because they are yelling back and forth at
each other when they walk by my window, like right
right there. You'll learn about all that kind of stuff.
You may also learn that, you know, when you're normally
in an office, you're kept awake, and there's certain times
a day that it's really hard to stay awake. You
may not be getting enough sleep and you've been getting
away with it in an office because you have free

(45:29):
coffee and it's not home, and there's other people talking
and moving around, and all of a sudden you're home
and you find out, man, you know, six hours of
sleep isn't enough sleep for a night. You may find
that your workspace hurts you. You know, if you're sitting
at a kitchen table, it's not gonna go well, you're
gonna you're gonna eventually have problems from that, you know.
I have I have a desk here. I've got you know,

(45:49):
the full like executive L shaped desk, and it is
completely full of equipment because the podcast and I've got
my personal computer, and I've got a work computer and
surround sound system, microphone, KBM switch, you know, all this
stuff is wired in. I had to even do a
wiring diagram to figure out how many, you know, which
cables I had to get and when I started working
for this company. And you're going to have to take

(46:12):
those steps because you want to be successful and you
want to make it so that environmental disruptions don't make
it where you lose your ability to work remote. There's
nothing worse than you know, pushing for it and then
getting to do it, and you know, a week or
two in all of a sudden you can't just because
you know, fate intervened. That's a pretty horrible feeling. And
so you're gonna have to You're gonna have to think

(46:33):
about stuff like, you know, again, your workspace, your your computer.
If you're having to use a personal computer for work,
don't buy an underpowered four hundred dollars computer. Buy real computer.
It's yours worst case, you know, buy really overpowered when
and put the work stuff on a VM so that
they can't mess with your your main you know, gaming
rig during off hours, right, because that's not cool, you know,

(46:55):
I worked for a company that did that, and they
were like, why did you install eve online? It's because
it's my computer. Yeah, you know, like you're spending all
this time to pay this guy to come yell at
me when you could have just gotten me a computer
that would let me do my job. You have to
think about your your desk and your seating because you're

(47:16):
you know, your your high end is in this chair
for eight hours a day. So you don't go get
a cheap, you know, ninety nine dollars chair, you probably
get a decent one, which I need to do again
because this one's starting to kind of wear on me.
You have to think about things like your time tracking,
like how are you going to you know, make sure
that you're doing the work that you're supposed to do
and that you've put in a full day's worth of
work and not over it. Because it's real easy to

(47:37):
get up in the morning and go, well, I don't
really know what time I came down here, I'm going
to start working and I'm going to be done when
I'm done. Well, you may be done at noon, you
may be done at ten thirty at night, and you
start at six in the morning, like Neither of those
is healthy, you know, for your continued success. So you've
got to think about, you know, your time tracking, even
if the company you work for doesn't think about it,

(47:57):
like you have to. You have to build a out
of habits. So I'm I'm up at five point thirty
in the morning, the coffee is ready at ten. After
six coffee pots, you'll set Like I said, it's the
slowest freaking.

Speaker 1 (48:09):
I was going to say, that's pretty slow, but yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Mean it's it's on a timer and so kick on
at a certain point and it's basically timed so that
when I go in the kitchen after walking the dogs,
I have a pot of coffee ready, and I tweaked
it and figured out exactly when that is. So it's
like beeping as I walked in the room because I'm
you know, that's I'm probably a little bit more inorretentive
about that than I should be. You got to think
about stuff like how are you going to synchronize files

(48:33):
and notes, like especially if you have a work computer
that you're remoting into and you know, like I had,
I used to have four screens on my desktop. Well
I couldn't really do that over the VPN connection. I
can only do like two and it worked well. So
it's like, well, I've got these other two screens up top,
I got remote desktop across the bottom. I can get
notes over, but how am I going to swap them

(48:54):
back and forth successfully? You know, you may have to
think about things like that. You also need to think
about your phone. Either you you know, you give work
your cell phone number and risk them calling you at
inopportune times, or you have to get a work phone.
You know, like the IP phones. You've got to make
sure that you have some way to communicate that can
get on the network and can work with the rest
of the systems. Although developers is not as important right

(49:17):
because we typically have gotten away from phone based stuff,
but a lot of people haven't. You need to think
about your webcam and headset. A lot of people will
go and they'll buy like a twenty dollars headset and
the cheapest webcam they can. It looks like crap. It
sounds like crap on the meetings and when upper management
is listening to you talk and they can't understand what
you're saying because you sound you know, you're water well,

(49:41):
you sound like you know one of the chipmunks and
your you know, your video camera is a piece of crap,
and your internet connection to a piece of crap too,
So like you're moving around like max headroom like that.
That is not a comforting thing for management. So it's
worth it to go. You know, I got a nice logitech.
I mean I have multiple headsets here because you'll be
in a podcast. Kind of changes your whole view on equipment.

(50:02):
But you need to have that in place and to
be thinking about that. You know, the trick with with
equipping your office well is you're probably not gonna be
able to write it off in taxes. You're spending that
money and it's out of your own pocket, and yeah,
that sucks, but when you think about the cost of
driving into an office, you're still coming out ahead.

Speaker 1 (50:19):
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 2 (50:21):
So anyway, once you've kind of got all that worked out,
you know, you do the whole thing of multiple trial
run days. Right, So you've gotten one, you found the problems,
you fix them. You do the next one, find the
problems and fix it, and eventually you get it where
it's smooth. Then you can ask to do it on
a regular basis because at that point you have proof
you've got numbers, you know what does and does not work,

(50:42):
and you know whether you actually want to do it
or not. One thing that a lot of people have
figured out here recently is that they don't like remote work.
It's isolating. When I first started, I thought everything was fine.
You know, the only conversations I had were talking to
my wife and talking to the dog, and that was it.
And then there was one day I went to a

(51:04):
gas station for some fried chicken because I'm healthy like that,
and the gal behind the counter asked me how I
was doing, and I told her at length, and then
I was like, Okay, that's probably a sign that I
need to fix some stuff, because that's not normal. And
that isolation. It really, it'll creep up on you after
a while, even though you may think you don't like

(51:25):
other people. Like everybody's learning that right now, that everybody's
got a minimum level of social contact that they need
and nobody's getting it. Yeah, so you're going to have
to be prepared for that. One another thing that I've
noticed is getting stuck in a bad job. The worst
job I've ever had I was remote four days a week,
and that's for a variety of reasons. A lot of
that was just because the company was bad. You know,

(51:48):
they were not run well, they didn't respect employees time,
they had a lot of really dysfunctional processes. And I
stayed at that job. You know, I think there was
there was one day in September that I was like,
you know what, I'm getting out of there, and like
when I went into the office I cleaned all my
stuff out of my desk that day. I didn't quit

(52:08):
until March. Wow, because it was it was hard to
find something else. And that's a risk if you you know,
if you work remote, it takes a while longer. So
once you start going, hey, I need to get out
of this job, you better start getting that resume out
because you'll be sitting there if you don't. You have
to think about what happens if they force you to
go back into the office because you know, management gets
in a snit, or you know one of your coworkers

(52:31):
doesn't do what they're supposed to do, they get fired,
and then they say, hey, everybody else has to be
back in the office because you know, it happened one
time and we're never going to let it happen again.
You got to think about what you're going to say
on that. That also means, you know, if you're going
to say no, I'm not going back in, well do
you have enough runway? And you're checking account to go, yeah,
I'm not doing that until I get something else. Otherwise

(52:51):
you're forced back in. And you know, the the thing
about being forced back into the office that's really insidious
is a lot of people, you know, myself included in
previous ops, will negotiate for remote work, you know, kind
of in lieu of a salary increase, because say I'm
saving a bunch of money and you know a salary increase, well,
uncle Sam gets half of that, but any savings I get,
I get that right. So it's easier to work that

(53:13):
way than the other way, and it works out better
for the company too. But you negotiate that you get
to work from home, and then they say, oh, you
got to come into the office, Like what do you do?
Then well they just you know, they basically went back
on a decision and an agreement that they made with you.
What's your reaction and you need to know what that
is before that happens, because it's it's really it could
be pretty awful i'll see. Another thing that happens is

(53:36):
sometimes you can be a second class citizen. How you're
working remote. You know, we don't care about, you know,
the fact that your kid, you know, needs to get
on the bus at eight o'clock in the morning. It's like, okay,
I want to have a seven year old standing by
busy highway waiting on a bus right right. You have
to be comfortable asserting, Hey, I cannot do this, this
is a bad idea, this is destructive. You know, I'm

(53:56):
not going to take a call at ten o'clock at
night and be expected to be up at six the
next morning. You're going to have to be at that
point where you can deal with those things, and a
lot of people aren't. A lot of employers aren't either,
or they don't think about it. One of the big
things is the time zone difference. You know, for every
hour of time zone difference you have, there's an hour
at the end of the day, at an hour at

(54:17):
the beginning of the day where not all your staff
is on. If you get to what two or three
hours difference, Now, the optimal meeting time for one group
is the lunchtime for the other group, or they aren't
there at all. Yeah, and so it gets more and
more pathological the more it spreads out. And companies aren't
prepared for this either, and so you're going to have
to help them get there because you're the one that

(54:38):
wants to work remote. So you've got to help them
figure it out. And I don't know how we're doing
on time. If we're running over.

Speaker 1 (54:43):
Or under, probably we probably should wrap it up pretty soon.
I think we're going a little over. But it's been
a good conversation for sure, and something that we definitely
need to as a as a whole world, need to
think about now.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Right, Yeah, you know, and I will say the thought
process is going to be ongoing.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (55:02):
The way you plan projects is going to change because
you can't get everybody in a room and hash it
out necessarily. You know, all that stuff becomes async. Your
project manager suddenly can't just ping you whenever they need something.
They've got to have systems in place so they can
tell what you need, and you have to make sure
that those systems are up to date. I've worked at
companies that they had some internal system that was written

(55:23):
in a desktop app that was just ancient and just
the stuff that happens when people start working remote. They
start filling in that system with more detail, right, And
that seems good except for the fact that that's the
system that the developers use and that's the system that
the CEO uses. So I had one where a developer
filled in, you know, here's the endpoint I set up,

(55:43):
here's the HTTP verbs you know, for these different methods,
and they put it in the ticket. The other devs
are going to use that information, but the CEO is
poking around in there and they sees HTTP verbs, we
should be using HTTPS And we had a BUCI compliance
meeting out of that. Yeah, like the you know, the

(56:04):
thing is is you're you're adding energy to a system
that you don't understand, and so you're gonna have to
do that with a little bit of care and caution
going in. And so that's that's the stuff I tried
to deal with in the book. So if anybody's interested
in the book, probably the best way to find chapters
of it or find information about it is to go

(56:25):
to simple programmer dot com and search for Will Gant
and you can see the you know, the articles I've
posted there, and that will kind of get you into
the pipeline to be able to get the book. It's
coming out at the end of April. Cool, Yeah, we should, uh,
we should push the picks. I know we briefly mentioned
that to you. I can start if you want to,

(56:45):
uh just like, is it just technology or can we
so we can definitely branch out. It's it's anything a
book game, you know. Really, I've picked everything from like uh,
lemon that you put in water, you know that comes
in packets, right, or you know, to anything, anything and everything. Yeah,

(57:06):
there's there's no real limit on it for sure. Well
I would uh, you know, I guess it would be
more of a shout out to Yeah, absolutely to Korean grandmothers,
which I obviously don't have one with my accent. But
I went to the international market right as this coronavirus
outbreak was happening, and you know, I make my own kimchi,
and so like, I have like the basket full of

(57:29):
you know, all the cabbage and all this stuff, and
I'm you know, getting ready, and one of them saw me,
It's like, are you making kimchi? And I'm like yeah,
And I ended up cornered in the international market for
a good thirty minutes with three Korean grandmothers going back
and forth on how I needed to make it and
what I need to put in it, and like I'm
like taking notes. I'm like, this is the best thing ever.

Speaker 1 (57:50):
That's great.

Speaker 2 (57:51):
Yeah, I mean, I'm like, this is you know, this
is one of those stories that like you wouldn't believe
a hillbilly like me with with a making kimchi, but
then be like in a serious conversation about the relative
merits of different regional methods of doing that. And I
just thought that was so awesome, you know, like that's
that's what we're going to come out with after this
whole coronavirus thing is over, is we're going to realize

(58:12):
that we're connected to other people.

Speaker 1 (58:14):
Oh yeah, this this this world got a whole lot smaller, you.

Speaker 2 (58:18):
Know, I did. And you know, some of the best
things I've seen out of people, you know, have happened
here recently between that and the tornado we had here
in Nashville. You know, some of the best actions of
people I've seen, you know have been in response to that,
and some of the worst have too, but you know,
you always see the worst, and so yeah, just a
just a huge shout out for you know, people that

(58:40):
are willing to take time out of their day to
help a random stranger that they'll probably never meet again
like that. That was absolutely awesome and the Kimshi was
a little too hot. I made it, but I can
tweet that later. Good advice otherwise, Yeah, you know where
to go, right, you know, I know exactly what I need.

Speaker 1 (58:59):
That's awesome. That's awesome, all right, So I'll do my picks.
I guess I'll I picked this before on the Freelancer show,
The Tiger King. I'll definitely give a shout out to
that because that is a life changing documentary and there's
a lot of fun I'll also pick out. I've been
working a lot with the State Management Library n g

(59:21):
x S. I've been working like that for a while
and it's it's a newer version came out pretty recently
and it's I really enjoy it, which is good for
State Management because you know, a lot of it feels
just like a waste, but now it's it's going well
and I enjoy using that. Those are my Yeah, it's
it was written for Angular from the ground up, as

(59:44):
opposed to just a direct copy of reducts so they
bring some more of the and and there's less boiler
plate as opposed to other state management libraries, which is nice. Yeah,
it's it's it's been working out really well for me.
So all right, I I think that wraps up our show.
Thanks for everyone listening. We'll see you guys on the

(01:00:04):
next episode.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
Already