The Good, Bad, and Ugly of Remote Software Development

Episode 192 · Fri, 16 Oct 2020 15:00:00 +0200 · 41:14 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Welcome, listeners, to the Cloud and Culture podcast. If you're listening for the first time, this is only episode five after all, here's the quick background. I am Derek Harris from VMware. And I am Danielle Burrow from VMware. And this podcast is focused on VMware Pivotal Labs and the work done by our team of experts to help organizations ranging from startups to the Fortune 500 shift their software development into high gear. As the title suggests, that entails modernizing and sometimes just kick-starting software development and tooling, as well as helping clients create a culture that will allow them to run efficient, self-sufficient software development teams for the long term. And this week, we're joined by Pivotal Labs' Joe Moore and Paul Sullivan for a discussion about the state of remote work and remote agile software development in particular. Joe and Paul give tips around tools and strategies, share stories from helping clients go remote when COVID-19 closed down offices, and explain which parts of the work-from-home experience might stick around even after things get back to normal and offices begin to reopen. Indeed. It's a really fun and informative conversation. And if you want to learn more about optimizing your team's remote development strategy, check out the show notes for links to a collection of guides, Miro templates, blog posts, and other content from the Pivotal Labs team. And as always, don't forget to visit tanzu.vmware.com slash labs to learn more about Pivotal Labs and how we can help you kickstart your next project and get better at building software. So great, let's get started. So VMware Pivotal Labs is known for our in-person immersive experiences with clients. But we actually have a history of working remotely, especially for certain types of engagements or with repeat customers, or maybe after an engagement has kind of kicked off in person at a labs office, and then we'd move to being remote or on-site at the client's location. So even though, you know, normally a lot of people think of Pivotal Labs as being associated with the Pivotal Labs office, we already had a lot of best practices and experience to draw

from when it, when the pandemic forced everyone to kind of shelter in place and work remotely in early 2020. And we published some webinars and blogs on remote software teams and remote pair programming, and a lot of best practices. But now that, you know, millions of people have been remote for the past six, seven months, I wanted to talk to Joe Moore and Paul Sullivan about their experience working with these customers and also internally and kind of get a state of the union. So with that, Paul, Joe, why don't you just briefly introduce yourself, and then we'll kind of get to that state of the union question. Sure. I'm Paul Sullivan. I'm a solution lead with VMware Pivotal Labs. And I spend a lot of my time helping our clients articulate what their kind of biggest software problems are, and then helping them bring the most powerful parts of VMware to bear to help them solve those problems. I'm Joe Moore. I've been with VMware Pivotal Labs and the companies that came before it for quite a while, almost 15 years. And almost that entire time, I've been an individual practitioner, engineer, programmer on project teams. I think at last count, I was approaching 60 projects that I have been on over my time at the company. Wow. Did you get a coin? Did they give you a... I wish. Actually, there was one project that did make a coin, and I'm still waiting for that coin. Some project t-shirts, but no coins yet, but it should be in the mail. But I did recently switch to a new team that is sort of supporting all of our services that we're kind of just... Paul and I have been... Paul described and I'm describing. So I have an interesting perspective, at least for myself, of kind of being in one role for many, many, many years, and now I'm doing something new. And that transition happened in the middle of the sort of pandemic. Yeah. And we were lucky to have folks like Joe around when the sheltering in place stuff happened, because Joe was, for the large parts of his career with Pivotal, a remote software engineer. And so a lot

of the challenges that come into place as a remote software engineer, and you're working on a team that is adopting agile practices such as pair programming and radical collaboration and all those things, we'd ironed out a lot of the details of what to do when Joe was remote, or there were other Joes around the company as well. But we did learn a lot in the transition when all of a sudden everyone was remote, and remote was not a thing that was unique or odd. We were all kind of going through it. And for me, when I think about back when it happened and the kind of transition we had to make, it was learning from people like Joe and taking a lot of those practices and bringing them online. But I feel like when I think about where we are today with being remote, I feel like that first phase was kind of like the uncanny valley phase. It was like we were taking all the things we wanted to do and just sprinkling a little Zoom on it. It was all the same rituals and all the same things, but it was happening through Zoom. And when I'm seeing what teams are doing now, I'm seeing some real innovation in not just bringing a little Zoom on it, but how are we rethinking some of these practices that hold true to the principles that we believe in that underlie them, but acknowledging this new crazy world we're living in where people are homeschooling their kids or taking care of sick relatives and everyone's life has just been upended. So I've seen quite an evolution in how teams have adapted to this scenario over time. I think that's interesting. I mean, you mentioned Joe Joe's had been remote and there'd been a couple other or a few other Joe's, right? Remote with the place. Is it, I'm imagining Joe, I'm just curious if you feel a little more seen now or understood. I've worked remote for a long time and sometimes depending on where you're at, you're definitely the odd man out or the odd person out and you feel like, okay, I just kind of jump into this, I'll jump into this meeting or whatever, but I'm not really part of this thing. And now, well, I mean, Pivotal, frankly, I joined when it was Pivotal and LPM were quite distributed to begin

with. So it feels a little more natural, at least in my role, but I'm curious, like just, just kind of sort of, do you feel more, do you feel more seen? Do you feel like everyone kind of gets now is what some of the challenges have been for you? Yeah, to, to an extent, definitely. It's something that, that I was really surprised by. And I, and I, what you say resonates with me a lot, the, the feeling of being a bit, the odd person out, especially when at the, when I went remote full-time in 2010, I was one of the only full-time remote employees at our, at our company. And so it's very often that there was an entire onsite team and me, and I was always sort of the odd person out. And I will say like people never intentionally tried to make me feel that way. If anything, I put that on myself. People were always incredibly inclusive. I mean, I'm, I'm humbled by the amount of work people did in, you know, the, the co-located offices to make me feel included, all the extra effort, the extra equipment, the wires and headsets and extra monitors and speakers and all the extra effort everybody had to do. And that made me feel very self-conscious for one that I felt like this, this burden, but then that did change over time where it became, you know, it did become more common for us to, to have distributed projects and such. And the thing that I was surprised by was when the, when everybody cut literally on a, on a, on a, on a Friday, I think we all got an email that said, yeah, don't come to the office on Monday. So you better get all your stuff and go home. I thought that Monday was going to happen. And the first time everybody is officially forced remote and that there was going to be this just a matte chaos. I thought there was going to be some kind of chaos of everybody clambering around, trying to figure out what's going on. And I was very much on, I had kind of, you know, I was ready. I was online early. I was like, I'm here, everybody,

I'm going to help you. And it was just quiet. And I would check in with a few people and they're like, oh yeah, yeah, we got it. We're good. Yeah. We, we were already doing like some of this with half the team and now the whole team's doing it and we're fine. And I kept waiting for this like bat signal to go up and it never went up because everybody was already sort of unwittingly training for this moment through the last several years of increasingly more distributed teams. And I'm not taking credit for any of this. Like everybody was, it's not like everybody had to go through me or something like that, or, or the other Joes, so to speak at the company, it just became a part of the way that we worked and other companies as well. But like I can, I can say our company, it just became a part of the way that we worked and to the, to the, to the point where it, it, it was less of a dramatic shift on that, you know, that first week than I predicted it was going to be. Yeah. The word training jumped out at me, Joe. And like, I hadn't really thought about it in that way before, but you know, in a healthy agile software delivery process, you're expecting change and you're kind of like, you're not over planning for, and predicting the future. You're planning just enough to get moving in the, for the next short time period and expecting what you do to influence what, what is going to come next. So you can't really predict it. So our folks are really oriented around this kind of like, Hey, things may be going smooth now, but they won't forever. And we need to identify it when it happens and react to it. And I think the other thing that the other muscle that was really important to us was this muscle of continual improvement. Like let's, let's have a, a culture of psychological safety when, where, when things aren't working, we can call it out and let's build a muscle of reflection and experimentation so that we do it on a regular cadence. We're looking at how things are going, acknowledging the things that are going well so that we keep doing them and, and having the bravery to point out the things that maybe aren't going so well. So we can run some experiments to

try to improve them over time. So I think that like trying to take an, take our, our, the agile process we all did in person and just kind of plop that on zoom felt a little inauthentic, but we wanted to hold things we didn't want to change was these kinds of like underlying principles that we held very closely of reacting to change and, and, and reflecting and continually improving. So it's very validating that just because we couldn't be sitting side by side, things didn't fall apart. You know, it was, it was the, the, the, the reason we're all together and like the principles behind the way we work or why we're even doing this at all. Those, those didn't change. Didn't matter where we were or the orientation of the team structure of the team necessarily. You know, it would have been, it would have really shown that we were way off the mark if everything fell apart just because we had to be remote. Sorry, Danielle, go for it. Oh no, that, and that totally makes sense. I was just going to kind of circle back to something that you brought up briefly, Paul, earlier on, you said that you've noticed some customers and, and some teams have gotten really innovative. Like it's, it's not just about sprinkling zoom on what you're already doing. Um, and I wondered like, do you have specific examples you could call out of things that are going really well? Well, there are two trends that I'm seeing that have come out in the, in the, the last full of months that I think are driving a lot of the innovation that we're doing. One is the kind of like thoughtful and meaningful or a thoughtful and direct move of figuring out which communication channels can move to asynchronous. So when we're all sharing space together and we're all working on the same calendar, there's a lot of kind of natural conversation and natural flow of information that happens where you don't really have to be super intentional about it. Like I can just wait for Joe to come back from his coffee break and I can ask him about the, the story that he's working on. So I think the, the, one of the trends I'm seeing is teams being super disciplined about reflecting on all of their

communication channels and meaning and, and being very purposeful about the, the channels that they moved to asynchronous speak. No, because the time that we're going to be spending together is by definition going to be less when people are, uh, dealing with all the, the, the kind of fallout of, of the pandemic. The, the other trend I'm noting is kind of the, I'm noticing is the kind of flip side of that is when we do get time together, when we, when we are working on this really kind of high collaboration, high value work, how are we making sure we're making the most out of that time? And some of the underpinnings of that has been tooling. So there's a lot of really great, um, kind of like cloud whiteboarding, cloud sketching tools that like, you know, um, will give you a semblance of like what it's like to kind of do a super, super collaborative, uh, session together. So how are we, when we do get that time, when we do have a moment where we need to collaborate, how are we squeezing the most out of that time? And how are we getting the right tools for the right job? For me personally, I do a lot of workshops with my clients and, you know, my, the, what I would usually do is get in the room, do all the workshops, and then I'd take pictures of all the things on the whiteboard and then go back the next day and do my kind of deep thinking synthesis on like, what does this mean and how are we going to help this client? And one of the things I love about this new world we're in is when I do a workshop in a tool like Miro, I have that artifact. Uh, I have no more pictures of whiteboards on my phone. So that's, that's a good thing. I don't have to go through and delete those anymore. So, you know, that's a, I think that's a situation that that's, that's a thing that came to mind for me of like, how, how are we taking these new constraints that we have to live with and turning them into a new strengths so that we can be more efficient and, and, and help our clients better. It is funny how some limits will tend to bring out some creativity in a way to be like, like, well, we have free to do everything. I'll just take pictures of this whiteboard. That makes perfect sense. Yeah. I've been reading a bit about the Stoics and they're all, they're all really into this idea of like, you know, how do you acknowledge these obstacles for what they are and like, turn it into the thing that sets you on the right path. And I feel very much, that is very much spurned by the challenges of COVID.

Can I ask, have there been issues within, I mean, not issues, but I mean, have you, have you seen other clients that have struggled to, to, to get on the, to get onto the onboard or get on board with the remote, the remote work thing? Or has it been just, I mean, culturally, technologically, like, we're just not prepared. Yeah. I think, I think there's kind of like a root cause analysis of like, we could go back to of like, small challenges that get kind of amplified and blowed up bigger in this environment. Like if, if, if you don't have a, a instinct for collaborative work, there are more barriers to collaborative work now. So those folks that, so, so if you work in a place that doesn't encourage or reward cross-functional collaborative work, it's probably going to be harder for you to get that going in these environments. And, but that's also a place where we've been able to come in and help and bring all of our years of experience in, in doing this radically collaborative work to, to help our clients navigate that. And whether it's the foundational tools that they use or just the kind of like mindset and culture, it's harder. It may take a little more time, but I haven't seen anyone just like throw their hands up and give up yet. And Joe, I guess, you know, you talked about this a little bit earlier about, you know, that first day of everyone being remote and wondering if it was going to be just a total disaster. And, you know, people were set up with a lot of tools and we do have an instinct to work very collaboratively, but I, I'd be curious to hear kind of from your perspective of, you know, as an organization, what challenges we might be running into or that we've had to overcome working with clients in this way. Yeah. I think that, you know, one of the things that I'm seeing teams do, and I know that our team has done is, is be very intentional about the, as Paul was kind of alluding to, like the kind of communication that we have and being very explicit and, and, and giving explicit time for things like

socializing as, as, as contrived as it might sometimes feel to have a, a meeting on the calendar at, you know, 4 PM on Thursday that says, get together and have fun. It's kind of like, you know, it almost feels like ordering somebody. It's like, you'll be funny now or something like that. It's, you know, it's, it's, it's something that I'm seeing teams do. And I know that our team has done too. So it's the, the having to acknowledge and put forth the, forth the extra effort to, to reinforce those personal interactions that, and social interactions that, you know, might've just come so naturally, you know, when we're, when it was more easy for us to get together and, you know, be in the same place. And, and even, I think that, you know, I, I'm thinking about the times when, when I was the, like the one remote person on a project, you know, I, we didn't do those things, you know, play games online or get together for an online beer very often, but I would always kind of save it up, right? Like I would, I would save it up for five weeks or so. And then I would make my, you know, once every six, you know, five or six week trip to the office from wherever I was living. And then we would kind of like pack in all the fun. And then I would like go back. Well, well now that, you know, there isn't, we don't know when the pack in all the fun time is going to be. So, you know, taking that extra time has been really important. I joined a team's meeting to, as a, as a guest a week or two ago, and the first item on the agenda was witty banter. And it was like 10 minutes of witty banter. This team had set aside up front of the meeting. And, and then, you know, for 10 minutes, we just hung out and talked and caught up on how kids, people were doing with their families and how people were, you know, some people were complaining about cabin fever. And then 10 minutes was up and we got into the meat of the project. And it was just

so great to like have someone, one team that like walked them around his room and showed us, showed us what his homework situation was. And it just, it just fosters so much more kind of like communal empathy for each other that it's so easy to forget to take those moments and do those things. Yeah, I can, I'll attest to me that I used to, I, Joe, I was very much in the same boat with you. I'd be like, sit at home, sit at home, remote, remote. And then once I got to the office, once I would make that trip to the office, it was, yes, I barely got any work done. Cause it was, you know, you've like, you, you pen, you pen up all of that, all of that talking and all that socializing and all that other stuff. And then you get there. And I kind of thought, I kind of thought like when, when these things started showing up on my calendar too, within our team, well, these, this is to be kind of cheesy and whatever, like forced forced. So, but it's, but actually it's not. And whenever I do it, whenever I engage, it feels much more. Yeah. You definitely, you definitely grow. There's some camaraderie that comes from that. And I think, yeah, especially now it's, it's just super important. And like, you're talking about Paul's, this idea of, cause that's what I wanted to ask too, is like, we're doing all this stuff during a pandemic is absolutely not the same as working remote. As far as arguments are during normal times. You don't have, like you said, you don't have your kids at home for not one. If you have kids, it's like, that's, that's a whole other world. Do you get a, I'm curious what your sense is of like, how things maybe shift if, I mean, assuming we get to a post COVID time, like, like, like how does some of the things we're learning now transition or, or shift, you know, once people can go back to the office, but maybe they don't want to. Yeah. That's a deep question. Yeah. I think, you know, it's, there's a lot of speculation happening there and, you know, I'm happy to speculate as much as anyone. Yeah. I think that it's going to be very interesting to, to, to see how much of say going back to the great office with all the amenities that our offices have anyway, and everybody working together, you know, people being side by side, like how much of that feels like we were really missing

that versus I'm going to struggle for words here for versus like how much of it feels extraneous or, or unneeded or needed only, you know, once a week or something like that, or like on an as needed kind of basis. It's, it's really, it's really going to be strange. Like, like being in the middle of it right now, it's really hard to predict what it's going to be like, you know, can you go home again? Kind of a, kind of a thing, you know, is it going to be like going home or is it like going to be like going back to, I don't know, the, the hometown where you grew up, where you realize like, actually, I don't, I don't know if this is the place. Maybe I should just, you know, go back to my home office business and, and work from there. Yeah. I think, I think there, the people that I'm talking to are definitely feeling some benefits from the flexibility. Now, I would imagine that trend is going to continue that like we will, will continue to need to accommodate that type of flexibility because I think it's good. That might be hard to go back from. And I, yeah, I wonder what the pole of a central office will be like. We won't, will we have the communal coffee pot? Will we have the big jar of gummy bears that everyone's sticking their hands through? Like, I can't imagine that stuff happening anytime soon. So we, how is that going to influence people's behaviors of, of where they work each day? I don't really know, but I, but I do know that we're learning some hard-earned lessons right now. Uh, and like most hard-earned lessons, like the, the, the things you learn tend to stick around with you. All this talk about, you know, being at home and being in teams and, and really having to work at different ways of communicating different types of information, like, you know, more asynchronous or more collaborative. It's all kind of reminding me of a conversation Derek and I had with Hedy Stern on our last episode where she was talking about this tension in agile software development between autonomous teams,

kind of being too autonomous and, and not really being in line with what's actually needed for the business. And I, I guess I'm wondering, Paul, if, if you're seeing this come up as an issue with some of the teams you're working with, like, is it easier for teams to kind of go off and be more autonomous and harder to make sure that there's that balance there? I don't know. I don't really know what my question is, but I'm just kind of wondering, like, what's that look like right now? Yeah. I, in, in my experience with the clients I'm working for the, I haven't seen the dial move on that. Like the, I've seen, I have seen agile adoption in some of the big clients I work with actually get more entrenched during this time. And I think it has something to do with that autonomy. And when I say agile software development, I am talking about like the practices, like the, the observable things that people are doing. I'm not talking about like the deeper cultural principles that underpin those things. So, but like, if you look at a team, you say like, yeah, they're doing, they have a backlog and they're kind of like collaborating and they're delivering stories and they're, and they have a lot of automation, like those types of things I look for that like, is this team quote unquote practicing agile? But again, those are the things that are evolving the quickest, right? Like, because, because we're needing to, we're needing to refactor those things in this new world. So yeah, I haven't really seen the needle move on. Like if you're talking about like governance, like how, how, how teams are measured and how those measurements are connecting to the core outcomes, the business is trying to drive. It's, it's still a challenge, but I haven't seen it become much more or less of a challenge. Yeah. It's interesting. The, it's totally true that there, there's always been a tension amongst such things as say what the customer wants and what the customer's users might want. And, and we've, I don't know that anything is really changing there, but there is something that kind of, I was thinking about, I was talking about this with, with somebody recently where

it seems like a lot of things landed just at the same time as everybody having to go remote. And by, by, by things, I mean like enabling things, zoom, like zoom is not that old and zoom kept getting better. And zoom was, I think probably just able to absorb a world going remote right now. Like, I'm not sure. And I don't have stats on this, but I wonder like, if this had happened two years ago, would, you know, when like zoom was, was brand new, we'd probably all be on some other technology. And would it have been able to have kept up things like good collaborative tools like Slack, you know, everybody going to Slack even more or Microsoft teams even more than they ever did before. You know, could that, would that have all collapsed just a few years ago, but around the, the idea of how teams work autonomously or not there, there's another sort of, it's kind of a combination of, of technology, but also a concept that kind of came along just at the right time. And I'm not going to go wet down the rabbit hole of this, but it's basically called contracts or contract testing between, in a software system. And, you know, in a nutshell, it's, it's a way of making sure that if our team or our part of the software changes in a way that makes it incompatible with another team's software that's relying on ours, that there's a sort of a test that will run and, and notify everybody like, Hey, you just made a change and that's going to break a bunch of stuff. You all need to get together and work this out is kind of the, the, what this concept and technology enforces. And luckily that's becoming very mainstream now, just when everybody is like, not only developing on different parts of the software, but might be thousands of miles away from each other while they do it. And so it's, it's really, you know, it's, it's, it's going to be interesting to look, you know, if we jumped ahead five years, you know, I'll, I'll wonder if we'll look back and say,

wow, look, look how the confluence of the world came together just at the right time to support everybody going remote, you know, or will we be saying, um, God, how did they do that five years ago without these 10 technologies that, you know, that exist, you know, in the future, but not now. Yeah. And I think it's also important to just kind of look at like, what is, what is healthy autonomy look like and how do we get that balance right? Like autonomy without accountability can go into chaos. Uh, to me, like the, what I try to instill is like the right level of autonomy is teams are accountable to outcomes and those outcomes are directly tied to business value, saving money, making money, protecting the company. But the autonomy they have is how the, how within the scope of their, their product, how, what, what, what they have to build to go reach those goals. So autonomy without accountability is chaos. And, and maybe that's the reason that like, if you're, if success for your team is just building more stuff, you know, you'll just build more stuff, but if success for your team is driving business outcomes, then you have, you should have autonomy to go get rid of those outcomes. And I think that's just a place where I don't think COVID has made an impact yet on the mindset that organizations have about, are we outcome focused or, or are we just, uh, building a lot of stuff? Yeah. That's a great thought experiment. That whole, well, what would happen if this had happened five, 10 years ago? And yeah. And then if it happened again in another decade. Yeah, exactly. Do you, but I, speaking of which, like one thing, you know, we've seen with, I don't know if this is an issue, but it just, Paul reminded me what you were just saying, you kind of peeked this at me. This question was like, is there, is there a risk though, when we talk about autonomy of getting into, I don't know if it's filter bubbles is the right term, but it seems like, you know, if you're in Slack or if you're in a, you know, some sort of communication tool, it seems kind of easy to get into, you know, this, like one channel goes off and, you know, you'll see like an 80 common thread over here about something, right. And it, it does get kind of easy to go off into, I don't know, like, like the communication maybe can break down between

teams and people, you can kind of get into that rabbit hole. Like, well, this is what we're talking about this now. And we're like, you know, is that, I mean, does that, does that, is that an issue? I'm just, I'm kind of thinking through my answer here. Like to me, what we want to instill is like a healthy communication style that is both kind and empathetic and direct. So yeah, do I, do I see the occasional Slack thread that goes on far too long and doubles back to the place it started? I see a few of those, but I also like when I, when, when, when, when the teams I work with see those things, the healthy ones say time to get back to work, you know, like, we, we, we, we, we've, we've, we've taken this to its logical conclusion. Like it was a good discussion, but like, let's, let's make a decision and move forward. So good for, you know, like well-facilitated meetings, well-facilitated decisions, all of those things, being intentional about those things can help prevent those, those spin outs. But to your point where I think you're going is like, some of that stuff just is, is harder in this world, especially when a lot of that communication is moving asynchronously and we're, and we're building new muscles to, to be better at it. Yeah. I think that, yes, something I've definitely seen are a few things along with like, you know, communication challenges, asynchronous communication challenges. And I think one of them is kind of a fear of missing out aspect of, well, we're using Slack and I've got, I'm in a thousand channels and all I do, you know, all one does, I'm not saying I do this, but like all one does is like cycle through all the unreads and all the channels. And by the time you get done, you have to go back to the beginning and, and start over to make sure you don't miss anything because you're not all together or there's maybe you're just getting exposed to a bunch of stuff. And that's another thing I've seen that, I don't know if the pandemic, how much the pandemic has, has impacted, but sort of has forced maybe in a particular way is, is that a big company like ours, you know, different, you know, the culture has evolved in different plate parts of the company

in different ways, maybe through acquisitions and things like that. And, and there might be things that are sort of holdovers from certain lineages. So I've had an experience where I thought I was up in the know about a particular topic. And then finally somebody said, Oh no, they, they don't use Slack for that. They use teams. You got to go over to teams to learn all about that and get involved in that community. And I get over there and I'm, and I find out like, Oh, wow, I'm, I had no idea there was this huge community of people over here. Or maybe there's a split community, almost like two clicks or something like that, that are sort of communicating in their own little bubbles. So I think that's the way you put it. And, you know, I think we're still working through that. Like, I think that's going to be a challenge probably for, for a long time, unless there's sort of like a unilateral forcing by companies to say like, you know, these five technologies are out and you all have to use this sixth one or something like that. Just a really practical question. You've mentioned several tools. So you've talked about Slack and, and teams and zoom and Miro. Those are all really powerful tools for working remotely. And I'm wondering if there's anything else, anything else, people should know about my favorite hack is there's a little Mac tool called meter and it lists all your zoom meetings in it. And then there's another at little applet called keyboard maestro, where you can map your keyboard quick keys to different actions. So I've got like mute video off, end meeting, you know, joy, automatically join my next meeting. I've got those buttons all on my keyboard so I can just kind of like jump in and out of meetings. And there's something super satisfying about slamming the F17 button and it closing zoom entirely without having to do anything else. You need, you need to, to map that. So there's also like the sound of like slamming an old school telephone rotary telephone. Yeah. It doesn't work so well with that touch bar. Yeah, exactly. It's not, it's not,

it's not, you don't get the, it's not quite as satisfying. Yeah. Those are great hacks. And I'll admit that for myself, I leave the zoom, uh, app window up all the time. And I've, I've set up a integration between zoom and outlook because our company uses outlook, Microsoft outlook for calendars and stuff. And it pulls all that stuff in. So I, instead of using the tool you mentioned, Paul, I've, which maybe I should go and check out. I just have zoom's app up there and it is telling me all the next meetings that are coming up and such, but something that is, that is super handy just in general, but it's becoming, I think more handy is, these, these extra tools and apps that integrate with these major. Communication platforms, like, like, like Slack, I think generically they're all called like add-ons or extensions or sometimes bots. So. One of the things that we might've relied on a lot as a, as a software development project team, you know, a while back was something called like a build monitor, which would be, you know, a bit, literally a big television that would show you the status of a whole bunch of stuff. You know, this, you know, these things are all the color green and that means they're up. This thing's the color yellow. And that means that maybe it's had some outages and maybe this other system is a, is a down and that represents as a big red, you know, star, you know, box on the screen or something like that. What, what I'm finding is a lot of teams are saying like, well, we're not all together to be, to look up at this giant monitor hanging above our heads, radiating information out at us. So we'll wire that into a Slack bot. So we'll have our team Slack channel or Teams channel or what have you there, there, all these things that are great with all these chat and communication systems or even email. And if something has a bunch of errors and you want to be notified about that, you tell it to do so. And it'll just chime in as like, almost like a little robot in your, as a member of your channel saying, Hey, this thing just went down. This thing crashed. This thing is, uh, was down,

but now it's back up and it was down for five minutes or something like that. So I think those kind of integrations, which I think is kind of what you were talking about, Paul, like these, these tools are kind of like optimize your, the way you interact with them. And they're either like radiating information back at you and saying, Hey, here's some stuff, do something or letting you communicate with them in the way that you want to do to tie that back into some of the more social activities. There's a, there's a Slack ad in called a donut, which will set up me. Well, if you opt into it in a channel, it'll set up a one-on-one random with someone else in that channel. So it's a good way to spend 15 minutes. The concept is you'd go get a donut, but I don't think anyone's getting too many donuts these days, but, and you get to spend, you know, you set up a one-on-one and you get to spend time with it, with a random person. So like in some of the channels I'm in that have, you know, dozens or hundreds of people, like, you know, the design practice channel, for example, where I like to lurk. It's great. It just, every once in a while, I just get a random one-on-one with a, with a designer I never met before. It's cool. It's like a targeted chat roulette. Yeah, exactly. A little more, a little more controlled. I want to ask just kind of in closing you two is like, and I think this has been alluded to, but I don't know if we've discussed it expressly is like, are there aspects, are you seeing aspects of remote, especially with regard to programming and, and kind of software development that are actually superior to working on site? And that, you know, again, I mean, whatever happens when, when offices start opening up again, but do you expect to see some of these things sticking around just because frankly, they work better? Yeah. I, I, I've had some conversations about this recently and I think the answer is, is definitely yes. You know, not that people are going to jettison, you know, every way they worked before and adopt something new, but there were, there have been some sort of surprise wins that everybody being remote again, with the technology to support everyone being remote kind of converging

at exactly the same time. I think it's no secret that, you know, VMware Pivotal Labs and, and, and the, and Pivotal, the history of the, that company that kind of VMware acquired that we were very much about pair programming, you know, two programmers working together on the same problem to, to implement the best solution together, literally on the same computer. And then remote pair programming, you know, is doing that same thing, but across some kind of screen sharing and, and audio, video, video technology, and that worked well for years. And it's keep gotten, it's gotten better and better over time, but something that's happened recently. And I think that COVID and we've talked about, you know, the, the flexibility people, not just want, but need people with kids at home, people with elderly parents, just the, the, the increased demands that the pandemic has put on people being at home. It has meant that, you know, people might have, there might be, people's schedules might be all over the place. And something that has been observed recently is that the, the idea of mob programming, or some people call it like party programming, because mob can have sort of a negative connotation of, you know, you might have three or four people collaborating together on a problem. Maybe there's a really hairy problem and people are stuck or they can't decide on a solution. So they all join a programming session, four or five or more people all at the same time. And they're all working on the solution together. Some kind of in the backseat, suggesting things, other people, literally sharing a virtual keyboard, so to speak, writing code at the same time and the seamless nature of which you can kind of jump between pairs. And this is my, my last project. I was in this role a lot where I would just sort of rotate throughout the day, dropping in to other groups, helping unblock them if they were stuck or just kind of seeing what they were doing. And, and I can kind of jump in and out of those scenarios a lot easier than I could if I was pulling up a physical chair and literally trying to L we were all, you know, bumping elbows or something like that. So that's something

that we're getting two people that are in person to join a zoom. So you can go in, you know? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And echo and all that kind of stuff. So like the seamless nature of being able to jump between groups has been the sort of, it's been a nice benefit to everybody learning. I mean, if there could be a benefit, it's everybody learning how to do that. And I think that that's going to be something that it's going to stick around. Yeah. And I wonder about some of the foundational things too. Like is Joe on a cold winter's day, is Joe going to be a better software engineer because he's, you know, in his slippers and didn't just spend an hour in traffic. I think those are the types of things we're going to learn about as things that people start to make decisions about how and where they're going to work when things start to open back up again. Yeah. There's definitely a mental health benefit that comes with, with being at home in terms of sleep and time and stress, all those things. And sometimes just shutting stuff off, frankly. Yeah. And it depends on the nature of the task you have to do. Yeah. I do not miss the New York City subway system one bit. Right. There's an interesting, you know, in this, you know, who knows what's really going to happen, but I can imagine the converse to an extent of, you know, you know, Paul, you spent an hour in the New York City, you know, subway system one way or something like that. And when you get to the office, you know, you might have an attitude of like, you know, darn it. I went through all this effort. I'm going to like, I'm not going to waste this day. Whereas, you know, Joe at home in his slippers, you know, not this Joe, some other Joe at home in his slippers on a cold winter's day, might find himself, you know, you're not quite as engaged, you know, as the roaring fireplace fire is going next to me. And, you know, there's a dog with its head on my lap. And, you know, am I really ready to like crush this like crazy algorithm I'm trying, trying to write? You know, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see if people stay as engaged for as long versus the stress that something like a commute, you know, might have, might have imposed.

If you're saying that people in New York are tougher than people in Colorado, I'll take it. Well, we're tough because we have to ski. Oh, well, on that note, it's really been a pleasure to speak with both of you. Thank you so much for your time. And I also just want to mention that we have a bunch of resources on remote software development, tips on, on remote work. And I'll be sure we post those in the show notes. So thanks again. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

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