Embedded - 330: I Just Want a Dog

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

Chris Svec (@christophersvec) chatted with us about going from engineer to manager and working from home.  Chris had many book recommendations (these are affiliate links): Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green (fiction) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink The Manager's Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier Resilient Management by Lara Hogan The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie   Chris is hiring for his team. Check out the iRobot Jobs page or look at the specific jobs he’s hiring for (in Boston, MA): Associate Software Engineer and Principal Software Engineer. Chris gave a talk to Purdue students about working from home, there is a video and a summary blog post. An interesting tweet about the difference between working from home and what people are doing now. The Canadian Federal government gave the following advice: Finally, Svec’s family wants a cat. They probably won’t get a Sphinx despite it matching all the criteria. Maybe an Abyssinian. Or maybe a dog.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White. I'm here with Christopher White. And we are joined by Chris Speck to talk about promotions and working from home. Promotions? Oh, hey, Chris. Hey, Chris. Hey, Alicia.

What are you promoting? It's not what I meant. I'm promoting myself oh oh always always be promoting that's not what i meant but we will talk about your promotion later can you tell us about yourself for people who don't remember you as the optimism slash cow guy. I like that. I'm going to start using that. I'm the optimism slash cow guy.

I am Chris Speck, and I'm an embedded software engineering manager at iRobot, where I work on our vacuuming robots, our mopping robots, and all the embedded stuff that goes into our various robots. If you believe my autobiographical Twitter bio, I'm also an all-around nice guy. So from every angle. Every angle. Like from 87 degrees, you're not mean. No, no, no.

If I approached you from 87 degrees exactly, you wouldn't punch me in that case. No, that's actually a local maximum. So you'd probably be greeted by a cash prize if you came in from that angle. But I'm omnidirectional. Nice guy. Well, when we finally meet in person, I'm going to bring a protractor, and we'll see about that cash prize.

I look forward to that. Okay, so lightning round. You've done this before, and I thought about changing all the rules and making it difficult, but in the end, it's lightning round. And we're really tired all the time now. Shall I go first?

Yes, please. What is your favorite programming tool? C-scope. What is your favorite debugging tool? Pencil and paper. Do you remember going places? And I have a follow-up. Yes, I do remember going places. Where did you used going places? And I have a follow-up. Yes, I do remember going places.

Where did you used to go? I used to go to things like grocery stores and places like vacation, things like that. I have no memory of those things. What's your favorite lightning round question? My favorite lightning round question? You've got one written here on the outline, which is, if you could teach a college course, what would you teach? I don't think I've ever been asked that one. If you could teach a college course, what would you teach? I hate that question.

I don't want to answer it. If I could teach a college course, I would teach embedded systems, you know, ground up, start with basically my embedded software engineering 101 stuff that I've written for the blog here and, you know, carry it on up through three or four levels of classes, which is the course I wanted to eventually write through the blog and I somehow lost steam halfway through. But that is it. If you got a cat, would it be most important for it to be fuzzy like long hair, short hair, or for it to have super cute ears, or for it to be a certain color? That's a lot of questions. Well, I'm asking for, you know, someone special.

So, what are my options? My choices are the fur. What kind of cat would you get, Chris? I'm not a cat person. I don't want a cat. If I had to get a cat, I'd want one that shed the least and had a reasonable personality if I had to get a cat. But I'm sorry, I'm a dog person, not a cat person. I don't want a cat. If I had to get a cat, I'd want one that shed the least and had a reasonable personality if I had to get a cat. But I'm sorry, I'm a dog person, not a cat person. I'm sorry.

So the Sphinx. Chris is getting a Sphinx. A Sphinx, sure. Does it tell riddles? Or would my cat tell dad jokes instead of riddles? Maybe. Should we continue this? Yeah, go ahead.

Okay, what's the best fiction book you've read recently best fiction i'm in the middle of a book whose name i cannot remember but i'm going to look up as i talk right now an absolutely remarkable come on kindle makes it very hard to see the title of the book you're reading an absolutely remarkable thing by hank green and it is a absolutely remarkable book. I'm enjoying it. I'm almost done with it. But it's a great book.

I'm enjoying it. I sent you a link with a picture of a Sphinx cat. You should look at it. Oh, that is, no, I don't want that cat. I do not want a Sphinx cat. Do not watch that. It doesn't shed. You know, okay, here's the thing.

Good personality. I've always wanted to get a PhD just so people would have to call me dr svec which sounds like kind of like an evil evil genius villain and if i ever do that then i will get a sphinx cat because that seems like the kind of cat that needs to go along with an evil genius but i think those cats you have to carry around like little misters to keep them to keep them from drying out and just spritz them occasionally. That's what I heard. So I heard you got a promotion. You were a promotion.

Something about a promotion. How do you manage a bunch of robots? That's my real question. You just code them to give you a promotion, and it's actually not that difficult. But yeah, no, we had a reorg at iRobot in October-ish, and the teams kind of split up. And one of the embedded teams needed a new manager. And so we have the parallel engineering and leadership track at iRobot, or I guess management and engineering track. So I made a lateral move from being an engineer to being a manager.

And so now I have a team of about six embedded software engineers that I manage, that I robot. And it's similar to the work that I was doing before. But now instead of actually typing on the keyboard in code, I'm typing on the keyboard in Jira most of the day, which is a project management tool. Which one of them is your favorite? Actually, I like all of them. I enjoy... I managed about 10 years ago. I did it for a little while, and I've just been doing individual contributor stuff

for the last 10 years. But I definitely enjoy both. I mean, there's something very good about having a task and being able to write the code and get the engineering thing working the way you want it to, test it, see that it's working, and kind of tie it up in a bow and commit it, and off you go. And it's very satisfying problems to solve and to deal with. management more, I think, on the whole than the engineering side of the house is that I like the communication. I like trying to kind of figure out what people are working on, helping to sort through priorities, helping to make sure that everyone is working on the thing that everyone else thinks they're

working on, and to try to create leverage in the organization. And I don't believe in the 10x engineer necessarily, but I think that if everyone's actually rowing in the same direction, that you can actually have really good results. And if everyone's rowing in different directions, then you're kind of hosed and it doesn't matter how good your engineers are, how good your programming is, or how good your bug rate is, you're hosed. Whereas I think good management and good sort good direction and priorities is a multiplier. So I enjoy the satisfaction from keeping everyone pointed in the right direction

as much or more than the actual engineering work. So you said you managed about 10 years ago. That was at a different company. Yes, yep. That was at a different company. Yes. Yep. That was a couple of companies ago. How has management changed in the last 10 years? And has it changed or have you? I've definitely changed. I mean, I'm 10 years older.

So, and I, you know, a lot has happened in the last 10 years. Like what? Oh, I'm sorry. Like what? It's not in the last like two months, ten months, five months, whatever. A lot has changed in the last, you know, four years and eight years and ten years, in fact. You know, I don't know that the sort of nature or goal of management has changed. Certainly, I feel like in the last couple of years, there seems to have been a lot more management things being written about sort of the people in the companies and the sort of motivations of the team and sort of keeping your people happy and engaged and productive.

As opposed to just simply, you know, marshalling resources, Henry Ford style on an assembly line. Not that knowledge work has ever been successfully compared to assembly line work, but I've definitely seen that kind of in the, in, you know, popular writings, whether it's blogs or books or podcasts or whatever's out there. I've always read business books and management books, you know, for my 20 year career, I've always been kind of reading that stuff. And it seems like the thinking has sort of changed to that. I have theories as to why that is, but that's that. Another big change is when I managed 10 years ago, it was a single team working on a single project. And so it was, you know, I had one job and it was just this one product to basically work on. And my job right now

is to work on, I have people working on three or four or five different projects and products at a time. And so it's a lot more distributed, fragmented. I'm not sure how you want to say it, but so there's a less focus on any single thing and kind of a bigger picture. So those are kind of the big differences. I mean, hey, I'm 10 years older, so I'm theoretically more mature as an adult. I don't have any good way to measure that, but I'm going to go by my age and we'll say I'm more mature as well. Has Agile figured into that change at all, or is that not really applicable to what you're talking about? It doesn't.

I don't think it factors in. When I've managed previously, it was 2010 was the last time I did. And we did not use agile. We used, you know, waterfall light, which, and quite frankly, it worked. We had a deadline and we kind of had a realistic schedule and we cut what didn't fit and it worked. Um, since then I've probably worked for the last 10 years.

I probably worked mostly in agile ish environments. And honestly, I don't think agile is a useful methodology, but it is the current flavor of methodology. So it's fine. It works as well as anything, I guess. But I don't know that it factors into my management philosophy at all other than, all right, I've got to use this system to actually, you know, get tasks done or get tasks assigned. And we use words like stories and story points instead of words like features, but I don't know that it factors in very much. Okay. Nathan Jones asked, how would you describe your leadership management style?

And as long as we're bringing up philosophies? My management philosophy is, I try not to use the word philosophy to describe it, but my thinking is that I just want to be a good manager for my people. And the way I try to do that is to mimic the good managers that I've had in the past. And Daniel Pink has a book called Drive, and his whole theory is that there's kind of three things that you need to be effective at being motivated and doing a good job. And those three things are autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And those three things are things that I try to help crystallize, motivate, and sort of prioritize for with people who work for me. So that's kind of long-winded, a more tactical, practical kind of a thing is I want to basically get all the roadblocks out of the way of my team, of the people who work with me, and let them do the interesting technical work

that is the goal of the company or the project we're working on and try to clear all the roadblocks out of the way. So they don't have to worry about what's a priority. They don't have to worry about getting a keyboard for themselves. They don't have to worry about more meetings than are necessary. They don't have to worry about finding information. Basically clear all the roadblocks out of the way, keep everyone moving in the same direction and hopefully keep everyone working on work that they find interesting. And when they are getting bored or something, you're kind of burned out on something to figure out, okay, what's the next thing you should work on? Here's some ideas, you know, try to try to help and guide

them. Um, you know, the days of a manager sort of planning your career for you are long gone if they ever existed in the first place. But I, I want to be the type of manager who can help people sort of find, find happiness in whatever role they're in. And when it's time for a change, hopefully within the same company, trying to find a different group or different project or different technology or different task that keeps them engaged and helps to build their autonomy, their mastery, and their purpose. That's a great answer. Are there other books you'd recommend? Yeah, there's a few that I think we talked about before the show.

Actually, one of my favorite recent sort of management books is something that you recommended to me, Alicia, which is called Manager's Path. And that is Camille. I'm scared to pronounce her last name. Do you want to try it for me? I thought it was Fournier. Fournier. try for me? I thought it was 40A. 40A. So she wrote this book, Manager's Path, about her time at various levels from individual contributor all the way up to VP, I believe. And the book follows sort of that trajectory from individual contributor all the way up to executive.

And each chapter or two is about a different stage of that management process. And even if you never want to manage or never want to really, you know, if you just want to do engineering, you know, individual contributor for your entire career, that's fantastic. That book shows you what your manager and your manager's manager and your director and your VP and your executives are thinking and might care about on a daily basis. And, you know, this goes back to my whole empathy shtick. But if you understand what your boss is, what their problems are, what her stresses are, what her boss is asking her to do, then you will be a more effective employee because, you know, you're part of your an organization to see what different people along the hierarchy have to worry about on a day-to-day basis. I like that one because people have asked me, well, what is supposed to happen in a one-on-one? New engineers ask that.

And as if the manager is controlling the one-on-one entirely. Yes. And that book says, wait a minute, you should go in with your own agenda and figure it out and make sure that you have a plan as an engineer. And then as a manager, you need a plan too. But those plans aren't the same plans. And the goal of the one-on-one is to to merge them and get the information exchange you need done i don't know that's one of the things i really liked that it was it was helpful for engineers i thought yes yes and i feel like there was a it's been a little while since i

read it but i think there was like practical like here are one-on-one questions that you and you know that the manager and the employee should both be asking and kind of answering along the way. And you had another one we were talking about, uh, that I hadn't heard about, uh, resilient management. Yeah. Resilient management by Laura Hogan. And this book I've probably discovered in the last six months or so. And this book is, is fantastic. This book is very, um, very people focused. It's sort of understanding the psyche and the needs and the kind of the human side of the people you work with, and sort of how to address everyone's needs and how to how to get tactical. And here are good one on one questions to ask, here are good ways to see how people are doing. And in, I forget if it's in the book or if it's in a bunch

of blog posts she has along with the book that she's got lists and lists of different, different questions for different sorts of situations for one-on-ones. And again, these are questions that, you know, you, a manager can ask or the employee can ask either way. And of course, as you, you know, you're, you're always an employee and you're always managing someone, even if it's just yourself. So, uh, you know, having, having those questions, like you said, Alicia from the manager's path book and understanding that you, you kind of own your career and you should own both people in, in the, in the manager workplace environment should own the one-on-one and that career conversation, I think is, is a great, you know, a great way to think about the response, the shared responsibility that we all should have

a piece of. She also did a couple of good talks. I can find links to them, but she did a couple of good talks that are on YouTube or Vimeo or one of those services, which I, which I also really enjoyed. It looks like her book is a little hard to get ahold of, but I will figure out how to get ahold of it and make sure it's in the show notes. Okay, great. I can send you a link afterwards, too. And you had lunch with the guy who wrote Mythical Man Month? Not quite.

Not quite. I forget how this came up. So Fred Brooks, who's the very distinguished former IBM engineer who wrote The Mythical Man Month, among other books. He actually lives in North Carolina, and he was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a long time, and I live in North Carolina. I've had the good fortune to see him speak twice in the area here. Once he gave a talk about computing history, which was just fantastic. And the second time I was part of a computer science papers group and we read one of his papers and he actually showed up. I'm not sure

if the person who was doing the paper reading, they must've invited him, but there was probably six or seven of us there and Fred Brooks showed up and he sat next to me at these cafeteria tables. And you can find the footage on YouTube where I'm sitting next to Fred Brooks discussing this paper. It's a little silly. It's probably the closest I've ever come to sort of a hero or a very, very famous computer science person. But yeah, I got to talk with him. He's a great guy. The most surprising thing was, you know, he was giving this talk on computer history and giving this talk about his seminal paper that he wrote. And, you know, the guy's a legend, but he had absolutely no problem saying, I don't know, to any question to which he did not know. And he would say, you know, I have experience in XYZ, but I have no experience about what you're asking me, so I don't

know. And I've noticed that that takes a lot of, you know, to say, I don't know, especially when you have a reputation as someone who knows a bunch of stuff, that takes some courage and some confidence, I think. And so that was surprising to me. You don't hear I don't know from famous people who are being asked their opinions very much. His book is tough for me. I mean, it's what, 30 years old now? I think it's older than that. Yeah. But it's just so difficult to read and realize, wait a minute, they knew all this stuff.

And we're still battling the same, oh, sure, put us in open offices. I'm sure that will make the bug count go down. It came out in 75. That's lovely. Nice. That book is older than me. I mean, that's true of a lot of things, though, that seem obvious to many people, or obvious in hindsight,

but there continues to be superstition because people either just don't want it to be true or, or think that they're somehow different. Right. That, okay. Well, yes, it's true that generally adding people doesn't make a project going faster, but it could work for us. Right. I actually, I invoked, I invoked him and the adding people to a late project doesn't make it, doesn't make it any better. I invoked that today, um, in a meeting where we were talking about staffing. And I'm not sure if it was received or heard, but I still believe it's true, at least in this case. Isn't there some joke about giving your manager multiple copies of it? Yeah.

Nice. Nice. Give him nine copies and see if he reads it in one ninth of the time, basically. Okay, so you are a manager and you started last fall. And then there was this whole thing that started in January. Has that affected your management at all? Yes, yes, it is. I assume when you say that thing in January, you mean the new year. You know, everyone took time off for New Year's. That was a pretty big thing. Oh, yeah. That was the important part.

That was the important part. No. Is that what we're talking about? No, no. I mean this whole, let's all stay inside and not talk to anybody except over Zoom. Oh, that. No, that hasn't affected anything. Nothing at all.

Nothing at all. No, of course it did. Of course it did. It's, man, this is an interesting time. Yeah, it's definitely affected everything about basically anyone listening to this, I'm sure. And certainly, you know, at iRobot. and we have two main offices. We have one in Massachusetts in Bedford and we have one in Pasadena, California. Those are our two main U S offices. We also have offices in China and in Europe and in London and all over the world. Um, and of course, most of us starting in February or March, depending have had to go home and stay home. Um, I've been working from home for five plus years now. So for me, the, you know, I'm still on the same zoom webcam that I'm on every day, but my entire team who all worked in either the Pasadena office or the

Bedford office had to go home, had to basically over a weekend, take all their work stuff that they could, including robots and debuggers and oscilloscopes and DMMs and power supplies and load it into their car and go home. And, you know, at this point there's the talk of, you know, phase reopenings, um, in Massachusetts and California have, have started talking about that, but we are all still at home and yeah, that's, that's changed, changed the daily, uh, the daily workflow of basically all of us. So as somebody who's worked remotely for a long time and then have your whole team and company shift to working remotely, has watching, and you can speak in generalities,

but has watching people who are used to working in an office try to make that transition, has that been interesting to watch? Are there any common are there any like common foibles that people run into? Uh, was there advice you were giving or was it just kind of smooth transition? Um, it, it went reasonably well. Um, I got asked for some advice, you know, being, being one of the few people who'd worked from home, we had about five or six of us, maybe, maybe 10 of us who worked from home full time. And so we were all asked, you know, in both sort of public and private settings, Hey, what do you recommend? You know, as we started to recruit people online, I was asked, I've done phone screens interviews

remotely for five years now. And so, you know, our, our recruiting people, you know, asked for advice on that kind of stuff. Um, the, it, the, the toughest part, honestly, is that it's not so much that, oh, we're all deciding to go work from home because we all want to go work from home. It's we're working from home because we don't have a choice. And for those of us with kids, suddenly your kids are home because their schools aren't open or their daycares aren't open or their, um, you know, their, their, whatever, whatever alternate care situation they have is not open anymore. So that has been by far the hardest part for part for those of us with kids is just trying to make work from home work when you're also trying to be a stay-at-home teacher at home,

stay-at-home parent from home, and trying to juggle that. You know, my wife is at home and she does not work outside the house. So when my son came back home and his school closed, she was able to pick up, you know, the teaching from home kind of thing. The school does virtual stuff and my son is young, so it's not terribly, terribly academic, academically rigorous. So I would say we have it pretty easy. you know, if you have like a second grader and a fourth grader at home and you don't want them to fall behind, but both parents or the single parents are working, juggling that is just an immense, immense responsibility and immense stressor. And so that is where I see sort of the hardest part of how to respond to this and how to be productive in your family and how to

be productive at work and how to be mentally not, you know, not stressed all the time. Although I think most of us are mentally at least partially stressed all the time now. There's a big difference between working from home, working remotely as you have done for a long time, as we have done for a long time and working with people who are suddenly working from home with kids under great stress from everything. This is just such a different working from home that it's hard to compare it. And it's hard to say, well, are people good at working from home? This isn't a good way to tell. Yeah.

I mean, everyone asks me, wow, so this for you is just like every other day, right? This is like, nothing has changed for you. And groceries take three hours now instead of 15 minutes. Exactly. I say, you know, like, yes, I come to the same room and sit in the same chair and, you know, have the same webcam, but you know, the 90% of my life that is not my work day is completely different, right? I have a kid down the hall and I have no, I used to go out to lunch with another neighbor who works from home. We'd go out like once a week and I don't actually see him anymore, except to wave at him from across the, across the driveways, right? You know, we don't get, we don't get, we don't go out to eat on a Friday night anymore because we are just, you know,

done with a week. I want to go have a nice meal somewhere and celebrate the week, right? You know, we can't get groceries because we have to go and, well, we can get groceries, but it's kind of a pain and you have to go and bleach them or burn them in fire or whatever it is you do to clean your groceries. And so, yeah, everything is absolutely different, even though the eight to five part of my day mechanically looks the same, but mentally my brain is minimum 25% kind of stressed out with just the general situation that is the pandemic and that is the current situation. You mentioned people going to the office and taking home oscilloscopes and robots. One of our listeners, Kieran O'Leary, asked, how do you deal with engineers bringing hardware and equipment home?

Who's liable if something gets damaged, stolen, or goes missing? And how do you think you will deal with this if it's a problem? I have never seen that be a problem, honestly. I have a bunch of gear at home here and uh i have never thankfully knock on wood i should actually knock on i'm gonna actually knock on wood um hopefully i didn't mess your audio up chris but uh i've never had something get broken on my watch i've had a couple keyboards die you've never had anything get broken well nothing expensive i had a couple keyboards die i've had a mouse die i've had a laptop die but i don't think you're trying hard enough i mean it depends on the what we're talking about right because so so if it's test equipment

like an expensive oscilloscope or stuff that's always tagged and you know there's the whole inventory management side of it if it's boards and things for product development i mean yeah they're expensive but they're also useless after the product is done so i guess you know i used to go back to fitbit headquarters with a with a tupperware bucket full of just junk just piles of boards which probably cost you know 100 grand at the time because i had fpga things and all this stuff and i just walk into the office say hey where do i put all this and somebody i put in the corner and it probably is still sitting there to this day uh so is it a different you know and if you if you break like development hardware sending new development hardware isn't

a big deal it's not really a thing of value right except for that moment that's that's exactly that's exactly it and you know i guess i have i have done soldering work, and I have definitely hosed. I've broken things that way. But again, I've never thought about it more than, oh, shoot, I guess I have to ask for another PCB to get sent to me. That's another two-day FedEx delay. So the stolen or going missing part, that's honestly never been a concern. Many of us bring stuff home all the time. The nice thing, I guess, one way that iRobot in particular, and I'm guessing many companies that are headquartered in the New England area, at least, is winter happens.

And that means every year there are at least one, if not many, many days of winter storms such that everyone has to stay home. And so I don't know if it helped us, but I can say that when we went to being all remote, our IT infrastructure, like our VPN or networks and everything, it all, it all worked. There was a couple of little hiccups, but for the most part that worked, everyone already knew how to bring robots home and get them, you know, working at home. My team in particular, you know, we know that, okay, I use a scope and I use a power supply on a daily basis. I'm going to bring that home so that, you know, we know that, okay, I use the scope and I use a power supply on a daily basis. I'm going to bring that home so that, you know, we just kept a list of what people take and we, we trust everybody and, you know, we're all adults and we're all, we're all, you know, uh, professionals at this.

And so honestly, other than, you know, we, we keep track of stuff, but we're not really worried about the going missing part. And you know what, if, if something breaks and something breaks and you, you get a new one, Cause that, that happens. It's just how it works. In the office too. Yep.

And, and while our test equipment, our oscilloscopes and such are expensive, they are still cheaper than the time needed to do the same job without them. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, if one employee is like breaking something every day, then okay, you might ask what's going on. That's true. That's true. Maybe take it out of the kid's room. Maybe don't, you know, drink your coffee directly over the board while you're... Actually, I mean, I'll have to follow up with the guy who works for me that, that I've been ordering three keyboards a week for him for the last year.

I should probably ask about that. Shouldn't I? Something going on there. Karen had another interesting question. Do you have any suggestions for managing people who are older than yourself? Um, my team is six people and only one of them is younger than me i think that's true if any of them are listening i think you're the one you're no no he knows who he is he knows who he is um no but my team is actually i'm super super fortunate my team is very senior they are all better engineers than me and i do not have to worry about,

you know, giving them advice on how to do their technical work. The, um, yeah, the, the, the people I work with are very good, very senior engineers. And, you know, even the one, the one guy who's a little bit younger than me, um, he's still, he's still great. Like I don't have to give engineering advice ever, um, with my, with my team, other than, you know, we brainstorm about weird bugs and weird ideas and that kind of thing. But I have managed and been managed by people older and younger. I've been on both sides of that. So I definitely, I definitely know that it can be an issue, but I have not had to deal with it in kind of a negative way. And so I don't, I don't have any suggestions, I guess, other than sort of like, I just assume everyone's a professional, everyone wants to do a good job. And I happen to be a manager,

which means I happen to be part of my job is to make priority decisions and ask people to, you know, do one thing or another. And I'm fortunate to work with, you know, good professionals who love tackling hard problems. And we have way more problems and way more interesting work than, you know, than hours in the day to do it. And so I just get to basically turn people loose on fun problems and age doesn't really, doesn't really seem to play a part in it. Um, if I were, you know, if I were 22, instead of in my forties, maybe, maybe that would be a different thing if the differential was greater. But I've been fortunate to not have to really deal with any negative parts of that myself. How do you know when enough communication is happening between your team, given everyone is remote?

Or even when they were in the office and you were remote? And how do you encourage people who don't communicate enough to do so? So my, my first rule is a rule that I stole from Michael Lopp, who runs a blog called Rans and Repos. And he's another, another author who I really like. He's got a book called managing humans and his, his central, he was VP at Slack among other things.

And he used to work at Apple. And his whole shtick is if you have one rule of management, only one, the rule is half an hour, one-on-one, every employee, every week. And so that is what I do. That's like the first thing that I did when I found out I was going to get to manage a team was to set up a half an hour weekly one-on-one every employee every week no like no ifs ands or buts that one it might get moved if conflicts come up but it will not get canceled it won't get you know deferred for a week so the minimum baseline is a half an hour conversation and and that conversation should hopefully be driven by the employee not by the manager but you know you both bring you both bring topics to the table every week how do you do remote one-on-ones the same way you do them in person who does use zoom um you know that's that

i hate zoom i hate zoom with a fiery passion do you hate zoom or do you hate she hates online she heard video well i mean i love slack i love. I'm fine with phone or whatever this is. This is a podcast. This is a podcast. Thank you so much. And there's two of us to say. But the video aspect, I mean, it's just, there's something in my brain that just keeps firing that says what that person said doesn't make sense with how they look and it's it's a video thing and i just and so i spend most of my call trying not to make

wincing faces as people's videos get stuck or the audio and video aren't synced or I can see somebody not paying attention where in a room that wouldn't matter because I would be paid. They wouldn't be right in front of me. I just, Zoom does not make my brain happy. Huh. I haven't really had that happen. Most people change their behavior a bit when they're on video. You know, just when I've done meetings. But if people seem to be drifting off and stuff, then that's certainly weird. Well, I mean, normal drift off.

Well, like, not getting coffee, but, you know, the kid comes into the room and they have to do something. That's fine. I totally understand you have to do that. But if it wasn't video, I wouldn't know and I wouldn't have to filter that but if it was if it wasn't video i wouldn't know and i wouldn't have to filter that out of the information i'm bringing it yeah anyway my favorite part was being projected into all hands rooms on oh like 87 inch screens yes yes i i am long and then seeing myself on camera because it's at the back of the all hands room on giant screen talking. It's very, very disconcerting.

It is. My friendly colleagues would frequently love to take pictures of me on the 87 inch screen where it's just me on there. If anyone from Zoom is listening, I have begged them from this. Can you please make a mode in Zoom where it shrinks? Shrinks. If it can't auto-detect the size of the monitor, at least let me push a button that says I want to be no more than 1-8th the size of the screen or something. Because no one needs to look at

87-inch Chris Speck on the screen. Like nobody. This is cruel. I want it to shrink me down and scale the pitch of my voice with the shrink with the size. Can I start talking now? Okay, I'm sorry i you you were uh you were talking about remote one-on-ones being just like in person and i derailed that because they aren't but i

understand the concept so maybe i should let you go back to it video video is hard it is hard you know i i still think video is better than just pure audio. I do not get derailed by the differentness, I guess, quite the same as you with the video versus audio. You know, for my remote one-on-ones, I try to do, you know, make eye contact, you know, put my camera on top of the screen and at least be looking towards the camera as much as I can so that then I put the zoom image. Yeah, you got to put the window with the person as close to the camera yes that is important yep and so just I try to be attentive and try to you know this sounds this sounds almost dishonest but make sure I am appearing attentive because if I just look at the screen that I'm not looking at them and so I try to you know keep some semblance of eye contact and just have the conversation, you know, how's it going? What is going well? What is not going well? What's stressing you out? Tell me about, you know, what was the hard part of doing this? What's getting in your way? These sorts of questions. And then it takes time. I mean, I've been managing and doing these one-on-ones with my team for about six months. And I would say, I feel like I'm, I, and I have, I'm fortunate that I've known everyone, but one of my people, um, for years, at least a couple of years, um, at the company. And so

I already knew them. And so to start to do one-on-ones was getting to build on that relationship. Um, but it takes, it takes daily, well, not daily, but it takes weekly, regular, repetitive times just to see people and get to know them and, you know, learn what they're doing at home, learn their personalities and what they're working on. And it just kind of built up that relationship. So your answer to Jakey Poo's question about how do you encourage people who don't communicate enough is to, like, pay attention and act interested? Yes, and ask questions questions that's really novel yes i invented it i've patented it in fact it is tough though i mean because sometimes you have other interests yes absolutely how to win friends and influence people is a very old and very classic book.

And it sounds almost dishonest, but it is another book which I recommend, which I think is free in many libraries right now. We're like one of these like always available books in many libraries right now. Anyway, and it, you know, Dale Carnegie, I think is the author of it, is basically saying, if you act interested in people, they will like you. And if you act interested in people, they will like you. And if you act interested in people, you will be interested in people. And so asking the questions and kind of just basically, even if you don't like socialization, acting like a human will make you appear more human. Mm-hmm. No, that's very true. I have occasionally, when I've been at like a conference or at lunch or something that I realize, wow, I'm getting bored, I totally will start podcasting them, interview podcasting them.

Not really, but I start doing the podcasting. Okay, you need to ask a question now. This is an interview. You can't just mumble. And it interests me, and it usually makes the person I'm with far more comfortable. And it is a matter of acting interested makes you be interested in not too short a time. You've got to be careful, though. Not too long time.

You've got to be careful with that, though, right? Because there's a fine line between acting interested and energy vampire. Yes. I'm not making a joke you can there's a level of sincerity you have to achieve right you can't just be definitely yeah i mean i think there's a skill there that's what i'm saying yeah well and i mean my my goal is to like have a good healthy work relationship with my colleagues not to you know not to dive in and learn all their secrets, not to, you know, just make 15 minutes of chit chat to get to know them better. Exactly. You know, for the relationship, you know, I'm not going to be best friends with most of my colleagues, but I want to know who they are. No.

Oh, you have you have a couple of kids in high school. How is that going? It's all it's all stuff I want to know who they are. Oh, you have a couple of kids in high school. How is that going? It's all stuff I want to know anyway. I'm interested in people and I like to know my colleagues. So it's all kind of part of it. I'm curious, have either of you managed a team remotely? I think you did, Chris. Alicia, have you managed a team remotely? I was in the office with half my team and then half my team was scattered across

the U S. Okay. So you both have, you buy Chris. I never managed remotely. I was, I was a tech lead remotely, but, uh, both times I was a manager, both or three times, all the times I was a manager were in office. Okay. Okay. I just wonder what, what did you all do for remote one-on-ones on either side of the IC manager table? Did you have any one-on-one strategies or things that particularly worked or that fell flat every single time? I had one-on-ones every week or so with my manager at Fitbit, depending on the manager, since I had 27 of them over the course of six months. Two weeks. of them over the course of six months. But yeah, we all had Zoom meetings and they would generally be, find a conference

room, so they were not remote most of the time, so they'd be in a conference room by themselves. And, you know, like the same kind of stuff you're talking about, but it also depends on how senior you are compared to the manager, right?

How candid you can be about certain things and what sort of topics come up. Because if the gap is wide, you know, you don't want to be telling a junior engineer, yeah, had a meeting with the director and this is what's going down and you should know that bad thing. And you don't want to share that with, with junior people necessarily because they may not know how to process it. And vice versa, a junior person might not be comfortable sharing, you know, the, the smallest minutia of office stuff that's going on with, with their manager. So it was a little different most recent because I felt like I was more of a

manager, a peer to the manager. And so we would tend to talk back and forth about all kinds of things very candidly. Yeah. Wait a minute. All your managers left. Yeah, I know. It's, it's the curse of me. Chris was too candid. He was too candid. Wait, wait, wait. But the last one, the last one, she left

like a couple weeks after I quit. So, the curse was broken. For me, it was about when I'm once. And partially getting to know people

as people, but also, as you said, trying to make sure that while they knew I was happy to have them in my team, I was also trying to make sure that they were going to grow out of my team. That if they wanted more skills, I could do what I could to make that possible. If they were interested in a different part of the system, okay, let's put you where you're adjacent to that part so you can start learning a little about it. But yeah, and it was, I think the difference for me for junior versus senior engineers, I mean, some of it was what you can tell them about strategy that will make them crazy.

Junior engineers will believe everything upper management says. Senior engineers will just laugh and say, yeah, we'll talk about it next week. But my junior engineers didn't tell me about personal problems as much. One of, like major, my dad passed away or my dad is sick, sort of things that as a mid-career person, you say that, everybody gives you a pass for a little while. And when it's your turn to give other people a pass, you do that. But as a junior engineer, a lot of them wouldn't tell me these big things. They would only break under the stress or get more stressed and cry,

which, anyway, yeah. I wish now that I had been a little more direct with some of my junior folks about what was bothering them in their lives. And at the time, I was like, I'm not your therapist. Just tell me the work stuff. But now I wish I had been a little more empathetic. That's good to know. That's good. And I've got a new college grad joining my team in about a month. And I've got an intern joining on Monday. Oh, you kept your intern.

I did keep my intern. Yes. I know that many companies I know are choosing not to go forward with interns or even offers. But thankfully, I get to keep my intern, and she starts Monday. Very excited to have her. And I've got a new college grad who was our former intern, who was a great intern, and we're getting him back. We're actually getting two of our former interns back, and they start in June.

So we will have more. And I heard that if somebody wants to work for you, now is the opportunity? Now is the opportunity. Thank you. I totally forgot. Speaking of promotions, I will promote two jobs that I'm hiring for on my team. So my embedded software engineering team at iRobot in Bedford, Massachusetts, although right now remote, we are hiring a kind of associate level, so zero to three year kind of experience, embedded software engineer, and then a principal software engineer, which is more like 10 plus years. If you go to careers, whatever iRobot's careers website is, you'll find them on there. But I'm very happy to answer any questions. We are looking for, you know,

the principal person is someone who's worked in embedded systems for a while and knows a fair amount in embedded systems and is capable of mentoring someone and has been around the block a little bit. Don't have to work with robots necessarily. Many people who start with us have never actually turned a motor in their life, but they understand embedded systems. And of course, the associate, what we call our associate software engineer, kind of a zero to three-year experience, zero to two-year experience is someone who is typically a new college grad or close to it, who knows something about embedded systems and would like to work for a company like iRobot. I would love it if anyone would want to reach out to me.

Send me an email csvec at iRobot.com. So cspec, my last name, at iRobot.com. And I'm happy to answer any questions. And if you send me a resume, that'd be great too. And if you don't remember his email, you can hit the contact link on embedded.fm and we will forward it along. And if you don't remember the embedded.fm contact link, then you can email me and I'll forward that along. I don't think that one's right now. Bonus points if anyone emails me and asks that. Okay, there was one other thing I wanted to talk to you about,

although we've kind of covered the, you have been giving advice about working from home, but this is working from home plus plus. You gave a talk in early April, late March, early April at Purdue about working from home. What was that about? That was about a talk about working from home. So I'm a very, this is the show on which I am talking. Thank you, Perd. I am a very proud Purdue grad. I went to Purdue for both my undergrad and my master's degree. My whole family, my wife, my three sisters-in-law, my brother, my mother-in-law just retired from Purdue. So definitely a Purdue fan. I love Purdue. And the ECE department, they've obviously gone, Purdue has gone like many universities and

basically everyone else has gone remote, has gone virtual. And I reached out and, uh, you know, I know some people there still. And so they, they had like a senior seminar class and they asked if I would give a talk about working from home and I've done it for a while. And so from a hiring manager standpoint and from someone who's simply worked remote for years every day, um, if I could just give some advice and it was great. It was, um, uh, I think it was like a hundred students or something like that showed up, um, virtually of course. And I just tried to give what I thought might be helpful advice about how to work from home, whether that working is school or whether it's actually working and just to try to get some context for what,

what students can learn out of this time, in addition to their coursework, which is tough and which is grueling and which is hard to do even when you're on campus and everything is normal. And suddenly you have to do it in your apartment or in your parents' house or in your childhood bedroom or who knows where else. So I tried to give some helpful advice there. As you did this, you also wrote a blog post for Embedded FM. And one of the things that I really needed to read at that point was the idea of the habits. You go

into your office at eight o'clock and you work. And maybe you work and you do successful things, but I needed to get back in the habit of you spend the time in there. You don't have to do it forever, but you sit down and even if your brain is fuzzy, even if you don't want to work, you do the habit. You say you do this routine regardless of whether you're feeling excited or bored or whether you feel like working or not. And you do it because you think of yourself as a professional and it's your job. How did the kids respond to that? How did the students respond to that? I mean, did they understand the idea of you do it because it's your job?

I honestly have no idea. The call was done using a Zoom webinar because it was 100 plus people. And so I have no idea what the students were. I couldn't see any of them. I could just see the professor who was kind of there as the class organizer. And, uh, she made some, some positive comments about, I got a couple of, you know, uh, Facebook or Twitter comments about students who said it was helpful, but I honestly have no idea if, if that, uh, if that was helpful or not. I

certainly hope so. Although, as I was talking, I thought, you know, 20, 21-year-old me, why did not listen to 40-something-year-old me talking about this? But it was the best advice I had to give. Well, the other thing I liked was the idea, and again, I'm not sure that 20-year-old me would have been able to take it but that if they can figure out how to learn in this environment it's going to be incredibly important for the rest of their career yes yes learning at home forcing yourself to do it all that yep yep i mean the learning how to learn aspect is is huge and i think the two main points, which you've pulled from what I said, the two main points are one, establish a habit, a daily habit of when you work and also where you work, if at all possible. And the way you go sit down at the same table, same time every day, if you can, and do the work, whether you feel like it or not. Because many days you're not going to feel like it. Many days I don't feel like it and you just do it. And okay. Some days are going to be more productive than others. That's okay. But it's okay to have an off day. It's okay to have a great day.

The second thing is the, um, you know, I didn't want to make this time seem all rainbow and everything's great, but one positive outcome from being forced to suddenly kind of be more independent and learn a little more on your own is that you can take it seriously and attempt to learn how to learn. You know, when you get to work, when you get out of college, you're going to be presented with problems that don't have answers in the back of the book. They don't have an answer key. They don't have an answer at all. And you're going to be researching technologies that don't exist or didn't exist when you were in college. You're going to be Googling what you're not going to be Googling because the problems aren't Googleable.

If your company, if you end up at a job and everything you can do is Googleable, then maybe your company is not going to be around for too long. I'll stack overflow at least. I mean, a portion of your job, but if you can replace your entire job with just a couple of stack overflow posts,

maybe you're not being challenged enough. Either that or, you know, you have a gig you want and ride it out for as long as you can. But yeah, I mean, learning how to learn, learning how to kind of motivate yourself and be disciplined is not easy. It is a skill. It is a muscle.

And school does not build that muscle all the time. So, you know, this is an opportunity to maybe attempt to build that muscle. It's tough. I mean, it's tough to give that advice as well as the advice of, but you should take care of yourself first. Yes, yes. And I think that's actually something that's feedback you gave me at the end of my blog post as I was writing this was, you know, put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you, I think is the way you phrased it. Yeah. You have to be functional yourself before you can help others. So, take care of yourself. Yeah. And it's so easy to say things like, oh, make a habit of it, have discipline, get down and do this. And then, oh, by the way, I have a three-year-old and a five-year-old at home and they're screaming and, and they have a dirty diaper, and I'm on a call.

And you know what? Who cares? Like, work takes second priority when your kids are in trouble or when, you know, your personal life is just really a mess. And so, I hope that the advice doesn't come off as saying, sounding like tone deaf, because not everyone can do it. Not everyone can do it all the time. And it takes a lot of privilege and opportunity to be able to even take advantage of that. So I hope I'm not coming off as tone deaf here. It's not easy.

And some days it will be easier. And some days it will be harder. You know, a single parent with two kids is going to have a much harder time than someone who has childcare full time, right? I mean, so I don't want to come off as saying everyone should be able to do this exactly like I do it but they should shouldn't they they should no no goodness no this this this is the time this is the time to to have some compassion for yourself

have some compassion for your colleagues for your employees for your manager for your uh for your neighbors who you disagree with and uh and for yourself and for your families. And just relax a little bit and forgive people a little bit quicker. And yeah, just have compassion. Well, now it seems redundant to ask this, but do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I think that was it. I think that was it. I'm just going to leave it there.

Our guest has been Chris Speck, software engineering manager at iRobot. Thanks, Chris. Have a good one. Thanks a lot. Thank you to Christopher White for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to the Patreon supporters in Slack who helped with the questions. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at showatembedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. We'll have a whole bunch of show notes links with books that Svek has suggested.

And now I'm going to read a little bit of the Sphinx Wikipedia for you because I don't think you're appreciating the Sphinx cats. Sphinx are known for their extroverted behavior. They display a high level of energy, intelligence, curiosity, and affection for their owners. They are one of the more dog-like breeds of cats, frequently greeting their owners at the door and friendly when meeting strangers. I really think, you know, you don't want them to shed. You want them dog-like.

You really should reconsider this. I just want a dog, thanks. Embedded is an independently produced radio show that focuses on the many aspects of engineering. It is a production of Logical Elegance, an embedded software consulting company in California. If there are advertisements in the show, we did not put them there and do not receive money from them. At this time, our sponsors are Logical Elegance and listeners like you. Thank you. Thank you.

Let me do that again. That was weird. That was weird.