Programming Throwdown - Working From Home

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

Many of us have found ourselves working from home due to current events. In this show, we chat with Adam Bell who has been working from home for the past decade. We also do the show interactive on Twitch.tv and take your questions! Give it a listen for a ton of great advice on working from home and some pitfalls to avoid. Thanks again for your donations in these tough times. We really appreciate your support! Feel free to continue the discussion on Discord (link in the show notes)! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2020/07/episode-103-working-from-home.html ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

programming throwdown episode 103 working from home with adam bell take it away jason hey everybody so um this is a pretty interesting episode we're uh we're actually uh live on twitch and so this is something we tried patrick what maybe five years ago or something a really long time ago um and uh you know i don't know why did we stop recording to twitch i think i think part of it was we got a lot more engagement on Discord, and the Twitch just couldn't seem to kick off. But since then, especially recently, a lot of folks have been saying, oh, we kind of want to see the podcast on either Twitch or YouTube or one of these platforms. And so we're going to give it a second go. We'll record some episodes on Twitch, and we'll see how it goes.

It really depends on you, our loyal fans, to let us know if this medium gives some extra value. Yeah, I think Twitch has grown a lot. And also, especially these days, which I'm sure we're going to talk about in a few minutes, I think people's appetite for consuming online content has only been going up. Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, a lot of people ask us why we use Skype and not Zoom.

And I think the answer, correct me if I'm wrong, Patrick, is just that we never tried Zoom. I mean, we've been doing this podcast longer than Zoom's been around. Oh, that's true, too. Yeah, that's very true. But you get some inside baseball. You know, we do a Skype call. We record it through Skype. And also Patrick does some recording. And then we kind of mix it all together afterwards. But anyway, so today we have Adam, and we're going to all chat about working from home, which is something we've all been doing a lot of lately. And it's something that Adam personally has been doing for, what, nine years full time,

which is way longer than either of us. And so I'm sure you're going to have a ton of insights. But yeah, maybe Adam,, you could start kick it off by just talking about, like, what made you work from home? Like, was it your decision? Or is it something that was circumstantial? And what kind of started that? Yeah, great question. Yeah, so in 2011, like I live in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, it's got like 85,000 people. It's not the tech hub that you hear about, right? So I had a boss who had left and went to work somewhere else, actually in Waterloo area in Ontario. And he wanted me to come work for him.

And he said, like, hey, maybe you could do it remote because I didn't want to move there. And so I took a day off work. I drove down there. I did all these interviews. And he said at the beginning, kind of like, oh, so they're going to want you to say you're moving here. But like, it's all cool, which was a little weird. Oh, no. So I went through like all the interviews and then I met with HR last and she was like, OK, so when are you thinking of moving to Waterloo?

And I was like, well, you know, I'm not like I think if you want to say that I'm moving here, then that's fine. But, you know, I'm not. And she's like, I don't know what you're talking about. This job is for here. So it became a whole thing. I drove home thinking I didn't get the job, which seemed like a great job. And then like my former manager phoned me up and said, I heard there was some sort of misunderstanding. We're happy to have you work remote. Let's get you an offer. Got me an offer. And he said, now the offer says that you're going to be working in Waterloo, but just ignore that. So I took a huge gamble and I took that job and I never went to the office. Well, actually, I went a couple times, but I started working from my small apartment that I lived in with my now wife. And I think within a week,

I was like, I don't think I want to go back to working in an office. I think that maybe, you know, the times we're in right now are a little bit strange. It's not the ideal working from home times. But back then when I tried it, I was like, this is a really good fit for my, you know, for who I am, for my personality, for the way I like to work. And so it's years later, I've been at three or four different companies, all remote. So like dive into that a bit. Like what makes your personality or anyone's personality good for working from home? And what would make it bad? Yeah, that's a good question. So like, I think the thing that is the worst for working remotely isn't really a personality thing, but an experience thing. I work on a team that's distributed right now. I think it's really hard if you don't have

experience like working in an office place, like maybe there's a way to do that. But I think that's the hardest thing, right? If you just finished school or something, you just finished university or grad school, and you're like, I'm starting a new job, and it's just you at home on your couch. Like, I don't think I don't know how you're going to learn, like what what a day's work looks like, like what the expectations are, like when you should ask for help. So that's like the biggest area that I don't think we've figured out how to work from home. The other thing I would say is just like, you know, like some people like to be really social. I'm probably maybe a bit less social than some. Like I think I can get by, you know, with a lower level of like water cooler chat. I mean, some people, I mean, I don't think some people might not realize that that's who they are until, you know, like our present situation where they're like, you know, I'm really struggling without, without the needed social contact. Um, also like I had a significant other that I lived with at home. I think if, if you lived by yourself

and work was your main like social outlet um i think that could be a struggle right yep yep yeah it totally makes sense i mean it totally resonates with me i think uh um i think along the same lines i wonder you know like people who are starting now uh you have to work from home so so you graduated from college back in uh uh probably i guess now maybe you graduated from college two weeks ago or something, and you got your first job and you're working remote, right? And I think it's a huge, huge challenge. And so another thing you said that resonated with me is this idea, like, we haven't really got it right. I totally agree with that. You know, I was thinking about how, you know, when you're sitting around the same desk, like in some

bullpen environment, you can just run over and talk to somebody or you can ask a question, right? You know, I don't think you can completely remove your privacy when you're at home. You can't just have a camera staring at you 24-7. It's just super awkward, right? But maybe, you know, one thing that might be better than what we have now is maybe like maybe like a set of hours like office hours type thing where you say like from one to two my camera is always on and uh so is yours and so there's this grid maybe of all of our faces for that hour and then it turns off something like that um yeah but there's that's one of probably a thousand ideas we could come up with brainstorming here today on how to make it better. I mean, I think there's huge amounts of progress that needs to be made. on Slack or whatever, you know, like a place where I see like working from home go badly is like people who might hash something out for 20 minutes in the office will spend three hours like talking

about it on Slack. Like, just like jump on a call. Like, I know it seems like they're not there, but just pretend they are and like, and talk it out. Yeah, what about like, I feel like I get notification overload now that I'm working from home. And I mean, similar to what you were just saying, where instead of just having someone on the shoulder, you send them a message and then it's just N squared problem, right? How do you deal with notification overload? Yeah, I mean, I think it's hard. I think the same kind of like office hours kind of concept could work i know yeah um like i talked to somebody at my work who kind of their like role is like half you know like like doing a lot of work and half just like

kind of meeting with people um you know kind of half manager half individual contributor and they said like they actually split their day literally in half and say like this time you know there's no notifications there's no whatever here's my you know my there's no notifications, there's no whatever, here's my, you know, my deep thinking time. And then here's where I'm whatever, telling this person to talk to this person or, or chatting. Yeah. Another thing is like, so my, yeah, like, so my wife works right now, you know, she's on a bit of a different schedule because of the times we're in. But like, you know, for the for the nine years that I've been at home, like she has like a fairly standard nine to five job. So she like, you know, we get up at the same time when she leaves. That's kind of like I'm in my work zone. Right. And when she comes home,

it's kind of the end of my work day. So, I mean, I didn't come up with this strategy. That's just kind of how my life works. But I think it's it's really important if you're working from home to have some sort of bookends. Because otherwise, people think that the danger is people at home aren't working. But I think the real danger is just that work becomes pervasive in your entire life and you can't turn it off. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think that and also people don't know how much you're working. So we're in a research team. And so there's a there's people don't know how much you're working. So, you know, we're in a research team. And so there's a lot of folks doing research on things that ultimately don't pan out.

And so when you're sitting right next to somebody, you see them, you know, sweating and then they're writing on the Expo marker board and they erase it with their hand and then they rub the sweat off their head. And now they have like a rainbow on their forehead. And they're just like they're just crazy like like stressed out and you say okay well you know at least i know for a fact that this person is putting in a lot of effort um and then maybe nothing comes to that which is really a shame but like at least you kind of have an idea versus now and it works the other way too sometimes you get this eureka moment and uh and you do things that you didn't even have to put a lot of effort into. And so that becomes harder to sort of internalize when you're not around the person. Yeah, yeah, totally. And I

don't know, like, you have to have a certain amount of buy-in from, I guess, the organization and the people you work with, I guess, right? I don't work in a research type environment, but I assume that if you do, and if you're going to be not in an office, then there needs to be some sort of understanding, you know, that this is how it is, right? Otherwise, like, yeah, if you have to dedicate your hard thinking time to making sure you're, you know, demonstrating some sort of output so that you can be measured, I don't think that's going to help anything. Yeah, totally. So Patrick, what's your experience been like? So Patrick works at a place where almost nobody ever worked from home. So at my job, we worked from home on Wednesdays,

way before a virus hit. But Patrick, working from home is kind of anathema to your company. And so what has it been like? It must be a huge change. Yeah, I mean, I think this is an interesting question for teams that are like mine. And I think you guys have been sort of alluding to a lot of the same things we're all going through. But companies that didn't have extensive work from home experience before, it's a lot harder of a transition. I actually think we've adapted pretty quickly but most of the team has been stable been working together for a while so they already kind of know what everyone's doing without having to talk about it as much um

onboarding new people has been slightly more challenging adjusting to them but we've done the the things like we're talking about like just have an hour every day or a little longer and just be on a chat and shoot the breeze or talk about specifics and people can sign off if they want, but new people tend to not have as much work to do. So they have a little more time to be able to hang out. And it's important, I think, to be able to get them that time, even if it doesn't seem directly beneficial to having them churn out lines of code. I think it's important to have people get adjusted pretty quickly. And so that's how we've been tackling it. It's actually been working out, I think, better than if you had

asked me at the start, how is this going to go? I would have predicted it going worse. And I think that's a realization a lot of people are coming to is that it's not as bad as they thought it would be for the people who said maybe they didn't want to work from home or it wasn't important to them before. They're realizing, oh, actually, there's kind of a lot of advantages to this. But then, yeah, a lot of people are saying, yeah, I don't really have a good home set up for this.

Like, I don't have a home office. I have too many other people in this space. And so for those people, of course, like it's more of a struggle. And so looking forward, I think the interesting thing is how people may choose to adjust if they believe there's a higher probability of this happening. So people may select where they live or not live or what kind of apartment they get or don't get

or house they buy or don't buy. Thinking that work from home may happen more often, or maybe we may be forced into work from home, which what do you call i guess that's a recency bias like it's never happened before but it happened now so it's more likely to happen in the future but i don't actually have to but i think a lot of people will treat it that way yeah that makes sense yeah i mean there's a lot to unpack there i think uh um yeah one thing is is this this idea of of um working anywhere i I think that that is going to be a huge disruption to the entire industry. And I don't mean disruption in a bad way, like disrupting your service or something, but I think it's going to radically change the entire industry. Ultimately, I think for the better. But I think, you know, if you think about the recruiting funnel, I mean, it's going to have to completely change, right?

I mean, it used to be that you had this locality bias. So, you know, we want people who work in this city. And so the amount of people who will relocate to that city is small. And so your process, your funnel doesn't ever get too big that you can't do anything, you know, to manage it. And then, and furthermore, like you could be really aggressive in how you do your funnel because you can only grow so big as a company so quickly, right? But now, you know, if we really go to this totally distributed model, then we have to figure out ways to field resumes from people all over the world for jobs all over the world and how to pay people in a competitive way around the world. I mean,

all of that stuff is going to have to get figured out in the next six months. I think there's like, you know, the quote about the future is here. It's just unevenly distributed. It's like places have been doing this right um they've just it's not been the norm right like i think if you look at a lot of the places that that have been hiring and been distributed like sometimes it's because they have like a certain particular niche where it's like you know if you need you know very specific uh type of people like maybe they're not all in one area, right? So you're like, hey, I need the best people in the world. And there's like two of them in London,

England, and one is in Idaho. And then so you just kind of adapt to that. Another interesting thing that Patrick said is like about like the type of environments you want to have, like for your work life right i think like when i started working from home um like i had an apartment it was a two-bedroom apartment i took like i mean people didn't have this opportunity this time like i took off some time between work i got all the crap out of my second bedroom you know like i set up a specific office and i was like this desk is my is my work desk um and i think that in a world where more people are working like this, apartments probably in urban areas have some disadvantages compared to getting a large house

where you could have some extra space, at least in terms of work. There's certain benefits in other areas, but I think it does change some of the preferences people would have. So how do you... Oh, go ahead, Patrick. Yeah, I have this, I don't know you call like a pet theory about the like thing but i'll tell it here in front of a giant crowd of people it'd be great um which is i was saying that uh the way i was thinking about it which resonated with me i guess i'm biased is uh when people live in like very urban environments they have smaller houses but they're willing to pay more because the entertainment living portions are

conducted outside of their house. Like they don't need a big kitchen because they eat out at nice restaurants. So if you live in New York City, Manhattan, right, like that's uber expensive, small apartment, but there's so much to do just within walking distance. You have a house that's a hybrid between inside your apartment and like the local whatever shop that you like to eat at down the street in the bodega on the corner is your pantry and you know you have all of these things very near to you go to all sorts of some of the world's best entertainment rather than just sitting at home and and watching tv on a relatively small tv because you have no space and so you're willing to pay more because you're not outsourcing is the right word, but you're utilizing space outside of your apartment as your living space, the park,

you know, entertainment venues versus if you live in the suburbs, you need a bigger house because that entertainment stuff moves inside of your domicile. So you need to entertain you and your family. And if you have children or pets, you need to do that sort of within your house because you don't want to get in your car and drive everywhere all the time. And so when you see these lockdowns that are happening where the entertainment spaces outside of your house are being denied access to you, it's like someone coming in and like, you know, biohazard taping off part of your house and telling you're no longer allowed to use this. And then at some point,

you're going to go like, well, this is a scam. This is a rip off. I don't want to pay these prices when I can't access what I was considering part of my living and the reason why I was paying for this. Like, why am I still here? Why am I paying this? And if you drop prices low enough, I guess the market demand will say like people will do some people will still choose that. But a bunch of other people are going to go either their price needs to get lower or I'm going to leave because i'm being denied access to part of like what i was considering my living space and especially for things like work from home that gets even harder because you lived in an area where maybe you still had to commute or whatever but you had the place where you worked was your office and now you can't go to that office and you have no alternative because you don't have

spare space in your place of residence and for for those people, I think they develop a very acute reaction to this where it's like they need an immediate fix. Because working from sitting on the edge of your bed is only going to happen for a few hours before you realize it's not sustainable. Yeah, there must be a middle ground, right? Where everybody moves to the medium size. Everybody lives in Boulder or St. Louis and has a co-working place, right? Like some middle ground where you're like, I have more space and I can share some urban amenities. And I don't know. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. A number of people where I work have brought up this idea that

they want to spend six months of the year in Nebraska and then the other six months in Manhattan where the job is. And that raises a bunch of interesting questions. So right now you could say, well, okay, we'll pay you, let's say, market rate for Nebraska, whatever a software engineer makes in Nebraska when you're in Nebraska. But then if you think about it, this gets back to something we talked about a while ago about like, what is something actually worth and how you figure that out? Also, you know,

what this engineer is actually worth to the company actually goes up because they're using less physical space and getting the same amount of work done, but you're going to end up paying them less if you take the market price attitude, right? And so there ends up being this sort of disconnect between these two ways of measuring what something is worth, right? And yeah, I think this whole, there's also, I guess it all kind of ties together. If on the recruiting side, we're now able to find a bunch of super talented folks in Nebraska, then that really puts a lot of downward pressure on people who are in the cities and, as Patrick said, need a lot of these extra amenities to have the same quality of life, right? Versus in Nebraska, those are capital expenses, I guess. And yeah, I think that whole thing is is interesting I think uh I did see a lot of um people getting back to like the furniture and and sort of being comfortable working from home I did see a lot of people

buying I actually also bought one like a like these mechanical desks that go up and down for your house and uh that was something I used a lot of at work. And I thought that it would be an insane amount of money, but it's actually, they've come down in price. You can get one at a pretty reasonable amount. And so far, I think that's been the biggest improvement in working from home for me has been getting a desk where I could stand up. Yeah, I also have a standing desk. Yeah, I bought it years ago and I haven't regretted it. Although I spend lots of time sitting at it.

Yeah, I think for podcasts, it's probably good to be sitting. I think the market dynamics thing is interesting. I think I saw something online that said that the market for software developers is going to get even more divided. Right. I mean, this was a theory because like if I live in Nebraska and you're trying to pay me local Nebraska wages, but I actually have a counteroffer from some other like Bay Area company, you're just going to pay me the Bay Area rate. Right. But if I if I don't, then I'll get the Nebraska wage wage and as this slowly fans out i think it will just mean that developers that are in demand get like a very high bracket and and

developers that aren't are in a very low like it should it should stretch things out um yep yep yeah i totally agree yeah i think that especially with what you said earlier if you have a niche skill um and if if the only way you let's say, build that craft is to work at one of these three companies, then that's your pool of talent. And so, you know, expanding to the whole world doesn't really matter because the whole world hasn't been exposed to those three companies that have this embedded talent or whatever it is. Right. And so, yeah, I think those people could probably do well. I think the people who are more generalist, I think that might be a place where there'll be some kind of compression. There's actually a question from the audience, which I thought was really, really useful. We'll jump to some of the

audience questions. So Cheesy Taco deluxe asks um what is it like onboarding new team members and going through the interview process uh you know now that we're all remote um who wants to take a crack at that first um i can so um yeah we have an interview process i mean we use zoom rather than skype that we're right now, but it tends to involve just some Zoom calls. And so we'll do like, I don't know, like CoderPad or something like that, where we'll have somebody work through a problem, kind of talking it out the same as you might for a whiteboard. And we have like just a couple phases of that. Yeah. And then, you know, somebody gets mailed out a laptop and, you know, they start my when I started at my current job on my first day didn't arrive. And so I wasn't really sure what to do. And I contacted the IT and they're like, they had sent it like to like the general vicinity of where I live, but not my exact house, which isn't. Oh, that's pretty bizarre.

Yeah, like that. I don't know. It's like they transpose some numbers in the street or something. Oh, I got I got the laptop eventually. But the first day I was like, I'm here. And they're like, all right, well, you can't really do anything. So, but I mean, I think... Wait, why not?

You didn't have any access or something? Yeah. Oh, I see. Yeah, I needed the work computer. At that time, everything was, like, behind a VPN. Now we use, like, Okta, which is pretty nice. Oh, yeah, right. But yeah, I mean, I think we just

have to adapt. Right. I think that like, I mean, obviously right now it's, it's not the case, but you know, in, in a post COVID world that people are still working remotely, I think like getting together is still important. Like, you know, we, you know, I worked on teams where we're kind of all over the place, but like once a quarter we get together, you know, ostensibly for planning, but really like just to hang out and like know each other as people who are three-dimensional. Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's very similar. We have, you know, a set of, I think we use, we actually use this product called BlueJeans, which is kind of like a Zoom type thing for enterprise. But basically it's a set of these, you know video video chats and then um we also use coder pad and then oh here's a kind of an interesting backstory behind

coder pad is um coder pad was actually started by somebody who worked at uh our company and um they ended up because we were like the first customer, I worked for this gigantic company. And we spent something like $10,000 for a lifetime, like company-wide license for CoderPad. And we've probably put like, you know, 200,000 hours into it or something. Yeah, I'm sure they're not making any money off us. But yeah, we all see Cer pad pretty heavily mail out the offer mail out the laptop and then we we built like um a set of onboarding docs that have like here's the social groups you should join here's some videos from you know some some of the leaders just

talking about the company and talking about the team and everything and that seemed to work pretty well and similar to what you were saying we also have, actually, we don't have yet an in-person thing because, you know, we all started working from home with COVID. So we haven't had the chance to do that yet. But we do have, every Tuesday, we have a social hour. And, you know, it's not mandatory. It's kind of this weird thing, right, where we really want everyone to be there. But as soon as we enforce it, it's not a social thing anymore. It becomes work again. So people come and go.

We have a decent percentage of people there. And we just chat or we'll play a game. We actually played this game called Zombs Royale yesterday, which was this web game where you, it's similar to like PUBG or Fortnite or one of these games, which is something where you can kind of bond as a team. It's really good to kind of force that time because it would be emergent otherwise. You know, like we'll just say, hey, do you want to just go for a walk? But now that you can't do that, you really have to kind of force it. You have to say like, OK, 2 to 3 p.m., guys, let's go do something cool. And it seems weird.

I mean, as a person who sort of set up the meeting, it felt weird to make a meeting to play video games. You know, it feels like, well, why are they paying us for this? But I think that you need it to sort of have a healthy team, have a healthy environment. I think would be the same as making things explicit, which were just implicit or emergent before. Like you were saying, you would naturally hang out with people and shoot the breeze, which goes down kind of a lot. So we've done something similar. Like we've played board games online a few times, just like one hour on Friday. The same thing, you know, kind of middle end of the day, just like, hey, everyone get on and do this. And it also does feel weird, but I'm the

same thing. I don't feel bad about it because I feel that it's important for the team to be oriented towards each other and sort of the way that would happen much more fluidly. What would you in 3D space? Maybe if we all had vr goggles it would be a different story but you know like thinking about people as more than just their comments on a code review or their status update is is really important um to being able to put yourself in their shoes and have that kind of emotional intelligence that sometimes people write about i think um you need to kind of know another person and you don't get that if you strictly just interact or at least in my opinion i find it difficult to just know that from the strict business interaction

that tends to be the default engagement model with this remote stuff yeah that is true yeah you you made me think of a couple other things so we have like like uh like you were saying we have you know join this channel join this channel um we also have like during the first week um like we'll fill up kind of like half of your first couple days with just like meetings that are just like you should say hi to this person um and say hi to this person um and then we also have a buddy program that somebody might work set up which is like they they take somebody anybody who's new gets just like paired with somebody who volunteers, who's like from a different part of the company. And they just they just meet like casually on an ongoing basis, because sometimes like I don't a problem that's not been solved by all this stuff is like like silos like if you develop social structures with your with your team like you do end up kind of not like you're not going to run into people in the kitchen

head or something who are on a on a different team um so that's our attempt at that but i think that's a hard problem yeah totally i've seen you know things like uh so you know we were in the office we had something called chow roulette where it would randomly pick two people who had signed up to this Chow Roulette and make them have a one-on-one lunch together. And so there were different groups. There was a Chow Roulette for engineers. There was one for salespeople. Then there was a general one if you just wanted to get matched up with anybody. And something like that, I think could could easily translate to online if i could probably be better online is probably more

awkward in person um you know because one person has to walk really far to get to the other person where they're eating right um um yeah and the thing you mentioned there was i went to a i had a virtual conference where um they had interesting button. You'd click this button and it was as if you ran into somebody in the hallway, like in between two conference rooms. So like, it's like while, like when one talk ended, there's about a 15 minute break. And during that break, you could click the button. And then if someone else clicked the button,

you would run into each other and it would just basically be like a one-on-one chat. And then after a minute or so, you would hang up and you could try it again. I didn't try it, but things like this, I think, are starting to get at that kind of just, you know, emergent conversation that happens in real life. It seems hard because it seems like forced, where like you know a lot of this stuff in person happens very naturally um but there is a a slack bot i don't know if you guys use slack but called like coffee i think it's called like coffee time and it's like people join this channel and then randomly i think once a week it like the bot will like ping you and somebody else and say like you guys should meet um and have coffee

oh it's cool it's sort of uh it's like the minimum viable product version of uh your your chat roulette or whatever yeah right cool uh someone asked um they said basically um actually i get the person's name so this is gaython on on Twitter. Gaethon said basically they work from home and they also that's sort of their leisure space. So it could be playing video games, watching TV. And so since they do both in the same space, when they're having sort of a bad day at work, they also don't want to have fun anymore because it's kind of like tainted. Right. And so, you know, one way to solve that is, you know, if you have a big enough place then you could just subdivide right but assuming that that for folks who are as patrick said you know kind of in the apartment setting um you know and they can only have one place to do work and to have fun um you know what are some tips we could give them to make that all

easier so i worked with somebody before who like went for a walk like before they started their day and then after like they literally commuted like back to their house um oh that's a good idea i love that idea maybe it can mentally uh you know like change the scenery and have you reset um yeah you got to find some way to kind of like yeah to to keep things like to block things out, I guess. But that's the best one. Yeah, just bootstrapping off that. When I have one on one meetings, I'll actually take a lot of those. I'll actually walk for a lot of those. So if I'm having a one on one meeting that's pretty casual with somebody that I meet with every week, where I

don't really expect them any take a lot of notes or something. You know, I'll keep my phone in my pocket. I'll have the headphones on and I'll just go for a walk around the neighborhood. And yeah, after a few weeks of that, I start just disliking all of my neighbors. No, but I think anytime you can get some exercise and kind of enjoy nature and stuff, I think that is one really good way to sort of recreate that. Because, I mean, when I did have these same meetings in person, that is what we did. We would go for a walk, sometimes even walk outside for a bit.

And so now it's even easier to do stuff like that. This is not my situation, so just making up ideas but i wonder too if you took it extreme so not only if you sort of walked to your house to start your work and then walked at the end of the day but you could kind of go half a step further and get those they have those hue light bulbs you know that change color temperature so like i notice i have my window open at my house so my room is lit sort of naturally but when I'm at work it's like I can't even see a window like it's just all harsh artificial lighting and that sounds kind of goofy but if you even like changed more of your space to like change scenes and if you had like a

very you know cool blue while you were working and then changed it to a warmer blue sort of at the end of the day I mean I don't know I've not tried that but it's just sort of adding to the you may be in the same space but if you move your desk a foot to the right and change the color and i mean you can kind of convince yourself that oh yeah no this is completely different uh and i think yeah i mean it's psychological it's like deep psychological so yeah yeah totally works i think you just caused amazon to run out of stock of hue light bulbs i think it's a great idea yeah when i when i first worked at home in my apartment and i had like a computer and a desk that i that i used for like casual stuff like gaming or whatever and i got an identical desk and i put them like on opposite walls um and i just like i didn't have

this exact same problem but i knew like if i was facing one way that was like work and if i was facing the other way it was uh i mean i don't i now i don't do anything that severe but i guess you got to find how to separate things yourself yeah totally makes sense yeah i think um um you know one thing that's been really challenging is is you know and and uh actually yeah it'd be great to get your take on this, Adam. So, you know, for myself and probably Patrick, like we were basically forced to work from home because of COVID. And so what that meant is, you know, day one of working from home was also day one of school shutting down, daycare shutting down, you know, and all of our, uh, uh, kids like being in our responsibility. And so it's just like an

enormous shock. And so I honestly, I don't, I don't know about Patrick, but I don't really, you know, I don't count the Wednesday thing that I mentioned earlier, because it's one day a week. So you kind of plan everything else around it. But I honestly don't really know what it's like to work from home full time without like all of these other you know externalities right and so one way that maybe we could sort of like reverse engineer this is is for you to talk a little bit about you know what was it like pre versus post covid uh because you've been working from home the whole time yeah i mean yeah i'm trying to think. So I've found like, I could tell you, like, just at a at a at a gut, like psychological level that like, I feel more like closer to burnout lately with the whole COVID situation, even though like, not a lot of my work life has changed, right? Like I, I worked here where you see me now, you know, a year ago, and I still do now. But, but now I do feel a bit boxed in um you know like so i think you know it's because you can't you it's not just that i'm here for work it's that i'm here for

everything right and maybe that that goes to that person's uh question about about kind of feeling kind of stuck in their bad day um so i think that these circumstances are not the ideal uh work from home circumstances um i i don't have any like i don't have any specifics though yeah i mean one thing i i noticed as well is is um and we talked about this in the past episode with max is um i feel this like it's very kind of um um like this bipolar like this up like very much like ups and downs and i think it's related to the fact that, and this gets to what the person was asking too. And the question is that you're in the same room for kind of everything. And so it just tends to, yeah, I think getting to what you were saying too, Adam, is like,

I feel like I'm kind of always plugged in because I'm always, you know, 10 feet away from work. And so if someone sends me a work email, I'm just much more likely to reply at the dinner table versus before, you know, there's a, there's kind of that, that mental barrier. And, and now I think with the COVID situation, you know, the reality is like, you know, I, at least personally, like, and probably feel you might feel the same way, Patrick's like, I can't give it a hundred percent when there are so many people, so much social infrastructure that I depend on that isn't there right now. And so when you combine not like a clear barrier between work and home with the fact that like, you know, you can't contribute as much as you did when everything else was open,

I think it gives you kind of this ups and downs where you feel like, oh, I'm not doing enough, I'm not doing enough. And then after you work for a day, you feel really accomplished. And then it kind of goes back. Yeah, I like so I'm on my team, like we were all kind of distributed, but but some people did work in an office. But, you know, many people didn't like before COVID. Now everybody's at home. The the people who have had the most challenge would be the people who have kids who are now home all the time. Like, you know, they, you know, like maybe they worked from home before, but they had daycare and now they have their kid there. It seems like everybody's adapted. But yeah, maybe it's just slowly wearing them down. I don't know. Somebody told me that they had gotten these

like children's like sand timers, like three different ones, like one that was like an hour and one that was 30 minutes, one that was 15 minutes. And then when they're in a meeting, they like put it on their desk and turn it. And then they taught their kid that like, you know, when it runs out of sand, that's when you can talk to me. So, I mean, I guess there's a certain amount of training that people are doing about about how how working from home works um i think even if you didn't have these current circumstances and you worked from home um you know and it's summertime and your kids are around like there is a certain type of work that needs to be done probably to establish

barriers like you know right now i'm busy and and things like that i don't have any i don't have any children i just have cats and i can just close the door so oh patrick you went on mute oh can you hear me oh now we can hear you yeah i was like uh can you just not shut the door no i'm just kidding don't yeah we got i got two banging at the door right now but it's totally fine yeah i mean i think, I think that's right. I guess that goes to, you know, everyone tries to spiral in projecting what the future will look like. But I think people taking what it's like right now or in the summertime versus the fall and projecting it out isn't necessarily the right model because having your kids at home or

I mean, it's even worse than that, right? During the school year, which was the case with us, is like not only were the kids home, but they needed to do their school and it's like yeah wait a minute like i'm supposed to be doing your school and my work and thankfully you know like i think i'm very lucky and privileged and probably um might apply to you guys as well but like my work is very understanding and just saying like hey like we know this is a thing like we we're lowering sort of expectations a little like you know try the best you can basically um and you know i i feel like i was still able to do and treat that responsibly but yeah i mean i think people taking learnings from now and projecting them forward

is not we're not able to sort of make it as sustainable as you might otherwise if there wasn't a global pandemic you know and it's it's more so even than that like people's vacations got canceled people's spring breaks got canceled summer hasn't been canceled but normally people would be looking forward to traveling and planning that traveling and family coming to visit and like none of that is going on or a lot less of it is going on and so i the burnout thing i think is super risky for people like i think you have to make sure to monitor yourself which i think people are of differing degrees of ability to tell like how their personal state is and just being introspective about that um but i mean i think it's very probable that if you like i mean this is not going to be fixed by august september october so you're

going to talk about march to october there's like seven months. And if you've not gone on vacation or taken a staycation or done something, you normally would have taken a day, a couple of days, a week of vacation. Yeah. I think people are going to get a work fatigue and frustration and associate it to something that might be slightly misdirected. That is such a good point, right? Like, I remember there was a time when there was sort of a crunch time at work and I didn't and we didn't plan a vacation and not really realizing that I was burnt out because I we had just had, you know, we just had kind of regular vacations. At the time, my wife was actually working for a cruise line and so they would have deals for the employees at a certain cadence and so we would always we always kind of just had basically the

vacations planned for us and so it wasn't kind of obvious that like oh like I hadn't taken a vacation in in you know almost a year and I'm totally burnt out and so yeah I think it's such a good point like no one really wants to take a vacation during a pandemic because what do you do? You just walk around your neighborhood or there's very few things that are open. But then on the flip side, yeah, a lot of people will probably get burnt out

and maybe not even know why. Yeah, I think like, yeah, take a staycation, right? Like take some time off and I don't know, put your computers in somewhere else and read a book or something. And just, like, get out of the house every day if you can. Yeah, like, there's a book about working remotely from DHH, the Rails guy. And I remember, like, one, I remember very little of the book except that he said that, like, you should judge yourself on yourself on whether like it seemed like you put in a good day of work like that you shouldn't really keep track

of like how much hours you did or or this or that you're like you know if if you have experience like in the world and and you know like hey you know i solved some things today this was a good day's work like that's good enough like don't be beat yourself up maybe you need to even turn that down even more right like if you have kids at home or other constraints like maybe you know if if you got close to a good day's work like pat yourself on the back don't beat yourself up and be hard on yourself yeah totally makes sense um someone asked and i think we covered this but but uh but Rubik's shoe, which I don't know if that's intentionally a pun on Rubik's cube,

or if that's just, you know, the first thing that came to mind, but either way, that's an awesome name, Rubik's shoe, basically asking, you know, what prevents our employers from, you know, what prevents wages from, you know, a race to the bottom, right? And I think, you know, a race to the bottom right and i think you know we covered that um you know i do think that there will probably be some kind of wage depression um but again like uh a lot of jobs are really niche and this actually gets to a another kind of semi rant which is which is everyone is is software engineer but there's so many disciplines in there. And so there's so many different specialities. You know, like we talked to Guillermo Ranch, right?

And he was talking about, what was it called? Next.js, I think. But basically it was a framework built on top of React. And yeah, I think pretty sure it's Next.js. You could fact check me on that. But, you know, and just extraordinary levels of depth and understanding and knowing the history and why things work the way they did and what that genesis is like. So, you know, I think whether you're doing front end, whether you're doing app development, backend development, whether you're doing AI stuff, whether you're doing embedded, you're always falling into where they're doing embedded you're always falling into some type of craft that you're becoming an expert in and so i don't really expect um this

sort of like uh wage oppression to be as severe as people are are saying i think that it'll be a gradual thing i think that you know yeah i think for a lot of people, the cost of living will go down significantly. And so that will help. And I look at it in a positive way. Like, I think we could sort of like energize, you know, people all over the world, you know, where there's a lot of folks who are anchored to a place, you know, either because, you know, their family is there. There's so many different reasons, right? And so we can place, you know, either because, you know, their family is there. There's so many different reasons, right? And so we can engage, you know, all of these folks. And so I think that there's a lot of potential there. Yeah. And I expect, I don't know what you guys, you guys

probably have a better, more accurate take on it, but I expect some places that are embracing the remote workforce right now will fail at it. Like, I think it's not a given that it's going to work out for every place. I think it's probably harder than it's. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you think is going to cause people to fail? So if things open back up and we allow people to work wherever, but everybody important is in this building, in this particular place. I'm not really sure that that's going to be successful. I think there's a failure mode for remote where you have a team except one guy. He's somewhere else.

And then he's not really a true member of the team to a certain extent out of nobody's fault but just um you know so i i think um like it's really just a culture change i think um you know that like if if the if everybody in the company is working distributed and kind of communicating in ways that are async and you don't have to be right there. I think it can really work great. But if you're kind of stuck with your traditional structures and everybody's in a certain place, it's not really going to be that successful. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, I'm wondering if software development communication is an area of opportunity. Imagine a software contract type of thing saying, look, I'm going to build this kind of system. I mean, I guess you could call that documentation or documenting before you write the code, right? But maybe like, you know, we somehow make that more frictionless.

I mean, I'm guilty of it. I mean, I'm definitely documenting as I'm writing the code. But I think if you're going to have a system like this where you're going to say you're going to build something and someone else is going to use it, you know, unless you can't just move sequentially, you have to be able to work in parallel. And so, you know, right now it's mostly just Google Docs. So we'll write a Google Doc just with some ideas. We'll send it out. People will give us feedback.

But maybe something more formal where you could, I guess if you're just talking about C++, you could write the header files and doxygen them, and then people will kind of know what to expect. But just some way for engineers to communicate more fluidly, because I think that is the number one criticism of remote work is people say look i have this back end i have this app i'm making you know the next tiktok and so it needs to be out tomorrow because tiktok was just banned in india yesterday

and so my app needs to come out tomorrow and so you know it only works if the whole team is right there and uh the the the app developer can look over the backend developer's shoulder and see the function call, right? I think, like, these are just good engineering practices that might get pushed by people being more distributed, right? Like, oftentimes, like, all that matters about your design is, like, the API, like, the surface it presents. I mean, maybe that's an extreme take right but thinking about those apis and agreeing on them like if you got if two teams have to communicate about something like let's let's agree on what this api is and um like i don't really care about the rest um so if it's teams i think yeah just be explicit about your apis like you said header files or whatever Like we've had success with like GraphQL

because GraphQL has like a schema. So you're kind of communicating like, hey, everything looks like this and it's a bit flexible so they can kind of make some different requests. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it will force engineers to do a good job.

I mean, which is, you know, not a bad thing. I know that a lot of our code is just in the company, a lot of our code is not documented very well. And I think it's almost perfectly correlated between things which were done quickly by teams that all sat next to each other, and things are not documented well, right? Because you just can't afford to do that if you're distributed. So even in cases where before we were really had remote work, we still obviously had multiple offices. And so things that were done jointly across multiple offices just tended to be better quality, but also slower. And so maybe this idea that it's almost like the 10x engineer myth. Maybe now we have the project done in a week myth where the downsides of that, now we just added another downside, which is that it doesn't support remote work. But the downsides of that are so extreme that we'll have to just accept that let's just make this two weeks, three weeks, four weeks and actually have good quality on version one yeah i feel like within a team like you should be able to talk it out like even if you're if you're remote um so yeah i don't know like like the place that i've seen um people

working remotely fail is like yeah if somebody just goes off and like build something and then they're like here it is um and then other people are like that's not my expectations i mean that's probably more likely to happen with working remotely but it doesn't have to right like you can just talk things out um it doesn't have to be extensive documentation like i've like sometimes before building something just in the slack channel been like okay so i have this ticket to do this thing here's what i'm thinking and then people are know, people will provide me feedback. And like, I learned this because of the reverse scenario where like I put up a PR and then people

like it just gets torn to shreds. Right. So I'm like, okay, before I start building this, let's talk about the approach. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, people can still talk even if we're not all in the same room. Yeah. Yeah. Totally true. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if you look at organizations that do this well, or at least maybe organizations that do this at all, I think sales is consistently almost every medium to large size company has a distributed sales team. And, you know, I think that that think that there's huge advantages to that. You know, I think that, you know, depending on the product, but almost every product, you know, even from an engineering standpoint could benefit from, you know, a hyperlocal view or lens through which to look at that product. Similar to how, you know, the sales team

in Dubai and the sales team in Arkansas probably don't operate exactly the same way. And so there's a robustness and a health that makes the system more healthy, right? So I think from an engineering standpoint, some type of franchise-type model could be really powerful. But actually, to Patrick, a place we used to work a long time ago, I don't know if your team had this, but we actually had some QA folks who were in another part of the US. And they would basically run our unit tests, like do code coverage, look for kind of problems, like errors in the development. But actually, they were totally disconnected from the core engineering team. So basically, we would get random emails from these folks saying,

hey, we found some issue, or hey, you might want to put some more tests here. But they were kind of like this separate, you know, disjoint org. And in hindsight, it's kind of like a powerful model because it's totally scalable. I don't know if, did you have that on any of the teams you were on or no? No, I didn't have that. But I, yeah, I can see how you're saying it's powerful. But I mean, it does increase overhead. But yeah, I mean, I think that's a give and take between separating parts of your team and gaining an advantage of sort of modularity and a defined interface. And then gaining the bonus of like more rapid iteration between two teams that don't have

a hard boundary like that. And I think that's just like a classic problem that people have to kind of move back and forth on. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, it sounds like my initial thoughts is it sounds I would want the people like closer to me right like I would want them working more closely than being totally separated um but I think it's totally possible like I don't know I think you can still have tight small teams uh you know when you're working remote I think it's doable I think it's the inter the inter-team stuff I think might be more complex yeah I think you know, I think you're totally right. I think it's kind of a weird way to sort of divide up the work.

Like say, okay, you're responsible for tests. You're responsible for new developments. It's kind of bonkers. But yeah, I guess the questions are like, how do we reduce the friction between teams, especially across time zones so if you have let's say the database layer being developed in in the east coast or even in london or something and then the application layer being developed you on the west coast

um i think that's where things become really difficult yeah so like i think that time zones are different than working remotely and i think they're that maybe they're like the advanced they're like the advanced skill right like just yeah you're gonna have a team and you're gonna be all over the place like keeping in a couple time zones right like uh i mean somebody said like have at least four hours of overlap but but maybe have even more than that right um and there used to be like this model i haven't heard about it in years but you know people used to talk about like this like follow the globe software development model where

like somebody would work on something and then they'd hand it off to somebody like eight hours away who'd like work on it and then like i cannot foresee how that would actually work right like just yeah just have a team and just pretend even though you're all in each other's homes, that you work together, you know, closely and talk on Slack and get on video. And that's my advice. Yep. Yep. Yeah. We have a team in New York that we work with very closely. And there have been times when, over the past few years, when, you know, it's just like it needs rapid iteration. And it just feels like nothing is getting done because we'll suggest something a day later. It'll come back to us in a different format.

And then we just play this really long like mail-in chess or something, right? And so finally, we just flew over there and spent a couple of weeks there and hashed it out. And so, yeah, I think maybe another piece of advice is if you're, well, under normal circumstances, non-COVID, if you're going to be working remote, you should kind of expect, or maybe you should not expect, but it's the other way around. Like you should encourage yourself to actually fly around and visit some people in real life. I i mean i think there's times when that is the answer and so um um i think that's you know beyond just the the social part

and doing the quarterly or annually get together um you know you should expect that like uh when you see this sort of trend of you know this sort of like impersonal like oh i'll get back to you tomorrow and then you know you should ping ponging like thisal like oh i'll get back to you tomorrow and then you know you should ping ponging like this did you say okay i'm gonna fly over there and let's like sit together for a week and um um you know and hopefully the place you're flying to has an office or there's some place you could both meet or something like that you're not flying to the other person's home with your luggage but uh um yeah i think that part is really important yeah the the place where i've seen things or a way that i've seen things go badly is yeah with these long iteration loops

and like you know like somebody who's like you know i'm working on two separate things because like i put together work on the one and then i have to get this other team to review it and then while i'm waiting two days for that i work on this other thing and one and then i have to get this other team to review it um and then while i'm waiting two days for that i work on this other thing and then and then like weeks go by where this person's just like slowly pushing forward two things and it's just like uh you know just talk to the people like yeah sometimes you you can't wait um yeah i don't know if you if you have to do a whole bunch of work in parallel to cover like really large lags, like you're, you're probably just covering up a huge problem. Yep. Yep. And you get a kind of feel for like the cadence for something,

you know, like you get a feel for like how the excitement curve, I guess of whatever it is you're working on. And so if, if you're working on something that you know, that, that, you know, you feel like you need to jump on it quickly, then, yeah, that's another reason to just let the folks know and say, look, like, let's set up a, you know, video chat. Let's set up a work chat or something where we have, like, more immediate, more loud, loud as in more notifications and all of that, like more loud communication so that we can just get this hashed out. And then other things that are, you know, maybe migrating the database. That's something that is not, doesn't require such a tight cadence. And so you can take forward to have the day back and forth communication. So Adam, we'll kind of wrap it up with, uh, what do you think will be

the biggest change in work from home? Like if you were to look back five years from now and say, assuming you're still working from home for five, for the next five years, you know, what do you think would have changed the most? That's a good question. So when I first, so when I very first started working from home, like probably for the first couple months, we did our daily stand-up on a conference call. I phoned into it. And then quickly moved to Skype and so on. So I think with more and more people doing it, whatever communication mediums are probably going to get richer. So I don't know what's beyond like our current video, maybe just lower latency or easy. I don't really know, but I feel like communications

is the hard part of working distributed. So something to do with communication. Yeah, that makes sense. Patrick, what about you? Predictions for the work from home future, the work from the future home, WFFffh i feel like we've notoriously been not great at predicting future yeah yeah look at all the bitcoin we didn't buy and bigelow spacecraft oh man i still remember that inflatable hotel in this space um let's not talk about them uh so yeah i mean i think the normalization of work from home is sort of a given. I think we've been talking mostly about software engineering, but I mean, I think a lot of people are going to realize that a lot of work can be done from home. And if it means getting

smaller offices for some types of businesses, I think that's going to be a pretty big win. If that cost of capital, wherever they are, is pretty expensive. The fact that we have to develop these tools and experiences now is going to have a trickle down effect to a lot of other more niche businesses that can take advantage of it. So I think that's an interesting trend to watch. Like, you know, just even thinking I'm trying to think of a crazy example, but management at Walmart, they would not necessarily have been able to do remote work before. But now maybe they can video conference into multiple stores, TV panels, and rally the troops beforehand because this video conferencing stuff has become cheap and better. So I think having video conferencing pop up in more places like that would be interesting. I also think there's going to be interesting changes in when people go to a doctor's office or hospital and getting triaging.

I think that's another outcome of this, but not necessarily exactly related to what you're saying. And I think the final trend, I guess, would be the desire of people to say, I have to have a dedicated office space where I live. So somewhere where I can put a desk and do this sometimes, I think will become a factor in where people choose to live. What do you think about WeWork? Do you think that WeWork will take over in the sense that everyone right now who's working from home could go to some local place, kind of like an Amazon locker, but for your office desk, right? You would just go to someplace close to you, but you'd still be working for a company that's far away. I mean, WeWork specifically has a whole bunch of problems with it, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Oh, my gosh. WeWork's a disaster. But just the idea that there's a desk you can rent, basically.

I think that would make sense. There's a real estate capital model for it to work. But yeah, I mean, I think the fact of having someplace you could go like a library, but for doing video conferencing and a little bit of office work. I think there's a lot of potential there. Yeah. Yeah, it'd be kind of interesting. I mean, it would separate your social clique from your work clique. Like you would go to the WeWork and you and the buddies who work at all your competitors would play ping pong together in the office breaks, right? But yeah, I think my thing is, I feel like everything will become collaborative. You know, like, look at the VS Code. Have you seen the live code in VS Code?

It's pretty amazing. It's awesome. Yeah, but I think, correct me if I'm wrong, Adam, but I think it's a broadcast model. So I don't think, you know, other people can edit your code when you invite them. It's just, they can just see what you're doing. And so I think the next step is where they could just write in your editor and then you could just extrapolate that to everything. Like maybe Excel has a button. When you press it, your coworker jumps into your spreadsheet and you're talking and he can also just add equations to it. Right. And so you can imagine every app, every enterprise app being like that. So VS Code is crazy good.

Like, so you can type in it. You can both type in it. You can be in separate windows. Really? Okay. You can share your terminal so that the terminal window, like in VS Code, they can type in it. And like, if you launch like a local host or something

on port something, something, you can like hit a button and it'll port forward it to them. So like if you're doing web like web development, you can load their local website into your browser remotely. So cool. Yeah. I mean, so I imagine just like modern enterprise apps being like that. I mean, especially Excel, which is probably the most popular enterprise app other than email, I guess. But yeah, that'd be my prediction. Well, so Adam, why don't you tell us a little bit, you know, we've talked so much about work from home. I think we've covered just about everything. Let me just check the chat now that I'm thinking about it to make sure we

covered. It looks like we got everyone's questions. questions and yeah why don't you tell us a little bit about co-recursive so co-recursive has you said you've kind of updated the format a bit and so what kind of inspired that and what does it look like now yeah so yeah co-recursive is my podcast is kind of uh like a an interview format um so that the thing that i've that i've uh changed is i've tried to um i'm trying to kind of get people's stories, almost like case studies of building things, of doing software development and kind of present it in a format that's interesting to listen to. like i had a guy sean allen he came on and he explained how like he had to build this uh like high performance system where like you know every request had to be like within microseconds and like what kind of technology choices that kind of drove um you know like tried this that wouldn't work couldn't use jvm because the gc pause you know can't keep it within a microsecond um yeah i had

like a twitter engineer um explaining how you know some of the keep it within a microsecond. Yeah, I had like a Twitter engineer explaining how, you know, some of the big data problems that they had, and then how he found some way to use like ideas from abstract algebra to actually solve kind of like real time data processing. And so I just released one today with Jim Blandy, who created a about like how he thought source control was broken, you know, back in 1993 and decided to build something better. So yeah, that's kind of my format change is to kind of embrace just like,

I guess it's kind of the stories you might tell around the lunchroom, but I guess, you know, with everybody being remote, maybe you don't hear these stories. So I'm trying to find, you know, people who built interesting things, solved hard problems and kind of have them tell their story. So I guess like, yeah, if somebody is listening, and they have like a super interesting story of solving like a,

you know, a really hard problem or, you know, building something, and then it turns out that there was a much easier solution, you know, reach out to me. Maybe we could do have a show about you, your problem. Cool. What was the most exciting episode so far since you've changed the format? Oh, it's I mean, they're all exciting to me. Yeah. Yeah. But you have to pick a favorite. I'm kind of putting you on the spot. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah. So the Sean Allen one that I was just describing i thought was pretty interesting so yeah he you know he he worked on um uh i think it's apache storm which was like a real-time data processing thing yeah and then basically like some wall street types approached him and said like okay we need something like that but like this is high performance or

high frequency trading right so we're like we're in the microseconds. Yeah. And then so he kind of had to, he kind of takes us through like the tech choices that he had to make, right? Like, should I use C++? Should I use I can't use this, I can't use that, and kind of how he got. So I think he ended up with a solution where, you know, they're crunching numbers, like I think he said, like 80,000 calculations a second, and answering like hundreds of thousands of requests um that are all under a microsecond but but how he got there is like wow it's like super unusual i guess uh his path wow it's totally wild yeah the uh um the subversion one you know really resonated we've we've talked to a lot of programming language inventors and one of the things that I noticed is, you know, for many of us, like everyone, you know, has everyone who's worked

in a language for a while sees some flaw or something they don't like. Right. But most of us just deal with it. Right. And even, you know, there might be cases where you have sort of analysis paralysis where you don't know what language to write in. And over time, you know, I think at least myself, like I've gotten more ambivalent to that and more likely to just pick something and start working. But I think, you know, to invent a programming language, you have to have the opposite mindset. Like you have to go into it saying, you know, Python has this feature. I can't stand it. you know um it's driving me crazy i can't sleep at night and so i'm going to spend 5 000 hours writing a new language and popularizing it to the whole world uh you know because of that right and so it tends to attract like a certain type of

person that has just incredible like depth and and just amazing stories and uh just like a very sort of like hard-nosed attitude to uh to programming languages and i find those people like super fascinating to to talk to yeah jim's story like i'll give you just a tidbit so so jim he was so like cvs was the the main source control uh before subversion um and he worked at this place, they had a giant CVS repository. And like, if you want to create a branch in CVS, like it actually has to like make changes to every file to like create the branch. CVS has no transactions.

So like, if somebody does a commit at the same time, like it's kind of like undefined what's going to happen. And the branch, like he was saying, it could take 45 minutes, could take two hours to make the branch because it has to go through hundreds of thousands of files. So he told the people there, he's like,

branching should be free. Nothing's actually changing, right? If you imagine this as a database, all we're doing is making a pointer that says this version here has this name. And they were like, yeah, sure, buddy. Like it's taken us hours. You say it should be free. Like, and they didn't believe him, but, but so he, uh, he went off and solved that problem. I mean, I think it took him years, but yeah, that's amazing. Very cool. All right. So yeah.

Um, co-recursive so people can Google it.'ll also put a in the link to it in the show notes people can check it out and i'm assuming it's also on all the podcast engines like stitcher and google uh podcasts and all of those good good places yeah search for uh co-recursive or if that's hard to spell i could just put like adam gordon bell that's my name it should turn up the podcast as well cool awesome are you have you tried uh um spotify are you on spotify i think so i don't i assume but i'm not sure yeah yeah we got all of a sudden we got a lot of requests to be on spotify and so we set it up rather relatively recently and um it's actually a pretty awesome experience. So yeah, I think anytime we interview a fellow podcaster,

we always tell them to check it out. But they recently signed some exclusive deals with some really, really big, big names in podcasts like Joe Rogan, I think, and someone else has an exclusive deal. And actually I found the interface and the analytics and all that pretty cool. So I'll have to check it out.

Yeah. Cool. All right. So everyone, thanks for have to check it out. Yeah. Cool. All right. So, you know, everyone, thanks for kind of checking it out, for supporting us on Patreon and all of that. Adam, thank you so much

for being on the show. You have a wealth of information on work from home and, you know, obviously super relevant to everybody. And I think it's going to continue to be relevant for most of us for a really long time. So I think it's going to continue to be relevant for most of us for a

really long time. So I think this particular episode will have legs to it. I think it'll be relevant for many, many years. So unlike Rust, which we did a show on Rust like 0.1, and we're still getting emails about how none of it is relevant anymore and how we'll have to redo that. But I think work from home is something that will continue to resonate with people. And so thanks again for being on the show. Thank you. The intro music is Axo by Vynar Pilot. Programming Throwdown is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 2.0 license.

You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work. under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 2.0 license. You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work, but you must provide an attribution to Patrick and I and sharealike in kind.