Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) WFH With WSJ's Chris Mims

Episode Date: March 21, 2020

WSJ Technology columnist Chris Mims and I talk WFH best practices, and how the Tech Industry has responded to the Covid-19 crisis thusfar. Sponsors: DoubleUp.agency * KeepComingBackPodcast.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. Today we're going to talk to Chris Mims, technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal. I'm going to be honest with you, this was in no small measure a therapy session for two guys who have been in isolation for more than a week now.

But also, we trade work from home tips and best practices for those of you who are working from home at the moment. And also we take a look at how the tech industry has responded to the crisis so far. then what I think we should do actually is let's start out by acknowledging our privilege here. We're going to talk about working from home and stuff today. Listen, there's health care workers out there on the front lines. There are people with jobs that if you don't go to the job, you don't have a job, you can't work from home. So I think I'm speaking for Chris too when I say we want to acknowledge that up front. But given that a large portion of the audience to this show is, you know, probably devs and software developers, people working in the tech industry that are probably able to work from home. Chris, how's work from home going for you?

It's enormously challenging, I think, as it is for everybody. You know, those of us with kids at home, it's, of course, even more challenging because they, we're under this extra obligation to keep them fed and alive. entertained and possibly even educated. I was going to say because my wife is actually sticking somewhat to actual school, like regimented. All right, now we're doing circle time. Now we do the pledge every morning. Are you guys doing that sort of thing?

No, we have a schedule that we make the kids, our kids are older. Age range is seven to ten. And they, the oldest rights out, one of the oldest rights out, a schedule every morning and it really helps and you know kids love structure so they love you know they're constantly like you know well what time is blah blah and oh this went over and they are really into modifying their own schedule i think they get a lot of this from school so having that schedule on alternating you know various things like here's creative time that doesn't involve screens here's educational time that does involve online learning here's your outside time here's you know quiet time for

reading our board game it really helps them and And it has allowed them to be, I wouldn't say self-sufficient, but to bother us a lot less. And in that way, I feel like they've really risen to the challenge, and that has been very refreshing. Yeah, I want to say to people with kids, there is a lot of stuff online, even a lot of stuff that's been made free online for like sort of structured distance learning and all sorts of stuff like that. my daughter, my five, almost six-year-old, I can't, I, you know, maybe I'll put it in the show notes, but she's been on this thing now for two days solid, and it's a lot of videos that's like self-directed stuff, and it's really good. And I think it's one of those things that has just been made free. So there's a lot of resources out there.

What about you? Are you keeping to a schedule? Are you regimening yourself? I mean, my schedule ends up being built around their schedule, because of course, is a journalist us. Everything else I'm doing is so variable. And we're all encountering a situation that we've never encountered before and all having to try to work together in formats that are novel for most of us. And so I think the kid's schedule is as far as my own schedule goes. I am adhering to making sure that I take breaks. I always have used the Pomodoro method where it's like you set a timer.

you know, every hour, you get up and stretch at minimum. You know, I'm trying to get outside because that is the one thing that we are allowed to do. And so one context so much I can possibly have a conversation with a human being who's not a member of my own household. I do think that kind of just really basic self-care stuff is absolutely essential to keep us productive and focused. Yeah, have you generally been working from home for the last few years or so? I haven't been. So I am adapted for it in that, like, I just have a setup. So, funny aside here, somebody sent me the top 1,000 search terms on Amazon for about the previous seven days. And I believe that number 61 is desk. Just that one word desk. And, of course, if you look at how it's trended since, you know, the same period a week or two before, it's, like, way up. It's exploded. So there's all these, items on there where people are clearly searching for, you know, the tech and the hardware and the furniture to work from home. My own experience with that is, you know, go ahead and invest whatever

it is that you need to, you know, get the right monitor, get the right stand-up desk set up. I did a lot of yak shaving over the past six months because I was on book leave and I just had to completely work on my own with my own equipment. And there were times when I, I felt like, God, this is really ridiculous, like how you're just, you've tried three keyboards to try to find the right one. But you know what? In the end, when it really came down to it and I really had to be productive, it felt like that paid off because it allowed me to be, I think, way more productive. I was just kind of, I had exactly the tools that I needed and I could just, you know, pivot from one context to another very quickly and type for hours and then there was no problem. Well, and like, you know, even things like a chair, like a good ergonomic chair.

My wife is still set up in the kitchen right now the last few days, and so she's sitting on, like, bar stools. And I keep telling her, like, you might want to get, like, really settled in in a comfortable sort of setup instead of sitting on bar chairs. But, yeah, like, don't, I agree with you. Like, don't overlook how important, like, getting a productive setup is, no matter, you know, what the cost, I guess. Yeah, these basics are, and it's not that costly, these basics are important. Amazon is still delivering for now. I should add that this morning we got the news that they had to shut down their Queens fulfillment center.

You know, and I've heard some early tremors from marketplace sellers that they're freaking out about this. I mean, what if more shut down? Also, how are they going to? What about customers in New York City? Are they even going to get stuff? Because I believe that Queens facility was their big new one. That's really high throughput, it's like 800,000 square feet.

So, like, yeah, I mean, you know, again, you can get this stuff online now. now might be the time to do it. Let me, yeah, I'm actually personally concerned about that Queen's shutdown, actually, but let me throw in one more thing about the whole work from home in terms of, you know, we're not experts here or whatever, except I actually, I'm recently a convert to having a commute because I think I talked about this a little on the show. Like I founded my first company my last year of college, and then for 15 years, it was completely remote. Every startup I've done never had an office, you know. So for 15 years,

I was worked from home. And the key thing is, you do need dedicated space. Like, I remember early on, you know, when I was still living with roommates and stuff, like, I would have my office in my bedroom. And that sucks. Like, you can't overestimate or you have to put value into, like, rituals and the ability to be like to shut the door. And again, this is privileged stuff. Maybe you're not in a location where you can have a separate room, but even just a separate space, you need to be able to be like walk through a threshold or turn a corner and not have your work staring at you, especially over your bed, I think. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Even if it's, I want one of my, one of my most productive, you can get really creative. One of my most productive

work from home setups ever was a closet that was probably only about two feet deep, like the kind that's so shallow that is the sliding doors. And it was just deep enough, but I put some 18 inch deep, six-foot-tall chrome steel shelving that I got from Home Depot or lows into it. And I would slide open the doors, and on the top was my monitor, and then at just the right height was my keyboard and that was my stand-up desk and then when I was done I would close the doors. So I think that kind of thing is like the minimum viable office. Yeah, yeah.

It works even better with stand-up desks that you can tolerate that or build up the stamina for it because they're much easier to tuck away. Well, you know, one more point on that, and this is coming back to the psychology of it, you know, like what people are missing now is the ritual and psychology of having a commute where if you think about it, Like, that's 20 or 30 minutes for you to not only decompress from work, but like mentally shift gears into not work. And again, if you've got kids at home, if, you know, you and your partner are both trying to work with the kids at home, I understand that it's harder to do these things, but like, if there's a degree to which you can have some sort of ritual where it's like you go meditate

when the work day is done, you go play a video game that is like, you know, sucking in all of your attention so that whatever you've been. can do to like mentally give yourself that switch from one mode to another, like, that's super key too, I think, if people can do that. Yeah, I agree. I agree. You know, walking the dog first thing in the morning is a really important part of my ritual, and that's how I think through what I'm going to do that day.

And you know, there's a lot of, there's, you know, endless thinking about like, oh, how do you prioritize your to-do list? And I saw Alexis O'Henney and tweet a while ago, he's like, I'm starting to think that the people who are just like, think about what is the world? one thing that I want to accomplish today are right. And I've sort of adopted that as well, because there's going to be so many interruptions. There's going to be other things that compete with your time. It's going to be other people making demands on your time, especially now that we're all work from them. I have way more people interrupting me now that all my editors

are on Slack and expect me to be there as well. I didn't even use Slack up to this way. I was so blissly out of the Slack route. So we have more of the electronic interruptions and people expecting us to be available there because we're not in an office where they can just poke their head in. So I think that, yeah, just you got to go outside, you got to take a walk, you got to do whatever it is at your first thing in the morning to just like get yourself into it. And then I agree that, you know, a ritual to get yourself out of it at the end of the day is also helpful. This is a sort of awkward transition to talking about tech and the response to this. but I'm just curious, what's your take, and you're as plugged into this as I am, what's your

take on the fact that it clearly was tech Twitter and especially VC Twitter that was on top of this like six weeks ago, like before, before Valentine's Day for sure, but maybe even earlier than that, like, it was definitely tech and VC Twitter that was like, guys, batten down the hatches, something's coming. Well, it was also public health and epidemiologists. Sure, sure. People like us aren't as exposed to it. That's right, right, right.

I think for people in tech, you know, D.C.'s, you know, are, they have to be sitting around doing trend forecasting. They're traveling more anyway. They may have investments all over the world. So it doesn't, in a way, it doesn't surprise me. One thing that somebody said that I thought was really interesting was, you know, your attitude toward this, like, really cuts across all political lines, and it's very surprising who is saying what to whom. So it was really funny. There was this incredible moment when

Elon Musk was like, you know, coronavirus panic is dumb. And then Paul Grom of all people responded, you know, like, you don't want to underestimate the way that X-Mentral grows. And I just thought, oh, there's a perfect distillation of how, like, yes, there were a lot of people who were way ahead of this, but there was also depending on your predisposition, plenty of people who were like, nah, not a big deal. Yeah, was it you that just retweeted the tweet earlier today about how Elon is somebody who wants to prepare for like an extinction level event and take us to Mars, but then at the same time, it seems to be not concerned about an immediate crisis in terms of a pandemic, but

the, uh, what do you think about? about, what do you think about the response generally? This is almost coming back to the Amazon thing. Clearly, it's like, when we talk about the big tech companies, like the platforms, this is almost their moment in a way. I did a segment on the show today about how I think the numbers like 20 million, like Microsoft Teams has gotten 20 million daily active users in the last month, like maybe 10 million in the last week. So there doesn't seem to be capacity problems there in terms of, as long as like the internet networks and the broadband networks hold out.

But other things like the hardware companies and maybe Amazon, like is it, should we be worried about the physical end of this for the tech economy? I am worried about Amazon's ability to perform because they're fulfillment centers. I think it would be difficult to accomplish the right kind of social distancing in them. It's not like people are necessarily cheek by jowl, but the fact that they shut down this one in Queens shows that they're operating out of an abundance of caution, and I am really worried that the hubs of their hub and spoke model of distribution are going to get taken out one by one by coronavirus.

That's extremely worrisome. On the hardware side, you know, I've also been talking to a lot of, Amazon sellers. I've been talking to people who do things like operate ports and operate the trucking companies that go in and out of them. And, you know, there is anybody's guess because the challenge is you have a supply shock on the production side. China is now coming back online. most people are not keeping, like if you're running a lean e-commerce business, you're keeping eight weeks or less of inventory. If you have in-demand goods, like hand sanitizer, that can get wiped out in three days.

So what is not clear is what happens in April? Are there goods that will be in short supply because people, sellers were not able to re-revelled? order them at the moment they needed them so that they could get on a ship and get here. You know, the average period, you know, one person has visibility across this told me that the average period between when someone orders something from a factory in China and it arrives at a fulfillment center and can be sold on Amazon is 90 days. And you can't speed that up. Those ships aren't going to go any faster.

So is there going to be a disconnect in April, May, where there are certain goods going that are running out. In addition, will quote-unquote non-essential goods run out because Amazon has just stopped taking shipments of goods that are not like baby products, home and health care, you know, basically the stuff that people have been panicked buying. So I don't think that the supply chain disruption is over, and I think that there are some nasty surprises coming. I think that China has done an amazing job of, I mean, they just said they haven't had a new case for 14 days. That's pretty mind-blowing. Yeah. So I think that their production is going to be ramped back up. I think that the ports have also said that, you know, this disruption is not as bad as when they've had like longshoremen strike, which completely shuts down a port. So there is a lot of flexibility in the supply chain. And like that's a tip I have, but I have some stuff on this coming out in the journal soon. And I think people are going to find it really interesting. But, you know, there's a there's a lot of unknowns and very particular good. can run out at inopportune moments. And what you're, you know, not just ventilators. What you're suggesting is, and again, yes, let's acknowledge that, you know, we're, we're not talking about, like, life and death stuff here. But you're suggesting also that the, the shock could come in April or May where it's like,

wait, why can't I get X? Because it still takes that 90 days for the whole thing to get back at 100%. Yeah, I was still point in blank. somebody who has visibility across a lot of these supply chains, that a lot of, quote-unquote, non-essential goods, they're going to run out on Amazon in April. We'll see if that happens. What do you think about this is the moment that the entertainment industry has changed forever? I've seen some of these quotes that, like, the entire theater business will be bankrupt, you know, by the summer or something like that.

Is this this is streaming's moment, I guess, as long as they can actually start producing content again? Yeah, I mean, I did not hear that much years. I've been more focused on what's happening with, like, food service. I mean, we just, this was the year that Americans started spending more on food from out of the home than on groceries. And suddenly just this,

This incredible whiplash of that has reversed. Everybody's like, well, I've got to eat at home now. So I am extremely concerned about millions of workers in restaurants and food service, in theaters and entertainment of every kind. You can see mass layoffs in Las Vegas right now as a lot of those casino scalebacker clothes. And I think that what I have read, there was a piece today in the Washington Post, really that I think summed up like what we're in for. And, you know, it's epidemiologists pulling together historical evidence as well as their own

mathematical modeling of the current pandemic. And basically, what happened with the 1918 flu pandemic was there was a surge in the spring, what we're going through now, there was a lull, and then the world got hammered again the next flu season, because of course then it's endemic and then it's circulating. And so I have also been told by public how. professional, that the real danger time is going to be not now, but next flu season in November. So what ends up happening is there's a tension, and we saw this in 1918, between people just not wanting to just completely tank their local or their world economy and no longer

be able to pay rent or close their children or feed themselves. There's a tension between that and the need to socially distance. And so what tends to happen is you get these hills of infection where it's like, okay, the infection rate goes down, Cuomo's saying that it's probably going to peak in New York City in late May, and then it'll go down. But then it might go back up again, and we can have worse shocks coming. You know, it's not clear. There's so many

things that aren't clear. We're going to get a billion tests in time and then start doing contact tracing through cell phone data. I mean, you know, who knows? But I do think that we're in for months and months of pain, and I'm worried about

everyone who works in many industries. Yeah, I mean, just a couple hours ago, the headline was that the Met Opera just laid off all of its people, even the musicians and the staff that work behind the scenes and stuff. And I saw another tweet that's like one-third of the museums that have closed this week will probably not reopen. But there's another, actually, something that I just saw on Twitter in the last hour. And then I have one more question about social media in general, actually. that was suggesting that if it holds that if you recover from the disease, you're immune,

you know, you were kind of hinting there at like this bifurcated, like certain people might have to remain isolated and certain people might go back out in the world. What if all of a sudden, a few months from now, the people that have had it and recovered are suddenly like gold because they can go back out into the world and work? And then other people that I haven't got it, like you're saying, in the fall would have to go back into isolation. or something like that. I mean, all of that hinges on whether we can verify that those people got it and recovered, right? That's the problem.

We all have friends right now. People in the family are like, yeah, I'm getting over a thing. It's like, okay, was that a cold? Was that a flu or was that coronavirus? I myself came back from Vietnam just when this thing was exploding in Wuhan. I came back with a pretty weird sort of flu-like thing with some odd symptoms. that I found out today are actually congruent with like the revised profile of symptoms. Am I one of those people?

Did I come back with coronavirus and not even know it? I won't know until I can get an antibody test. Right, until we can all order like home kits that we can, you know, and maybe that's the solution is that. Those home kits will tell you if you have it. The antibody test will tell you if you've once had it. Interesting. That is not available yet. So the final question on social media generally, in a weird way, like social media and Twitter

especially has been so valuable. I know you're on Twitter as much as I am because I see your tweets all the time. What's your take in terms of it might not be good for our personal mental health, but in terms of keeping society informed and communicating, what do you think about social media? in this moment right now? I think it's absolutely essential for individual and collective mental health that we go on news diets. And my version of that is I try to just really read the news twice a day, beginning and

end of day. And I might weigh in on Twitter in between here and there or just push out something that I've seen as interesting, but like I will keep my phone logged out of Twitter during the day just to keep me from scanning there. Like I love the iOS extension linkie, which lets me just tweet anything with a block quote from the text, you know, from Safari, and I don't even have to be logged in to Twitter on my browser. I don't have the Twitter app on my phone either for that reason. I mean, I've even like resorted to, like, using buffer sometimes because it's like, okay, I have this, I feel this, like, civic duty to push out this thing that I've found that feels important. But I just don't want to wait into the morass.

So that's what I'm really trying to do, is that news that where I'm just checking twice a day? Well, unfortunately, I'm doing a daily corona shows. I have to force me. I have to put my mouth into the fire hose every day. But thank you, Chris. Be well, by the way. Yeah, thank you. Be well as well.