Welcome to Bytes in Balance, the podcast where we navigate the wild world of software engineering together. I'm Dan and this is Damian. We have been juggling code, teams and sanity for over 35 years combined. From junior devs to principal engineers, we have worn every hat in the industry. In this podcast, we're sharing our journey, lessons learned and mentoring tricks to help you find your own balance.
It's not just about the tech. We dive into people, psychology, communication, and all the messy bits in between. Think of it as group therapy for the digital age. We bend to swap word stories and share what we think is solid advice. Sometimes we even bring guests to shake things up. This podcast is our way of tackling the stress, burnout, and growth pains that come with the job. It's as much a balancing act for us as it is for you. Grab a seat and let's navigate this madness together.
You'll find some interesting links in the episode description if you want to learn more about us or the topics we discuss. All right, let's get started. Good to see you and good to chat again on this episode. Yeah, good to be here. Yeah, I think this is going to be interesting. We're going to talk today about remote work and working from home. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Why are we talking about this today? What's causing this topic to be front in our minds?
We saw a couple of weeks ago the move that Amazon did to announce a full five-day return to office. And I know there are a lot of opinions on that aspect going around the internet. And it is a controversial topic that is definitely hurting people. And we both have our own opinions, you know, in some cases, strong opinions about this. And I think it's good to have a conversation about the topic and try to understand a bit what's going on.
Yeah, I definitely have my own thoughts, but it'll be interesting to talk about the impact that this has because I know real people who are being impacted by this. I have seen people very frustrated, venting on LinkedIn. I have seen people quit. Actually, this was the last straw and they just quit.
So maybe we start by jumping back to the way things were pre pandemic, right? I think it's obvious that the pandemic caused a big shift in things. Although I mean, obviously, remote work was here for decades before the pandemic. But I think both of us were at Amazon and more. or less used to the full-time in the office sort of thing. Let's kind of jump to the pre-pandemic state of things and share our experiences there.
I'm not going to tell this complete story at this point, but a former manager, someone that I respect a lot, told me in my last days at Amazon at that point, it's like, what changed from before the pandemic when we were coming five days a week? And I think that could be a way
to drive this conversation let's think of how things look before pandemic and then the impact of pandemic and then how these things look today yeah just because i'm thinking about it to answer that direct question different people might answer differently but for me i don't think the pandemic actually changed anything
I was feeling the impact of full-time in the office culture, and we'll dive into that. I was feeling that before. I was trying to work from home when I could to manage distractions. The thing that changed with the pandemic was that now everybody was doing it. And so everybody was forced to level up their online communications and how they did remote meetings and all that kind of stuff. But nothing really changed for me. I always knew I
wanted to work from home, but the pandemic really made it possible for everybody to be on the level playing field while they're doing so. Yeah, I agree. So how do we tackle this? How did your life look before the pandemic in that sense? I'm going to speak at various points in my career. When I was brand new to Amazon, I loved going into the office. I lived in a small apartment in Seattle, and I didn't want to sit at home. I didn't have a desk at home.
And I was learning from people there in the office. So I enjoyed it. I enjoyed going out to lunch with all my coworkers and all that kind of stuff. But as I got promoted a couple of times, and as I was doing less and less sort of just hands-on stuff.
And also I was needing help less. I was more independent and things like that. I started feeling the impact of being in the office all the time. People were constantly coming by my desk and I was getting distracted or even if they weren't intending to interrupt me and had a question for me, this was like open floor plan.
Amazon didn't even have high cubicle walls. So it was just lots of visual distractions. And I was just finding myself taking every excuse to go disappear into little conference rooms or the coffee shop, or there were all these little pockets of comfy chairs littered around the... Amazon campus. And I would go hide out in one of those places just to get stuff done. At a certain point, it felt kind of silly. Like I'm commuting into this office.
And then I'm trying to escape my desk and go to all these places just so I could get stuff done. Of course, I still had lots of meetings during the day and things like that. But that's when I started to explore like, oh, maybe I should bulk up a lot of these things that I do and try to get them done at home when I have less distractions.
I did see people at Amazon who were full-time remote and had somehow made it work, but I always struggled because even on those days, which was maybe once a week, maybe once every two weeks, if I had to have any meetings, it was always a pain.
People at that time weren't used to always having a virtual dial-in for meetings. If you were participating in a meeting, you happened to be working from home that day, you were definitely at a disadvantage. Your voice was coming out of some crappy little box at the corner of the conference room and everyone else was.
having a real discussion in person. That was my personal experience is just feeling more and more frustration with the distractions at the office and feeling like I was jumping through hoops trying to escape that. How about your experience? Yeah, my experience was a bit similar.
I probably did not went through that initial phase that you describe at Amazon. I had a small apartment. I did have a desk at home, but there were different driving forces. I joined Amazon a little bit as a senior software engineer at that point still.
i did have an office at the beginning with a door which was actually great because it's like when you have a door you can close the door and at least you have some protection i tend to get distracted easily so for me this open floor and offices, they don't necessarily work well.
And I remember exactly the same thing that you are describing. There is a moment when you start moving towards senior, then later principal engineer, where it could get really distracted if you don't do things to protect your time. Eventually, I lost the office. There was a reorg. They had to redo their plan, put more people, etc. We went to high density. If you remember the high density meaning at Amazon, it's like basically, I never thought you could put that much people in a floor plan.
Right. Two desks back to back where you have to watch where your feet go so you don't kick the other person. Oh God. Yeah, totally. That was a struggle. Eventually, way later on, I regained an office. Then I lost it again. It was this whole thing. I remember talking with my manager and saying, please, I really need the space to lock myself. And as you say, it's the constant interruptions.
knock on the door like hey you have five minutes five minutes become 15 and once you stop there try to focus on something else and somebody knocks in the door 10 minutes later and this is your team you're helping your team it's also part of the game so it's important but I remember doing the same as you trying to protect my I'm going to some random place, but then you don't have your desk or extra monitors, right? It's problems. My experience was not much.
different than yours. It's fighting with commuting. Maybe now things have improved slightly, but I still don't think Seattle has the best transportation system to some extent. So you ultimately get forced to drive, struggling and fighting the traffic can get.
problematic similar experience pre-pandemic yeah and so the pandemic definitely forced companies hands obviously they had all the tools for some industries it was more complicated but for software engineers everything we want to do can be done online
And everybody was forced to do this all at once. Earlier when I was describing dialing into meetings as the only remote participant, you're at a huge disadvantage. But now suddenly when everybody's remote, and now all meetings are basically this big grid of faces, actually things
worked fine. That was kind of the surprising part. And I think that's the thing that everybody is jumping to when they say, no, I think we should just keep working from home is everybody mostly figured it out and it worked fine. I think it was a shock for lots of people. My wife had a conversation with one of her co-workers that worked from home for a long time. And this person was telling her that it took her like a year, a year and something to fully, really adapt.
at the beginning of the pandemic, the first month, I don't know if you remember this, like feeling exhausted to some extent, the first months with meetings. And then I started doing some research about this and then just start realizing that having everybody's faces in your screen at the same time,
time, even looking at yourself in the screen, even the small delay between the voice and the actual gestures, that actually wrecks havoc in our brains and that are trying to pick up these cues. And that's why we were tired.
I actually learned that in big meetings, it was actually a good idea to hide video, both mine and other people's video, in big meetings at least. And I kept videos, you know, in meetings that were like two, three, four people. That made sense to some extent. I started hiding my own video, by the way. from the screen.
That's so interesting because I do the opposite. I see what you're saying about big meetings. I think it's more appropriate for the people that are talking to have their videos on, but everyone else sit with your video off. But I would never hide my own video. That's funny. That would cause me a lot more anxiety because I'd sit there wondering.
about, oh, what do I look like? What do people see? Is there anything weird in my frame? Mine is hidden right now, by the way. I totally get it. But ultimately, it's the same thing when you are in a meeting, right? That's true. I mean, I don't carry around a little portable mirror with me. And it's interesting, though.
So I think at the beginning was hard. I think eventually, and I don't know what was your experience, but we managed to get over it and we managed to be running very successful operations and teams.
Yeah, maybe I glossed over it when I said everything was fine. We did get to that point really quickly. I shared your experience with the kind of meeting overload. I think the initial experience was everybody felt like they had to have more meetings to overcome for the lack of being in the office. Sometimes
it encourages meetings to be longer because everybody is sitting in their comfy chairs and drinking coffee and things can proceed in a more relaxed pace which is bad when you're sitting in a lot of meetings but yeah pretty much everybody adapted and we changed some things We had a few different policies and things like that. But yeah, we were the same operational bar. We were still executing things. We were still getting stuff done.
And I think eventually we figured it out the right currency. It's like when you mentioned that we ended having much more meetings at the beginning, you know, and eventually it went down. It may actually have gone lower than when we were in person, the number of meetings. And we started doing lots of things.
asynchronously. I, for example, found myself that I could actually manage my interruptions way better than when I was in the office because this knock at the door, you have five minutes, you have a question, et cetera, actually became a Slack message.
And a Slack message, and this is not going to sound well necessarily, but it's something that it's easier to either ignore or pause for later. Yeah, and I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. That's your right to kind of manage that and make it asynchronous.
absolutely i mean i guess the word ignore sometimes doesn't sound the best but defer yeah defer yes but it's like ultimately i remember thinking in terms like okay this is now a focus time so i can focus on doing something creative or dive deep on something etc i'm writing a document and you know it's like messages are not necessarily high priority and then later in the day it's like i have a one hour one hour and a half or something like that so i'm gonna
engage with the team and start answering Slack's messages and go back and forth. And sometimes even having two, three conversations at the same time, because why not? You can actually do that. To some extent, it was efficient. It worked really well. It was a very intentional way to manage these things.
Of course, you always have a pager. If something is really, really, really urgent, you know where to find me, where to find that pager. I remember even having a conversation with my manager and telling him like, I may intentionally ignore or defer, as you say, Slack messages from you, which people tend to react faster to their bosses' Slack messages, right? But I may do that if it is urgent or it is an emergency.
See, my page is always on. Just page me and that's fine. I'm okay. Yeah, it was really interesting what you said before about having multiple conversations simultaneously. One of the arguments that is being made against remote work is that, oh, being in the office fosters more collaboration and things like that. And okay, yeah, maybe to some extent. But one of the things that I noticed was now once we had Slack and everybody
was managing most of their communication via that asynchronously, it was a lot easier to collaborate with people who were much further outside of your team. Previously, when you're in the office, they planned out the floor plan of what teams sit where.
intentionally so it's like these teams work together so we're going to have them all in a row on this side of the building and all the managers can whatever and sure that is fine but now once we're all on slack i could very easily ping someone and have a deep conversation on slack or
on video chat or whatever with someone in a completely different division who in the office would have sat in a different building or in a different floor or something like that. But now I can have the same kind of conversation that I can have with my teammate with them. It was an interesting way that I think collaboration was actually easier once everyone was remote. Well, and that's an interesting concept because if you think about it, there was so much intention.
on putting these people together with this and building physical structures around virtual structures. Yeah. And those virtual structures at Amazon would change all the time and they'd have to do re the floor plan planning committee would go and do this every year. It was a huge waste of time.
No, but you could argue that you let the system evolve on its own. Then you let the system adapt and get close to whoever needs to get close to whoever needs to get close to ultimately make it work. So basically, it's something that now can adapt. It's not constrained by any physical layout.
I see what you're saying. Yes, now it can grow organically. Previously, it was not evolving organically. It was one, usually the VP's executive assistant who drew up the diagram. You better hope you were on their good side. The other interesting thing about platforms like Slack, for example, is that because their asynchronous nature,
When you are having a conversation in Slack, you don't need to answer immediately. And that gives you time to think. Suppose I Slack you something, you reply something. We are not in person. We are not wasting each other's time at that point. I don't have to put a reply immediately. I can think about stuff like for an hour or so in background before I actually come back at you with a reply. And I think that produces also a more meaningful conversation in some cases.
yeah i think it's different i can definitely think of times where that mode of communication actually hinders things not hugely but there are times where i want to have a conversation with someone but maybe it's hard to completely put into words or it would take a lot of time
energy and i just have the sense that it would be a lot easier to have that conversation on a video call or in person or something like that i think that's i guess what i had to develop is i had to develop the sense for like okay which of these communications something where someone asks me a question that might require
me to go do some research absolutely that should be a slack message because i'll go do some quick research they won't be sitting here like standing there hovering over me while i do that research i can get back to them and say here i found the answer here it is and it was very efficient
But I think the interesting thing is that we develop that sense. Like, I remember being in that situation now that we're talking about that and thinking like, hey, you know, I definitely need to talk with this person. It's like, hey, do you have five minutes? Let me know when you have five minutes.
And I think we developed all that sense of when things could go asynchronously and when things really needed to go with this knock, knock, knock, you have five minutes, that before was the default or tend to be the default. Speaking of meetings, there was something really interesting that happened to me in meetings and in general meetings. What do you think about that transition? You mean the transition of meetings in person to virtual meetings? Yeah.
Well, it certainly made it a lot easier. I scheduled a lot of meetings the year or two prior to the pandemic and even during the pandemic. And it made scheduling a lot simpler. I remember, again, having to schedule meetings with multiple people across multiple teams. And having to think about, oh, this person is in that building, and that's a 10-minute walk from this other building, so maybe we'll have the meeting here. A lot of logistical concerns that just went away.
you did not have to fight for conf rooms anymore oh yeah man that was a huge uh depending on what building you were in that was very contentious finding conference rooms people would be poaching or um squatting in conference rooms and you'd have to go kick them out
and all of that just vanished. It could get very aggressive sometimes. Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. You are one minute over. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I saw that happen. They went in, barged in, and then they realized that the meeting was being held by like the...
SVP and they're like, oh, wait, hold on. There's some kind of a pecking order protocol that happens there. You're probably more asking about the experience of being in meetings. Again, some things got easier and some things got harder.
back at the time prior to the pandemic, not all the conference rooms had a really good projection setup that you could plug your computer into. Maybe we were just in the dark ages then or something or the crappy buildings, but you couldn't depend on being able to always pull up something and share it. Whereas when you were all on a virtual meeting, it was much easier to pull up, share a screen, share a doc.
and even have people sort of follow along with you. That was one change that I noticed. I feel like we got better about our sort of meeting artifacts. A lot of times before the pandemic, meetings would just be people in a room and the artifact would be some scribbles on a whiteboard.
that maybe someone would hastily snap a photo with their phone camera as they left the room and then they'd transcribe it and whatever. This stuff got better when we were all virtual because we'd start a virtual doc, like a document for note-taking right away. We'd all be looking at it. We could all add. to it. I know we're not talking about interviewing, but the same way I feel like coding interviewing actually got better when we moved to virtual.
Because now they're sitting in front of a keyboard, they can type. I know people would defend the practice of writing code on a whiteboard, but like, man, I don't think that is very good experience. Yeah, I agree. I saw something interesting. This happened to me personally and I saw it in other people too.
By the way, for those who know me, I'm in general a shy person and an introvert by nature, by definition. It's crazy that we are recording a podcast, right? And, you know, when I was a university professor, I could stand up in front of 20 people and just give a lecture. That's fine, right? But somehow...
in those meetings before pandemic, I always felt in disadvantage because I always fell behind of the extroverted that can actually talk a lot and takes control of the conversation or whatever. I don't know if this happened to you, but it's like a little bit in my nature. And when pandemic... hit and we started having remote meetings, stuff started changing. Interestingly, I could totally identify the moment in which I started seeing this in myself. It's like the play field leveled.
And then I found out that I was participating way more in meetings, saying much more of the things that I wanted to say. And that was an interesting growth and something that I could see. The people that tends to, you know, talk too much and drive.
seemed to have an advantage from those aspects, lost some of that advantage, right? I saw more people like me also participating in meetings. So there was a playing field level that was very, very interesting to the point that I found interesting things about myself and outgrow it. that point. And now I can do that probably in an in-person meeting, but it was very interesting.
Yeah, you know, that's funny because I did not have that experience. I'm definitely also an introvert. And, you know, some people at work would actually be surprised about that. I'm an introvert, but I would get all of my social interaction sort of.
out at work. Like I would go home and I basically didn't have very many friends or things going on outside of, I mean, I have a wife and kids, but that was the extent of my social interactions after work. That's actually changed now that I quit my job and I do all this part-time stuff. I am a lot more social now.
No, I definitely had the same experience early on in my career of having a hard time in meetings, not knowing when to speak up, things like that. I basically trained as a bar raiser. Amazon has a particular role for interviewing.
And that kind of helped me get out of that in a major way. This was prior to the pandemic too. So prior to all of this, that was actually really difficult for me because it's a challenging role. You have to do an interview. You have to do tons of interviewing, but then you facilitate the debrief.
discussion. And in theory, you have a veto power against the hiring manager. You can block a hire if you want to. I'm not a very confrontational kind of person by nature. So doing that training and becoming a bar raiser
forced me to kind of level up my interactions in meetings. I feel like I got pretty good at anticipating different ways a discussion would go and being able to respond to that, which is not normally something I'm good at being an introvert. I like to think about things overnight and come back to them later.
on. And I got a lot better. I had developed a lot more sort of like verbal scripts for doing things, for starting a meeting, for closing a meeting, for closing a meeting where we don't all agree on something. Those are really difficult situations that I would struggle with in my default.
answer would be to just not talk and clam up and be quiet and shy. Once I developed those scripts, those strategies, I got a lot more confidence and I felt good in in-person meetings. And so there was something that I actually lost going to virtual meetings.
to like sit around in a room and look at people's body language and like oh hey how are you feeling about this oh you don't look that excited about this thing we're discussing what are you worried about and I had to change how I do that I can no longer rely on all these cues Maybe that's the reason why I like the faces on in meetings, because I relied on that to some extent in in-person meetings. So it's interesting how our experience is a little bit different there.
No, but it's interesting how certain and this is a tangent probably but how certain things in our careers trigger that growth and that change. And it's like in your case, what's becoming about racing and the training and having to deal with these situations in which, sure, sometimes the debrief can get rough and a lot of discussion. And as you as a bad racer, I have seen it. In bad racers, I have to conciliate, find some type.
of consensus and move forward. In my case, it was weird. It had something to do with pandemics and the way we started driving meetings in a different aspect. I saw it in a lot of other folks that would start speaking up more in certain meetings. And there are things that I miss.
Don't get me wrong. I do miss in-person brainstorming, whiteboard-in-front-of-you discussion about architecture. That's definitely harder to do. I have tried several approaches, and I haven't found one that is close to the...
experience of a whiteboard, cost-effective, where you don't have to buy a bunch of hardware to ride with your hands or rely on an iPad or something like that. And that actually is efficient. And we have adapted, by the way. I found ways to have architecture discussion, this type of thing. things through meetings, through remote meetings, and we have adapted, but that's definitely an aspect that I miss.
Yeah, I think remote work is here to stay and it is for me personally in my career for sure. But something else that I noticed that suffered was training of new hires, people that are new in their career. I'm thinking to a lot of new college hires. that we onboarded during COVID when we were all working from home and all new to it. And sometimes that went great. And sometimes that went really poorly. And I mean, to be fair, that happened before the pandemic too.
But I think all of those barriers to communication, if you're new in your career, it's hard for you to know when you should reach out for help, when you should ping someone on Slack. I know that's hard in the office too, but I think definitely people... suffered, you can just walk over and look at someone else's screen while they're doing stuff. Yeah, you know, you can screen share and pair program and things like that virtually. But again, it takes more intention.
And if you don't know what you're missing out on, if you don't have experience from before the pandemic, I think a lot of people didn't really realize that they were suffering. Yeah, I agree. I definitely think that it takes more intentional effort to actually deal with those situations. And I understand why some managers could struggle in that sense. I remember one manager in particular, he would basically walk, you know,
the end of the day, somewhere around 40 or something like that, greeting everybody and talking with everybody and, you know, asking, hey, what are you doing and stuff like that. That's definitely harder in a remote environment. And I agree, you know, new people potentially could struggle there. I also think that they don't know when to ask for help or something like that. When you are in office, you also need to solve that on your own. It's not that when you're in office, they ask for help more.
They don't. I think the difference is that if you are there and you are seeing them, it's easier to reach out and say, hi, what are you doing? Or so on and so forth. While remote, you have to extend that slack and try to engage in that sense. Right. And you don't want to be a micromanager either. So there's this balancing act that you have to get it right.
yeah i still think it's doable i think you have to be more intentional on the ways you do things yeah companies are talking about why they want to bring back people into the office and one of the reasons is preserve or keep developing our company culture and like yeah
you bring a bunch of people and force them to all come and work in the same room or in the same building, there is some amount of company culture and camaraderie and whatever that will develop automatically. And when you take that all away, everybody works remotely. I think you do have to be more intentional.
You have to develop those things. You have to think about your culture and think about how you want your employees to interact with each other and be intentional about that. It won't just happen automatically.
But then again, thinking back to a lot of the office cultures where companies expected things to happen automatically, you know, they would just throw a bunch of people in a room with a foosball table and expect that culture would develop there. You know, I don't think that was better necessarily. I agree.
What do you think are the reasons for companies pushing for this? Do you think it's these things we're talking about? I think remote work is here to stay. For me, it is pretty obvious. I think that there is an old school of management that is struggling to change.
And that's normal, by the way. That's very human. I've gone through my own stages in life and things and aspects where I have a struggle to change. That's hard. If you really don't know how to move forward, sometimes it's easier to move backwards.
right it's very easy for companies to look back and think hey a couple years ago this was fine everybody came into the office and nobody complained let's just go back to that yeah which is kind of coming back to the comment of this manager asked me once a couple of weeks before i was leaving amazon it's like what changed it because before we wouldn't come in five days a week and i had a very solid explanation for that that i'll come back later but that's kind of what i see and you do
see a lot of very successful remote cultures. You have examples like Atlassian, I believe is full remote, Airbnb, I believe is also full remote, and a bunch of others. When you start digging up, you will find big organizations, big companies like those, and you will also find medium-sized, and you will also find small organizations that work and operate that way. And I suspect, particularly, small organizations could benefit from this a lot because suddenly you don't have to...
paid for offices that's definitely a reduction in your costs well and that's why i'm so surprised i don't want us to focus only on amazon here but that's why i was so surprised that amazon went this direction because
I would expect that the cost savings from not having to have as much office space, because in theory, if everybody was fully remote, maybe you maintain enough office space for people to come in once every two weeks and have big team meetings and things like that. But I would think the cost savings And I would expect of all companies, Amazon would have people looking at the frugality aspect of that. And that's why I'm surprised that they're on the forefront of pushing people back.
And I think there are a lot of conspiracy theories around those wise and whatever. I don't think it's worth diving into them. But yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I think there is overall a lot of huge benefits. And I think you should have some type of office or place, and that's when I evolve. That's when I still have a much reduced footprint and cost and regular office, where sure, you can meet with your colleagues and your peers.
once every two, three weeks, I have some interactions. The way, you know, I'm framing this is like, I don't have any problem going to the office. If we decide that we do have to spend an afternoon dealing with something tricky and focused and whiteboarding or whatever, that makes sense. That's a productive... mute in that sense if we decide that that's the case. So I think you will still need some type of office in some cases and some type of locality to encourage those type of things.
I do think there are a lot of companies that are benefiting from remote work for many reasons. I do think a lot of companies are being able to attract top talent right now, people that have the realization that they do want to work from home and that it's better.
willing to work for smaller companies, even give up some money from their paychecks to have the privilege of actually working remote. And small, medium-sized companies, et cetera, could really be benefiting from this if they played well. I also think the amount of...
that are actually working remote, we are underestimating it because what we see is the news of big companies like Amazon saying, like, we're gonna return to office five days a week. And I don't have, by the way, hard data on this one. It's just a hunch. You don't see, you know, the small...
medium-sized, or even some big companies accept these landmarks like Atlassian, Airbnb, that are actually full remote. You don't see those type of things in the news. Right, because they're not talking about it. They don't publicize it. Yes, they are not big enough to actually attract the type of attention.
Yeah. Well, it's especially interesting to see the difference in the big companies. I don't know if this was this week, but Microsoft explicitly responded and said, no, we're going to keep allowing people to work from home while it works out, while they're still productive or something. I don't know if it sounded as ominous as
as it does in the press release. But it was something like that. I thought that was interesting. I'm curious to see what happens in January when the Amazon one officially goes into effect. And again, for Microsoft, if it is working for them and they are figuring out the way to move forward for them,
that's great good for them makes total sense like ultimately you measure the productivity of your people not for the amount of hours spent in the office that's very 19th century you measure the productivity of your people with many other useful metrics Why do you think today you want to work remote mostly? It's hard to think about going back to the office. What do you think are the benefits of remote work?
Well, I kind of separate them into two categories. There's the benefits of your working life that we already talked about. Less distractions, or you can manage your distractions better. I have a very nice, quiet office. Okay, I have guitars. Those are a minor. distraction, but you know, I have all my coffee and my comfortable, quiet office, my comfortable chair. It's a very nice working environment. Oh, I get to avoid a commute.
But then there's also benefits in my personal life, my family life. The commute impacts that. But I can step out of my office and go say hi to my wife. I can have lunch with my wife. I can talk to my kids if they're home. I can go have lunch, make myself a healthy, cheap...
meal here at home. I can do the dishes and start the dishwasher and then come back to my desk. And I probably took less time than I did leaving the office, walking to a restaurant, paying for some overpriced meal, walking back. All those things add up to more satisfaction in my personal life and being able to get more done and being less stressed out. And it benefits my work. So it's win-win for me.
Yeah, the answer that I gave to this manager was that because we found, we discovered a huge amount, an increase in quality of life. and work-life balance that it's really hard to give up and to go back. And it translates to similar things that you are basically defining. I have my workspace set up as I want. I minimize certain distractions and I have my own other distractions. Like I think that your guitars in the back, for example, is those types.
of things that when you are annoyed of something that is not working, you just get up, maybe riff a little bit. Yeah, for sure. In big meetings where I didn't have to talk, I used to sit there and just play silently, do scales and exercises and stuff. Little things like that just are so great.
And those things, by the way, they contribute to your productivity. They make your day less stressful and hence more productive and hence more creative. Right. If I was in the office, I would just be sitting in some uncomfortable conference room twiddling with... my pen, being distracting to all the people around me. And here I'm not. I'm at home. I'm in quiet. I have my camera off.
Well, I do the same with the Rubik's Cube. This is my thinking machine. I can do this in the office for sure, but I can do this at home. And I agree with you with sharing lunch with your wife. I do that also. If your kids are at home, being able to tell them hi.
keep an eye on them. And I don't think those are distracted things. I don't think that I lost productivity with those. I actually think that they increase my productivity. You have to be careful. You have to find the way to do it to work. But I think that's important.
I also wanted to share and I wrote some numbers. There was a LinkedIn post these days about somebody basically talking very positively about the return to office, you know, and I started making numbers. These are the numbers that I'm making. It's like... If you spend one hour and a half commuting every day, which was my case, that's seven and a half hours a week. That's 31.5 hours a month, which translates to 378 hours a year.
If you think 40 hours a week, kind of weeks, that's basically two plus month a year, just wasted income mute. And then I started thinking like, wait, it's not only the commute. There is a whole preparation at home before commuting that you don't do when you don't commute. And that's probably adding time. So if that adds 40, 45 minutes a day to that commute, that ultimately translates to... three plus months a year. So it's three plus...
40 hours a week, months that we basically are wasting. And some people could argue that they listen to audiobooks or they read if they commute in the train and so on and so forth, but not everybody actually can do that. It's not necessarily the way everybody actually can commute. And I think it's a minority that goes into that direction.
Right. There have been times in my career where I've had a commute and I've enjoyed it because I got to sit in the car and listen to music or ride the bus and listen to audio books and stuff like that. But a long commute is not enjoyable. And if you're forced to do that.
every single day in and day out, over time it loses its joy and it just becomes a slog. No, and I think that listening to audiobooks or whatever and so on and so forth is just a tactic to make that commute more enjoyable. It's not a goal on its own.
no i'm perfectly capable of before i step into my office i go on a walk and i listen to an audiobook and i come back to my office yeah and you get the extra exercise from that so i started making these numbers and when you make these numbers it's really hard to say or to justify oh, I'm going to waste three plus months that I'm not getting paid, that I'm not getting much from them just in commute. And on top of that, just start thinking like, and I'm spending more gas, more insurance, parking.
It impacts everything. As you're talking about all these things, I'm thinking when I worked in person, when I had to do that commute every single day, I hate commuting. So what I did was I lived in Seattle, not downtown, but I lived in Fremont.
Oh yeah, I think we talked last time. We lived very close to each other. One of the reasons why I lived there was so that I would have an easy commute, just cross the bridge down into downtown. And it was a 15, 20 minute commute on my bike and it was good. But when I was planning to work remote. for the majority of the time, I made the decision to move up north. And now I live in Edmonds. And I'm up here, I kind of was hedging my bets. It was like, I'm still like a 25 minute drive downtown.
But if I was commuting in every single day, it would be unbearable. It would be terrible. There's a bunch of trade-offs that I made. Now I'm no longer close enough to commute every day. but my equivalent rent is so much lower. The cost of living outside of the city, this amount of space, I have room for all these various hobbies that I have that take up lots of space. All of those things, you can quantify them monetarily as you are doing, but they impact your life in huge ways.
Yeah, there is a lot of impact in that economic impact on people's life. I think there is even ecologic impact. Now I feel bad of thinking of all the gas, fuel burned, whatever emissions, you know, commuting is like, well. Yeah, just so people can sit in a room together and be...
on Zoom calls with other people. Exactly. I remember, for example, after the pandemic, when we actually started going three days a week to the office, and man, it was rough. The white lights were unbearable. Distractions were unbearable. I remember being here. and somebody right there in a corner joined it to a meeting on time, whatever we were using back then.
And then it was like, okay, that's very distracting. And then realizing that the person on my other side was also joining to the same meeting. They both were in their own desk and I was listening, you know, one-fifth or one-fourth of the conversation. Yes, yes. Oh, so awful. I have friends now who are Amazon employees and who will be impacted by this. And I talked to them and I'm like, so you're going in now sort of three days a week, sometimes less.
how is it? Are you meeting with people more? And they're like, no, most of the people that I meet with are on Chime, basically Zoom, because their teams are distributed now. They now work on teams that are split between three or four different states or even different countries. And so...
Even when they're forced into the office, most of their teams are not there. That's, I think, one of the things that the pandemic uncorked the bottle on a lot of teams moving around and people distributing around. And you can't put that back in. Yeah, it's very hard. So at this point, I think we have talked a bunch of interesting things, but what do you think all this means for our careers? What does this mean for your career then?
Yeah, well, like I just talked about, I kind of made an intentional decision to move somewhere that would be further away from Seattle proper, where most of the big tech jobs are, at least the ones that are moving in person. I'm definitely committing to, in the future, working remotely either 100% of the time or the majority of the time. But at the same time,
I wouldn't feel comfortable enough moving to some podunk town in the middle of nowhere where I'd be forced to only do that. I'm a little bit hedging my bets for my own career. I'm close enough to a city to be able to commute if I need to, but I'm hoping to continue working remotely. of the time.
I do enjoy going in for short design discussions or things like that where we want to gather around a whiteboard. So I'll enjoy opportunities to do that when I can. But I don't think I want another job where I have to commute in five days a week and just have that whole. thing be part of my life. Yeah, I agree with you. I see my career in the same place.
It's definitely going to be hard for me to go back to a situation in which I have to commute five days a week or even three days a week. I see a lot of benefits of working remote and I think there are and there will be lots of opportunities. think there's people that actually likes going to the office and there will be a little bit of this polarized situational culture where both are going to coexist and let's see how the future looks.
I am in the same situation of you, you know, trying to find the middle ground and not going definitely too far away town in case it's actually needed. I enjoy also going out with co-workers, you know, and having conversations and discussions from now and then. I think it's important.
But I see my career as a full remote at this point. I think I can have a good influence in a team as a full remote as I had before in person. And I also think that there is going to be a set of new companies and even old companies are going to actually be able to make. the shift that are going to attract a lot of good talent that it's in a similar wavelength that we are. I'm even willing to sacrifice at this point of my life money for discomfort and for quality of life.
And that's where small companies actually are going to thrive and they could leverage. It's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next few years. yeah that's definitely true i'm really curious to see how things will shake out because i still feel like a lot of these things that we're in are still kind of experiments for example the three days a week hybrid schedule thing i think that's going to go away because it doesn't make a lot of sense it just feels
like a weird stepping stone that companies are using to go to full remote. It's like either you buy into the benefits of remote work, in which case it makes sense to schedule meetings and do in-person time sort of intentionally around whatever activity or doing. It doesn't make sense to just set this policy and say 60% of our time we will be in the office and then 40% of the time we will work from home. It just doesn't make sense.
If I'm going to make a prediction, I'm going to say that there'll be less and less of that sort of weird middle ground hybrid schedule and more of a either we're full remote or we're remote plus these explicit meetings where people are required to attend or something more intentional.
I'm interested to see specifically how Amazon's five days a week return goes. Maybe it's more of a morbid curiosity sort of thing, but I'm curious if they stick to it. It has a big impact and lots of people leave or not. I don't know, honestly.
Yeah, I agree with you. The pandemic triggered this weird social experiment. Despite the pandemic being over, we are definitely still in the middle of this social experiment. And it's going to be interesting to see how things look down the line in five, 10 years or something like that.
Okay, folks, I think this discussion is coming to a close. I've really enjoyed going through this with you, Demi, and I think both of us are in a really similar stage of our lives where we're fully bought into this whole remote thing. Even despite that, both of us have had such a different perspective on some of these things. So I really enjoyed this. And I want to thank the listeners who are still here at this point for listening in as well.
I enjoyed this conversation. It's a fascinating topic and it's going to be interesting to see how it evolves. And thank you folks for listening. We appreciate it a lot, keeping up with our conversations and our rambling around. And that's it for this episode of bytes in balance. We hope you enjoyed our deep dive into the world of software engineering. Thanks for tuning in.
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