WEBVTT 0:00:15.066 --> 0:00:21.057 Hey everybody, we are here with a new. 0:00:21.681 --> 0:01:14.449 Episode of Programming Throwdown, and it's Patrick and I talking about working from home. Before that, we're going to jump into a little bit of intro topic for people who are this is their first time listening. You have some news, news and links of the day, book of the show, tool of the show, and then we will dive into our main juicy topic, which is working from home. And it's going to be interesting because this is one of the few topics where Patrick and I disagree. So we're going to have a little bit of a friendly debate here about working from home. But before we go into that, I want to talk about smart homes. I remember hearing about smart homes a really long time ago and thinking, actually, here's where I first heard it. Remember when Bill Gates, this is like, I think in the 90s, he 0:01:14.972 --> 0:01:16.035 showed off his home and 0:01:16.035 --> 0:01:23.039 as he was walking through the house, the lights are turning on, the sound was following him. Yeah. I remember thinking that was amazing. This is what 0:01:23.039 --> 0:01:28.152 a billionaire does. Actually, I had one before that. It was Carousel of Progress and then that. 0:01:28.455 --> 0:02:24.261 Oh man, Carousel of Progress is so good. So just for people who don't know, Carousel of Progress is this amazing ride at Disney. It's still around. I took my—amazing is a bit of an oversell, but yes, it is a ride at Disney World. Yeah, I guess it's dated now. It's like in the future, we will have microwaves. But at the time, it blew my mind. And they go through the progress of the American story and stuff. It's really cool. At the very end, they talk about the future, which is now the past, which is kind of funny to think about. But in the future, we'll have an Oculus Quest effectively. And they had a smart oven. And then the guy, the father of the show, he says something about the sun is 900 degrees or something and 0:02:24.970 --> 0:02:31.560 it causes the oven. What was that? The score. He's like getting his score. He's like, I've got 800. I've got 900. 0:02:31.560 --> 0:02:47.400 Oh yeah, that's right. And the oven thinks he's setting the temperature and burns the turkey. It's hilarious. But yeah, you're right. I remember seeing that and thinking there's no way an oven would be able to understand what you're saying. And here we are. 0:02:49.911 --> 0:03:43.299 Then I went through a phase where I thought the problem is that it's too expensive to retrofit a home. And so you're never actually going to really see any of these things, which I think was true for a long time. But now people are buying new homes and the technology has been around for a while. And so I'm actually starting to see more smart things in homes, which is really cool. I personally went through and redid all the switches in the house to go through Alexa. So now I can tell Alexa to, you know, turn off the lights in this room or turn on lights in that room. And I have them on a schedule. So, you know, when the kids forget to turn the lights off in the morning, it turns all the room lights off every weekday morning. And it's been pretty awesome. And it's been actually pretty easy to set up. 0:03:43.300 --> 0:04:03.340 Yeah, I actually don't think homes are becoming more smart. I think actually a lot of this stuff is figuring out how to retrofit them. It seems to be anyways, but I kind of like that. It's kind of like smart TVs. I kind of have a beef. I hate Smart TVs. Cause even if it's a really nice TV. Okay, great. 0:04:03.660 --> 0:04:08.420 So I like the TV, but the smart part, I don't know. I don't want to see ads when I start my TV. 0:04:08.420 --> 0:05:17.900 That's not only that, it's like two, three years old. And then it's laggy is I'll get out and they force you into the, like, there's no hardwire base OS that will just like let you switch to whatever you've plugged into HDMI. And so it ruins the modularity. And all of a sudden your nice expensive TV feels junky, which probably somewhat intentional, but the smart home stuff, I guess can be on a very big spectrum from like frustrating to amazing. I also retrofit a lot of my lights. I did it with kind of a heart, hard mode. So I did it with a Lutron RadioRA2, which is you actually like go into the electrical box, open it up, rewire in the switches, and sort of switch them all over and it adds dimming capability. But you there's like some features locked behind like a training class that you have to go to them and get or whatever. So I had to do some kind of like workarounds to, and I bought all my switches used on eBay because there are like physical actual switches rather than buttons. So they're like really nice and they they're color matched to all the other light switches in the house. So, I made it. Yeah, I have, I have the same thing, except I got the 0:05:17.900 --> 0:05:29.400 Amazon Basics version, which connects to Alexa and all that, but it's the same as Sense that you have to pull out, physically pull out the switch and replace it with, as you said, a button. 0:05:29.400 --> 0:05:57.260 Yeah. So this one has still an actual switch, and it will work if the internet doesn't connect over Wi-Fi. So it has its own like backhaul radio network, you know, like whatever. And then you have like a hub in the house, and then the hub bridges into Ethernet so that you can expose it in, in my case, Siri and Google Home and whatever for that optionality, but same thing, you know, setting schedules and connecting various things, fans and whatever. 0:05:57.260 --> 0:06:33.792 Yeah. None of us, neither of us have done, I'm assuming you haven't done like a smart fridge or a smart stove or anything like that. No, that doesn't. I've seen an amazing stove where you set, instead of setting how much heat you want, you set the temperature. So you're like, I want this base plate to be 350 degrees. And apparently if you get it to the right temperature, then you don't need cooking oil. Like you could throw an egg on and if it's the right temperature, it'll like caramelize the outside and the egg will just slide around. Oh, that's cool. I... 0:06:33.792 --> 0:07:02.420 Don't know about that. I've seen the ones where you tell it what kind of meat it is and approximately how much it weighs and you stick a temperature probe kind of on the inside and it's measuring basically the temperature gradient. Like it knows the outside temperature with the temperature probe and then it knows like the internal temperature. And so it's trying to write, you know, kind of intelligently. Guys, sounds cool, but I just don't know. Like I normally keep toasters and ovens for more than a decade. I don't know, like in a decade, is that going to age well or not? 0:07:03.100 --> 0:07:29.680 Yeah. My parents have one of those. They have like a Ninja, and it's actually amazing. Like neither of my parents—I hope you're not listening, Mom—are pretty, really good cooks to be honest. But this thing is like, you can't mess it up, but you basically take a raw steak, you put it in, you put the probe in, you press a button, and then like a perfectly cooked steak comes out, and even they can do it. So I've been really impressed. So nice. 0:07:30.100 --> 0:08:13.590 But I have seen people on the internet with Home Assistant setups and stuff that have insane scripts. And all I can think of is like, what happens if something were to happen to me and I end up in the hospital or whatever, and I'm not home and like my spouse, my wife, like, you know, she can't figure out how to debug the fact that like the light switches aren't working or air conditioning keeps going to random temperatures. And so I do actually think there's like a sweet spot in what parts you want to be just a little bit better than a dumb thing can do. But actually you can go overboard with, you know, RFID tags and scanning in and a whole procedure that could just be very fragile. And I would shy away from any—I've not embraced any of those things myself. 0:08:13.962 --> 0:08:51.694 Yeah. The other thing, which is kind of adjacent to smart home, is I have like these smart tags on all of our keys. And so every three months I have a little calendar notification for myself: 'That's like charge all the tags,' and they all take like a little micro USB. And I actually bought a hub that has like an octopus of micro USB flanges that come out, and I plug in all the keys into them to recharge little tags. But that's been a life changer. Cause it's like some so many times it's like, 'Oh, I can't find the keys.' It's like, 'Hang on.' You know, it's like you're Captain America. You press... 0:08:51.694 --> 0:08:53.760 The button. It's like, you're Captain America. 0:08:55.579 --> 0:09:14.189 You feel like a hero at home. All right. I should be—I should be an advertisement for e-tags, but yeah, I will say I'm the one who has to go onto all the apps and ping various devices to get help finding stuff. But I remember growing up. That was always a thing: 'I can't find this.' 'I can't find that.' And you can't find the... 0:09:14.189 --> 0:09:20.365 Remote. Okay. All right. Jumping on to news. You have the first news. Yeah. I... 0:09:20.399 --> 0:09:24.364 wanted to cover this. Somebody pointed out to me the other... 0:09:24.449 --> 0:09:29.959 day conversation got to rocket launches in space. And they're like, 'Patrick, you're the one who always seems to know all of these things.' 0:09:30.319 --> 0:09:31.620 When's this happening? Whatever. I 0:09:31.840 --> 0:09:35.339 was like, Oh, okay. Well, I feel attacked, but you're not wrong. 0:09:35.340 --> 0:11:33.900 Anyway, so, I felt like we had to cover it on here, which was since last recording—which is has been a while—SpaceX had their Starship launch where they sent a spaceship and the booster up and landed the booster back, caught it on chopsticks at the SpaceX headquarters there in Texas. And then the Starship went all the way almost all the way around the world, but they went to the Indian Ocean and splashed down, and they actually caught it on a buoy camera. It was very cool. If you haven't seen it by now, I guess you're probably hiding from the news. But definitely go watch it. It is very cool. And I just wanted to talk about that. That is a huge engineering feat. Like, you know, just in general, like all of it, people didn't know this, like cost to orbit. I still think—I know, I think I've said this before, probably on this show—but I've told people there's a few things I think will just completely transform stuff in a way we don't understand. And I think really, really low cost per mass to orbit is one of them because you can put lots of things up: manufacturing systems, whatever. You can like start to harvest asteroids. I just think like it's very hard to predict all of the things that can happen if it's cheap and frequent access to space. Just my personal opinion, even starting to see that with Starlink and like there was some natural disasters, some hurricanes here in the United States and people getting internet fast and being able to request assistance and that kind of stuff is just transformational. And now even they were turning on cell phone to satellite direct communication for calls. So there's just all sorts of things. I think we're not going to be in a future where there's just constant internet connectivity for everything as a given, it's just like the low barrier. And that's already pretty transformational, but then also, you know, just like I mentioned, you know, all the other things that kind of come on—abundant power, like almost infinite power would be another one that I think people underestimate how transformational it'll be. 0:11:33.900 --> 0:11:36.715 While we're on this topic. Anyways, but going back, 0:11:36.715 --> 0:11:58.040 I had a question about the harvesting asteroids because I've played like X4 and Everspace. I've played a lot of video games where you are harvesting asteroids in space. And I always wondered, like, is that a real thing? Like, do asteroids have rare metals like to so they have enough rare metals that to justify going and harvesting them? 0:11:59.024 --> 0:12:51.120 So rare metal is like rare on Earth in a cheap and abundant way to access. So it's not it's not a thing that would happen today. And I think people have tried to make it happen because like it's on the verge of affordability, but it's one of those things like you can try to be an early person and someone will be the first, but it's also true that in whatever 50 years, it'll just be a no-brainer, right? Like, hey, to go out to that, you can get propellant up and then use that propellant to go out to the asteroid belt, get an asteroid, look for an asteroid, whatever, bring it back. It's not going to be like humans of the old West, you know, like going out and panning for gold kind of stuff. I don't think it'll be people locating one, bringing it. But imagine if gold went from like a relatively rare thing to cheaper than, you know, maybe not like iron, but cheaper than, you know, just normal metals or whatever. 0:12:51.540 --> 0:12:55.032 And so you would drop the asteroid in like a lake or something like? 0:12:55.032 --> 0:13:25.947 You would maybe, but no. I mean, I think if propellant, which is a problem because it's heavy and bulky, if you could get it up, get to the asteroid, bring it back to Earth orbit or mine it with things and sort of refine it to some degree. And then you would bring it back just in a capsule or whatever, not the whole asteroid, but the gold. I mean, we bring back—imagine like what, you know, you four humans in a Dragon capsule come back down safely. Imagine if the capsule was instead, I mean, it'd be really heavy, filled with gold. That's gold. That's a lot of gold. 0:13:26.760 --> 0:13:33.439 Why can't you just drop the gold in a lake? Because I mean, it won't burn in the atmosphere, right? I mean, it 0:13:34.300 --> 0:13:40.712 will. It'll turn into plasma and then you'll have like disassociated gold spread all over the Earth. Oh, 0:13:40.712 --> 0:13:48.407 I didn't realize. I didn't. I thought the melting temperature of gold was like a lot higher than that. It's really low. Yeah. I 0:13:48.407 --> 0:14:00.319 mean, almost anything like, you know, we get hit by rocks all the time and you see you lose a lot of it. So I don't know. Maybe some people have some ideas on doing that or if you very controlled the entry somehow. 0:14:01.020 --> 0:14:10.359 Wait, so maybe, okay, it's kind of a dumb question, but like if gold destroys and like, how does the spaceship not destroy when it comes in the atmosphere? Like, is this something stronger than gold? 0:14:12.239 --> 0:14:58.699 That's not a single dimensional question, right? Like, Oh, I see. Yeah. I mean, gold is not a very strong thing, period. But yeah, I mean, the bulk of it is by shedding, shedding heat. So you get these ceramic tiles is the most common thing. And they're, I guess, somewhat ablative. So like the parts on the outside, they're very insulative. So the heat doesn't pass in. Ceramics themselves have a very, very high temperature. And then I believe they also use some forms of like parts of it is, is burning away. But that reaction of burning the outside away is actually cooling the stuff underneath. Oh, interesting. It's very careful. But for a metal, you don't get that, right? Metals are very conductive. So if you burn something on the outside, it would just all that all the heat would just come through it. They're hyperconductive. 0:14:59.240 --> 0:15:08.740 So like you could, in theory, like, like surround a huge chunk of gold in space with like ceramic plates and then throw it out. 0:15:08.740 --> 0:15:39.479 Like build a capsule around the gold or put it in a capsule and yeah, land. Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. That is super cool, man. So we'll see. Um, you know, and I think that's also, uh, you know, controlling the speed using propellants. I'm not saying that's going to be five years. I just like, you know, it's, it's very cool to see somebody, you know, almost exponentially improving our access to, to space. So shout out to any SpaceX people who may be listening to this and like cringing. I do feel free. Maybe we'll have to Oh yeah. SpaceX people hate 0:15:39.479 --> 0:15:47.325 us right now. I have a few friends there and, uh, yeah, they work, uh, incredibly hard. So they're very dedicated and huge props to them. Um, 0:15:47.984 --> 0:17:02.976 and so upcoming will be the test number, I guess are numbering at six. So in the next couple of weeks as of recording, so it may be already done by, by the time you guys listen to this episode, but they're going to kind of attempt to do most of the same things, but you know, just a little bit better. Um, and so build up, you know, repetitions and learn and, and, you know, measure better sensors, try, try some, you know, small modifications, but, but definitely very cool, very exciting. Um, and then the thing that I mentioned to people that I guess a lot of folks missed was landing the booster back on the pad with, you know, the chopsticks and eventually even the Starship back, uh, means you can basically set it back down, fill it back up again and shoot it up. Like this whole thing where you don't splash it down or landed on a drone ship or, uh, you know, landing pad and have to like ferry it means you literally just like that. And that is the plan. They just like lower it back down onto, it is the launch pad, just lower it back down to the launch pad, pump it with propellant again, check to make sure nothing's broken and send it up. So you can sort of send a single ship up multiple times a day, um, sort of like production. And so with a dozen ships doing, you know, even two launches a day, that's 24 flights to space a day. Think about how much stuff you could put up. Like it's crazy. 0:17:03.972 --> 0:19:01.740 Yeah, that's wild. Um, super cool, man. Um, yeah, I mean, there's so many things that could go there, but we'll, we'll just an interest of time, uh, check out the video. If you haven't seen it, I've seen it. It's, it's really amazing. Um, and, uh, yeah, huge props to those folks. Um, all right. My news first news is ShareDB. There's a really cool library of uses for a variety of projects. And the basic premise is, um, maybe I'll just start with Git as an analogy, right? So, you know, with Git, you have, uh, commits and like you can make a commit, uh, don't consider yourself yet with branches just for a moment, but like, you know, you could make a commit. And then if I go to make a commit, uh, to main, it will say, Oh, you can't do that because you're not on the latest version. You need to fast forward. And so you do a Git pull. And so it will try to, you know, if someone's made changes while I was working, it'll try to like, you know, undo my changes, make their changes and then redo my changes. Um, and most of the time that works, except it could be a conflict. Like if, if you, uh, deleted a line and I added some characters. So that same line that's now deleted. Now we have a conflict, right? Because, you know, I'm modifying something that you deleted. And so it's not obvious what we should do there. Like maybe it should be undeleted or maybe my modifications are now irrelevant, right? It's not clear. And so Git world war. You'll say, Hey, we have a conflict and you go into your code editor and fix it, right? This is all stuff that everyone knows. Um, but you could imagine like an autonomous, like a rule-based system. So for example, for the example that I gave, um, you could say, well, if there's a conflict and one person deleted a line and the other person modified it, then just 0:19:01.740 --> 0:20:24.531 delete the line. Um, so you could end up like defining rules, um, for how to govern these conflicts without any human intervention. Now it might not do what you want, but it will not require any, uh, human in the loop. Right. And so this is the premise for something called Operational Transform, which is effectively just a set of rules such that like, you never end up in a state where you don't know what to do. Um, and so Google Docs, uh, any of these collaborative things, if you've ever used Notion or any of these tools, they all work under this premise. Like if, if, if Patrick and I are editing a Google Doc together, as we literally are right now, and, uh, and Patrick deletes a line right as I'm modifying it, Google Doc doesn't pop up and say, Oh, I have a merge conflict. It has some logic to handle it. And I, I don't know off the top of my head what it does probably just deletes the line, but, but it will handle it. Right. And so as you can imagine that handling it is not trivial. Um, there's all sorts of weird edge cases that could happen and that you have to think about. Um, and so this library ShareDB is actually made by the guy who made the sharing featuring Google Docs. So 0:20:24.852 --> 0:20:27.974 bit of background, uh, this guy built this way 0:20:27.974 --> 0:22:03.047 for people to collaborate, you know, using the browser and Operational Transforms, all that, uh, Google bought his company that turned into a product called Google Wave that was, uh, managed in my opinion, poorly, uh, as a product and subsequently failed. Um, but then Google Wave, um, may, uh, you know, was absorbed by Google Docs, um, to make what I think is an amazing product, which is, which is, you know, Docs and Sheets and presentations and all that, um, using that same technology. Um, so that gentleman has since left Google and built an open source version of the same technology. And this was a long time ago, like I think eight years ago, he left Google and I'll have to look up his name, but, um, and so he's going to continue to work on it and make it better and better and better. Um, and so ShareDB is the latest version of it. Um, I've used this in a few different projects, you know, if you have something and it can actually work on JSON now too. So imagine like you have a JSON object that represents the state of your app and you want multiple people to mutate this state. Um, you can use the ShareDB library and it will handle like the web sockets and all that stuff for you. Um, so I'm a big fan of his library. I've used it in a few projects. I said, I think it's really fun. Uh, definitely it's easy, relatively easy to, to get started with. And, uh, yeah, if you ever have a project like this, I would recommend it. That's 0:22:04.937 --> 0:22:06.203 really interesting. I tried briefly 0:22:06.203 --> 0:22:07.030 to search, but 0:22:07.030 --> 0:22:26.672 I was having name collision with the, with the, uh, the name of the database with the, the, who wrote it, but that's awesome that like you mentioned, it feels there's probably a bunch of apps that end up needing to solve the same issue. And so having a sort of like backend that just kind of helps you do it is, is actually really cool. 0:22:28.191 --> 0:22:55.478 Yeah, totally. All right. My next news topic is something that's been off and on in the news, something, the topic we've covered, which is Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. And this one just got me really excited. Some advance happens every few years and then nothing happens. And then something happens again and I get excited again and I just want it to be a thing. And I don't know when it will be, which is 0:22:57.064 --> 0:24:54.440 that Meta talked about their Orion Augmented Reality glasses. I think they kind of said that it's too expensive. They have no plans to make it into a product at this time, but they wanted to kind of show off what it was presumably, you know, get some press around it, show that they're still working on their kind of Metaverse ideas. But, you know, if you haven't seen any of the coverage about it, definitely check it out from an engineering and technology standpoint. It's very cool what they are attempting to do. And again, like I said, there's been Google Glass, you know, these, various startups have attempted to get into this space. Feels like this one is now the front runner of people who got closest to the vision of, you know, you walk down the street and you just have overlays on your glasses. And as someone who's worn glasses since I was pretty young, I have always been like, there's this space where you could just put stuff like, I wish I could see things and, and, you know, still not. So hopefully in our lifetime, we'll sort of get this technology to come through. I just think it would be pretty cool. In my opinion, other people disagree, but I think it makes so much more sense than smartwatches or your phone. And you see so many people now just walk around like looking down at their phone and just from a situational awareness thing as a pet peeve, I was like out the other day, doing a run and I ran past so many people that were outside walking, presumably to get exercise and just literally staring at videos on their phone. I don't want to throw stones at TikTok, but anyways, it's just like, it got to me in some old man, get off my lawn kind of way. Like you're outside walking around, like have headphones in and have whatever, but like you totally aren't paying attention. It's a little dangerous. And, you know, also like if it was under glasses, two things: one, maybe they would keep more awareness. And second, I wouldn't know. And so the world would be a better place. Anyways, so shout out for Meta those Orion. 0:24:54.760 --> 0:25:33.060 you know, Augmented Reality glasses, I think are really cool. You know, there's obviously ways we stopped to figure out, like you can't actually project black over something. Right? So like actually mask something out is still a challenge, but I'm excited for having just, you know, even a very basic, just very easy to use, not super expensive, little bit of display, you know, in my glasses, even just like a blinking light or something. Like, let's just get lower expectations a little. I don't really care. Just something that'll maybe I can put one up in my smart home, you know, a little light that flashes when someone's on my front door or something. 0:25:33.600 --> 0:25:41.040 I mean, I would definitely get rid of my smartwatch if I could just get notifications on my glasses. So that's like one less device I'd have to wear. 0:25:42.100 --> 0:25:50.590 Yeah. It makes sense to me, but it's just a hard problem. And I think smart people are working on it. I wish them luck. Yeah, totally. 0:25:51.265 --> 0:27:48.200 All right. My second news blade and sorcery 1.0 is, I totally love this game. You know, a lot of games when they get to 1.0, it's not really that different than 0.99. You're like, okay, well, you know, congratulations to you. But for me as a consumer, it really doesn't matter. But this game had a major overhaul in 1.0 that made it even more fun. Oh man. I mean, I've put just countless hours into this game. So I'll tell you my routine really quick. I might've already said this on show, but I have these things called heavy hands. They're about like three pounds each and they're basically metal gloves. I was almost said gauntlets, but they're not really, they don't protect you at all, but they're metal gloves that you wear on top of your hands that just add a lot of weight. And, I'll put on these like really heavy gloves. You can still hold the quest controllers with them and I'll basically swing swords and, you know, fight bad guys and stuff in this game. And that's like an amazing workout. You will sweat bullets if you wear these heavy gloves and try and swing a sword around for an hour. And, so up until 1.0, it wasn't really even I would consider a game in the sense that there's no progression. There's no hook. It's basically like you go in an arena and enemies show up and you sword fight them. But there was, it wasn't really, it was more of a tech demo than a game. 1.0 makes it truly a game. There is so many fun things you do just for example, not to, I won't spoil the ending or anything like that, but there's a mini boss that you fight and he's got like kind of like if you've ever played the game Star Fox or any of 0:27:48.200 --> 0:29:20.640 these games where the enemy has like a weakness, like a certain point, that's a weakness. So the boss has a weakness point, but it could be like way up high. And, and, and the mini boss is extremely tall. So like 20 feet tall and the weakness might be like on the top of his head. And so you literally have to climb on this boss's back while he's like thrashing around and trying to get you off of his back. You have to climb on his back, get to the top of his head and start whacking him with a sword. It is like exhilarating. I actually never get seasick or anything like that playing. I'm fortunate. Maybe it's just too many years of playing pixelated Doom and these other games in the nineties, but, I'm somehow immune to it. But I could imagine like pretty much anybody else getting sick on this. Cause this guy's like throwing you around and you're trying to hold on and you're trying to like wall climb, rock climb this giant thing. So, extremely, extremely fun. They added like skills so you can like, there's a skill tree. I put all the skills into the athletic stuff. So I actually don't do any of the sorcery part in Blade and Sorcery. I just put all the skills into being able to like hit people harder with the swords, which goes along with the exercise part of it. I found it extremely fun and it is totally worth whatever they're charging, which is pretty reasonable. I don't think it's like a $60 game or anything. 0:29:22.080 --> 0:29:33.677 I haven't tried this one. I'm curious if I should, I tried the Gorn people were like really into Gorn and does it is good too. Okay. I don't like that. So then maybe I won't like this one by a correlation. 0:29:33.745 --> 0:29:45.540 This is a million times better. So it's directionally the same as Gorn. So like, if you didn't like the whole premise of Gorn, you might not like this one, but this takes it to the next level for sure. Maybe 0:29:45.979 --> 0:30:21.974 I just, you seem to be into very skill, skillful VR stuff. I've never, I was more do like the puzzle puzzle games, like, escape room. I expect you to die. That kind of stuff has been my go to. Oh yeah. The, like, let me get better at the game itself. I just, yeah, I haven't, I guess I should keep, keep trying. I think partly I don't get super, super motion sick, but I do a little bit. And so the ones that are more aggressively like move around and, you know, be fast and quick. I feel like you see the limitations of your VR system quicker, because of update rates and 0:30:21.974 --> 0:30:23.104 stuff versus, you know, 0:30:23.104 --> 0:30:29.719 slow and I can move, but it's a more applauding pace isn't, isn't as problematic. Yeah. I 0:30:30.698 --> 0:30:39.860 mean, so I just checked it's $30. Uh, I think you can refund it within 48 hours. So you could always grab it and then say like, Oh, I'm, 0:30:41.009 --> 0:30:42.342 I'm vomiting. Um, 0:30:45.143 --> 0:30:53.969 Yeah. So do you use a broomstick handle as your source? Like, is there a danger of whacking your TV or any other people in the 0:30:53.969 --> 0:31:14.033 room? That's an interesting idea. I never thought about that. That would be pretty cool. Someone should make basically what I've, what I've done, but with a broomstick handle. So like, you know, a really heavy glove that goes on the outside that doesn't interfere with your thumb. So you can still play, right? And then a broomstick handle for the sword. So you 0:31:14.033 --> 0:31:46.000 can whack yourself in the head. I know that I know they have them like 3D printed, like gun rifle, like attachments for some of the shooting games and stuff there. They don't look like guns. They're just degenerate, but you know, hold the, hold the handles a proper spacing apart or feel a little bit like a pistol grip or whatever for, for some of the I've seen online. I, as a 3D printing person, you kind of bump across those things sometimes. So I wouldn't be surprised if someone has, you know, iron pipe, but I'd probably break a snap, but like, uh, yeah, it was something heavy to attach and really get a workout. 0:31:46.860 --> 0:31:53.976 Yeah. It was super fun. Actually, if you, if you had something really long, you'd get that cantilever force, right? So I was going 0:31:53.976 --> 0:32:02.346 to say that you just need something with those Olympic weightlifting weight attachments to the end. And you can put like a 10-pound plate, you know, a foot out from you. 0:32:02.447 --> 0:32:06.565 Oh, that was so hard. You couldn't like the torque would be, you know, or go a 0:32:06.734 --> 0:32:14.159 meter out. And then you do like a pound at end of a meter and you'd just be like, Oh, Oh, and then it's like, I have 0:32:15.036 --> 0:32:19.373 to explain to my family why there's like an Olympic weight sized hole in the wall. I guess I 0:32:20.369 --> 0:32:26.200 mixed my, I'm going to make people upset. I said a pound a meter away. You'd have to 500 grams a meter away. There we go. 0:32:26.920 --> 0:32:31.560 Yeah. We're in America. You have to do it in like a dove farlings. 0:32:33.092 --> 0:32:35.033 It's a half stone at 0:32:35.033 --> 0:33:17.963 A furlong distance. All right. Book of the show. Mine's an actual legit book this time. That is the book that wouldn't burn by Mark Lawrence. I've recommended a series from Mark Lawrence before, and this is the first book in a series and actually done with it yet, but I am enjoying it so far. I will say for me personally, it was a bit of a slow start. I kind of just went off of, you know, recommendation that it was an author and it was getting good reviews, and I didn't even read the description. So it was a bit like trying to figure out what it was going. And then I kind of got excited. And then I was like, when to prepare for this and read the summary and was like, Oh, this was just 0:33:17.963 --> 0:33:19.397 like literally the back of 0:33:19.937 --> 0:34:03.829 the book. Okay. Anyways, but, but definitely been an interesting parallel storylines that intertwine, telling of a kind of interesting world. I don't know the full details yet, but one of those things where rather than tell you all of this stuff up front, you're just kind of learning as the characters sort of go through their story. And there's some interesting ideas and sort of a mysterious world that's being inhabited. And you're trying to figure out, you know, how similar or dissimilar is this, and so I definitely check it out Book That Wouldn't Burn by Mark Lawrence. If you're into that kind of like science fiction fantasy, if you've read something from Mark Lawrence before, very cool. So it's the first 0:34:03.829 --> 0:34:10.840 book of the, it is the first book in a new series. Okay. So yeah, you have to be prepared to wait for the second. 0:34:10.840 --> 0:34:34.559 Oh, okay. Yeah. Fair point. I guess I should have tell people that the library trilogy, I think the first and second book are already out and the author. Yeah. The third one isn't yet, but this author Mark Lawrence has been able to finish multiple series before. So it's not their first rodeo. Yeah. Right. That's not name calling any specific 0:34:34.694 --> 0:34:35.600 Patrick Rothfuss. 0:34:36.314 --> 0:34:42.600 Anyways, they can't finish their series. If you're listening, Patrick, 0:34:44.160 --> 0:34:45.291 if you're here for 0:34:45.291 --> 0:34:48.500 you, man. Yeah. We get back to work. 0:34:51.360 --> 0:34:55.659 I've heard much worse things said to him. So I feel, I do feel that I do feel bad for them. 0:34:55.759 --> 0:35:00.460 Yeah, totally. No one likes to be stressed to do something creative. I mean, that's like, 0:35:00.460 --> 0:35:02.980 People probably have no idea what we're talking about. 0:35:02.980 --> 0:36:49.279 My book of the show is also a book. It's called Masters of Doom. And it is a biography of John Carmack and John Romero, two of the founders of id Software that created DOOM. It's awesome. I mean, I'm a huge fan. I put countless hours as a kid into DOOM, into Commander Keen, into so many of these shareware games, Kingdom of Cross is actually mentioned. They worked closely with Scott Miller who made Kingdom of Cross. So it was just like a total nostalgia trip. If you're not, you know, a millennial, maybe this won't relate, but man, it just really threw me down memory lane. So fun. I am about two-thirds of the way through it, and I'm just having an absolute blast listening to this book. The interesting thing is they really talk about some people wanted to make a really gory demon-like game since the beginning, but they started off making Commander Keen and making kind of some of these silly games. But they always had this big vision, at least on the artistic side. On the technical side, John Carmack's always been kind of like head and shoulders above all his contemporaries, which I think pretty admirable. And they talk a lot about that. Overall, I thought it was—I think it's a fantastic read, and I'd recommend folks to check it out. 0:36:49.280 --> 0:38:25.799 I have read that book. I was actually looking quickly. I was for sure. I probably recommended this, but I have not. So, yeah, good, good recommendation on Masters of Doom. Like you said, I actually didn't play a lot of the games that were talked about there, but I kind of knew about them. But reading about the dichotomy between folks just trying to push for artistic versus technical and John Carmack, even today, I feel like is around, and we were talking about VR and had some stuff going on there with Meta and Oculus and the work he was doing there. But I think definitely for a lot of people, a very formative figure in the programming space and sort of the way he approached things and the way he did things and just kind of going for it and kind of a rare, a rare talent there. But definitely an interesting read, even if for nothing else, it's kind of interesting to start to see those retrospectives of things that are largely software or programming, right? There's not that many of them where programming is really the star of the show, and here it kind of was. And so, we're kind of getting to the point where you can have those historic lookbacks. I also did happen to see recently, randomly some recommended book list from Elon Musk—not that endorsement of him, but this book was on his list. So I think you're in a, I guess maybe, maybe you can, that's correlation, right? If you guys read and recommend the same books, then like you're going to have the same outcome and wealth. So. 0:38:26.200 --> 0:38:32.680 Yeah. I will eventually be able to catch something with chopsticks. I mean, I've been trying basically my whole life to pick up a dim sum. I can't do it. 0:38:32.799 --> 0:38:39.440 That's true. I am really bad at actual chopsticks. So maybe I should engineer robotic chopsticks. Maybe I would do better. That's right. 0:38:42.040 --> 0:40:38.300 All right. Time for book of the show. Well, I did a book for book of the show. I'm not doing a tool for book of the show. That's okay. I'm doing Blatro, which is a very weird thing. I don't ever say it. It's just one of those words. I always see, but B-A-L-A-T-R-O, which is, I guess you call it a roguelike playing roguelike. It's been around for a while on PC, but it recently had mobile releases on Android and iOS. So you can now play it mobilely, which is very bad for my free time for a while. I'd been playing it on my Steam Deck actually. And it was bad for, you know, anyways, get his fancy Steam Deck. And all I did was play this card game. Anyways, it was much better on my iPhone. But I've been playing it. It's one of those like perfectly finds the bounds of like, it's random and you can do as good as you can. And you still just lose. And I play kids with play games with my kids sometimes, and they think they're just amazing. And I try to express to them, you realize you took a very bad strategy. You needed a specific, very unlikely outcome four times in a row to win. And you got it like, yes, you won, but like, I don't know that you should be super proud. Anyways, this is that game. Sometimes you just really, really bad draws or whatever, and you can lose, but you can always just be trying to improve your probabilities. And I feel like with these games, you can't overthink it. You just got to kind of go fast. There's no don't get analysis paralysis. You just kind of zip through it and try to do your best. But definitely been having a good time. I think it comes in, I got it off of Apple Arcade or whatever. So I didn't pay for it, but I believe it's not super expensive on the various platforms. So if you've never heard of it before or never tried it, I would, I would definitely give it a shout out for that, you know, plane ride, bus ride, train ride, sitting in the car, having a few minutes, definitely not while you're using the restroom, you know, definitely don't use your phone when you. 0:40:38.300 --> 0:40:44.425 Anyways, but like, those are the perfect opportunities for getting in, you know, a few hands, for, you 0:40:45.876 --> 0:40:53.335 Know, well, okay. Small digression here, but sorry, you can use your phone in the restroom. Totally fine. No, really. Are you joking? 0:40:53.335 --> 0:40:54.060 Or are you? 0:40:54.200 --> 0:40:55.613 No, no, I'm sorry. I was 0:40:55.782 --> 0:40:56.524 Just like, go 0:40:56.895 --> 0:41:25.600 ahead. Okay. But you know what you cannot do? You cannot use your laptop in a toilet stall. And then you definitely cannot put the laptop on the ground of the toilet stall. Like I saw this one time at work and I was like, this is like a whole new level of disgusting. Like this is like, those people who for some reason spit in the urinal. I don't understand that either, but like, this is even worse than that. 0:41:28.780 --> 0:41:40.365 This is like, Oh, I need to put my laptop on the floor of the toilet stall. Like, what are you thinking? I can't, it's gotta keep going. I don't want 0:41:40.365 --> 0:41:46.120 to know where you're playing your games from. I don't want to know where you're slacking me from. Just like, let's just keep it. It's fine. 0:41:46.424 --> 0:42:35.901 Yeah. We don't need to go to this scatological on this show. Oh no. Yeah. Don't bring your toilet. I don't bring your laptop into the toilet stall. Just don't do it. It's not that important. That code can wait, you know? All right. My tool to show is an actually I thought unbelievably amazing tool. It's called Cursor. It's an IDE. I guess because of whatever limitations, they couldn't just make this an extension on Visual Studio Code. So they had to actually fork it. So it's a complete fork of Visual Studio Code. But it does some pretty wild things. Like for example, I renamed a function and it was like, 'Hey, you know, you called this function,' and like all these other places all over your codebase. You want me to fix it for 0:42:35.901 --> 0:42:36.458 you? I was 0:42:37.133 --> 0:44:00.459 like, sure. That I think already exists, you know, in different things. Like we've had that refactor option and that beans like a long time ago, but, but then it just kind of got more and more sophisticated to where like, yeah, you're changing things and it's like hopping to different points of the file and other files and like, 'Hey, you should do this. You should do that.' And like I wrote a docstring for a function and when I was done, it like jumped to the next function and started a docstring for me. It's like, 'Hey, it looks like you're in docstring writing mode. Let's keep writing doc string.' I thought it was awesome. I think it's a real threat to Copilot and to these other tools. And so I would imagine Microsoft is probably hard at work to, you know, make the actual Visual Studio Code do some of these things. But, but yeah, I hadn't really experienced an IDE like that before. So it's totally free. I think it's a usage-based model. So, if you code enough, you'll eventually hit some kind of a limit. I haven't used enough to hit any limit, but at that point, or maybe it's a time limit—I'm not totally sure—but at some point you'll have to start paying for it. But they have a pretty generous free tier. So I totally recommend folks trying it out. It's pretty wild. 0:44:02.220 --> 0:45:01.660 I haven't used it, but I will say some of the stuff you're talking about was discussed. I was listening to the Lex Fridman podcast and he interviewed the team at Cursor, the folks that are there. And they talked a bit about why fork Visual Studio Code, why not a plugin? I also talked about some of the difficulties in sort of human-machine interaction. And then also how to trade off various model selection between each other for potentially different tasks and just even the suggestion diff flow and how that would work. So if this is a topic that's interesting to you, I'll give a shout out to that podcast. It's definitely not a short podcast; I guess ours isn't very short either. But if you're interested, it is an interesting discussion. They also talk a little bit about how to tell if LLMs are kind of like intelligent, what problems do you think they could or couldn't solve? Like what's the extent? So I thought that it was an interesting listen. 0:45:01.660 --> 0:45:34.040 Yeah, totally. I'm definitely in this camp where for whatever reason I haven't had as much. Oh, you know, it's because I've been reading books in the car instead of doing podcasts. So I've been doing Masters of Doom and some of these other books, but because of that, I've been accumulating notifications of things that I want to watch. So I have on my phone all these notifications of all these episodes of Lex Fridman, and I don't want to clear them, but I also don't seem to have enough time to get to them. 0:45:34.040 --> 0:45:48.968 Yeah. I do while I'm exercising. I tend to listen to—I haven't done listening to books. I have books when I drive podcasts when I exercise has been my balance. Yeah. I think, I think you 0:45:48.968 --> 0:45:52.124 hit the nail on the head. I need to actually exercise and then, 0:45:52.225 --> 0:45:55.347 I'll save that diatribe for another time. 0:45:56.420 --> 0:47:55.920 All right. So let's jump into the topic working from home. So let me set the stage here. I originally got interested in working from home around 2018, 2019, when we decided to move to Texas. And so basically, you know, this is pre-COVID, pre all of that. And, you know, there are undoubtedly a lot more tech jobs in the Bay Area than there are in any city in Texas. And so working from home seemed like a nice way where we could move closer to family and all of that, but still I could keep, you know, the job that I really enjoyed. You know, at the time it wasn't an option. And so I was in the middle of interviewing for in-person jobs in Texas because I was pretty committed to move when the pandemic hit. And I remember I was actually sick. I don't think I had COVID. I think I just had a regular cold, but I was sick during the time when they said like this is the last day you can come into the office. And I was super sick. And so I actually couldn't even go in and get my stuff. And so it took me like probably half a year to get my stuff out of the office because at some point they just completely shut it down. And so at that point I decided, 'Hey, well, we're all working from home here. I might as well make this move.' So, so we did move to Texas. And so I worked from home for a while. And so, you know, as did a lot of other people. And so then at some point companies opened back up and now what we're experiencing is, 0:47:55.920 --> 0:49:21.820 A big debate around RTO or Return to Office. So notably, you know, Amazon has said that their employees have to come into the office five days a week. They even went a step further and said, if you're in a satellite office, you know, if you're like the one person in Nashville, even if you're at an Amazon office, that's not good enough. You have to go to where the rest of your team is. So even people in the office have to move to a different office. That's maybe I think the most extreme version. Then there's a whole gradient. I know Dell said you can't get promoted if you're working remote, which I thought was actually not very smart. I feel like that creates all sorts of weird side effects. My opinion, but they did that. And then all the way to, on the other end of the spectrum companies like Figma, ironically Twitch, which was owned by Amazon, really taking a stand in the other direction and saying no, you know, remote is here to stay, remote is better. And we will never give up on remote, really taking a stand there. And that's kind of where we're at right now, at this real crossroads. Is that what's your take on that? The current situation? 0:49:22.620 --> 0:51:17.980 Yeah, I think you have a decent summary of it. I'll say we used to do a lot of interviews and I think a lot of the companies we talked to had strong opinions on remote work. And I was, I think a lot of those were even before COVID. I will say, I think the tooling around remote work and the expectations and some of the stuff I think we're going to try to talk about today is evolved a lot in the last since COVID and sort of everybody went and had to go do it for a while. I think there's a better understanding of what it means. And there are a lot of companies that were built sort of ground up saying, we want the best people no matter where they are, we're going to build up a culture around it. And I do actually think that that's really important. But the other thing I'll just say to bring up here in the intro is there are two at least two very important pieces of work from home, which is company and the company's culture and the company's expectations, but then also personal. And just like there are many, many kinds of companies, there are many, many personal situations. So I think to be reductionist about either that there can only be one company. Well, I mean, I guess insert a free market argument here. But also to have a belief that everybody is the same. Because you have a certain way that you are, it's really one of those things, almost one of the most extreme ones I've seen where really taking time to communicate with others and empathize maybe their situation, their health, physical setup, their family situation, their whatever could just be so divergent from yours that it's very hard to understand their desire to be in the office or not have to come into the office. And then, 0:51:18.200 --> 0:52:39.740 You know, as Jason mentioned, I guess to muddying it all is those things being forced to change or changing over time. Anytime I think there's a change, it's also difficult because people's ability to handle or deal with change can vary. So, I think all of those make it a topic that it's not one size fits all, but I do think there's some things to talk about that if you're going to work from home full-time or part-time, there are some I think things you can do to be aware of, to help yourself, to sort of think about it. And I do agree that there's a spectrum from no remote work, all remote work, hybrid plans. And I think going forward with high confidence, I feel like I can say there'll probably meet more diversity, more variance in the kinds of companies and jobs available than there was pre-COVID. Pre-COVID it was almost always in-office expectation for full five days a week or more. And very, very few companies were fully remote. But I think in the future, I think that variance will be a lot higher. I think you'll see a lot more different kinds of companies and even new models and ideas popping up. So, I think we'll have in that way, that'll hopefully be better because you can kind of choose based on your personal preferences. 0:52:39.740 --> 0:54:34.000 Yeah, that totally makes sense. So yeah, I think maybe we should start with our background. So both of us were from Florida, my family ended up moving to Texas, your family's still in Florida and we were working thousands of miles away in California. And I do think that we should just acknowledge that that's tough. Like, I mean, there's a lot of people who do it. It's not uniquely our problem. There's people whose families are on the other side of the planet, right? That's even harder. But I think as you like have kids and then try and raise those kids, they take a lot of time and more time you put in the more sort of nurturing life that they have. So of course you're really compelled to do that. And so that's when you really start wanting to have more family around. So I think that it does tend to work from home benefits do tend to skew kind of older. And on the flip side, it's good before you have a family or any of that, it's nice to go into an office where you have you we went into an office before we had kids where we could benefit from like having other people around and just all the sort of passive communication that goes on there, the sort of water cooler chatter and all of that. So definitely there's as you said, there's a lot of different factors. I think like sort of spoiling the ending here. I think that we do have to take sort of a relativistic approach and say, look, different people are in different situations. 0:54:34.000 --> 0:55:08.138 And the company just needs to be able to handle those situations on like a case-by-case basis. So blanket things like all remote people are fired, like what Amazon's doing or or they don't get promoted or on the other case, like to the other extreme, like we're not going to pay for an office. And so you will never have a place that you can go to that's your place to work. So, I mean, these are two extremes that I think are just not going to help, not as helpful as finding some middle ground. 0:55:10.062 --> 0:55:25.485 I think yeah, I think you summed up the basis and motivations about family situations being a key reason, I think for both of us of why the situation ended up where we did. I do think there is 0:55:27.510 --> 0:56:49.000 something to be said for sort of software-only companies or parts of the company versus companies that have a physical or manufacturing or business component or, I mean, I think it can also be reductionist. Like I think where you and I both have spent most of our time working are companies that had very large software-only organizations or only software organizations and very little hardware integration components. And so those things can be very different than places that have manufacturing lines. And so I think from that way, it's also hard for a one size fits all approach or people to kind of understand the needs of both. And then like you do mention, I do agree that I think earlier in your sort of career, having camaraderie around for a variety of purposes and mentorship and that kind of stuff, there's less rigor in your schedule and it can help a lot to be in the office. I do agree with that. I think Facebook has come up and said some stuff about that where or Meta, I guess, where they had some little bit of a different handling for junior engineers versus more senior engineers. And over time they've sort of worked on that. So I do think there's some merit to those discussions. And I and I do really think that but I also think 0:56:50.822 --> 0:58:36.700 A lot of people don't realize when you're sort of work from home that internal motivation, the psychologically and being really brutally honest with yourself and saying, Hey, if nobody's around, like when everybody's around, there's that peer pressure, right? Like, Hey, even if you have an office, like people are kind of seeing you working, you're seeing other people working. There's like a deep in internal level of like, I should also be working. And it can be true. If everyone's just playing around or goofing off at the office, that's also a distraction. But seeing everybody work can be really motivating for you to do work as well. And if you're home, are you going to be able to do that? Or are you going to be distracted by the stuff in your life or your situation that are going on or the things outside or the noises or going for a walk or whatever, right? Like, are you actually going to be able to sit down and focus no matter what's going on? Or, I will also say it is difficult. Even, you know, I work from home. And for instance, this week, there was a partial holiday. I don't know how you call it. So I was working, but like my family had off and some people work, some people had off. It was sort of mixed. And so I was sitting at my computer, my family was off doing something, more or less fun and around the house and then out and about and coming and telling. And I'm sitting here like attempting to get my work done. And they were respectful to me, but am I able to be motivated enough to stick with it and get what I need to do done, even though those distractions around. And if you're in an office, that motivation is sort of there for you because you're there, right? Like, yeah, kind of cut off from it. You've already committed versus if you're sitting there and hearing video games being played or hearing stuff happening, are you still sitting there and typing your code with the same focus? Or are you not able to have that internal motivation? It's something only you can answer and it's going to be different for everyone. 0:58:38.198 --> 1:00:32.740 Yep. Yep. Totally. Okay. So I think we got, we did a pretty good job covering what it is. We should cover now. So, you know, if you're not working from home, you're going to be working with people who are working from home. And so it behooves you no matter what to understand the best, like the do's and don'ts of working from home. This can help you if you're managing people, or even if you're a peer to somebody who's working from home, you can always offer this advice, or you can suggest that they listen to the show. But just knowing goods and bads, I think are really important for this. So the first thing we have on the list is scheduling. I think that this is extremely, extremely important. Some kind of general things I've done that worked really well is, you know, I did finally kind of like color-code my calendar. I put a bunch of personal things in my calendar. So for example, if I'm working from home on Friday, and I have an intent to smoke a brisket on Friday while I'm working from home, which is a great idea, highly recommend it. I will actually set up like tiny 15-minute meetings for like, okay, you know, take the brisket out and wrap it and put apple cider vinegar on it or whatever. Like, so if you're thinking like, I'm going to do my laundry while I'm at working from home or these other things, just make them explicit. You know, if you're ashamed to like put these things on your calendar where everyone can see it, you can make them private meetings. So people don't have to see, I don't really care. So like, sometimes I'll, I'll go to a meeting and they're like, how's that brisket coming? But I think being intentional about your time, 1:00:33.300 --> 1:01:57.306 when you work from home is really, really important. And as I said, you could be private and just have a bunch of busy blocks, or you can just be transparent. That part is less, less, less important, but what is important is that you can look back and say, yeah, this day, I spoke some brisket, I did some laundry, I went for a run, I did all these things. But you know, I worked from like nine to nine or something or nine to seven. So like, yeah, I did the hours. I just took breaks in the middle and it works out. I think it's easy to fall into a trap where you start running a lot of errands and doing a lot of other things. And then at the end, like you just don't know whether you really put in enough time. And I guess like a meta point, it doesn't really matter how much time you put in. What matters is getting your projects done. Right. So you don't have to put in eight hours a day, but but I think that it's all kind of connected. So like you can end up in a position where let's say a project deadline slips, then you're going to kind of wonder, did I just not work as hard as I should have on this? And so that's where you go back to your calendar and say like, Oh no, I actually was, you know, I did work a ton of hours. I just miscalculated how hard this project is versus, you 1:01:57.559 --> 1:01:58.977 know, when you're at work, 1:01:58.977 --> 1:02:11.093 you have this because you're driving to work and back, you have this general sense of how much you're working. And when you're at home, you lose that sense. You have to replace it with something explicit. I 1:02:12.848 --> 1:04:11.880 Absolutely agree on this, on the scheduling front. And I think the reverse as well, too, is having a schedule with your family as well. So that it is a mutual respecting, like, 'Hey, from this time to this time, you're going to see me, I'm around, but I'm not here.' Like this is time I'm dedicated, but then there's also times when I'm not. And so I'm not doing work in this block and this is family time. And, you know, it's just the end of the day so that you don't end up accidentally working, you know, 14, 15, 16-hour days because you just didn't plan otherwise. And I do think you got to try to strike that balance or even just burn burnout. And so I think scheduling is important on both fronts. I also think scheduling is maybe a bit more of an important topic and making sure that you connect with team members that you need to. And really, even if it's not going into a meeting, scheduling that like, 'Hey, I'm going to have an email conversation or Slack or connect with this person and do this thing.' Cause there's no, oh, I'll just do it when I see them. Cause you won't see them, right? Like you're not going to bump into them. So those things have to be sort of planned and thought through. And I think that it can be a bit where we're having this, I was explaining to someone what CRM software was. Cause they were like, 'Oh, I don't even know what Salesforce is? This huge company, and they do CRM.' And I don't even know what CRM is. That's explained to me like, 'Oh, that sounds dumb. That's just a spreadsheet.' And I was like, wow, okay, whatever. But this part, one part of it is managing your relationships with other people at work and building up. Maybe that's talking very condensed about work stuff, but maybe it's also having casual time to connect with people and understand who they are and sort of build up that rapport with people. And it has to become intentional. And so scheduling those things as well, I think can be a bit weird at first, but it's definitely 1:04:13.977 --> 1:05:39.010 Important. Yeah, totally, totally agree. I think looking back, and I think we've kind of foreshadowed this, but I found working from home personally to be really difficult. I wasn't like, I mean, the work got done, but I feel like I didn't communicate as often. I just didn't build the same relationships. So when I look back at my work from home time, I still have closer relationships to people that I worked with in person before the pandemic. And so I've spent the past two months working in person two, three months. And I feel like I have a closer relationship to some of these people than people I worked with remotely for much longer. And again, it's this is a spectrum. So if you worked with me remotely and we're close friends and we talk all the time on SMS, this is obviously not directed to you. But just in aggregate, I feel like I didn't develop as many as close relationships. And I think a big part of that was just not being again, explicit. So especially with people above me in the chart, I never really felt comfortable setting up a meeting with my boss to just talk about the weather. Like that never really 1:05:39.010 --> 1:05:40.394 felt okay, or even 1:05:40.394 --> 1:06:35.997 like my boss's peers or even other peers who are higher level than me. And so because of that, I didn't really build any of those relationships and the relationships I did build remotely were people who either reported to me or were kind of reported to my peers, et cetera. So I do feel like you have to get out of your comfort zone and understand like, yeah, my boss is definitely busier and has more responsibility than I do. That's why he's my boss. But that doesn't mean that you won't take like 15 minutes to just talk about the weather over Zoom. That was, I think in hindsight, a mistake that I made. And then Patrick, I think you've been working remote, same time I have, but you're still working remote. I think you found you've really thrived remotely. Yeah. 1:06:36.705 --> 1:08:30.540 I mean, I think for me, so we should say, I guess you started working remote at a company, you moved to a new company where you were more or less remote, and then you've kind of moved on. So I've been at the same company the whole time. So I think maybe I'm a bit rose-colored glasses because I had built a lot of those relationships ahead of time and then brought them. Oh, that's a good point. Remote with me. So I haven't had to rebuild them. Like I had rapport with almost all of the people that I work with and even my management. I do think give a great point though, that people should be aware of is being very careful in hybrid situations. If you're remote and other people are on site, especially if you imagine a manager that's on site and has some people that are remote and some people are, there is, I think there's a natural sort of difference that can build up there. And some managers may be very good at sort of handling that and others may not be. And you just got to be real realizing that like Jason's saying, like, you need to make sure that you're intentional about building rapport that people on site wouldn't need to be. Is that fair or unfair? Well, I tell me, it doesn't matter. Life's not like it doesn't need to be fair or unfair. It's just the way it is. And you can either realize it or not. It's your choice, I guess, but spoiler, it's the way it is, is you're going to maybe have to be intentional about some things that aren't. And that goes into, if that's part of why you don't like it. Yeah, that's fair. Oh, that's different. You said the word 'fair' anyways. But yeah, I think that you're absolutely right. Like building those relationships is critical. And I think it feeds into what we're going to talk about next is just communications. And I think if you're for companies that are fully remote, like obviously I already got to figure it out. But remote work also generally comes with people in different time zones or different schedules that are even more divergent than being in the office. And so I think figuring out a culture 1:08:30.540 --> 1:10:24.700 around your most people have now sort of the meetings, the sort of Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex, whatever video conferencing there's email, and then there's some instant messaging kind of thing, whether that you do that over texts or Slack or the Teams product or whatever. Right? People Discord, people have these sort of like, I guess, three modalities as well as sort of wiki page editing or whatever. And I think figuring out the right way to communicate what you're working on, what your availability kind of is, communicating where you leave off on something, if you're handing it off, or what you need people to do, or how, like what you're looking for help with, or, 'Hey, I need this PR to be reviewed,' whatever those kinds of things are and being very deliberate about all of your communication or the very vast majority of your communication becomes written as opposed to casual in person. I'll just when I see them, I'll tell them. And as someone who continues to work remote despite working with people who are in a more hybrid situation, it's kind of funny to hear people say that. Like, 'Oh, I'll just tell them when I see them.' And it's like, okay, but for me, that's like, I might have a meeting scheduled with them once a week or that they're in the share, but otherwise I'm not going to see them. So to me, if I need to tell someone something, I have to type it right now, or plan to type it because otherwise, that communication won't take place. And so I think just across all of those things, finding the right way that people are aware of the work that you're doing so that there's not a conflict to be resolved, like making sure there's no overlap or we're doing the same thing. So being intentional about communicating what you're doing, when you're doing it, how the work is getting done. And I found there are some people that I work with are very good about expressing their status 1:10:24.700 --> 1:11:04.967 over in Teams rooms or in personal messages proactively. And then other people really have to be sort of prodded to give a sort of update. And as if you are the person who's in a remote day or remote working situation permanently, I think making sure to be proactive about communicating what you're doing and what you're working on so that not that like people like Jason, it's not getting your 40 hours in. It's just like that people are aware that you're there and the tasks that you're taking on and that they feel they know situationally where you are. And that's something you have to sort of pursue yourself. Yep. Yep. 1:11:05.305 --> 1:12:27.520 Totally agree. I think you said something that really stuck with me. Too much. Oh, the yeah, the whole like 'I'll see them, I'll just tell them when I see them.' I think that another important thing there is to keep notes because you can't really, there are certain things that aren't practical to do immediately. Like, for example, the example you have is perfect where it's not just something I can text somebody. It's something that requires like a face-to-face conversation. But it's not practical for me to just set up a Zoom call right now with some person, cause who knows what they're doing? Like you would in person, you could just walk over and say, 'Hey, blah, blah, blah.' But over Zoom, like it's a little bit more challenging because the person might not even get your Zoom invite in time if you did it for five minutes from now. Right. So what I did instead is, which I thought was really useful and I've carried this over even to when I work in the office, is just keep notes. I use a Remarkable Pad. But you could also use a Kindle Scribe, or you could use Google Docs. It doesn't have to be a physical thing, paper and pencil. I haven't heard of this thing, but apparently some new invention. But 1:12:29.089 --> 1:12:42.539 yeah, just keep notes. I think that's important. And that way when you do meet with somebody, you have like four things that you can cover. And so it ends up being more 1:12:44.682 --> 1:14:34.470 efficient. Yeah, absolutely. I think I use a notebook and pencil. I don't know. Half the time I don't think I ever go back and even look at what I wrote or be able to make sense of it, but just helping you jotting down a few notes about things. And I do think there is a culture in office as well, just to be balanced about it, where some people are more okay being interrupted, others less. And this is for a variety of reasons, but you can kind of read people, like see if they look like they're really busy or do they look like they get interrupting? But it's this try, I don't know. It's a difficult problem. Like I have a certain priority of thing that I need. They have a certain desire or lack of desire to talk right now. And like, this is unspoken, but it got it's a nonverbal communication in person that sort of happens and needs to be normalized there online. It's like you said, people don't know, like am I just sitting doing code? Am I just doing training and they are free to ping me? I'm happy to pause it and talk to them. You know, it's really difficult. People don't know kind of what you're doing. And so I try to express to people, 'Hey, for me, if you want to meet with me, here are the hours I'm generally available.' So you can generally expect me to be available within this time, but I might have meetings. So just send me a message and say, 'Hey, I want to chat.' And then I'll either tell you, 'Yeah, let's do it now,' or, 'Hey, here's the next time I can kind of do it in' and that you should never feel bad about asking. Cause I like, I won't feel bad about telling you no. And you know, or not now, or here's the next time I can do it and that they shouldn't feel like making it very clear. 'Hey, you can't see me.' So just ask me. And most of the time I'm able to make time to talk 1:14:35.297 --> 1:15:59.672 to them. Yeah, definitely. Also, setting up kind of like social things. That's another kind of thing I would put under communication. When I was in person, usually the org leader, the director, whoever would set some kind of event like, 'Oh, it's Taco Tuesday.' I'm going to go and order a thousand taco or 200 tacos for like the entire org. Or, 'Hey, this is a day,' or let's do board games on Thursday or whatever it is. But online, when you're working remote, I think you might have to be the person to set that up. And it's important to have that kind of social time. And it follows more or less the same rules as in person where not everyone has to go to Taco Tuesday. You could just continue to work at your desk. You don't need to do that. I mean, I wouldn't recommend that. I think socializing is actually really important, but I'm saying like you don't mandate; there's no mandate to go to Taco Tuesday. And similarly, there's no mandate to hop on a social Zoom call and play Web Hangman or something, or some little fun game. But so you don't make it mandatory, but I think having that space for people is really important. Yep. 1:16:01.748 --> 1:17:28.502 I completely agree. And then the last major thing we wanted to cover is if you're going to be doing hybrid work or working from home, I mean, I think planning your space, you're going to do the work in, is very important. I mean, I think that there's this like, 'Oh, I'm going to just do my work from the couch,' or I'm going to just be wherever. And sometimes I do that, but it's very rare. I think that it's a lot better to have a dedicated space that even if you go work from those other places, you can at least have the place that you go to focus and your brain knows this is the focus place and you go there and that's where you focus. And it may be a space that's used for other stuff at other times, but during the days that you're working from home or if you're working home all the time, maybe it's a permanent setup. And again, I like I mentioned in the beginning, depending on people's life situation, that may be a lot easier or harder for them. But for me, it's been very important to have this is my desk. I've spent time trying to curate it into the way I want. And we can maybe talk about some of what that is. But when I'm sitting here doing this and I always have to tease the people, to people in the house and my family is like, 'If you hear me clackety clackety clackety on my keyboard, that's not the time to just ask me casually something,' you know, whatever, like maybe wait. But I think having those things is very critical. Yeah. 1:17:29.549 --> 1:17:47.183 Totally. I mean, I went through a period where basically, at four o'clock, the kids would start banging on the door to want to come in and play video games. So, we have all of the video games in the same room that I do all my work in. 1:17:47.453 --> 1:17:49.005 Which is spicy. Yeah. Not. 1:17:49.005 --> 1:18:39.559 Not a good idea because the kids want to play games and we give them like a half an hour a day during the week of game time. So, it's not like they get more time if they come earlier, but of course they just really want to do it as soon as possible. Right? So that just creates this weird situation where I would start acquiescing and saying, okay, at four, I'm going to go work in this fair room on my laptop, but then it's like not very comfortable and you kind of lose your context. And so finally I realized, like, okay, no, from whatever until five o'clock, the office is off limits. Like I have to focus, and that made things easier. I totally agree. Having a dedicated space is huge if you could do it. 1:18:39.700 --> 1:19:59.939 Yeah. And so, I mean, when people go to the office generally, and this can vary, some people get stipends for an allowance for setting up their home office. Many people don't. But in the office you often are provided a keyboard, monitor, that kind of stuff. But at home, that's not necessarily true, but I don't know. I still probably have better setup than I probably did at the office, but I have a standing sitting desk, even though I sit the vast majority of the time, but at least it's sort of micro-adjusted to where I want, and I can stand up. And so I have a nice standing sitting desk. I have my computer up on, or my monitor up on a monitor arm. So the desk underneath it is nice and clean. And I think having that space that just—I don't know, maybe other people are like, no, I'm not really, I don't really care. But I have speakers because I don't need headphones coming at home. So I have speakers set on my desk to listen to music at an appropriately ear-sensitive volume, but still sounding good, you know, a webcam for doing my stuff, and having it all set up really nicely and in the same spot. So every time when I go into a meeting, like I know where things are, I have the stuff I need, I know what I'm going to do. But yeah, and I have a—I did get a nice chair. I think a lot of people have really crappy office chairs, but. 1:19:59.939 --> 1:20:08.950 Wait, tell me more about this. Cause I'm definitely in this camp where I think I have a crappy chair, but like how do you, what actually makes a chair good? 1:20:09.456 --> 1:21:51.120 For me, it's one that's adjustable. I'm not going to go into it; it's a really nerdy, deep topic, but I mean, you can go on Reddit and see a lot of common ones that people are suggesting and offices close all the time. I personally, when I was in the office, I sat in conference rooms all the time and that had random people sitting in the chairs and never bothered me. So for me, buying liquidated office furniture, which you can find on eBay, for like 20% of the price—you know, like 80% off—or most cities of a decent size have like office liquidation warehouses, which is where I got my chairs from. You can go in and sit. And so there's like Herman Miller chairs that people really like, and they can be customized and be very nice, but adjustable seat height, adjustable seat depth, adjustable lumbar support. And where I live, it's very hot in Florida. So I have mesh-backed chairs. So there's no cushion so that there's airflow and I don't get a sweaty back. But all those things are important to me, to be really comfortable. I get back pain, which goes back to the exercising. You got to make sure you exercise, but also having a comfortable chair. Cause you're going to be there a lot. And in the office, you often move meeting to meeting. If you have meetings and generally move at home, it's very easy to sit down and then not leave your chair for vast majority of the day. Right? So you're sitting in the same spot, even more than in the office, and having those intentional get up and walk around times is actually important, but having a nice chair to sit in, cause you're going to be there longer in my opinion, or at least for me, I was there longer, is super important. 1:21:51.120 --> 1:23:25.695 Yeah, that makes sense. Another thing that I would put on the list is going outside. I noticed that when I work from home, my general strategy—I've talked about this on the show many times, but just to recap—is I'll work a ton of hours during the week. If things get busy, I will put more and more and more hours during the week, but the weekends are totally off limits. I'm only going to work on the weekend if something's truly on fire, there's like a major disaster. But because of that, yeah, I'll come in on Monday. It'll be a lot to do. I'll work Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday. And at some point around Wednesday, I'll realize that I haven't left the house in 70 hours or something and it'll just be out of control. So, one thing I would recommend is doing like a fake bike to work or something where you bike for five miles and you just end up back at home. But it's your bike to work, or do something where you spend some time outside. I'm fortunate in that I get a lot of natural light in the office. So, it's not like I'm not seeing the sun or anything like that. But I think being outside is super important. And even if you're there on the weekends, doing a lot of fun stuff, it's still important during the week to just take some time, go for a walk, do something where you're going to be outside. 1:23:26.674 --> 1:23:29.020 So what you're saying is you need to touch grass? 1:23:29.520 --> 1:23:36.023 Touch grass every day and not like a Chia Pet on your desk. That doesn't count. That's cheating. That's a Cheetah pet. 1:23:38.436 --> 1:24:49.969 No, I agree. I think in the personal thing, it's as you mentioned, I sometimes will take account of when was the last time I—so I do go outside a little bit to your point to that level, but when was the last time I went somewhere that wasn't just my house? And in some times it can be, I won't admit to how long it can be a very long amount of time. And I'm okay with that, but people around me ask, am I okay? Like, when they figured out or realize I haven't gone anywhere, like, 'Hey, you haven't been anywhere in a certain amount of days or whatever. Like, are you okay?' Oh yeah, fine. Like I have plenty to do here or whatever. And like you mentioned, I exercise, so I do running. So I run outside, I'm out in the outdoors, but I won't necessarily go anywhere else. And like you said, when you're at work, you tend to drive to work and drive home. That's at least a thing, but you'll also tend to—at least I did stop on the way home sometimes if you need something from the store or whatever. For me, I don't know. Yeah. If you could get it delivered, you can. I have other folks who are out and about more. So my wife will pick stuff up or whatever. But I do think, like you said, it is important for your brain to go somewhere else from time to time. Yeah. 1:24:50.965 --> 1:25:39.362 I mean, kind of related to that. One thing that I found really useful was to go to different kinds of meetups and different events, and basically create synthetically that kind of water cooler chat where it's a bit like strange because it's not your coworkers; it's other tech people who work for presumably other companies, unless you happen to have coworkers nearby who are going to the same meetup. But it gives you that sometimes you just need to be with a group of people with some kind of topic and just kind of talking and grabbing some pizza. And so, you can kind of get that same kind of energy by finding like-minded tech people in whatever city you happen 1:25:43.885 --> 1:27:17.519 to be working. I think we covered a lot of home setup stuff. I definitely for better or for worse don't really pay a lot of attention. I guess one thing I do have is a laptop stand. So the laptop screen is higher. I was finding that was kind of like more hunched over. So I do think getting the screen at the right eye level will save your back. I think that's important. Oh, what about how do you? So I'll talk about my setup and then you can tell me yours. Cause I'm feeling yours is probably way better. But what I have is my gaming desktop and I have my work laptop hooked up to the same peripherals, same keyboard, mouse, monitor, etcetera. And so, I never quite got the whole KVM thing to work. I think I bought one and then returned it to Amazon. So what I have now is a DisplayPort splitter and a USB switch switcher. And so I have to press two buttons, which is kind of annoying, but if you do it right, you can actually press both at the same time. But basically I press one button and it switches over to my laptop display port; press a different button, and my laptop now is controlling the mouse and keyboard and webcam and all that. And then when I want to go back, I press the buttons again. And so I found that to be pretty useful because you can get one nice ergonomic setup and use it for both things. 1:27:20.059 --> 1:28:34.694 I mean, I guess it's going to depend on the situation. I did have a setup very, very similar to what you're describing for a while, actually like almost identical. But my current one, I just have two identical desks side by side. And so my gaming and like sort of family PC is like on a, on the same desk, same chair. Not the same monitor. My work monitor is a little bigger, a little nicer. And I have a laptop stand that actually has my iPad on, which is what I use for video conferencing. So it's like a custom, you know, built devices and matter what I'm compiling are doing in the backend. My videos run smooth. But yeah, I have two side-by-side setups that are very similar, but not identical. I use a split keyboard, split mechanical keyboard, versus the regular desktop is a conjoined one because not everybody has gone through, you know, the just the sitting there for the same length of time and making sure to figure out the right finger habits and stuff. So other people use that computer. I'm the only one who uses this computer. And so, yeah, I have a very similar setup, but I have it basically duplicated, and that's a luxury, right? Like I understand that's not possible for everyone, but it works for me, and I 1:28:35.723 --> 1:28:49.881 really like it. Yeah. I guess that kind of goes into our second to last topic, which is handling distractions. I think we talked a little bit about this with family distractions. I think, I 1:28:51.855 --> 1:29:50.540 mean, just to recap, I think being distracted or like maybe, you know, I'm saying it is kind of like in interleaving personal stuff and work stuff. Some amount of that is probably fine. Like probably, you know, even more productive than going into the office and not being able to do any of those things. But again, it's just really, in my opinion, it's really about measuring all of that. Now there are some things that are truly distracting. Like if you have a dog that keeps bothering you, or something like that. That's a true distraction, but I think most of the time it's really just we're conflicted with things that we need to do around the house that are just so much more apparent, you know, like even just simple things like, Oh, a trash is full. I see it now three, four times more than I did before. And so you have a tendency to just spend a ton of time on these things. 1:29:52.940 --> 1:30:55.431 Yeah. And I think like getting deliveries to the door, you know, being there kind of, it's an advantage of being home. And I tell people sometimes before there was any work from home and my company, they have a hybrid. So even people who are in office or still have some days at their home. It's very like there's so much expectation of getting deliveries or purchases or whatever. Like people want you to be home and then they don't necessarily keep the hours they're supposed to be there. I had a repair person come the other day, and they were like six hours late. And I had called several times like to try to figure out where they were, and they got upset. Like I'm going to be there. And I'm like, but if I wasn't going to be home all day, this is going to be ridiculous. And I slotted time for you to be here. And then like, you're not here. Yeah. And so I think absolutely you're right. I think having careful diligence about what happens, what are you going to handle? Because come on, like some stuff just needs to be handled, right? Like some part of your house on fire or something, you probably should take care of it. You know, that meat has to get tended to; it's gotta be delicious. Yeah. I mean, that 1:30:55.431 --> 1:30:56.984 jet ski is not going to 1:30:57.135 --> 1:32:19.739 drive itself. Listen, listen, no, I'm just kidding. But you're right. Things like the dogs, children, like, so, you know, my kids are, you know, kind of middle school age during the summer, they're home. That's not fair to others for me to change or behave differently. Right? Like when they're home, that's how I kind of view it. So I have to set up a way to interact with them where, like, Hey, I can be here. I'm here to help you. But like, you also can't these times are times where I'm doing focus. And so I think absolutely right. Like distractions and people, especially if you're in an asymmetric thing, if everybody's worked from home, I think everybody kind of can do the same thing and it'd be similar. But I think also being cognizant, if some people are in the office and you're not, then like, you kind of don't want this constant awareness that you are doing all this random stuff and they're here trying to get your attention or be focused. And so, yeah, like I said, I think a lot of that can be very difficult, but you got to be, I think, intentional about it and making sure that you don't have lots of noises. You have a space that you can work from, or, we didn't talk about it, but I mean, it was a thing before now and kind of like with WeWork, but it kind of went away, but shared spaces where maybe you're remote, but you still go to a place that has an office. And actually, yeah, let's dive 1:32:20.025 --> 1:33:23.610 into that actually. Cause I forgot actually a whole chapter in my story, which is related to that is, as I said, I wasn't crazy about working from home. I did change jobs, and actually the biggest reason I changed jobs was that it was an in-person job. And this was a few years ago. So like around 2021 or so. And it was a WeWork. So there were about eight of us. The whole company was 1600. So this was like a tiny fraction of the company, but it was enough that they could get an office. And so, it started off as eight. I think it grew to around like 12 or 13 people. Obviously it's all sorts of random people at the company. So it's not like I had a whole team there or anything like that. But the WeWork thing was interesting. You know, it's 1:33:25.197 --> 1:35:19.320 it's sort of a good middle ground where you don't have like a shared space. It's like when you go to the water cooler, there's people for all sorts of different companies and you have a kind of like your one room that you have to lock. You can't, you don't really know the people in the other rooms, at least not in the beginning. So you can't really trust them. So it is kind of like a weird situation, I would say. I don't think it's uncanny Valley territory. Like, I don't think it's actually worse than being at home or being in the office. It's not like something that's strictly worse than both of those. But it is somewhere kind of in the middle where it is not quite that office feeling, but you do get some of it. And I like too that you get the commute and it's also close to, at least in my case that WeWork was close to downtown. So I'd have a lot of different events in the evening where I could leave my car parked at the office and then go and hear someone talk about, you know, go Lang or something. And so, so I think it checked a lot of those boxes. And then just, I guess to finish off the story, the company I was at got acquired and the parent company that acquired us shut down all the WeWorks, which was kind of personally kind of a bummer. But I understand why they did it. But oh yeah. So getting back to your point, the WeWorks are pretty nice. And you know, if you do feel like you want to go to an office and you have a small coalition of people at your company who feel the same way and are close enough together, you can recommend a WeWork. I basically did the whole thing in a sense, like I found the WeWork. You know, we dealt with all the pricing. I ordered the monitors for everybody. So I basically did the whole 1:35:19.320 --> 1:35:31.660 thing from bottom from scratch and actually ended up not being as expensive as I thought it would be. You know, for a company, it was very reasonable. So, so yeah, something to 1:35:31.660 --> 1:35:38.965 consider. Do you think it's something that an individual could do? Like if they're just in this place by themselves, can they just like rent a 1:35:38.965 --> 1:36:30.540 space there? Yeah. A person on my team at my last job did that. They got a WeWork for themselves. I know this because they asked me if we could reimburse them and I tried and we couldn't, but so I'm sorry about that. If you're listening, I tried my hardest, but they ended up paying out of pocket. It was actually pretty reasonable. I don't remember the number also there in New Jersey. So, I'm sure it would vary wildly, but yeah, I do know people who have done that. And especially like in his case, I think he has two kids who are under four, I think. And so he's like, I just can't be, it's just yelling all the time at home. So he's in an apartment. So, so I think it made a ton of sense for him. And yeah, I'd recommend that as a thing folks can try out. 1:36:32.840 --> 1:36:43.630 Well, it was a bit of a wide ranging, bit of tangent laden podcast today, but you know, I think we'd covered it from all aspects. So it's good. It's bad. Yeah. Maybe like one last 1:36:43.967 --> 1:36:57.029 A thing to cover is the future. Like, where do you think this is going? Do you think RTO is going to be enforced by a lot of companies? Do you think a pendulum is going to swing back? What do you think the future is going to be? This. 1:36:59.138 --> 1:37:06.411 It's hard. I mean, I think, like we said there, this existed for a long time. So I think, there is 1:37:08.369 --> 1:39:07.759 An economic advantage in my opinion for companies to pursue, not just the same solution. I think there's comfort in sort of doing the same thing as all your other industry peers. But I mean, I think there's economic advantage to companies who are willing to do things different and try different things and offer stuff that's off normal. Or for very large companies, it doesn't even have to be the whole company has one policy, right? Like I think that's an advantage of big companies. And so I think we will see more variants. I think we'll see a lot of struggles with companies changing. And I think not all the time, but sometimes companies change policies and this has been true before. And it's true now around remote offices and remote work. I think famously you and I worked at a place that changed. It's how many remote offices they wanted to have. And this was a big thing. And is that, you know, part of the economic cycle? Is it part of trying to reduce headcount, save expenses, consolidation, tactical? Like it's very difficult to disentangle these things because even if people say why they're doing something, I'll always say it. So I think you'll continue to see ebb and flow and people pointing at reductionist views of why that happened. But I think we'll see more variants. I think as video technology gets, you know, just more accepted and more reliable percentage of people who do remote work, you know, let's call it at least two days a week or more, probably going to continue to be pretty high, but we'll probably stabilize for a while until we see some other change that drives it differently or an innovative, really big up and coming company that people try to fight against really shows a different way forward, I guess. So I think we'll probably be stable roughly where we are for a while. And I, I think it kind of makes sense. I think the belief that some 1:39:08.502 --> 1:39:36.970 People do it, but for the most part, not like everybody's going to be van dwellers and we're all going to like be in a van and travel around like it's remote work, but it's nomadic, you know, virtual nomad, you know, van dwelling, like whatever that you see these things from time to time, like, Oh, I worked from Southeast Asia and I worked from the ski resort in the winter. And I were in for all the reasons we just said, I actually don't think that's anything except a vanishingly small minority of people because I was talking 1:39:36.970 --> 1:39:47.517 to somebody who did this for five years and they got actually really burnt out of being a nomad. And so, yeah, I agree. I don't think it's sustainable. 1:39:47.854 --> 1:40:35.740 I think all the distractions around getting a reliable internet connection around, you know, maybe if you run your own business, I mean, there's always exceptions, right. But the distractions, if you have a family, if whatever, like, it's just, even I talk to people, you know, because I'm remote or like the place I work offers remote weeks, people are like, Oh, I'm going to take this while we go on a family vacation to Europe. And it's like, okay, so all your family is going to be like doing cool things in Europe. Cause you know, we're in the United States and they're going to travel to Europe, going to do fun vacation things. And you're just going to sit and work in the hotel in a much worse than normal place to be working cramped, bad internet, you know, whatever. And like, you think that's going to actually be productive. And most people kind of agree, they realize it. And so it, it's very rare that someone does that. 1:40:37.019 --> 1:41:07.116 Yep. Yep. Totally agree. It's, it's one of these things that like, it sounds cool, like until you really think about it and it's like, okay, do I want to work for five days in this like cramped hotel room just so that like I could ski, you know, Saturday and Sunday and maybe Wednesday evening, or do I want to work in like a very ergonomic friendly place where it's quiet and then just take two weeks off and go skiing every day? Like it's just, the other one just doesn't make a lot of sense when you really try it out. 1:41:09.479 --> 1:41:13.444 Cool. Yeah. So I guess I'll give my prediction. I think that, 1:41:15.047 --> 1:41:56.860 I think that we'll reach some kind of stable equilibrium where, where, you know, there will be like a couple of remote folks on each team. And so no team will be able to, no team will be, will be like all get to getting together all the time. And so it's going to be kind of expected that like, Hey, when there's a team meeting, there's going to be Zoom there and there's going to be accommodations made for remote people in every team meeting. I think that's going to be the norm. I think that dam has like completely broken and there's no way there's a reason to do anything different. 1:41:59.243 --> 1:43:14.320 I think, I think for people managers, that's where I could see companies like continuing to draw a firm line. And so it could get to the point where you say, look, you could be an engineer, maybe you could be a line manager. But if you, if you want to get that promotion to Vice President, you know, you have to move across the country. And so we might see a situation where, you know, like empty nesters like relocate. It's like, okay, you know, I've, I raised my kids, they moved out. I'm ready to be a Vice President. I have to move to the headquarters. And so kids go to college and you end up going to headquarters of Company X or whatever it is. Because that seems like where they're going. Although there was that notable case for the Starbucks CEO, I guess, doesn't live in Seattle. And there was like a big hoopla about that. So, so yeah, I do think that for certain roles and obviously Patrick talked about, you know, manufacturing and things like you just literally can't do remote, but, of the roles that are, you know, entire, that can be done remote, there's going to be a certain set of those roles where there's just continuing to be pressure 1:43:14.320 --> 1:43:15.602 to be in the 1:43:15.737 --> 1:44:08.404 office. I actually find that research is one of these roles. Ironically, there's this feeling that, Oh, if you're a team of researchers that you have to be around the whiteboard together, which I think is actually completely wrong. I think actually as someone who worked in research for many, many years, I think research should be like one of the first things that you distribute. But, but we'll have to see how that plays out. I think there's still a lot of unknowns, but I think we both agree that remote work is not going away. And, and I think that, you know, people should feel comfortable, you know, moving to, and I'm just going to pick no offense to Idaho, but moving to Idaho, and being able to get a tech job remotely. I think that people should feel confident if you're wondering whether to make that move to Idaho, if you're still going to be able to have a job, I think you can make that move to Idaho. 1:44:10.294 --> 1:44:18.968 I, yeah, I don't know the internet quality in Idaho. That used to be a big concern. Now you just use taking it full circle. You use Starlink. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. You just catch 1:44:18.968 --> 1:44:19.980 the internet on chopsticks. 1:44:23.700 --> 1:44:37.980 Cool. All right, folks. Another awesome episode. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks so much for supporting us on Patreon. A lot of fun there, and we will catch you all next time. Bye. 1:44:37.980 --> 1:45:09.980 Thank you. Thank you.