My Everywhere / Nowhere Office
As I write this, it’s 65° and sunny. I’m in a park near my house, leeching off of a donut shop’s WiFi, witnessing the splendor of our world, and I just pushed a commit to a PR that I’ve been working on for a few hours. In another hour, I’ll have a meeting, and that meeting will take place via Zoom from this picnic table. I’m limited only by the weather, connectivity, and my MacBook’s battery-life. This is the promise of the future of work and I am living it.
Most days I work from my home office, or my couch, or my dining room table. Other days it’s a coffee shop or my kitchen counter. On days like this one, though, glorious freedom calls.
Why don’t we all work like this? Why isn’t this golden day being shared by all of my fellow gentle code enthusiasts and casual Friday attendees?
Traditiooooooooon. Tradition.
The emphasis on centrality in a workforce is an old one. It marches lockstep with the corporate, industrialized model that permeates our governments and school systems. Its roots can be traced back to when the work being done necessitated close proximity: I add a widget, you add a wingnut, and someone at the end spins them together into a hoodad.
Though the additive nature of production hasn’t changed much in the intervening century or so, the nature of the assembly line most certainly has. One need not be in the same cubicle, nor even on the same floor, to design a website component that will be implemented by someone else. So, why not a different state, timezone, or even country?
The answer for most companies is a matter of trust.
The Cost
Desk work is expensive. Period. When a company makes an investment in human labor in a specialized field, it comes at a pretty steep price. One must consider salary, insurance costs, tax implications, liability, on-boarding, eventual raises, bonuses, and maybe even stock options when deciding to hire an employee. It’s an investment, and a weighty one at that.
Through that lens, it’s relatively easy to see why the idea of a centralized office and a solid management layer would be so appealing to the person or entity signing payroll checks. Having control is an important feeling for people with skin in the game.
Dia&Co. has made a decision to distribute its engineering resources in the face of this, and for good reason. This is an ever-ongoing process around which we’ve been iterating. We’ve been cataloguing these changes, too.
The Talent
Some specific personal qualities and technical qualifications are necessary to do an exemplary job in our line of work. Amongst those are empathy, drive, meticulousness, and talent.
I know that that last word is a bit ugly and hand-wavy, but it best encapsulates a large gray area of skill that could be expounded upon (and has been) in books by people with Ph.Ds. To me, talent is a mixture of acquired skills (expertise in a language or framework, for example) and an ability to learn new skills quickly and well. We routinely hire developers to contribute in their primary languages while training them in others. This is not rare in the industry, either.
Empathy is a large pillar of our workforce at Dia&Co., and something that we look for in potential candidates. Being able to assume best intentions and lead with the same is instrumental in effective communication and aids the software development lifecycle in running smoothly. Communicating one’s ideas without stepping on toes, or understanding needs without being explicitly told, makes teamwork dreamwork™.
Being attentive, really attentive, to the minutiae of the work being done is another x-factor for our hires. People with the ability to rigorously test their code before opening a PR, or who can use that skill to aid in finding better ways to implement a feature are invaluable to an engineering organization. They save time in test and maintenance.
Which brings us to drive. It’s not enough to be able. There are thousands of excellent singers with pretty faces (looking at you, Bublé), but 99.9% of them lack the drive, connections, and luck that it takes to make a career out of it.
The same holds true for anyone contributing to the SDLC. Being a truly solid software engineer, QA engineer, DevOps engineer, or machine learning engineer requires the ability to drive your own workflow. To seek out problems which arise and settle them. To predict where issues might come about and prepare for them. Essentially, to be a grownup and do your job.
With these pillars (and others) in place, the trust which was once assumed through centralizing workers in tiny, neck-height, hideously-carpeted walls without a door, can be ensured through the personality and skill set of a given developer, designer, PM, etc.
Keeping it Productive
Goodwill, talent, drive, and empathy are important. Maintaining order and purpose requires means beyond those of the individual. Our teams and rituals are designed to elevate those needed attributes to a thrumming hive of productivity.
Work groups are arranged into cross-disciplinary pods (hi, weird SCRUM dolphin reference), and the workflow is managed by a product team — one member of which resides within the pod. Design, development, QA, and product all have an equal space and voice within these groups.
Rituals (standup, retrospectives, backlog grooming, and planning) are preordained and allow the team to share what they’re working on, reduce friction, and develop camaraderie. All of these rituals take place on Zoom, have a stated agenda, and are lead by whomever is available to attend. Keeping focus in this way allows for not only the completion of work, but the ability to tackle incoming work from other stakeholders within the company.
Having each of these take place via video call allows those remote workers (an increasing number) to feel connected to their pod, and informed of decision-making and timelines. In short, to feel included and contributory.
Talent lives everywhere
Dia&Co. is a NYC-based institution. It grew up there, and there it will remain. Many of the best developers, QA, designers, PMs, and DevOps folk on Earth live and work there already. But, talent lives everywhere, and finding someone with the skills listed previously — specifically the empathy and drive bits — is exceedingly hard, even in a market as big as NYC.
So, we search outwardly to find the best fit, regardless of their place in the States. And, for those team members on staff in NYC, having the added flexibility to “WFH” when needed cushions what already is a fantastic work environment.
Dia&Co. has engineers in Oregon, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Maine, and a host of other places throughout the United States. And we’re growing. (Join us!)
My Picnic Table and the Future of Work
After a day of shipping deliverables from my kitchen and writing this post from a picnic table, I am able to really appreciate the trust placed in me by my employer. That trust, and the adaptability of the engineering team at Dia&Co. due to its distribution, are the future of work.
And, as rents increase in major work hubs and more experienced developers move out to the country to raise their families — or raise alpacas in their spare time previously-lost to commuting — distributed teams will likely be the future of work for our industry.
I’m going to close my laptop now, buy a guilt-precipitated coffee from the donut shop whose internet I’ve been Bogarting all afternoon, and walk home to see my family.
As I do so, I’ll not be thinking about the advantages of remote work; but, of my incredible luck at having found a group of empathetic, kindly, skilled, and professional colleagues at Dia&Co. My feeling included (despite being miles and miles away) is all the proof that I need that ours is the coming way for our line of work. See you in the future.
