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Maria Gutierrez and Glenn Vanderburg lead Living Social’s distributed engineering teams for the past 5 years. They’re both now at different companies, and still at different geographic locations, but in this episode of our podcast, they sit down at their respective locations with us over Skype to talk about how to hire, manage, and lead distributed engineering teams.
Transcript: provided by scribie.com
00:01 Miles Matthias: Hello and welcome to Exec Podcast where we talk to CTOs and VPs of Engineering about start ups, engineering, and leadership. This week we have Maria Gutierrez and Glenn Vanderburg on the show. Maria and Glenn are both leading engineering teams at early stage start ups these days, but previously they jointly led the LivingSocial engineering team. There’s a catch. Maria is in Scotland, and Glenn is in Texas. In fact, a lot of the LivingSocial team was distributed, so Maria and Glen have loads of awesome experience at managing distributed engineering teams. So that’s what we’ll be talking about today. Before I start the episode, if you enjoy listening to our podcast, please let us know on Twitter, @execpodcast, or about leaving a review on iTunes. We really love hearing from all of you, so please take a minute to say, ‘Hey.’ Without further ado, here’s Maria and Glenn.
00:49 MM: Welcome to Exec Podcast. I’m Miles Matthias, and I am here with my co-host Kevin Owocki.
00:55 Kevin Owocki: Hi, everybody.
00:56 MM: Today, we have a special episode with two guests talking about distributed teams, and all four of us are on Skype in completely different locations. So practicing what we preach, which is exciting. We have Maria Gutierrez. Hey, Maria.
01:12 Maria Gutierrez: Hiya.
01:13 MM: And then we have Glenn Vanderburg. Hey, Glenn.
01:16 Glenn Vanderburg: Hello.
01:18 MM: So Maria, you are in Edinburgh. Why don’t we start with a little bit about yourself, and your background, and tell us about what you’re up to.
01:27 MG: I am in not-very-sunny Edinburgh today. It’s been miserable weather all day. So, I am currently the VP of Engineering at FreeAgent, and I am based here in Edinburgh, Scotland. FreeAgent is an online accounting system designed to make it easier for freelancers and small businesses to manage their accounts. I joined the team at the beginning of the year, in January. But previously, I had been working at LivingSocial with Glenn for the previous five years where I was working remotely from home and managing large teams from here.
02:08 MM: Awesome. And Glenn, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
02:13 GV: Hi, I am Glenn Vanderburg. I work for First, which is a early-stage start up in Durham, North Carolina, building systems to improve the home buying and selling experience for real estate agents and homeowners alike. I’ve only been in this position for about a month. And before that, as Maria said, I worked at LivingSocial for five years, and a lot of the experiences we’re gonna… We’re both managing distributed teams in our current positions. I work from home in Plano, Texas, for example, but a lot of the experiences we’re gonna be talking about are based on having worked for several years managing a large distributed team at LivingSocial.
03:03 MM: Awesome. Why don’t we start off just by defining distributed teams. There are a lot of different versions of a distributed team, and everyone has their own little definition, so let’s talk about what does a distributed team actually mean to you?
03:19 MG: There’s different type of teams. For us, the name ‘distributed’ is what we chose to use because a lot of people call it ‘remote,’ and that indicates a little bit like somebody alienated, in a corner of the world, working by themselves. But I think ‘distributed’ really gives you a better picture of what… It might be a team with either people that work from home, or people that are on the road and they still need to be communicating with the rest of the business regularly, or even multi-site companies. So a company grows so large that they decide to have multiple offices either in the same country or across the world. So that gives you, encompasses all the different types of working in a distributed environment even with customers at parties, etcetera. You could also consider that working in a distributed fashion. What do you think, Glenn?
04:16 GV: Yeah, I agree with all of that. We do try to be careful with the term ‘remote.’ It’s useful when you’re trying to make a distinction between one person who is off-site and another person who works in headquarters everyday or whatever. But in the early days of our team at LivingSocial, we did find that it emphasized a implicit class distinction between the on-site people and the remote people, and whether… In some ways, it reflected a real distinction, but in other ways, it just emphasized perceived inequities in how people were treated and how people worked. And so we adopted the distributed teams terminology, and that works better.
05:08 MM: My software brain takes me to learning about client server models in school and how a lot of software right now is built completely peer-to-peer, and I think that…
05:19 KO: Exactly.
05:19 MM: Everyone being equal class citizens is an important distinction. How did you see that manifest when the remote employees found themselves to be second-class citizens?
05:33 GV: Well, it caused some strife and inefficiency, and really, the turning point was when most of the people… And we had a partly distributed team at LivingSocial where roughly half the team, anywhere from a third of the team to two-thirds at various different times, worked in our headquarters in Washington, DC, and the rest were everywhere, working from home. And the turning point really came when even the people working in the office in DC started adopting the same work habits and styles, and communication styles particularly, as the remote employees, so that it was effectively a distributed team where we all communicated and worked in the same way instead of one team… You don’t want effectively two teams, where one is the team in the office and one is the team of remote people, because you need better communication than that.
06:37 MG: You want to avoid it to be a second thought, and that’s one of the things that Glenn and I are very passionate about, is around the commitment. If you’re leading a team, if you’re running your company, and suddenly you see yourself in the situation where you have people that are working from different places, we think it’s very, very important from the very, very beginning to be very deliberate and intentional about what you want to do and how do you wanna prepare for that, so that it doesn’t become this second-class citizen that we’re talking about, that are not treated and they don’t have the same opportunities as those people that are in the office.
07:16 MM: So what are some practical tips for someone who’s beginning to manage a distributed team? Are there certain times in which you should say, “Well, let’s move this conversation to Slack,” or “Let’s invest in this specific software”? What should I do as a manager of a distributed team to make sure that it’s completely equitable?
07:42 MG: I would start trying to understand why you have a distributed team and what you’re trying to solve, especially if you’re gonna continue potentially growing that team, if you continue going in that route and that direction or not, because you might end up… A lot of companies, especially small companies, they might end up in that situation maybe because they’ve brought over another company and suddenly they have a remote person. So that was the case of LivingSocial. They acquired an employee that was home. Glenn joined the company and suddenly they had half of the engineering team now happened to be distributed, but maybe that hadn’t been thought through of how it was going to be supported. So, to me, the most important thing to do is think, “Okay, if you are in this situation, whether you’ve chosen to be in it or not, understand what you need to do to support those people.”
08:35 MG: And one of the benefits as well is you might have a completely co-located team, and suddenly somebody for personal reasons, and that was my situation, you want to continue having them working for you, but they need the extra flexibility, and they might need to go and work from home. So what are the things that you’re gonna put in place to make sure that those people don’t feel as a snowflake, people that everybody has to adapt so that they can feel like they fit in and that they are still participating? And to us it’s all… We’ve talked a little bit about that in the blog already, but it’s all about communication and being very, very deliberate and intentional with the communication. And it’s not just what you communicate but also what things that you’ve put in place to support to make that as successful as possible. So do you do investment in AB equipment, or even just your computers, make sure that every single computer has a camera and good mic so that people can communicate successfully? If you have a mixture of teams between co-located and distributed that maybe all your meeting rooms… Like here at FreeAgent, we’re really lucky, ’cause every single meeting room is equipped with televisions that have a Mac Mini, and they have cameras attached so we can go into Skype, Hangouts, or whatever tools we decide to be used to be able to see our colleagues that are working from home in any meeting that we are taking part of.
10:06 GV: Your example of, ‘When should we take this to Slack?’ is a great example, because people working face-to-face, we’re all very good at communicating in those situations. Well better, and it seems very natural, we do it all the time. And in a distributed situation, communication patterns take work and attention and you have to learn to do it well, and you have to know… You have asynchronous communication like chat and email that doesn’t interrupt people but then might be a little slower. You have group chat that is sometimes distracting, and then you have face-to-face meetings or phone calls and synchronous things like that, and you have to think about when to use one and when to use the other, and when to write things down. Communicate in writing versus voice is something that doesn’t persist. At first that sounds like a lot of extra overhead and work. It’s like, “Oh, maybe this distributed thing isn’t worth it because you have to think so much about how you communicate,” but really, if you think about it, I bet every team you’ve worked on could’ve benefited from a little more thought and attention about how communication happened and what gets written down and what doesn’t, and ultimately we found it to be a big benefit.
11:42 MM: Absolutely. One of the things I’ve noticed about that specifically is engineers tend to… Because we are so… I’m just trying to find the right word. Like we’re very deliberate about when it comes to… Especially to writing code. You write the character you’re going to write because you mean to write that character, and you’re very deliberate about communication. And I’ve noticed sometimes it’s easier for engineers to understand that concept of communication, but how do you… And there are all sorts of tools to help engineering teams get on the same page, but how do you help the whole company do that, and how do you reach over to the other business side of the company and help them understand the communication and how to work on a distributed team?
12:27 GV: That was a big challenge. It was our engineering team that was distributed for the most part. And we had a few business people and product people who worked from other locations, but for the most part, they were all in the office. Well, one example was, they would always want to gather in a conference room and have a traditional face-to-face meeting in a conference room and stick a laptop on the corner of the table and dial in the remote engineering participants in a meeting. And that’s totally natural. No reason to expect anything different, except it often devolved into two separate meetings going on at the same time, occasionally yelling at each other and syncing up to exchange something important.
13:28 GV: One turning point was when a guy located in the DC office, an engineer, said he wanted to try to find ways to help make the situation better. And he started advocating, among engineers and business people alike, two things. One, take a work from home day every week, but instead of the usual pattern where you’d pick a day where you don’t have any meetings, make sure you pick a day when you do have meetings. So you can experience what it’s like to call into a meeting as opposed to being there face-to-face. And the other thing was, Hangouts first. We did most of our remote meetings via Google Hangouts, and he said, “Whenever possible, rather than gathering all the co-located people in a conference room, sit at your desks, and join the meeting on the same basis.” Some of the business people found that easier to deal with than others, which I also understand. But for the most part, it worked really well.
14:35 KO: Well it’s sounds like you’re dog-fooding other people work styles which you’re building empathy amongst your team which is really important.
14:44 MG: One thing that has worked really well here at FreeAgent that I’ve been very impressed to see from the day that I arrived… I think the founders from day one they had some remote employees that were working from home, and they decided to really simplify the technology that we use here. So every single person use a Mac across the whole business, so everybody is on the same page, and they have the same tools. And we all use exactly the same technology. So for example, at LivingSocial, we used Slack, but that was more for an engineering tool. We used it with product, etcetera. Here, Slack is used across the whole business. So everybody is used to use the same applications to communicate the same way. Everybody uses Skype or Hangouts, whatever we decide is appropriate for that communication, and that can really help. Especially, if you are starting up. If you can consolidate how everybody across the business work and use the same tools, I think that can be very, very beneficial rather than having that divide that maybe we had at LivingSocial. Some of the funny stories from that is I remember going in calls with, maybe, somebody from the sales team, and their machines didn’t have webcams. So we’re big into always using video, and I used to get very frustrated because I thought, “Why are they not switching on the cameras?” And then one day, I asked. And they said, “Oh, we don’t have a camera in our laptop.” So even little things like that make a big difference.
16:16 GV: “We’re not like you hoity-toity engineers that have all the fancy stuff.”
[laughter]
16:20 MM: That was their excuse.
16:25 MM: The other thing, I was interested to see if you had any experience with was… Obviously you have to help other people understand the method of communication, to pick wisely. But one thing that has been hugely beneficial on all the engineering teams I’ve been on is when you talk about things in the open. Even if I just have to talk to Kevin about something, I’m gonna do that in the open group chat just so that if someone else has two cents or someone else may be impacted or whatever by what we’re doing, it’s easy for them just to read the history and be like, “Oh, okay. I’m up on that.” But I’m one of the administrators of our Slack team, and every, I think it’s month or whatever, Slack sends out a stats email by your group and then tells you the percentage of private instant messages versus public ones, and every month it’s in the 70-80%, and I’m just like, “Guys come on! Let’s try to be in the open a little here.” But it’s a struggle for people ’cause it’s natural to be like, ” Oh, I gotta go talk to that one person, so I’m gonna go privately message them.”
17:23 GV: Yeah, and it’s interesting because what you’re doing when you’re encouraging the public communication is recreating the serendipity that you see in an office environment. Where you go over and talk to so-and-so because you have something you want to talk about with her, but the other people around you hear snippets of that, even if they’re not eavesdropping on you, and realize, “Oh, they’re talking about something that affects my work, and that’s a very interesting thing, and I’ll listen in or walk over and join the conversation and spread it a little more widely.” And in chat or email or phone calls or whatever, most of our point-to-point electronic communication, there’s no opportunity for that serendipitous knowledge transfer to happen. And that’s one of the benefits of A, public channels in Slack and B, I think Slack in general, it seemed to have a lot more uptake among non-engineers than previous chat things.
18:37 MM: Absolutely, I mean we had IRC forever. “Engineers, we’re cool.” Like whatever, but all of a sudden IRC has pretty colors, and people are like, “Oh yay.” But I personally was in love with Flowdock, which was before Slack got big, ’cause the coolest thing about Flowdock that I really liked was you could click on an individual item in a group chat which would open like a sub-chat, so you could have context. So a git-commit would roll in to the thing, click on it, and then have a whole conversation about that git-commit so you could see context, but alas, all the business people got attracted to the shiny colors on Slack so whatever, but… [chuckle]
19:15 MG: Another example of benefits that I was just thinking about for the people here co-located that maybe they wouldn’t be able to have if we didn’t have a more distributed team is when we do any large team meetings… We use GoToMeeting, for example. So we broadcast the meeting, and we make sure that everybody can participate. All those meetings, whether it’s a training session, a forum, or the team town hall, engineering town hall, etcetera, they all get recorded just because we are broadcasting them, so we might as well keep a copy of them. That means that even people that would normally be in the office that maybe they’re not here that day or for whatever reason they can’t make it, they also have an opportunity to later on watch them. And I think if we didn’t have a distributed team, we probably wouldn’t be going through the process of trying to record all this information. So keeping, going back to the writing more things and putting things more in front of people, all those practices that you would normally put more effort when you have a distributed team really, really benefit the rest of the team as well.
20:26 MM: So I’m hearing a couple trends here. Moving to public channels over private channels, recording town hall style meetings so that people who are out can participate. And Glenn, I want to unwind us back to something that you said which I thought was super interesting, recreating the serendipity that would happen in an office environment. I had once read that the real cultural interactions don’t happen in a meeting, they happen in the hallways, like whispers after a meeting. And I thought that was a super interesting point about the serendipity. Are there other ways to increase serendipity amongst your remote team? Do you get people together for a happy hour over Skype or should you fly them all in one place every three months? What’s the best practice here?
21:15 MG: I think it’s a mixture. I think face-to-face, nothing beats face-to-face. So I think I’m a big believer on regular basis, get the team together and help them socialize a little bit more in person, and…
21:28 GV: By physically with travel.
21:29 MG: Yeah, with travel. But obviously, that depends on the budget and where your team is located, so that’s something that managers really need to take into account as they hire people. It’s, “Okay, what does that mean ultimately to my budget, and what expectation should I set with the team?” But then we used to do a lot of things at LivingSocial, and here at FreeAgent as well, around trying to get people to socialize more on a day-to-day basis.
21:55 MG: So on Wednesdays, I think it is, 4:00 to 5:00 we have the remote coffee hour, so a lot of the people that work from home they just get together and hang out. They have a coffee, and they have a chat. We used to have at LivingSocial, when we had the company-wide town halls, there normally used to be a happy hour at the end of it in the office, so Glenn and I used to fire up a Hangout and invite people to come on and chat with us, anybody that was distributed and wanted to continue talking about what we had heard about the business.
22:30 MG: Like weekly, I used to do weekly demos with a team. It was to show a little bit of progress that we had done, but really, the purpose for me was to really get the team to socialize, talk to each other, and learn from each other a little bit more. And we used to play music at the beginning and at the end. And it was a little bit of fun, but it really, really helped to get people feeling that they were part of a team and not just the immediate people that they were talking to but the wider engineer organization.
23:00 GV: You zeroed in on something that’s really important, and in the blog post series that Maria and I are writing and have both gotten bogged down on ’cause we’re so busy with other things. [chuckle] I wrote a post that basically calls this rule number one of distributed teams is that communication takes work. In a co-located environment, there is a whole bunch of latent implicit communication that happens without anybody even noticing, much less trying to make it happen. You run into each other in the break room, and even things like just seeing this person leaning back with a thoughtful look on his face. You’re learning something about what’s going on in their work right now. They’re dealing with a difficult problem and trying to figure it out or something like that, and you learn about other people’s work, and you learn about other people’s personalities just quite naturally without any thought or effort at all.
24:10 GV: And in a distributed situation, every single bit of that takes work. And some of the most effective people at being remote employees understand this and make an effort to get their personality across in Slack, or group chat, or whatever. And that can take the form of sharing cat videos, or making jokes, or whatever. And you have to strike a balance and not spend all of your time doing that. Although, it was remarkable to me that some of the most productive employees, remote employees, I’ve ever seen seemed to always be active in remote chat, in the chat rooms. I don’t know how they do it, because I can’t multi-task that well. But then, as a manager, I’ve had to counsel some employees that, “Look, I know it doesn’t seem like work, but it’s just as much work as stopping to have a conversation about movies you saw over the weekend in the break room in the office with people, because you’re most effective working when people know you.”
25:28 GV: And it helped a lot. We eventually ended up with not just one… And my current team, at first, is too small for this to really make sense, but with a big engineering team like we had at LivingSocial, we ended up with not just one off-topic room, but we ended up with a music room and a pets room and a vacations room and a sports ball room and movies and whatever, and most everybody was able to find a place to have conversations that were not explicitly about work topics. And surprisingly often, work topics end up creeping into those conversations too.
26:05 MM: I think that’s really great. And as an engineer, who likes to maniacally manage my notification preferences in Slack, having different rooms that I can set on and off, can be really nice.
26:16 KO: Absolutely.
26:17 MG: Another part important there, is that the management team was also participating. And I think, to create that transparency and visibility is important that we were all part of those conversations, and it wasn’t seen as something that we shouldn’t be doing, because actually, Glenn and Maria are here posting funny gifs as well and having a laugh. And I think that was one of the keys, I think that it was successful at LivingSocial was half of the engineering leadership team were working from home. So Glenn was working from Texas, and I was working from Scotland, and that was normal. There wasn’t any impediment. You could be doing any job within the team, and it was okay. You could do it as well from home or from the other side of the world.
27:12 MM: Awesome. Buy-in from leadership, that’s a really great point. ‘Cause the people I look up to in the organization, I want to be following the same communication patterns that they are. When you think about explicitly growing your organization, such that distributed teams are well done, I’d imagine that hiring for personalities that are gonna be productive and good team members while they’re remote is a specialty in itself. Do you have any tips for hiring engineers or team members that are going to be remote?
27:49 MG: We have a few. I think we’ve all learned situations when it has worked, and it hasn’t. I think rule number one for me, is if somebody is applying for a job to be working distributed, you need to do an interview using the technologies that you are gonna be using when you’re working together. So make sure that you do plenty of calls with Skype or Hangouts, whatever you’re gonna use to communicate. And then you can get a feel for how comfortable they are communicating in that environment. That you do, maybe your peer programming during the technical interview. If you do so, it’s that you also do it, not just in person, but that you have somebody collaborating from their computers at home. We used to use Screenhero, which is a tool that I very, very highly recommend for peer programming. I think it was bought by Slack, and I think you can only use it through invitations, but it’s by far the best tool that I’ve found to be able to collaborate remotely in the best way possible. But I would make…
29:06 GV: We use that today at First a lot.
29:07 MG: Yeah. And so I would make sure that you don’t… We used to bring people for the interviews to the head office after they’ve gone through a few screenings, and so on, but if somebody’s gonna work from home or from another place, it’s important that you get an idea of how they collaborate. And even for the people that are going to be co-located, I think it’s always good to get an idea if they’re gonna be able to successfully collaborate with somebody else. So I used to get always people, even though they were coming to DC for interviews, to have somebody in the team that work distributed to do the interview. So we were used to put them in a room in DC and have them talk to somebody, I don’t know, myself in Scotland or somebody else, so that we could get an idea how they were going to collaborate. But then, simple things like just asking about their set up at home. Do they have a good internet connection? Because if they don’t, then there’s not much that you can go by. Or a good environment at home, a quiet place where they can really work and concentrate, and you’re not gonna have your kids running all day through. Still, we didn’t mind that actually. My little boy has been in plenty of Hangouts and meetings with me. But at least you need… Most of the time, 99% of the time, you need to make sure that you have a good environment where you can really concentrate and do your work and not be interrupted too much.
30:37 MM: Definitely. I was also wondering, one of the best pieces of advice I got about distributed teams and engineers in general, was contributions to open source projects. I think I was wondering, had you experienced that at all?
30:52 GV: It can be a good indicator, I think, of somebody being adept at working in that style and communicating via text, or pull requests, or code comments, or things like that, but we certainly have had a lot of very successful team members that didn’t have that history at all.
31:14 MG: The problem with that is that, you introduced some biases, and you assume that people have had time to work outside, work on those projects if they weren’t sponsored by their companies. For example, I hadn’t been contributing to open source projects when I joined LivingSocial. I had a family, and I had quite a busy schedule. So you don’t want to leave out people that might not have the possibility to dedicate that extra time outside of work to contribute to those projects.
31:50 MM: Yeah, definitely.
31:51 GV: I would throw that into the mix of things you look for, but I wouldn’t give it any special weight.
31:55 MM: Yeah.
31:55 MG: Having distributed teams and having that flexibility sometimes of working from home, really opens opportunities for some companies to hire more diverse team, and that’s something that I’m a big believer, because that was the reason that I decided to work for LivingSocial. I had had my little boy, and at the time, I was working for a big software company here in Edinburgh, but I had to commute every day to work, and I wasn’t getting a lot of time to spend with Ethan. So I decided to join LivingSocial because working from home allowed me to spend more time with him. It doesn’t need to be just women that have just had kids that need that extra flexibility. There’s many people that might be in the same situation. Maybe they need to care for a family member or whatever their reasons are. And so it really opens… Having that opportunity to give the extra flexibility to your employees, I think is very, very powerful.
32:57 GV: It’s not a panacea on the diversity front. In the same way, it opens towards to some people that might not otherwise be able to take a good tech job. It can close doors for others because they might not have a place at home where they can work, or they might need the social interaction and feel like they really want to be in an office every day. And so I don’t think every company should have a fully distributed team, any more than I think every company should force everybody to come to work from eight to five everyday. So it’s good to have a healthy mixture of those things.
33:37 MM: Well it’s interesting that we’re talking not only about the on-site versus remote versus distributed access of the conversation, but we’re also talking about work hours when you get into the flexibility that enables more diversity. Do you guys find yourselves not working eight to five as you’re moving more into distributed teams?
[chuckle]
34:00 GV: My perspective on that is… This is this something I feel very strongly about, as an employee and as a manager. When you work from home, it is almost inevitable that your work life will slop over into your home life. Because you’ll see an alert, and your computer’s just right there, and it’s very comfortable to go in, and pick up some work that needs doing, even though it’s between TV shows at night or whatever. And then so, as a manager at the company, you must not begrudge your employees when their home life then spills over into their work life a little bit. It’s going to go both ways. And so as Maria said, her little boy Ethan was in a lot of meetings, and I got to know by face and name, the children and pets of a lot of my employees, and, “Sorry, I have to leave this meeting five minutes early because I’ve really gotta go walk the dog,” or something like that. It’s important to have overlap time where you’re all working together, but it’s also important to be flexible and pay attention to productivity and contributions more than adherence to particular schedules.
35:25 MG: I used to work from 1:00 in the afternoon ’till late in the evening, so I wasn’t really doing by eight or nine ’till five, but that was perfect because that was what suited me. So I try to move my hours to fit the US, the east coast. And that was really exactly what I needed for work, but you need to be careful. There’s a few people… Like there was a colleague of mine here that… It’s very easy to just to be on all the time. You start a little bit early because you are here in the UK, and you just get a head start, but then before you realize you are… Everybody in the US have gone home, and you’re still working. And so it’s very important to always keep that in mind and try to put a little bit of separation.
36:12 MM: Sure. Oh, geez. I just think back to when I worked remote for a little while, back when I was renting apartments. Back then, I had my work station in my bedroom, and it was just so hard to create a separation of work and home when you don’t have a separation of space. And of course, now I have an office, which is just a room where I can go in, and I can be in that headspace. And then when I move into another room, I’m able to let work go. Not completely, ’cause I still like architect features while I’m shaving or I’m in the shower or whatever, but it is nice to have that separation.
36:43 GV: But you could do that even if you’re getting ready to go to the office.
36:45 MM: Yeah, that’s true.
[chuckle]
36:47 KO: What are your engineering values?
36:50 MG: So here at FreeAgent, I think the top one is around collaboration and being able to share your knowledge and help others. Both to help grow the skills of the team, but also improve the quality of the product and try to reduce the individual point of failures. And the other ones, we’ve actually been talking a lot recently about what were our guiding principles and what are our values. And we’re going towards being more deliberate and intentional around the signing for failure and with security in mind. And the other big one, ’cause we are going through a big growth spurt just now is invest in minimizing the time to production so that things don’t get too complicated, that as the team grows, there’s too much ceremony around deploying to production. So I would say those are, they’re still fluctuating, but we’re going towards those ones.
37:56 MM: Okay, those are good ones. How about you, Glenn?
37:58 GV: For me, I could go on about this for a long time. But the one that I keep hammering on a lot recently, I strongly believe that software development is a branch of engineering. Whether we like that or not or think it’s a very mature one or not, it is. And the best definition of engineering I’ve ever heard, and unfortunately, I’m not gonna be able to get it word for word, but it’s like, “Engineering is the use of heuristics to best achieve a desirable outcome within the applicable constraints.” And it’s always a balance between quality and robustness and cost and time schedule and all those things. And there’s a recurring pattern I see among people in our field to think it terms of good and bad or best practices versus everything else is crappy. There’s one right way to do it. And I really have tried to train myself, and I try to encourage the people I work with, to think in terms of costs and benefits and risks and rewards, and consciously make those trade-offs instead of implicitly take trade-offs that somebody else decided were a good idea in some context and blindly apply them to all the contexts you work in.
39:36 MM: So, articulate trade-offs. That’s a good one. Let’s see. Our next, final question, which is a little bit more of a fun one, is do you have any engineering war stories? And we did Maria first last time, so Glenn, why don’t you go first on this one?
39:55 GV: Engineering war stories. Here’s one example of a war story related to distributed teams that shows just how much leverage a tiny change can make. In the early days of our distributed team at LivingSocial, the worst pain point and the times that brought up the most griping among the remote employees were large group meetings like town halls. Because we did them in the traditional style where everybody gathers in a room, but then there was a camera and microphone set up with a laptop to stream it to the remote people. But we often couldn’t see very well, and we couldn’t hear very well, and the people in the room found it much easier to ask questions and get answers than the remote people did.
40:46 GV: And then one day, our VP of engineering started doing the town hall meetings from his home office. And he was pretty close to DC, and he usually went into the office most days of the week, but on days when he was gonna do a big town hall meeting for the engineering team, he stayed home and did it from his home office. Instantly, everybody was on the same footing, and we quickly worked out a way of submitting questions via a Slack room devoted to that purpose, so that everybody was doing that. And it was a really small change that turned out to have a really huge impact. It’s surprising how often, not just in a distributed team context, if you find the right change to make, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a big one to have a huge impact.
41:37 MG: Even those other nightmares that we’ve talked about. I actually think that we… One thing the engineering team at LivingSocial is we were brilliant collaborating with each other, no matter where we were. Because we were so used to working in this distributed fashion that when we had a really big nightmare, something that was gonna require a lot of work and potentially long, long hours through the day or whatever, we were able to organize ourselves in a way that we could pass on the work and we could collaborate successfully, everybody from home even if people had left the office by that point. And having all the tools available to be able to enable that communication and that collaboration, I’m pretty sure that we were able to solve a lot of those problems way quicker than if we hadn’t been working that way for a long time. We had a really funny story as well. I was mentioning to Glenn earlier on that maybe we should bring it up. We were talking about face-to-face and having the team come meet together every so often. We used to at least normally once a quarter, later on it was a bit longer, most people would come to DC. Once a year, we would have a big summit where we would all get together as an engineering organization. There was one year, I think it… Was it February? I think it was February or January…
43:04 GV: Early February or late January.
43:07 MG: So everybody went. We were about 160 people at the time in the engineering team, half of them in DC, the rest we were distributed to all over the world. So everybody went to the DC office, and there was this huge snow storm. So all the people that were co-located were stuck at home, whilst everybody that were distributed, we were all in the office because we were all staying in hotels next to the office, so that was quite funny. We were all in the office everybody that normally…
43:37 GV: We basically took over the home office for a couple of days.
43:40 MG: We were in there in the house, just not being able to get to the office. So that was quite funny. And we got stranded there for quite a few days.
43:47 GV: Oh, but it was great because we had three days of the entire team together. And then just as all the remote people were about to head to the airport to go home, this big snow storm came in and stranded us there. And so then we all had a couple of days, just the people who never get to see each other, got to hang out at the office together, and that was fantastic.
44:06 MM: That does sounds great. Last question, it’s a bonus question. Where can we find you guys both online? Glenn, why don’t you go first.
44:13 GV: I am GLV on Twitter.
44:15 MM: Nice. Short handle there.
44:18 GV: An early adopter.
44:20 MG: And I am MariaGutierrez at Twitter. All one word.
44:25 MM: Okay great. Well thanks so much for being on the show guys.
44:28 MG: Thank you.
44:28 GV: Thank you very much for having us.
44:30 KO: Thanks guys.
44:31 KO: Thanks for listening. As always, if you enjoyed the show please leave us a review on iTunes, or share our podcast with a fellow engineer. It would really help us out a lot. You can also sign up for email notifications when new episodes are announced at execpodcast.com/subscribe. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.