Software Developer Management and Remote Work | Rubber Duck Dev Show 101

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Rubber Duck Dev Show. I'm Chris. [00:00:03] Speaker B: I'm Kristen, and today we're going to. [00:00:05] Speaker A: Talk about engineering management and remote work. How does the remote life do a thing? Sure, I said that. Anyway, before we get into the meat of the show, we can review, how was your week? [00:00:19] Speaker B: I'm so busy. But then I'm like, right before you say, okay, we're going live, I'm like, what? Did I do this? Yeah, I'm still doing a lot of coordination with contractors, employees and whatnot, so I'm spending a fair amount of time doing that. I'm actually prepping well, I mean, I'll announce it here. I'm actually prepping basically a scaling postgres course. So I'm going to be actively working on that. So basically the same kind of thing like I do in my consulting. Basically, if you don't want to pay me to do it for you, you can learn from me in a course and do it yourself if you want. So basically I'll have further announcement later. It's going to take weeks or months or whatever from now, but I know that's one thing I'm trying to put in place as well. So what about you? How's your week been going? [00:01:23] Speaker A: Well, like you has been really busy. We're trying to get a fixed release out to one of our large clients, but getting things out to very large clients into their production stream. There's a lot of hoops to jump through and a lot of things to departments to get sign offs for and all that stuff. So it takes a while, but we're trying to get it done in the next month or so. So before the holiday season, things are settled. [00:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:53] Speaker A: Trying to do big switches like that in the middle of a holiday season is a nightmare. So we're doing everything we can to avoid that, which I think we will. And also I'm starting to get involved in other areas of the other areas of the engineering other engineering teams, other verticals, because they're trying to get me to have a broader understanding of the stem to stern stuff because they want to move me up a bit to more into the kind of the press box, as it were, which is where I'm kind of used to looking at things anyway, through most of my career. So I've got to go on a big learning spree because I know the back end stuff really well now for this company. But I've got to now learn all the front end stuff, which is your favorite, which is a thing, but just got to do what you got to do. But it's kind of weird because being doing some team lead activities and stuff, it really has kind of had me thinking about, especially the past few weeks. The topic we're going to talk about today, which is remote work and managing that well, doing engineering management for that, not just management in general, but how do you manage that situation and how does remote work work? And what are the differences between that and being in an office? It's kind of, once again, a timely talk for us for me, anyway, because I'm really having to kind of concentrate on this stuff and the transition of both of those topics. So without any further ado, let's talk about that. So remote work I mean, remote work for engineers has been a thing for a while, but when the plague hit, that became the norm, right? Yeah, especially for engineers, because most of your job you can and do do online. Right. Which means I can do it from my home office, or I can do it from the office office just as well. Well, technically just as well. But there are some differences we'll want to talk about there. But then you've also got the problem of engineering. Managers are used to managing a certain way, and then all of a sudden, everybody is only connected by Zoom and slack. So the management has to change the way and the team leads and stuff like that have to change the way they're doing things. So we'll talk a little bit about the difference in those things too, and I think we should get a little bit into the challenges and pros and cons of now we want to get back to the office. Says a lot of companies. Right. So first off, what do you kind of think about how did that transition affect you back when the plague started, or did it even affect you? [00:05:28] Speaker B: Well, as a background for those who don't know, run my own company and predominantly remote, essentially all remote employees, remote contractors. So I was already remote, or the company was already remote. Clientele are remote. We literally don't have anyone near us. So actually, the reverse thing happened when, as you say, the plague hit. And what I mean by that is that I used to interact a lot with my clientele that were they would get together in a conference room and have the single conference phone, and I would be communicating with them over the phone or maybe online, but just predominantly audio only. When this event happened now, suddenly everyone was on zoom, and I'm like, oh, that's what you look like. Oh, look at all these different people. So it actually became more engaging when it hit because everyone forced themselves to get this new technology and like, okay, now I can actually put names to faces or faces to names, et cetera. So for me, it kind of worked in reverse. But apart from that so I actually got to see what clients look like and be more engaged with them. But apart from that, things didn't change. [00:07:00] Speaker A: Right. So your big difference was on the customer side, but internally, there wasn't much of a change for you. [00:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah, nothing changed. [00:07:09] Speaker A: I was used to going into an office to do my work. I commuted to an office for 25 years or however long, however many millions. [00:07:19] Speaker B: Of years it was, I was in that place. But that was over a decade ago, right? [00:07:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I stopped doing that actually in 2019 when I quit my job and kind of semi retired, foretold the coming. [00:07:39] Speaker B: Of the yeah, right. [00:07:42] Speaker A: But I wasn't working as an engineer at the time. I spent a couple of years away from doing software stuff to do other things because I needed to reset my brain. And then when I went back in 2021 into software engineering, everything was remote. I mean, you couldn't find an office job at that point. That wasn't a thing anymore, really, not in the software engineering world, which was fine by me because I had wanted to work from home for quite a while. And I'm at a point in my career where I've got the maturity and the self discipline to manage myself and to make sure that I'm producing what the company needs me to produce and understanding what that requires and stuff. And I hate clock watching. I get up and work when I'm inspired to work, and I still do at least 8 hours a day, but usually more than that. But I'm more productive at home because if I have an idea about how to solve a problem at 09:00 p.m., I can just walk into my home office and solve the problem instead of not sleeping that night because I'm still thinking about it and then going into work tired and forgetting what the hell I figured out. [00:09:09] Speaker B: Right. [00:09:11] Speaker A: So there are some benefits to working at home for me from that perspective, but it was a big change and there's some freedom in it as an employee, being a work from home employee. But there's also some stress involved in that. You don't have the constant communication to help keep you in line. You have to do that yourself and you have to show the production of your work and you have to be able to manage yourself and be mature enough to do that. What I think has been discovered is that there are a lot of people who are not mature enough or organized enough to do that. There are people that need a work environment. There are also people that like not a work environment, an office environment. There are also people that like an office environment. And frankly, I wouldn't mind we don't have any offices near me, so I can't go to an office environment. My company has said, hey, if you're within 40 miles of one of our offices, you are required to come into work four days a week into the office. I can't because the closest office to me is 3 hours away, so that's not a thing. But I am talking to them about, hey, can we get there are several of us in the area within ten or 15 miles of me. Can we get like a once a week rent an office space where we can go in and just be in the same place. Because there is a missing of people contact when you work from home too. Zoom is a thing, but it's not the same thing. [00:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Be careful what you wish for. [00:11:21] Speaker A: Well, I know. [00:11:22] Speaker B: Can we do one day a week? They're like, okay, we have this facility. You're supposed to be there four days a week now. [00:11:27] Speaker A: Right. Hey, look, if it was a ten minute commute, I wouldn't mind. Where I got burned out was I had like a 45 minutes to a 1 hour commute each way every day. That was just too much. Yeah, but one of the things I'm wondering is for smaller businesses and things setups like yours, where you are pretty much all remote as the owner or the management of that, do you have desires to have in person office stuff? Is that a thing that you care about? [00:12:10] Speaker B: I think having a more not yet. I mean, things may change, like if the number of employees increase or some people that are part time, if they start maybe becoming full time, it all depends on the success of the business and me being able to compensate them at that level. But if that increases, then I can start thinking about it. I'm not adverse to it, but I've seen enough companies that are maintaining a remote work environment that I'm like, don't have to yet. So I'm not thinking of, hey, this is something that it's not on my timeline, it's not on my roadmap, but I'm not adverse to it. For example, I don't know if that kind of like, answers your question. Yeah, I'm kind of flexible at this point. [00:13:15] Speaker A: It's not something you feel you're at a need to really put a lot of thought into yet. [00:13:21] Speaker B: Yeah, if I had more employees or more full time employees and they were expressing interest, then I would all right, well then let's start exploring what that would look like. [00:13:35] Speaker A: Right. So we're talking about it from the employees perspective. I'm a work at home employee and what's my perspective there? I want to shift a little bit to looking at this situation from a team lead or management perspective. Now, you obviously have that perspective because you own the company, so obviously you're in the management position and you have to manage your employees. I'm kind of in the middle bit of that. I've got bosses and I've got team to lead. And one of the things that I find is that when I was in management positions in the office, it was much easier for me to keep tabs on what was going on in all the different flows because if something was missing in the centralized management product right. In our apps but what do you. [00:14:42] Speaker B: Mean centralized management product? [00:14:44] Speaker A: Products like GitHub and the jira and the ticketing systems and all that stuff everywhere that we kept the centralized information of who's doing what and what's going on. If that stuff wasn't there, I could just walk down the hall and ask whoever's relevant, hey, what is going on with this? Right? That's not as easy now, like I've got slack, but I can post a message in slack and it may be that it's three or 4 hours before I get an know that's there are some things to do to mitigate that. But that's a big difference in how you can manage the situations, the information flow. And I think that's the big difference is just the information flow is very different in those two scenarios. So have you run into any issues on your end with trying to manage remote workers? [00:15:49] Speaker B: So my whole metric is production, what is produced. So I don't have any insight into I do for some of the contractors what's going on on a regular basis, but I basically just have to measure production and do I feel that production is adequate and if not, say, just ask questions with regard to the level of production and speak to that. So I have to measure output, I can't measure effort is, I guess what I'm saying, right? So in terms of I do have some of the part time employees, I've given them a flexible schedule or I say I have allowed them to have a flexible schedule. And the downside of that is that I can't just select them, I can't just call them, I can't just email them, I can email them or do asynchronous communication in that way. Right, but it's like you said, it may be 4 hours, it may be the next day before I get any kind of return. And that's what expectations have been established. Like some of the contractors I'm working with, I'm actually working through a company that has acquired some of these contract. I don't know if you call them subcontractors, but basically they have defined working hours so that I know I can send them an email and they're supposed to be working and supposed to receive it and I can say, hey, can we set up a meeting in ten minutes to talk about yada yada yada? And they're like, oh yes sir, we will do it. I'm like, okay, great. So I think it depends on the expectation. So like in the case where you were saying it may be three or 4 hours before they get back to you, if for your organization that is not appropriate, I guess the controls that one could put in place is say let me know what hours you're going to be working. It would have to be more strict, you could still be remote, but just say and they could define what those hours are, but at least you know, hey, Joe is on from this hour to this hour. If I send him a slack message, as long as he's not taking lunch, he should get back to me in pretty short order as opposed to saying oh well, work when you want type thing. Then the downside of that is you get the effect that you say is that you sent a slack message and I don't know when he's going to get back to me. [00:18:32] Speaker A: Right. And most of the time I have the expectation that hey, it could be a couple of hours before I get an answer to this and that's fine. We do have a special bat signal we can send up if there's an emergency but we try not to use that because we recognize that one of the benefits of being remote is I can have a little more flexibility. I don't have to be tied to a computer for eight straight hours, right? Yeah. If I want to do 4 hours here then go for a walk, then I need to run to the grocery store, then I'm going to do another three 4 hours and then at midnight I'm pumping a couple more hours into it. That's fine as long as I'm producing this stuff. So to be a work at home employee, you need to be able to show production because like you said, that's all the management can really evaluate you on is what did you produce, what did you do for the company? I don't care when you did it. [00:19:36] Speaker B: And I think it's important to make this distinction is that you can choose remote work or not and you can choose flexible time or not. So what that means is that you could have people in the office but they could choose when they want to be. You could give them the flexibility to choose when they wanted to be in the office. And maybe some of these people that say, well, I don't like remote work, maybe it's that aspect they don't like because it's expected if you're remote working, there's more flexibility in when you work. Right, but like I just said, I just gave an example of where someone's working remotely but yet they have a fixed expectation of when they're working. [00:20:18] Speaker A: Right. [00:20:20] Speaker B: So if you're a manager and you want that you could still do remote but institute that and then just be able to do a slack and know you'll get a response in relatively short order presumably. [00:20:34] Speaker A: Right. Like I said, there are ways to mitigate a lot of that stuff and there are different plans in different companies. And in fact, because we're a worldwide company with many thousands of employees across many different teams, so even different teams have different ways of dealing with this stuff, especially if you're a support team person, you have different requirements of when you're at the computer than you do if you're an engineering team person. So it kind of depends on your role as well as to how much flexibility you can have. And there are people that like you said, they don't want the flexibility I want to be here from 830 to 530, and then I want to be done for the day period at 530, I'm done. I go hang out with my family. I eat my dinner. I relax and watch some TV or play some video games. I go to bed when I want to. I'm done. So there are people that just like that kind of predictability to their day. I happen to not be one of those people. I prefer the other thing where I thought of a great idea to solve this problem. I want to go do it right now. I need to run to the store. I don't want to do it at 05:00 traffic. So I'm going to go do it at two in the afternoon. [00:21:59] Speaker B: Right. Traffic planning is a big thing. [00:22:06] Speaker A: Yeah, well, what time is it? [00:22:09] Speaker B: Dang it, it's too late. I don't want to do what I yeah, forget it. [00:22:11] Speaker A: I'll do it tomorrow. [00:22:13] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:22:15] Speaker A: After the morning rush hour. Yeah. Especially around here. In Florida. Some of the traffic areas get really. [00:22:24] Speaker B: Near a bigger city, is the issue. [00:22:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Boy, I wouldn't want to live around Atlanta either. I've driven. [00:22:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that's one of the worst, but one of the worst. [00:22:38] Speaker A: It's a nice city, but the traffic oh, my goodness. Rush hours. Anyway, that's not the topic of this. [00:22:44] Speaker B: Quick side note, hilarious point. So I took a trip a number of weeks ago, or maybe it was a month ago, I can't even remember now. And my son did some driving. I mean, he has his license and everything, but it's not a car. He drives regularly, but we come on, man, drive at least some so he chose driving near Atlanta, one of them. And we kind of had to pull off because someone needed to use the bathroom. And given the time it was, I said, maybe I should probably drive. He's like, really? [00:23:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:24] Speaker B: He's like, okay. We got off the exit. It was 14 lanes across. He's like, I've never seen this before. [00:23:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a bit of a trial by fire. [00:23:37] Speaker B: I can't believe that it was just all full. It was insane. [00:23:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:23:46] Speaker B: Sorry for that tangent. [00:23:51] Speaker A: But I mean, that's a thing you got to pay attention to. And one of the decision factors between remote work, work at home and work in an office is there is travel time involved. And if you've got a 1 hour commute in nasty traffic, it becomes very draining after a while. Not to mention the fact that 2 hours of my day are spent not being productive because I'm sitting in a car. Right. I could solving problems for those 2. [00:24:19] Speaker B: Hours and then just think about it. If you're the kind of software engineer who doesn't interact too much with I mean, yes, you have some interaction predominantly. You go and you sit at your desk, you code all day. You go to lunch, you come back, you code, and you go home and maybe you just have a few interactions. It's like, well, what is the worth of going into the office for that, right? [00:24:41] Speaker A: And I will say that I'm a big believer in face to face being around people type of thing. Not zoom, but being physically colocated with people as human beings. I think that's just something that's hardwired into us. We need people around other people around us. We're not lone creatures by default. But there are times where it's like, well, that's just not an efficient way to do my particular job. So let me find other ways to get that social interaction. Now, from a management perspective, I will say that it is significantly easier to manage a colocated team than a remote team. Having done both, there's a lot less logistics involved and a lot less planning involved in the management. The team management part and the project management part doesn't really change a whole lot. But the team management part is drastically different. So I can understand management wanting to get people back together. It makes sense. It is more efficient from a management standpoint to do that. There are also human benefits and efficiency benefits of hey, I'm just down the hall from somebody I need to talk to. So boop, I go talk to them, I get my question answered right away. Not to mention building the rapports with people and that kind of stuff. There are X factors to be considered with going back to the office. [00:26:38] Speaker B: But I'll keep in mind what you're going to say. I was just going to push back for a moment. Kind of like I think in the scenario where people are expected to be online at the same time, I think slack is a be able to boop or pop in technology. I think it does allow you to do that. And if you need to, like now they have this new huddles feature where you can immediately convert a chat into a huddle and now you have online video and you can talk through something and depart when you're ready. So I think the tooling is there a lot to handle some of this. I mean, yes, you still lose something with, know, physical interaction with someone else in the same room, but I don't know, I think it gets a lot done, right? [00:27:34] Speaker A: It does. Now, one thing I will say about like slack, so slack and those kind of things, I mean, we use slack at work and that's probably the most predominant one that people use. But there are other ones. But anyway, like Microsoft teams, those kind of things do start having problems at certain numbers of people and we are seeing some of those problems because what ends up happening is you get pinged so much that you just start ignoring the pings. They become background noise and so then it isn't, hey, there's a ping, it's something I need to take a look at, it's ping, ping, ping. Ping, shut up, phone. Leave me alone for 4 hours, right? And then you go back to look at the stuff, the messaging, and there's a million messages across, a million different threads or channels and you're like, I can't keep up with all this. This is impossible. 90% of this stuff I don't need to know. But the 10% is so buried in all this crap I can't find it. Right? So there are some issues with that. I'm not saying it's not a good tool and we use it extensively and I rely on it a lot. I've got it always open. Even when I'm not at work, I'm checking it for stuff. But you have to kind of be careful because the other thing that we found that starts happening is rather than ticketing and tracking issues, they start just becoming, hey, I'm going to ask you about this in Slack and then we're going to have this ongoing conversation and eventually get solved. And there's no tracking of this issue, which means there's never a knowledge base article written so that people can resolve it later. There's never any ticket tracking so that we can keep track of efficiency. And then the discussions end up getting lost in the Slack bubble because people think rather than make a ticket, I'll just ping this person and then we'll just solve it right here because it's easier. And so that's a trap that we. [00:29:43] Speaker B: Fall into, presumably, but at a cost, right? [00:29:49] Speaker A: And so that's something that we're constantly kind of having to reiterate to people is Slack is not our ticketing system. This is not how we ticket things. It's not how we plan them. We have a ticketing system, so you need to use it. I get why people do it. It's the natural thing to do. It's the easy thing to do. Hey, I'm going to run to your office and talk to you about this thing. So there are some things to be cognizant of there and I think those things become more prevalent at larger team sizes. If you've got two or three people, it's not that big a deal. If you've got 2000 people, you have to have some communication controls and some rules there. It just gets completely out of hand. So one of the other interesting things that I've seen in the company, and this was also mentioned, I've read this in a couple of different articles too, including the one that you showed me is that management is starting to collapse vertically, where instead of having between me and the CEO, there's ten layers of managers. They're getting it down to, okay, now there's two layers of managers and they're spreading it out. Well, I mean, I'm being a bit hyperbolic there. [00:31:26] Speaker B: I was going to think it drops down to five two what? Just like Twitter, man. [00:31:32] Speaker A: Yeah, right. But what they're starting to and I think this is a direct result of this kind of paradigm and having to interact and manage this way. Because one of the things that I'm noticing is that upper management can't get as much information and because it takes longer to pass things up the chain this way, with remote work, they don't have time to wait for all the stops along the path. They need to get closer to the origin. And so I think what we're seeing is that a lot of these companies are collapsing their management structure so that they have a better ability to manage these remote paradigms, because they're different. It's a different way to manage things. [00:32:32] Speaker B: But do you think remote work is the cause of like, this article was talking about the layoffs at Meta referenced some of the layoffs at Twitter and basically collapsing the levels of management, as you were saying. But do you think remote work is the cause of that? [00:32:52] Speaker A: No, I don't think it's the cause. I think it was the thing that exposed the that clearly exposed the flaws in that system. Right. Because before that, it was kind of easy to it was fast enough to where it wasn't brutally bad to have to wait for that information flow across all those channels. But when this massive explosion of remote work and remote offices happened, I think it exposed the inefficiencies of that kind of system, and top level management had to look at that and say, I can't keep track of what's going on with this many layers in this paradigm, so I have to start collapsing this. So do I think it's the cause of that problem? No, I think it was the exposure of that problem and people saying, I need to do something about this. [00:33:56] Speaker B: My interpretation of why it's happening is that because the good times have ended and revenues are dropping. [00:34:04] Speaker A: Well, there's that, too. [00:34:05] Speaker B: They're like, what do we cut all these people? Well, no offense to these individuals, but these individuals that are only doing management and not coding as well. [00:34:18] Speaker A: Yeah, well, the thing, though, like, in our company, it's not that we're getting rid of the people. It's that we're moving the structure around so it's wider instead of taller. So the people are still I mean, we're still employing all those people. They're streamlining the activities so that they can actually go wider into more verticals without stacking one vertical really high. [00:34:52] Speaker B: I know nothing about your company. I was just referencing the article that was talking about Meta, which they laid off a bunch of individuals as well as Twitter, that laid off a whole bunch of individuals. [00:35:04] Speaker A: Right. And I think that some of that has to do with that, where they're starting to figure out that, wait, we're losing money, and it's because we're paying 14 levels of people not to do anything but pass information up the chain. What do we need to do that for? That's a waste of money. But also, I think there is a reason to have. Levels of management. There's a reason to have the ability to offload things to certain people and have certain areas that specialize in things. Especially as a company grows bigger and bigger and bigger. If you're at top level management, you can't talk to 1000 different people at once. You have to be able to filter that information to the stuff you need at your level to make the correct decisions. And so you need a set of management under that that they can filter and go down. But what I was seeing in a lot of these companies is it was getting to the point where you had a manager for every two employees and then every two of those managers had their manager and every two of those and it was just this ridiculous using. [00:36:31] Speaker B: The word I've heard you use. Not infrequently everyone had their own fiefdom. [00:36:36] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. And then you get into problems with gatekeeping and information hoarding and stuff like that. The politics that come with all those levels of horse crap which personally I have zero patience for. But I do understand the need to delegate certain things out and filter information back up because one person can't deal with 5000 employees. It's just not possible. Yeah, but I think that just went too far. And my sense is that this explosion of remote work kind of exacerbated that situation and really brought to light the shortcomings of having too tall of a management structure. [00:37:32] Speaker B: Yeah. This is my opinion. Not that it's right or wrong, of course, is that I think the revenue droppage is the catalyst that kind of caused the layoffs. But I think also the remote work is having them question. It's easy to become well when the times are good. It's easy to become lazy with regard to your policies, your procedures, your management structure. So I think all of that giving more flexibility than maybe is ideal in terms of remote work which causes people not to be tracked as well as they should or their work product or whatever it is. [00:38:16] Speaker A: Right. [00:38:16] Speaker B: I think all of that just kind of built up and then this now has to bring things well, the pendulum to start swinging the other way when the good times stop. [00:38:26] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's absolutely a multivariate issue that happened. I mean, there were lots of contributing factors, I think. But I think the biggest one that kind of shined light on where the actual problem was in the financials was I think for a lot of companies having this explosion of remote stuff, remote work was actually a good thing because it forced them to kind of evaluate, how are we structured and how are we passing information back and forth, and how do we make that more efficient? [00:39:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:04] Speaker A: And what they discovered was stop having so many levels that don't do anything but pass information. They have to actually do something. [00:39:17] Speaker B: Do you mind if I jump to kind of a slightly different subject on this. [00:39:20] Speaker A: No, go ahead. [00:39:21] Speaker B: So one of the things this article also talked about was the difference between having a manager who code that I thought we could talk about, but one is having a manager that codes versus having a manager that doesn't code. All they do is essentially people management. [00:39:42] Speaker A: Right. [00:39:42] Speaker B: What are your thoughts on that balance? [00:39:47] Speaker A: So first, let's bound this in talking about engineering, software engineering. [00:39:55] Speaker B: Sure. [00:39:56] Speaker A: Because Salespeople is a completely different story within the context of software engineering. A, big, it depends on the size of your team. Right. And B, I think it depends on how many teams you have. But in general, I don't want a manager. I don't want somebody managing software engineering that can't do software engineering. That's not a thing that they should be doing now, whether they do software engineering anymore because they're having to spend so much time on project management and people management and stuff like that that they don't have time for. Engineering that I don't necessarily have a problem with, but they better know how to do engineering, because you can't lead people in something that you have no idea how to do. Right. Like, if I had a salesman come in and be the team lead for the engineering team, I'd be like, no thanks, that's not okay. But he's good with people. [00:41:11] Speaker B: Or even worse, I don't care. [00:41:13] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, but they're good with people. I don't care. They don't know what the job is, so they can't manage it. [00:41:25] Speaker B: When I think about it, I think there's two responsibilities. There's one for the I'll call it the HR management, like interacting with people. Hey, how are you enjoying your job? What is your ultimate goal? Would you like to move up? How would you like to move up within the company or change roles or whatnot? Doing evaluations and things of that nature. But then there's also the I guess I'll call it the leader in terms of directoring, where things should go in terms of software engineering. Or we should use these tools. We should do it this way. It still may require communication, of course, with a team. [00:42:07] Speaker A: Right. [00:42:07] Speaker B: So I think those two roles need to be fulfilled. I think they could be done with one person, but I would find within being two people as well, because as long as it's the kind of the right relationship. So you could have someone who's the I mean, this just may be the tech lead and basically all technology related things for that team, he's going to direct it, where to go, whereas maybe you have an I don't call it the HR Management manager, but a general manager just overseeing the human resources side of things. [00:42:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and again, I think that distinction you're right. I think that distinction comes into the there's a certain team size where that becomes a thing. Right. Because if I have a team of like if my company is five people, a software development firm of five people, I'm not going to have an HR lead and a tech lead for that team. Right. Same person does both. Exactly. Also, I'm probably not going to have a project manager and a product manager. Same person does both. And probably the same person that does the tech lead is doing those things. But when we get to a company like the size of the one I work in, just the platform API team that I work on has two product managers, project manager, a tech lead, and a overall vice president, I guess you would call, of that team. That's not his actual title, but that's essentially what it is. But that's because we've got somewhere on the order of 30 people just on the platform team, right. So it makes sense. We also have many, many customers that integrate directly with the API. So we need multiple product managers because not one of them could handle all those customers. It just wouldn't be possible. So there's a certain size where that makes sense. I will say, however, that I think even if you're the kind of the HR person, the HR type person, the people manager on that team, you should have some experience with the stuff that that team does. It wouldn't make any sense for a software engineer to go manage a marketing team. If I went and managed a marketing team, I wouldn't have a clue what the hell to tell them to do because I don't know marketing. I mean, I know a little bit, but that's not my specialization, and so I would not be a good leader for that. I'd make a mess of it just because that's not my area. Conversely, I don't want a salesperson over managing the software engineering team. They may be the best salesperson in the world, but they don't know jack shit about software engineering, and they can't lead a team that does that. Right. I think even if you're going to be a tech lead, you need to be able to have the people lead skills for that too. And somebody needs to be marching up that track to be the software engineering management people. But you don't need a million of them. Even if you've got a large team, you don't need 85 layers of management. It's just inefficient. [00:46:14] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely not. [00:46:19] Speaker A: Anywho all right, so any other topics on there? [00:46:22] Speaker B: I don't think so. [00:46:24] Speaker A: All right. [00:46:24] Speaker B: I think that was pretty much it. [00:46:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that was a good discussion. A lot of stuff that I've had to think about, actually. [00:46:31] Speaker B: But let us know in the comments your perspective on it. What do you think of remote work? Do you like it? Do you not like it? How is your management structure, those types of things? [00:46:45] Speaker A: And if you are a remote worker, do you have a desire to go back to the office even if it's two or three days a week, because I actually wouldn't mind that, but I don't want to do it five days a week. But, yeah, let us know in the comments. As always, we want to hear your thoughts, especially if they're different from ours, because that's how we learn. Anyhow, that was a great talk. Hope you guys enjoyed that. If you did, please make sure like and subscribe leave us some comments. We will respond to them. If you comment, I will go in there and respond day, so make sure you do that. Also, check us out Rubberductdevshow.com. You can sign up for our newsletter and you'll be notified when we have our episodes go live. You can also talk to me on Discord or on X. You can find me at Ducky Dev show over there. Send me messages. Love to talk to you guys, so feel free. We will be back next week with Drew Bragg. We're going to be talking about the things that we use, the items that we use that aren't necessarily yeah, that aren't necessarily Ides, but things that we use in our daily programming lives that we think make our programming lives better, more efficient, easier, nicer. So that should be a good hardware. [00:48:26] Speaker B: Software, what our layouts are like and. [00:48:28] Speaker A: Stuff, all the things. So make sure you check that one out. Thank you for listening and watching and being here with us. We will be back next week, and until then, happy programming. [00:48:41] Speaker B: Happy programming.