On random days like today, I find myself thinking about the many dysfunctional or unethical companies in the world, and how different—better—things could be. The thought crosses my mind often. In a way, it’s inevitable. Eight hours a day working, for years, could do that to any person. I want to try something different. This cannot be all there is.

So far, most of my jobs have been in startups. Only one company wasn’t an early startup, it had a decent size. To this day—with all its issues—it’s still the best place I’ve worked in, and it was fundamental for my career early on. Looking back to the startups, I can’t avoid but think that I could do it better. It’s the arrogance speaking, as I know for a fact that running a company is not an easy task, and making it succeed is even less so. Still, I would love to give it a try. Not to make money, mind you—although there’s some of that—but to be able to create the environment we deserve and can be proud of, that helps people—customers, workers, communities—and the planet. We might be able to put our grain of sand and show the world that there are better ways to work and organise.

Coupled with the “idealism”, the thrill of adventure, creating something from scratch, helping it evolve and bringing people together towards a bigger purpose is captivating. The risks and sacrifice are high. Many founders speak of years devoted to their child—the company—, of long hours, stress, and the responsibility you have after hiring people. I’ve seen it, a founder who didn’t take care of himself, mentally and physically, bearing the constant stress and preoccupations of making the company survive.

I sense there must be a way to balance the stress and taking care of yourself, after all: “mens sana in corpore sano”. Have you tried to decide or do an important activity after sleeping only four hours or feeling awfully sick? Exactly.

It’s that time of the year when fans are sold out and the national sport of complaining about the weather gets to peak levels, we’re ready for the gold medal. The London sauna brings fresh news, in September I’ll start a new job.

Given the news and that we’re on a summer break, I’m planning to take a few breaks from the newsletter here and there until September. The idea is to almost stop until the end of September (Friday 27th), since I’ll be going to Spain for a few weeks and start the job in the middle of the month. I’ll take a break next week, write for the 16th of August, and then go with the flow, meaning that you might get a random newsletter before September.

As a software developer, never underestimate how having a good setup that works most of the time matters. I had to go back to my old but trusty Windows PC with WSL, after working with an M1 Mac for the last year, and I felt a lot of friction. Things weren’t working the way I wanted them.

For example, when I cloned the dungeon crawler game I’m using to learn Rust, it wasn’t working with WSL for some reason. I didn’t want to “pollute” Windows with coding stuff, as Linux is my go-to system. Furthermore, the configuration wasn’t up to my liking, and had to spend some time getting it to an OK point. In the end, I caved in and installed Fedora, having to spend some time once more configuring everything (terminal, languages, etc.), and the game still doesn’t work, crashing the system, and I suspect is because of Nvidia and Wayland incompatibilities or that it’s time to buy a new PC or maybe a Mac.

I have been considering my priorities about remote or in office work. On one hand, it’s good to see that, at least, hybrid is the default, with various ratios, from one to four days in the office. On the other hand, there’s a lot of individual and parallel work—the typical one person, one ticket feature factory—which can be, depending on how the company goes about it, isolated and unsupportive.

There are several degrees of isolation and “unsupportiveness”. The one I’m trying to avoid is the one when nobody talks to anybody on a day-to-day basis, there’s no communication or collaboration beyond the typical ceremonies and there’s no support even in the onboarding phase (pick increasingly difficult tickets and figure it out as you go, everyone’s doing their own thing).

On the other side of the spectrum, where collaboration and support are deeply appreciated, you might find a team that does pair programming or software teaming (aka ensemble or mob) as the default, where team members talk to each other, virtually or face to face, and there’s a feeling of camaraderie and bonding. They collaborate and there’s an effort to build shared understanding and create a mindset of continuous improvement. In essence, the team is a team, not a group of strangers, each doing their thing.

I appreciate the collaborative and supportive environment way more than the “this is the jungle” one. If I can choose, give me the first option every time. Not only is it a healthier, saner and more fun environment, but it can be more beneficial for the business.

Now, what happens if you join a company with a hybrid or remote arrangement, with a feature factory, in the isolated, unsupportive area of the spectrum? Working remotely intensifies the isolation and lack of collaboration. It’s also more difficult to get any improvement going, build a connection, bond, and rally people around goals. For me, that kind of environment is soul crashing.

Remote or in office work, way of life or way of work, that is the question.

My best—and most likely impossible—scenario would be a team with high collaboration (pairing or software teaming), support and remote by default. In fact, that’s what the team I was working with in the middle of the pandemic was, we went from working five days in the office to working remotely with some small adjustments, and it worked great, we had the best of both worlds and when we could go to the office. It was a choice, not a mandate. Another example was in a previous role, where no developer was in the same country, but we were always collaborating in some shape or form, and had great relationships.

It’s already extremely rare to find a company that does pair programming and cares about quality, it’s even more difficult to see one that works remotely. In their defence, making remote ways of working work it’s tougher than just bringing people to an office, it requires extra consideration.

In truth, going to the office is not the holy grail to avoid isolation and lack of support. It can still happen, now spiced with a cacophony of voices, keyboards, kitchen sounds, an all-year buffet of illnesses and an extra effort to focus. At least we have the creativity and synergy inducing water cooler moment!

Another angle to this is that, if I have to work in a feature factory, where I need to wear the code monkey hat, I rather do it in the comfort of my home, instead of commuting to the office to look eight hours at a screen and plug myself to an endless supply of intravenous pseudo coffee.

Priority wise, it’s a mess. Remote work is great for the quality of life, but depending on the company, it can be extremely isolated. Working in the office can be great if there’s collaboration, pairing, etc. but you have to accept the commute, the noise, etc. The noise in particular is something that troubles me, as wearing hearing aids makes the open-plan office problematic, having to spend more effort to understand people, and it gets me mentally drained at the end of the day.

All things considered, at this point, I am open to going to the office regularly for a great situation that ideally aligns with the way I’d like to work. I’d like that great situation to be remote or hybrid, but that’s like winning the lottery. Otherwise, I’m leaning to remote or hybrid as the default, accepting that it can be isolated in some situations, although I try to avoid companies where all the signs point to no collaboration at all and an every man for himself environment.

Interesting links

• Can we do it? Should we do it? (Gabrielle Benefield). Gabrielle writes about an important topic, to consider the ethical and sustainable aspects of our outcomes, not only if they are feasible, desirable or viable.

• Why Kubernetes, Kafka, or Istio can derail your platform engineering efforts (Steve Smith). “This pitfall happens when your platform team prioritizes the tools they want over the capabilities your teams need. Teams will lack capacity for planned product work, because they have to regularly maintain Kubernetes”

• When Do We Realize the Last Responsible Moment Whooshed By? (Johanna Rothman). “When we decide too soon, often as a form of risk management, we often incur the costs of late learning. […] if we decide too late, we run the risk of emergency work.”

I’ve been doing a few interviews here and there. To spice things up, I’ve been asking something along the lines of: “how fun is it to work here?” Granted, the basic need for working is earning money to survive, having fun is normally not in the conversation, but the answer, or lack thereof, could tell you a few things.

The fun in the question is not only about laughing and having a good time all the time. When I try to look back at the companies I’ve worked for, there are some distinct times that were enjoyable. Enjoyable in the sense that there were challenges that pushed me to expand my knowledge, people to learn from, a close-knit team, a sense of safety and belonging, things were improving… Even in frustrating and difficult times, people supported each other, and, in some occasions, there was a way forward, agency to solve our issues, and we were heard.

I can’t say I’ve had the feeling of having fun in a long while, not consistently for a significant stretch. Maybe it’s an “it’s not you, it’s me” thing. John Culter in a LinkedIn comment wrote the following:

Imagine the fun of working in a place that gets it instead of needing to try to persuade people every day.

Hey there!

After almost a year in my current role, I’m now looking for new opportunities. Based on the market right now, while there’s the chance of finding something this month, I’m inclined to take August off and start the real search in September, after all, having time to disconnect before a new job is the healthier approach. Luckily, there’s no immediate urgency, I can take some time finding a situation that aligns with my values and ways of working.

The good thing about having more spare time is that I can focus more on what I really want to do during the day. On top of applying for new roles, I’ll keep focusing on my learning goals, writing more consistently, exercise. It would be great to go back to playing guitar, as it’s been abandoned for quite some time.