 ready? Yeah okay so we're a tiny crowd so we can be more interactive I'm Colin and I'm gonna give you a little bit about what I've actually learned from working in a distributed remote and virtual company companies I have the ability to tell you I've never actually worked in an office before in my life maybe some of you have that same ability okay yeah so I intend to keep it that way I've moved around a bit but I've more or less worked on the same thing for 15 years at my SQL I lived in Melbourne at home I worked on the database server at Sun they acquired us I lived at home in Kuala Lumpur this time I moved from Melbourne and it was a new concept for Sun Malaysia for people to work in at home as opposed to not going to an office it was kind of common at you know Sun in the US but definitely work from home was not a common thing for them Sun obviously does not exist but many open source projects you may have seen or used possibly came from Sun shortly after that I started this new thing called MariaDB server so I was on the founding team right up until autumn last year does anybody use MariaDB server heard of MariaDB server yeah okay so we we also managed to obviously work at home so Monty program was a company of maybe 15 developers one admin staff the would call a mama because she would be the person who paid our bills it's quite important and the rest the rest of us just stayed at home in various places then it merged with another company called SkySQL who also more or less just kept sitting at home and MariaDB cooperation and now I work at Precona where we do all things my SQL and MongoDB so we've been around for 10 years and I work in the CTO office so I still do dabble a little bit on engineering the my SQL server I'd love to work more with MongoDB server but I haven't had much time on that so I know at least one gentleman here uses MongoDB do other people use it too okay and yeah everything we do is we make 100% open source tools and that was actually one of the main reasons why I moved is to make open source tools and sure there are many talks by Red Hat here as well and Fedora project largely run also remotely not only even for Red Hat staff but also for the community so I reckon that open source communities totally understand working from home so if you come from an open source world working from home should be easy for you because you know you this is typically what you end up doing right you find some software you you most likely download it you you probably don't read the documentation but maybe you compile it or nowadays you use packages and you and if it's good software you typically will get you know started in in less than five minutes so you know the my SQL install rule was download get started in in typically less than 15 minutes MongoDB I think is taken this further with with less than five minutes so there they are of course benefits to this in the sense that you can get started developing in a very quick fashion but they're of course disadvantages in the sense that maybe you you make defaults be simple and easy so you have say weak security models and then you get these press releases saying 40,000 MongoDB instances hacked it's not because you know MongoDB is bad it's just because it was configured by default to be fairly insecure and maybe about a month ago you'd see the same thing coming out from my SQL world right a bunch of them got encrypted and then you're supposed to pay some Bitcoin to get them decrypted and you know I think we've got MongoDB users here you've got my SQL users here and you know give it some time and maybe postgres users are here but probably in a couple more months you'll see that even though they have a higher order I would say that you'll probably find postgres databases hacked and similar story anyway sometimes you join a mailing list if you like the project enough you use the project enough if you also join the IRC channel though I should probably scratch IRC and say that nowadays lots of open source projects start to use Slack and I don't know why really because Slack just takes up more memory for instance but seems to be a common thing and then sometimes you find that you need to make a patch so you you make a patch sometimes you just file a bug which is good and sometimes you evangelize products to friends and you know this conference is actually for many years had huge chunks of people from Mozilla because Mozilla would sponsor their visits here and I think Firefox is one really good example of corporate backed evangelism that works out quite well I don't know if they're still here this year big Mozilla track yeah okay so that's so they are still here this year okay all of this more or less forms what is referred to as the architecture of participation where you have a system designed around communication protocols that are more less instinctively designed for participation so generally anyone can participate you become first-class and but participating is a first-class thing to do and I think the web really opened participation to software development outside of just software development it's also to all users of the system so I didn't coin this phrase this is coined by Tim O'Reilly but he himself didn't coin this phrase because he'd learned it from someone else but what this sort of gives you is a network effect of things so open source communities are very rarely formed outside of a specific office or a room and they don't you know that's what maybe an open source product maybe that doesn't mean an open source project will be like that in terms of open source projects people tend not to care about time zones they tend not to care about weekends so you know a very good example is nowadays github has this punch card system you want to see if a if something open source and github is a project or a product look at the punch cards if it's a product it's usually Monday to Friday 9 to 5 or 9 to 6 no you don't agree and if you and if you look at a project you tend to find sporadic hours so it can range from 6 in the morning till 12 1 in the morning and it'll be Monday to Sunday like every day of the week you get commits and that's one of these cool things that I started looking at when I want to evaluate if an open source project is actually a project and not a product because if an open if it's an open source product and it's you know commercially back you want to be very careful that they may change the license on you or they may do other nasty things on you down the line which they all can do by the way especially if you sign a contributor agreement saying hey I'd like to you know give you joint copyright contributor agreements in that sense usually are not not so good open source projects very rarely care about you going to an office sure they have summits so you know if you're a very large open source project Ubuntu was a good example of this they'd have these Ubuntu summits every six months I think it got so large that they decided they had to stop doing that in person but now they do it online and Debian still has debcons where people go at least once a year somewhere nice but you don't really need to go to Debian to contribute to Debian you can do that effectively from your your home and I'm guessing all of you must have seen this wonderful video of this South this professor in South Korea who was talking on the BBC these kids started running in and more or less I would say you know minus all the jokes that's how a lot of open source projects are still communicate right you can still have hangouts you can still work via Skype video yes I know Skype is not open source but I'm sure most of you have used it at least once it's quite useful software do you pick up the phone to call someone in an open source project to say hey I think you need to do this it's almost unheard of you tend to work in an asynchronous fashion and meetings every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead this is Jason freed in the book rework he is the founder of 37 signals who now call themselves base camp they built a company that's profitable they're proud about it and they even contributed obviously to Ruby on rails because David Hannah Maya Hansen works works there he's also the co-founder of the company they've never taken a single cent of venture investment I think they might have sold some portion of the company to Jeff Bezos but they're very happy building stuff also in a fairly asynchronous fashion where people do get to work at home so are all of you working in a company in an office do you go to an office on Monday out of curiosity who goes to an office at Monday okay so the rest of you don't go to an office at all or okay once or twice a week so you're mostly remote that okay excellent so so we have some good tips for that right because if most people are remote that actually is a bonus but if some people end up sticking in the office that's obviously a problem so yeah so many of you do go to the office but if you want to think about it you know company shouldn't be any different from open source projects if open source projects can can give you what runs the internet today like the Linux kernel is not developed in an office neither is you know the GNOME environment that you may use neither are you know many web frameworks for websites to use I don't see why it just can't work in you know companies so it's very clear that you need to have a very clear stated goal of what you aim to achieve so I can pick from what I know which is say MySQL MySQL stated goal was make superior database management available and affordable to all this is a vision a mission a goal and if that goal meant adding features that would effectively make it a little bit more competitive to say Oracle maybe you know make it or making it more a real database that that was something that one would have to do over time Maria DB server we chose community developed feature enhanced and backward compatible those were our themes for a very long time and as for PCOTA server we just sell it as an enhanced drop-in replacement to my SQL where your queries may run faster you will troubleshoot without guesswork so our ideas and goals are very very much stated so we just focus on sort of things like manageability and so forth and that that is probably very important not just for a piece of software but also for a company that plans to work remote because you all have to be working with a stated mission and a vision so distributed workforce I highly recommend you establish a distributed workforce early on because once you've got people sitting in an office it's going to be much harder to get them out of the office distributed workforces I found a great for development teams so if you're in engineering there's absolutely no reason for you to wake up in the morning drive to work to take public transport work from 9 to 5 and come back you might as well save that commute time and do something better or maybe work more even it also works very well for consulting organizations because you know your bread and butter is obviously being with a client if you are sitting in the office you're probably not actually making money which is kind of the goal of your of consulting it also works well for training so on-site trainers it's clear that you shouldn't be sitting in an office otherwise the sales team isn't actually doing a good job selling your training and support if you're doing you know follow the clock support is there any reason for you to be doing this outside of your home you could be sitting at home you could use frameworks you know there are plenty of tools that help you do 24 by 7 support at home like Zendesk and you know if you want more the open source equivalents you can obviously obviously use things like eventum to some extent the JIRA would work JIRA is not open source though so you don't really need to be sitting in an office sales unless you're inside sales is there really reason why you're sitting in the office or at home you should be out there doing whatever you know I don't know if it's playing golf I don't think open source sales people get to play golf much to be fair to them but you should be out visiting people I would admit though that it's definitely a bit more challenging if you're in finance and admin because you have to send out contracts you have to keep contracts there's lots of paperwork involved and maybe the next talk after this by Virgil from legalese would be a bit more helpful because everything would be more more digital so to speak sure you can get people to sign things digitally but you still need to keep you know those those can't even the scan receipts and so forth you still need to keep them somewhere and typically people need some kind of physical address well because the bank wants to know that you actually have an office and so does every other provider so to speak human resources you you have to you have many tools today there are tools like bamboo HR that can handle human resources quite well but sometimes maybe they also need to sit in office like it's it really is dependent I don't think they need to but I found human resources people tend to want to sit in offices management so if management comes from an open source mindset or from a technical background I have a feeling that they're quite happy to work at home but if management comes from traditional organizations they most likely want centralized management of some sort so you know again back from experience with my SQL we had a centralized management in California and the human resources actually run out of a small office in Sweden but and and that was it everyone else worked at home so 90% of the people I'd say worked at home Maria DB started off with distributed management though it is now sort of coalescing in California and Pocona Pocona has followed the centralized management model because we have a huge office in Raleigh North Carolina and that's where you know the payroll people and and so forth sit so there's also social aspects of you actually working in a distributed environment culture you have to come from a culture that actually wants to do independent work I think so working cultures definitely differ in Europe Asia America when you speak to people sometimes you're very direct depending on what culture you come from sometimes you're extremely polite so you don't say no even if you mean no I mean some cultures they have wine with lunch that's considered normal some cultures have drinks after work culture definitely plays a role if you're going to be successful in doing this distributed workforce thing because people not only have to work asynchronously also have to have trust of them actually working asynchronously which brings me to the next thing which is trust you definitely have to be a self-motivated self-starter to sit at home to work otherwise it is all too easy to say look I'm going to DJ tonight I'm gonna come home at four in the morning I'm gonna crash wake up at noon I'm going to be fairly demotivated after my DJing to actually work on some software especially if I had to do quality assurance on a database server and then I'm going to get out again at six o'clock to start warming up for my DJing tonight this this can't happen so so you obviously need metrics to know how people are performing it's quite easy from a software development standpoint because it's not just you can also look at checkings you can see how many bugs are being closed if you're meant to do QA you can see how many tests are being written there are always ways to sort of manage this so to speak cultural backgrounds what it what about when people don't speak the language you expect them to speak so you want to hire in your base in Singapore and you want to hire in the Ukraine and yes they can more or less do reading of English but maybe they don't write English so well you need to provide support for that sort of thing as well which is the being able to communicate home countries also this this does play a role as to where they're based because if you know suddenly they were basically Ukraine maybe they'd like to relocate at some stage and you'll have to think about supporting them definitely self-motivated you need to also want to be in a collaborative work work environment you cannot always say wins are going to be mine I am going to be you know the I team and so forth those kind of people are very very hard to work with in a remote fashion it's also very great thing to work with in a remote fashion and so I speak English natively and I use to use a lot of colloquialisms because you do that if you've learned English as a native language colloquialisms don't translate to other people who have learned English as a second language so you definitely want to avoid that so I spent many years trying to avoid colloquialisms because you can't tell someone you don't want to be the square-pack in a round hole because they think they take it literally what is a square-pack in a round hole and doesn't make any sense any longer so throwing away idioms and problems may not be a bad thing you also definitely don't want to be passive-aggressive this this is a way to kill working remotely what does it mean to be passive-aggressive so instead of me actually telling you hey I think this is bad I'll say well you know I think this could have been done better or if I want to give you throw some shit at you I'll say you've done some great work here but the but is the famous this is where you need to fix yourself and then you might end with but keep up the good work which which clearly now does not mean you kept up the good work from the start or it was that problem where I was being kind of passive-aggressive saying you're doing a good job at being bad yeah so I think when you write as well so when you speak you can be you can clearly know if you're being passive-aggressive but when you write I would say tone and nuance definitely gets lost in writing so if you are writing to people who don't speak English as a first language this is maybe not so good emotion obviously doesn't translate well into text even though they're emojis nowadays and I think the other really important thing that most people who work at home forget is that you need to have a work life balance at my SQL we used to say we would only hire you if you had a pet or a girlfriend or a boyfriend some more significant other that would keep you grounded because that would be motivation for you to go have a life but that would also be motivation to work you needed a balance I mean sometimes you have a tough day wouldn't it be nice to just walk the dog somewhere or go out for you know a little little drinks and so forth sometimes people say they can't focus you know isolation causes causes them the ability to not focus nowadays you have the ability to go to a co-working space or a hacker space so life is actually quite simple and yes you can subsidize going to a co-working space just like you can subsidize going to a gym in fact some insurance providers I don't know if this happening in Singapore but in London some insurance providers actually give you an Apple watch and they subsidize your insurance based on how much activity you report to them from your watch well I expect that will happen everywhere given enough time I mean this is $249 you could save that money you could save an insurance like who doesn't want to save money yeah yeah but it also keeps you like on the hamster wheel but also remember active people work better at home they because you can't just sit down there for 12 hours you'll be a zombie and you'll gain lots of weight so this is a pair of boxer shots with a MySQL logo on it you probably can't find this anywhere except on the internet and I probably have one at home but we we did say we'd like you to work from anywhere so sample that's not me so remote has advantages clearly for one you can hire great talent from anywhere you don't have to worry about visas you don't have to worry about uprooting them from your families you have great talent sitting in the mountains somewhere near India they could work on a project that happens in Singapore even and I mean who wouldn't want to live near a mountain in India compared to well Singapore is a nice place yeah okay so I think that's one of the major things that we learned all along is why not hire from anywhere and everywhere you don't have to be in one location the idea from that you can work from anywhere this lets employees who have aspirations to move also move so we've had people who move from Australia to move to Thailand I mean who doesn't want to move from Australia to Thailand spend a few months there and then find your life and then one and then we've had people move from there after that in the middle to Sweden and they've you know decided to become resident there one move to Canada to and end up you know starting a new life there but you could never do that if you were constrained to work in an office you would never you know pack up and move it's also quite liberating to give people the opportunity to go to a new place for a couple months where they can work in the mornings enjoy themselves in the afternoons and maybe work a little bit again in the evenings I know Bali is a famous spot for people to to drop by and I've got a bunch of friends there now as well so I myself will go visit them in a couple weeks and Chiang Mai so working from anywhere is awesome you set your own work schedule this is actually how to work remotely you say I am available for these core hours and you could always reach me then but out of the core hours I may be available and nowadays it's getting harder to say you can't be available in those days you could say I see doesn't run on your mobile phone but now Slack does so being being available is not going to be a more common thing and there's no more excuses that you don't have data you don't have a smartphone I mean come on that all of you have smartphones with data packages so I would still advise core hours so I'm around say for four hours every time in this time zone when I'm in this time zone and otherwise I may be around but I'll still be working for the full eight hours and of course time zones can follow the Sun so if you're running a support organization you need 24 by 7 support so do you put people on shifts or do you just hire one in America one in Europe and one in Australia then you've got 24 by 7 support it's so much more efficient than putting people on shifts paying overtime it's it's healthier even that's definitely good for support organizations have a business review and Forbes also said that if people who work remotely are 50% less likely to quit 87% more engaged than the appears and nearly two times more likely to say they love their jobs who loves their job okay I was expecting way more hands okay I reckon that working at home will definitely give you the ability to lead a higher quality of life because you can go to the bank when you want to you don't go to the bank because banks open from nine to five when you're at work you can do groceries when everyone else isn't doing groceries so you actually reclaim time right you do you don't do groceries on Saturday when everybody's at the grocery store and you're not stuck in a commute grind which in Singapore may not be so bad but you know I'm staying out at a hotel which takes 45 minutes in public transit or 15 minutes in a in a Uber so you really do reclaim time if you're going to live here you probably use public transit more than Uber I'm guessing the other one thing that I didn't put here on the slides was that hiring remote also increases diversity and diversity may not be a huge thing here but it's it probably is extremely huge things say in the US where you really want to hire diverse people you want you want not only diverse people but you also want them from from different sectors and so forth so diversity allows you to do what you want so you don't have to worry about you know showing up to work and people being odd and so forth I've also recently seen maybe in the last couple of weeks a lot of highlights on this thing called the remote year and while I think remote has its advantages the remote year project which you know takes you to a new country once every month I don't think that's quite what I was aiming for when I when I proposed this talk because that that is more like a booze filled cruise that takes you to 12 different places that allows you to just party under the guise of working remotely here so so if you're thinking that I was referring to remote year I'm definitely not so communications that's weird everyone here uses something like github possibly so github definitely allows you to make communications much easier than you'd expect you can do you can even file requests on github and so forth slack slack and be a water cooler but you cannot have two water coolers so so if you go to work two days a week and you spend the other three days at home but there is really a water cooler at the office then slack is not the water cooler and that's a problem you need to you can only have one water cooler not multiple water coolers if you want to do stand-ups which is basically figuring out what you've done yesterday you know last week or last month you can do stand-ups effectively on on slack this idea of chat ops which allows you to do deployments see what's been committed and so forth this has been running very well on slack for multiple organizations you can even discuss support tickets so if you are familiar with something like eventum or zen desk and you choose to before writing to the customer to see you know what maybe it you can also discuss it with your colleagues so something like slack or I see is great for this sort of thing email email as much as people hate it is actually still an awesome tool how many of you here don't use email so I thought everyone uses email right because it works but email works in an asynchronous fashion and that's also really good from a remote standpoint JIRA we've seen a lot of people start using JIRA it's even though it's you know as I said not open source but it's free for open source projects it's a nice piece of kit and handle project management quite well and you can do lots of communications and you can tie it in with git commits as well some reason I seem to be going back it's very good then there's confluence which you can get as part of the whole package from Atlassian and Google sites Google sites not so great in terms of collaborative even though it comes from a search company Google Drive I definitely see lots of people use Google Drive now very actively so I think this is sort of sort of this one because it you can do collaborative docs spreadsheets and so forth and tools definitely evolve over time and then there's also Skype and Google Hangouts in fact now when you make a meeting with Google Calendar you probably automatically gives you a Google Hangout link so you can actually immediately communicate fairly quickly so all I can say is tools tend to evolve if I give this talk in three years time none of some of these tools may have changed tremendously but I'd probably be willing to bet that email will still be there Slack may actually be replaced by IRC and you know maybe though the new hotness will not be something like JIRA any longer or Google Drive I don't know face-to-face is still important even especially if you're a remote worker you want to see who you've hired when I got hired at my SQL I only met my manager six months after we had we had started working together and then and this was before the times where you could do Skype video there was no Google Hangouts so we really just did phone calls or Skype calls and text communications don't skimp on company and team meetings team meetings should probably happen at least twice a year if you're going on a cadence of actually releasing software every six months company meetings could happen once a year and it's really good for teams to interact with each other yes this does get expensive as your company grows larger but even spending sometimes up to a million dollars could be extremely useful form for morale and there's some very good companies that talk about how they've achieved this buffer was one of the first to start doing this I think they even started part of their experience here in Singapore but automatic is a very large company and they are more or less all remote they're the makers of WordPress and they definitely still do company meetings in person this is the one time you don't skip or in-person meetings I would say is definitely do meetings of course that also requires some planning because travel is not as easy as people think you can have visa restrictions so I'm happy that I come from a place where I can go pretty much anywhere but that's not true for many of my colleagues so sometimes people view travel as a burner and companies like buffer where they're smaller can actually say look you can actually travel for longer than just one week that you're there you spend several weeks at a venue I highly recommend monthly all-hands calls this is the time where you share information about how your company is progressing at my SQL we call it radio saquilla the saquilla was the name of the dolphin we continue this concept even at Percoda where there are monthly all all-hands calls that people can join the call to see what the company's been doing for the last month and what's possibly going to be doing next month this is probably extremely important if you are completely remote taking time to attend a call is useful and of course make recordings weekly CEO calls if you if you're more than 70 to 100 people it is very likely that the CEO may even have an assistant of some sort and it is very clear that the CEO has to manage a lot of people so having a call every week to just talk to people let them do Q&A is not a bad idea Google Hangouts are great for team meetings and I think nowadays team meetings is great because you get to see someone's face or seeing six people's face it's kind of nice to know that they're all there they're present and they're listening to the meeting so Hangouts is actually good for this I'm not sure if Skype actually does multiple videos they do now okay you have to pay for it okay so in that case Google Hangouts clearly wins because you can have tons of people sitting in one room brilliant which is all you need really for a team meeting I mean you don't really have teams of 30 people possibly harmonize your benefits policy this includes vacations you can't say Europeans get 35 days because law states so and Americans get 14 days because law states so and Singaporeans get 10 days because the law states so that's just not fair give everybody the same vacation days because that will make the Singaporean who normally gets 10 love working for you because you're not getting 25 and then America normally gets 14 love working for you because you now gets double the vacation time it doesn't cost you anything really that morale benefit very useful always pay for internet and mobile bills that's a clear thing co-working space bills to defray the cost of co-working space this definitely helps prevent isolation so I say pay for that definitely you need a hardware budget you can't say things like I'm gonna provide hardware out of one one venue and you know I'd like to charge the corporate credit card they have an Apple store nearby if they want to buy a Mac let them buy a Mac you know something sensible like what is a sensible hardware budget when you join the company 2,000 euros that seems I don't know kind of reasonable presumably you want to always remind everyone about asynchronous communication now this really is very important especially if you have some sets of people working in an office because if they are working in an office they think that if they in the office you should be in the office if this spreads over time zones that that feeling is the same so everyone needs to be reminded that communications happens asynchronously unless you know they booked you for meeting and so forth synchronous communication does not work if you're going to work remotely just it's just not impossible you want to document really really heavily if it is not written it really doesn't exist you don't want to go into documentation paralysis but you definitely want to document heavily because it's so easy to say well this person said this over the phone oh I found this on one slack on one IRC log well it's becoming easier with slack now that you can search slack but you have to pay slack for that feature otherwise it loses messages after 10,000 or something so document heavily company culture has to be made extremely clear inside of documentation as well this includes the values which we talked about earlier your company history because people are going to join and not remember what happened at that meeting six years ago and it's much better that they realize what what came out of that meeting six years ago that to hear it from people at the bar going oh yeah I remember this thing happening not cool and of course there is constant evolution with culture it doesn't it is not stagnant culture evolves it's it's gonna get better processes must be extremely clear there must be decision-makers you must have a process around conflict resolution at MariaDB where you have people working at a corporation committing code and also are in the community about half of the committers are community members you need to be able to know how to to actually say look this is a bad commit how do you do that if you are a core committer or a captain so to speak you now have the ability to say even if someone gets paid to work on this they're writing junk that's okay that's perfectly good lots of open-source projects obviously have this free BSDS the idea of a core committer in the Linux kernel environment if you commit code you have a voice if you just give hyperbole they give you a real pain in the it's it's it's not a pleasant experience I mean Linus will lart at you and he will scold you and so on if he even bothers to reply so some some form of public resolution definitely makes sense and also one other thing another code from David Hatterby Hansen is make sure there isn't an advantage of being in the office and no disadvantage of being remote and this is especially true when you have an office where sometimes you're remote and not everyone shows up at the same time and so forth this is extremely extremely important which is why the tools matter working asynchronously banners as well now there's one thing I didn't really talk about here up here in decision makers because holocracy has been something that has been pushed forward I think a zappos really started implementing it and I think holocracy is useful if you if everyone grasps the concept of it and again there you need to document avenue because if you know someone has a role and that person who normally may handle that role is not there someone else should take over said role they are thankfully a bunch of resources out there as well for this right one of them is an essay by Paul Graham which is being people fail it's a short essay will take you 15 minutes to read but it more or less tells you it's nice to not be a mean person even though that's what they tell you you need for success maybe I'm sure many of you have seen red articles or see movies that portray Steve Jobs as being a complete a hole and if he is a hole he succeeded how but maybe he was not really as mean as people think he was there contrary beliefs as to as to that as well or maybe he did not succeed yes all that yes or maybe just yes and and that may be like one in a million scenario right so you can't always be expect to be the outlier in this in the situation so I highly recommend people to read that rework is both Jason free to David had my answers book on how they are thinking about work differently and then they if they followed up with a book called remote which was which is a book about how they don't have it they don't require an office they have an office in Chicago you can drop in but they more or less tell you you don't need to be there and they hire extensively around America and the world to work at at what is now called base camp not 37 signals and of course as the other one book that I highly recommend that would fall under the mean people fail category and it's it's titled the no asshole rule it's down it's I believe second edition it's obviously a little longer read maybe it's two or three hundred pages long but if you're gonna work remotely because you don't see the person's face all the time and if you if the person frustrates you you just maybe feel like it's much easier for you to type bad nasty things it be more aggressive that's one of the advantages of reminding yourself that in the no asshole rule is that by not seeing people it doesn't mean you have to be a mean person and it has it's obviously filled with huge chunks of tips on how to you know interact with people in person as well as as remotely and it's not it's not the happy-go-lucky kind of book where you get from you know like Dale Carnegie which is the wind friends influence people scenario this one's actually it's actually useful and it's something we recommended people to read even at MySQL the moment it came out so we would allow people to to buy the book and expense it which is another great thing to do I guess it's a tradition we still continue till today at at Prokona and I've seen this happen even at St. Nigelis which is what Virgil will talk about later is it's actually a wonderful thing to let people read the same things you've read and allow them to expense it even if it's not available in a in a central resource somewhere it's it's clear that reading will broaden minds so with that I like to say thank you I've finished a little earlier than the actual cutoff time but since we are small we could also open this up to a little bit of discussion since as I said before at the start I have never worked in an office before everything I've worked on has been completely remote so I could give you anecdotal evidence of how it is to work remotely even with people that work in office. Do we use OKRs? Yes so we definitely do use OKRs so those are like key results and objectives that you expected to achieve we set OKRs to a basically a three month cycle because three month is a quarter and actually the OKR method we use is the is the Rockefeller-Rox method and there's also a book about this I think you can buy it on Amazon for but maybe like seven or eight bucks and more or less you pick three to five important things that you are going to achieve in in those three months and from there based on how you've achieved it at the end of the three months that will that will be a bonus payout right so a quarterly bonus is another great motivator and you know in a way many people probably do it because you get employed for on a 12 month salary scale unless you're in Australia and this quarterly bonus is will actually help give you that 13 month salary which is what we're supposed to be getting anyway plus more so yes we definitely do do OKRs how are we managing OKRs you know previously we tried this this Google Drive thing you have a dock now lately we've also started using Asana Asana seems to be quite a useful tool you can update that status you can give tags to things so it's it's quite simple but I would say any any tool makes sense but OKRs definitely make sense as do weekly reports so I didn't mention that either but a weekly report of what you did your top achievements your key your key achievements your what you're going to achieve next week what you're waiting for I think that's especially important because if you know a blocker it's probably worth stating send blocker and your key good vibrations you know like stuff that may not be related to work but may may require celebrating something like celebrated partner's birthday yesterday got sloshed awesome time so that other people could maybe wish you if they read it and send that to a central mailing list right so that everyone gets to see what people are doing if they care so OKRs definitely make sense any other questions how do you feel about like companies like Buffer and GitLab don't have harmonized salaries you're right so yeah I've seen Buffer and GitLab not harmonized benefits and I've also seen companies like you know Percona and MySQL and even MariaDB where we did and I'd say that in terms of employee retention we seem to retain employees for forever I mean it's it's it's hard to get them to leave actually I don't see turnover being high I'm not I'm not saying that's that's a good thing or a bad thing but if you've already hired for fit if hired good performers not having to replace them every second year is probably a good thing so yeah so yeah yeah so Buffer doesn't harmonize salaries yeah they've been quite open about that fact that they also look at locale and yeah I mean I don't think that's that's superbly positive especially in the buffer sense where everything is open at least for us everything is not open not not that open as in we don't broadcast the salaries of everyone that that is challenging but I think in the buffer sense that that could definitely be a problem for you know employee retention but it may also be may also because then you're actually basically saying look you are getting a salary based on on your birth lottery which is not fair and and we'll buffer and I don't know buffers address this before we'll buffer say if I was employed in Cambodia at buffer to be a happiness engineer I think that's what they call their support people right and I decided that my life goals now did not want me to live in Cambodia any longer like I was I was tired of the uncle what I'd like to now live in Singapore will they now increase my benefits or will they tell me I have to live in Singapore on my Cambodian salary at which point that would I think it might actually even be impossible to do so I don't know if they actually help you grow as an employee or not I'm not read them mentioned that but we have had people who want to live leave Australia to go to Thailand and it's great for them right if you if you've earned a salary that started in off in Australia and you live in Thailand you live like a king and then and then they moved to Sweden where where then you need to start thinking about increasing salaries again right and the company needs to support your aspirations as well because you are not you're not just a machine a resource to support the company's aspirations and of course I will have to admit that if you you know get hired in the Ukraine or you know Russia you may get paid a little less than than someone else but the benefits in terms of your vacation days are good are the same your benefits in terms of reimbursing for health care would be the same and your salary would most definitely be probably in the top 15% of the job you're doing in say Russia compared to anywhere else and it really does work from a retention standpoint from what I've seen anyway like literally I mean they say people who are who are young millennials like probably all of us in this room kind of gen X whatever they move jobs every two years or less I can say with with a stamp of certainty that nowhere that I've worked the people move jobs every two years they they've stuck around you know for five years and it's not because of the options you're waiting for the options to mature and then you actually stick around because you're happy you're happy with what you do you're happy that the company supports you and you're happy that you know that you're not getting shafted and if you are getting a more or less harmonized salary you're happy to know that this is the best you're gonna do in said country that you don't have to you know move or do anything weird so it's kind of like a drug actually you've got you know you've got not the best best variant of said drug possibly I mean salaries are like a drug right anyway like people use them like a drug you get them you spend them yes I've got 15 employees around the world and exactly what you're talking about I actually pay on the lower side but I have high retention as in most of my folks are working their way to the three to five years it's like you know right away that somebody's not gonna work oh yeah the first 90 days are crucial you'll definitely know if they're not going to work out then yeah so yeah definitely yeah first so in addition to okay ours the first 90 days like your probationary period I think that's pretty standard anywhere even if you're remote no it's not standard anymore yeah yeah yeah yeah so I think I think that that goes without saying if you're going to pay someone you pay them for three months and you watch them like a hawk for those three months but you don't want to watch them like a hawk when they need your hand for everything because remote worker can't need your hand for everything especially across time zones absolutely so within those 90 days you definitely want to make sure that you've already spoken to one you've got your manager set to have a one on one weekly that's that's clearly important we usually assign a buddy of some sort that buddy will probably not be from your department but maybe a very helpful person from another department usually they're always helpful people who love to onboard people and that's the sort of person that you know so that's the person you look up to and say hey you know I need to do this expense report like do you know how to do that and they can they can point you to that sort of thing so that's the first 90 days in the first 90 days those okay ours you still set okay ours you still wait for those weekly reports and then you you produce and typically I would say that you know by 60 days you already know if the person is going to stick around or not and it obviously helps if they've worked at home before then you know that they're going to continue doing a good job if they haven't worked at home before then you really do monitor for the first 90 days but if they survive even the first month and it's your first gig working at home and I'm more or less certain that everything will be okay their first two weeks are going to be slow because they'll probably have to buy a new laptop or and whatever but I don't expect them to tell you something like oh I need to get a new internet connection I mean I find that hard to believe so yeah onboarding you give them a good onboarding packet you don't see them even in the first 90 days possibly I mean it's not that lucky that you all you have a company meeting or a team meeting that syncs with someone's being hired but it also helps to hire everyone on the same day so that they go through a batch so that so if if five people joined on March 8th for example that that that batch will go they'll do things together they'll learn things together so they can help each other out as well that that is useful if you're going to hire in numbers don't hire them as and when do you feel like it I think having maybe like it like in Pekota size where we have maybe 180 people we do we do it twice a month so that not only you have a buddy but you also have each other as buddies and you can learn new things from your colleagues question yeah so culturally you conflicts may be different you're absolutely right so like if you know a German person who is very much into writing documentation and making sure things happen in a process versus a same Malaysian person or a Singaporean person where we're a bit more chilled out you know where we know think we know how to do things we know how to get things done but we're not going to say it has to be methodology and that's that's a give and take from both sides right so you know you don't want one person complaining to your manager hey you know this guy is completely lazy and you saying that that person's got something you know stuck up somewhere you don't want that either so clear communications have a conflict management policy obviously in place but also getting getting both people to sort of harmonize with each other like why does this guy need everything done in a method method all the fashion and why does this person need to be so free and easy all the time that can there be a middle ground where you learn how to work with different people and I think that also comes with maturity right so you don't you don't hire a 20-year-old who would be mature enough possibly at that time no offense to 20-year-olds but who'd be mature enough to say look that that 40-year-old who is telling me like I need to follow doing XYZ will actually it's actually not a bad thing maybe but at 20 you think the world is infallible right like I can do what I want to do and sometimes it takes some time for you to realize you can do what you want to do but it also doesn't hurt to sometimes have some kind of framework and cultural differences always exist I mean we've had we've been on call I've been on calls where people say things like that person's absolutely lazy that's not that's not productive but we need to know why you think the person's lazy and the person may not be lazy and you know it's just getting people back to equilibrium so to speak so conflict management is a lot about good leadership and good policy thank you all right thank you