 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. We're welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE. Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for a special conversation with Michael Letchin, who's the Director of Technical Advocacy at Cohesity, and John Troyer, Chief Reckoner at Tech Reckoning. Also does a CUBE host co-host with us in some events, certainly VMworld. Guys, welcome to this conversation. The title is Work-Life Balance. Is it really that simple? A topic that Cohesity, you guys are donating your session and VMworld on to kind of give back and share data around, really an important issue around work, which is burnout, mental stability. Been always been a stigma, but that stigma, now people are recognizing that, hey, you know what? If you need to take some time off, why not? Exactly, people are just getting, just completely overworked at this point in IT, so we really talked about it and we thought it was a good thing to do something different than standard for tech companies nowadays, sometimes. John, you and I have talked off-camera with the CUBE sets around the old IT adage, do more with less, almost like banging people hard to do and squeeze more profits out of it, you guys VMworld, certainly. When you were there, you had virtualization change the game on the server landscape, but the old IT, they work hard. There's a lot of technical people working hard and they're asked to do so many different things and now as careers start to change, more pressure. Right, right, we're in a 24-7 world, the cloud is there. IT only really gets noticed sometimes when things go wrong and that's kind of a resume generating event, so people in our society, I think, there's a lot of pressure. So talk about the session, I know it's a teaser when I want to reveal too many cards here on the video, but what's going to be talked about in the session? What's the topic, what's some of the data? Well, we did a survey, we didn't even really promote it very much for IT professionals, we got 360 responses from IT professionals all over the world, North America, Europe and beyond from people doing cabling in data centers all the way to CEOs of companies talking about IT burnout and about what they're feeling, what they're experiencing, what symptoms they're having and burnout is really not just being tired, right? We think, oh, I didn't get enough sleep, I'm burning up burnout. It is really a psychological disconnection from your work, from your purpose, from your coworkers. It's a feeling, I don't want to do this, it's really an FU moment, excuse me. You can do it digitally, you can say that. You have no FTC to worry about. No, but this is important, I mean, people do want to do the good job and we hear all the stuff and market, oh, admission-driven companies, but in the day, if the work environment is not going to be conducive to people feeling good about themselves or being kind of together, that's just huge. Exactly, and I think there's something to be said about getting that time, not just enjoying what you're doing every day, but to keep doing that. Sometimes you have to get away from that. And I think that's a lot of what we found when we did the survey was people weren't always seeing that they could get away from it. They really felt pretty pressured to stay in and sometimes it wasn't just from their management either. We saw a lot of people who came back with comments even that some of the issues they had were the community actually kind of pushed them into, they needed to do more. They needed to be out in the community. So they were doing their day job and now I've still got to do more. I've still got to go out and do more blogging and I've got to do more training. I've had to do more certifications. Is it really helping your careers? Is it helping your life? Is it helping your family? Work-life balance has been always been a topic. And you mentioned the community. You've also had open source to that too. There's a more pressure there. That's like its own company. So you have the work-life balance. What are some of the pressure points that you guys see? Because I know living in Silicon Valley for me personally over the past 20 years, I know people personally as well as stories from friends. This huge burnout as entrepreneurs and CEOs, startup founders, they burn out a lot. There's failure involved. And you've seen depression and mental illness become a big topic and people are talking about it. And it's out on the open now. It's not hidden. It's not one of those things. What's the IT equivalent? What's going on in the world there that you guys have uncovered in the survey? Well, certainly it's pretty similar. A lot of it is hours worked, right? You're on call a lot. You're traveling a lot. The pressures get worse as you get higher in the organization. We, in the survey, we just saw, there's a lot of science to say, you shouldn't be working more than 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week. Once you get over that, your actual overall work productivity plummets. And we saw a lot both in Europe and the U.S. People work not only more than 40 hours a week, but outside of business hours as well. And they're even connected on vacation. And interestingly, a lot of them weren't because they had to. Like it wasn't they were on a call or a shift job. So you kind of expect like you're gonna work weird hours. If you're an early on help desk person, your own call, you have that twice a week, two weekends a month or whatever, you kind of expect that. It's kind of been norm. But a lot of these people are management, director level, VP level, that are still working all these extra hours and are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And feel like that's what they have to do. And often they don't feel like they're in control. So even the executives. So it's a normal, right? If you're, again, if you're a individual contributor, a lot of stuff is out of your control if you're in the middle manager. But even the folks who were seniors said, I don't feel like I can control my work. And that seems to be a big part of psychological fulfillment that you need to have the strength to keep, you know, to keep working hard every day. And the digital tools make us more connected. It's only compounds that I think because, you know, you could be on the sideline at your kid's soccer event or sport. You're still checking your email. Still the distractions of the screen are there. Well, I think that was something. One of the things that came out of it was the number of people that do not disconnect and are on 24 seven with their personal and their work, especially in North America, was incredibly high on it. You get into Europe. It was a pretty significant difference. Pretty much across the board, I think it was like 85% stay connected on their personal email, everything. 24 seven, like people are giving up their Instagram on their Facebook on their own vacation. But they definitely, for a work side, I mean, we saw 70, 80% of people that were still somewhat connected for, even when, especially in North America, whether it was just their email or they checked their email once a day. And that's if they even took the vacations because that was something that I thought was pretty shocking on how little people took vacation. I mean, I just saw another study that just came out the other day that there was someone like $270 billion worth of vacation hours wasted last year in the US. Yeah. We're not used up. Not used. I think it was 270 billion, I think was the number I saw, which is an absurd number of days off that people aren't using. It's a fascinating topic. And I think it's one of these cutting edge societal challenges of the tech industry that needs to kind of put on the table because you think about all the stuff we talk about in these conferences like DevOps, you automate away the heavy lifting, the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In life, you see that same kind of potential. I mean, if you can be more creative, you're seeing projects being more project-based, less hourly work. So is the work in changing, does IT shift? What do you guys see there? What's the surveys or any anecdotal data or data around how the types of jobs are changing? Is there more flex time? Is there more project-based? Is it more team-oriented? Is there any shifts in kind of what you're seeing there? Well, in the survey we asked about, are people talking about it at work? And are there programs? Are people acknowledging that this is happening? And for the most part, people aren't really talking about it. I think there is more automation as we grow our data centers up in our cloud, but I don't see people, it just means people are doing more, which is where we started. They're doing more with less. And I do know that one of the things that we often see from previous, my previous job as well as for here with Carisi, it's the simplicity of what we can do, does tend to make those projects and those jobs easier. So it frees up some of that time that we weren't getting otherwise. I think kind of going back, you mentioned the comment about the startup founders and how quickly they burn out in Silicon Valley. I think it's not just the CEO, the people look at and they say a startup founder and they think it's the CEO and the three people. But in all reality, if you're a startup that's 50 people and below, you're probably doing just as much time and you have that commit, like it feels personal to you. I mean, it did to me. And I know for sure when, I mean, I started at an extent as you're worried when it was pretty small when we were there. And as we grew, but it also meant I felt some ownership in it, which meant I did more and I did more. And I definitely got to a point where I was burnt out. I was very much burnt out and it became very obvious. I mean, I ended up on a, I hate to say it's a bender, but I was definitely on a bender for a nice long week for a vacation. Startups are kind of a dick thing, but also so is the dopamine effect with digital and also the work. Is there anything that you guys gleaned out of the surveys that were potential solutions to the problem on burnout? Were there any kind of unsolicited like, this needs to change? Was there any kind of obvious mandate that came out of the survey? So I think there was some definance on management needs to be more prescriptive. That chaos is a big issue. If people don't know what they're there for and what they're doing, it's a big issue on it. There was a lot of things about mindfulness. Surprise, we've got quite a few comments on you just have to find that time to step away. There is going to be a little, we do have a little giveaway that I'm not going to give away at the session yet. But so if they're at the session, we have a little giveaway to help people with the mindfulness. What time is the session? Where do they find the location? So it's on Wednesday of VMworld at 12.30. The location, I actually don't know the room yet because I don't think VMworld has told us the room yet. Well, VMworld is moving back to Moscone from Vegas after the reconstruction is done up in San Francisco, so that's new. So check the location for the session on Wednesday, 12.30. Any other burnout characteristics that we missed that you can share that's important? Well, I think the prescriptive thing, the management being more prescriptive is important, taking actually, taking vacation, unlimited vacation in some ways can backfire against you because people don't take it. They don't have their two weeks. You know, the other thing is, I think just management has to build in enough profit to let people take some time off and take some, you know, end of this. It's a HR planning challenge too. Did work at home come out at all on the survey? People working at home, did that come into play? So I think it came more into play around the travel side of things than it did the work from home. We did see some interesting things on the travel. It seemed like if you did not travel at all, those people tend to get burnt out at a higher rate. The people that travel all the time really were pretty low on the ones that felt like they were getting burnt out. They were numb. They didn't know they were burnt out. I mean, it could be because they don't have the life part of the work-life balance because they're always on a plane. I know that feeling, but I try to find the time. Yeah, people who work hard always have a spell. Hey, get off the computer. There's paying attention to the things that are right in front of you like family, for instance, comes up a lot that I see. Connecting to your purpose, whether that's your family purpose or your work purpose was a big part of it. Being able to kind of split your attention that way. Get your attention back. Well, thanks for doing the survey and that's a great service to the industry that you guys are cohesively doing to use the session up rather than plugging the company's products and gear to give back. Really, I think it's super important for companies to have that social responsibility on it. And I think it's, it was a pleasure for me and for our team to be able to talk to management and be able to say, this makes sense. And then agree, which I don't think there's a lot of companies out there with us. So I'm super excited to be able to have it. When you start getting the therapy going, let me know, I'll be the first customer. I need all the help I can get. Everyone knows that here. Burnout's tough. It's an important issue to be talked about. There shouldn't be a stigma associated with it. People can perform best if they're rested. That's well proven. So congratulations on a great serving. Well, I got you guys here. I want to get your thoughts on VMworld 2019. It's theCUBE's 10th year covering it. John, you were working at VMware, running the community, social media, podcasting, blogging, tweeting, when we were there for the first year. You were there from the beginning. You've been with us the whole time. I want to personally thank you for being part of our journey. It's been great. A lot's changed in 10 years. And if you look back at the industry, two acquisitions today by VMware, Paul Maritz took over the helm that year in 2010 from Diane Greene, laid out essentially cloud, although they kind of didn't happen the way he thought it would happen. But guys, what's your take on 10 years looking back at VMworld? What's the big moments of good, bad, and the ugly? I mean, to me, VMworld has been a great connecting point for the community. I don't think there's been another community and another network that has grown nearly like VMware has done and what has happened with it. And VMworld's been a big part of that. I mean, whether it was VMworld in one part of the year and partner exchange in the other half, but it was that chance to actually see all those people that you talk to so often, I think it's been, it has been a world of difference for me. I think I've missed the first one. I think it's all, maybe the first two, if I remember right. So I've been pretty much all of them along the way, but it's been unbelievable what VMworld has done for technology on making other companies realize how much bringing the network, your community together really matters. The community piece, John, one of your thoughts was to me, my observation in the past 10 years has been resiliency comes up, all the different changes in the landscape that we've seen from the early days from the cube now to now, much different world. But you look at some of the things of the dodgeball, the beat brown bags, the undergrounds, all these things that were organic. VMworld's community, when they find something that's good, they double down on it, it hangs around, doesn't really go away. You got all these cool things happening. Well, that's the secret of bringing people together both as a community of practice around their professional activity and raising the bar in their profession, their domain, and all that other good stuff happens. I think there's definitely some B-School and PhD case studies to be written about the value of relationships and trust and ecosystem I think within VMware, I think it's a real, I mean, sure, Microsoft exists. There's other conversations going on in technology, but I think VMware's is particularly interesting. I wanted to say though, from 10 years, I mean, 10 years ago there was a lot of talk about private cloud and true cloud and all that sort of stuff and you guys handle that at Wikibon and SiliconANGLE and theCUBE. But the funny thing is now there's still a conversation going on around how dumb multi-cloud is and hybrid cloud is for a certain set of people. On the flip side, there's trillions of dollars, much of whom is showing up, we'll be showing up in San Francisco next week, trillions of dollars of business this year solving real world problems today and not being so pure architecturally or, I don't know, it just seems like, I'm just mystified that there's still all this multi-cloud is bad. The survey we were just talking about really kind of highlights what is becoming a thousand flower, blooming kind of enablement happening. The societal challenges that are out there being solved by software. And if you look at the focus this year of applications, microservices, it's really an application conversation and it's so much that the infrastructure has to enable that. So finally, maybe this next 10 years will be not about the underpinnings. Although- So you're saying the next 10 won't be the year of EDI? I think that already kind of happened. It is a huge success. It's called the internet, right? Smartphones. Good stuff, guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Good survey. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Special Cube conversation here, previewing VMworld 2019 and the survey that they're talking about on Wednesday at 12.30. Looking at burnout, check it out by Cohesity and John Troy, Tech of Rec and the Great Survey. It's the Cube, Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.