 joining us today as we kick off the distributed teams track at RailsConf. My name is Maria Gutierrez. I am VP of engineering at FreeAgent. At FreeAgent for over 10 years, we've been building accountancy software using Ruby on Rails that puts freelancers and small businesses in control of their finances. Our head office is in beautiful Edinburgh, Scotland, but about 25% of our engineering team works from home in other parts of the UK. I'm Glenn Vanderberg. I'm VP of engineering at First. We use predictive analytics and Rails to help real estate agents make more effective use of their marketing time and dollars. Our company is located in Durham, North Carolina, but I work from home in Dallas and about one third of our company works remotely. The two of us recently spent five years as colleagues helping to manage a large widely distributed software development team at Living Social. So Living Social started with offices in Washington, D.C., that was our head office, but it grew in open engineering offices in Boulder and Portland, but still the majority of the engineering team, which grew up to 200 people at one point, we're working from home from all over the US, but also in the UK, Mexico, Brazil, and eventually China, India, and Australia. Between us, we've been a part of several distributed teams for the past 11 years, including today at FreeAgent and First. While working together at Living Social, we found that we shared a passion for understanding how to do distributed teams well. We're strong advocates of such teams, and we both think that the distributed teams we've been a part of have been some of the best teams we've ever experienced. But when we say things like that, a lot of people seem to hear things like this. We'll hire some senior engineers and we'll figure it out, or distributed teams are just as good as co-located teams in exactly the same ways, or even it'll be easy. So those things are not what we mean when we say that distributed teams are a good idea or a great choice for your business. None of those statements are true, and they don't have to be true for distributed teams to be a good idea. There are also plenty of people who think distributed teams are a bad idea, and they make statements like these from executives at Zarely, IBM, and Yahoo. We also believe that these statements are false, and they miss the point that distributed teams have their own distinct kinds of benefits. In these cases, what we see is a lack of willingness or commitment to do what needs to be done to succeed. And that is okay if that's the way a company wants to run their business. One size doesn't fit for everybody, doesn't fit all. But today we are going to talk about some of the lessons we've learned over the years. We've made a lot of mistakes along the way. But whether you are an engineer, a manager, or a senior leader in your company, we hope this talk will help you to avoid repeating some of those mistakes, and will help you take advantage of the benefits distributed teams provide, and hopefully avoid the same path that some companies like Yahoo or IBM took, and others kind of building a distributed team and then having to take that benefit away. If you are an engineer or an individual contributor, some of these things might not seem immediately applicable to you, but as a remote team member, you bear some of the responsibility for making a distributed team successful through your own behavior. And you can influence your management and help them understand the challenges they're facing. And if you're searching for a new remote position, you can ask the right questions to find a team that is set up for success. Part one, make a commitment. Choosing this path requires commitment. Half-hearted efforts will result in a worse experience rather than a better one. Company leadership has to support a distributed team strategy. In this section, we'll talk about things that will test a team's commitment and show you some of the answers that we've found so that you'll be prepared at the start when you're beginning going down this path along the way as you face challenges and later when the strategy is questioned by new managers, executives or investors. And you start by investing in the basics and the basics is organizational culture. But how do you build company culture when you are not working shoulder to shoulder? A lot of people ask that question. A lot of people are very skeptical about this but distributed teams can also have a great culture. It will just be a little bit different. So culture has nothing to do with the physical space that you occupy or who you sit with. Kind of the space certainly contributes to the team environment but it does not build good culture. We have amazing offices at ThreeAgent but that is not what makes good culture for us. You can have the best offices, you can have people working shoulder to shoulder and still have a very toxic culture. So to us, culture is all about the people, all of you, kind of your common goals, your common values and also their respect for each other. So it's caring about the success of your customers and it's caring about the success of your colleagues and their wellbeing. In fact, the two companies that have worked with the stronger cultures have fully embraced distributed teams. In the case of Living Social, their culture has far outlived the longevity of the team. So most of the people we used to work with are still in touch every single day supporting and caring for each other long after they've left the company. Another basic commitment is to invest in the best tools that your company can afford. Better tools make communications easy. Some simple things have really big payoffs, good computers with quality cameras, headsets, easy to use communication software for chat video documentation, et cetera. Start there and then pay attention to how well those tools are meeting your needs. Make sure everyone that needs them has access and knows how to use them and help people who are having difficulties. If your engineering team has access to Slack and Jira, but no one else in the business does, it will be difficult for them to collaborate successfully. At First and FreeAgent, where we work, every single person in the company uses the same tools. Consider that case, that cost when making tool choices. For example, remote pairing using SSH and Tmux works great for us nerds, but it leaves out less technical team members like product managers and designers. But a tool like Screen Hero can be more inclusive. You need a critical mass of remote developers. If you just have one or two remote people on a larger team, that builds friction and resentment that comes from having special snowflakes that get special treatment. If you don't have a critical mass of remote people, they won't have a sufficient voice in the culture building process. What constitutes critical mass? Is it a quarter of the team, a third, even a half? The proper threshold will vary from team to team and it'll actually fluctuate. Once you've made the important changes in work practices and habits, maybe it's not as important to have as many people who are remote. But here's the rule. As long as the remote team members feel like second class citizens, your balance is off. And it doesn't take senior leadership to influence that situation. You can start by helping eliminate the us versus them attitudes between locals and remotes. And terminology is an important part of this. The terms remote and local are alienating and emphasize the distance and the difference. So we started emphasizing the term distributed, which puts people on an equal footing. Some big breakthroughs at Living Social came from individual contributors who started adopting this more inclusive language. But that said, it's quite helpful to have managers and technical leads as well working full-time from home. So one, so that management understands the issues firsthand. And two, so that there's not a perceived glass ceiling for remote workers. And if there is, at least it's very, very high. Because if employees feel that their location is a barrier to their career progression, they will live probably when you need them the most. So everyone in this picture, so Glenn, Ndala's, Evan, Nla and myself in Scotland started as engineers and moved into senior leadership positions over the years, working full-time from home all over the world. But also those in the DC office and the head office, like our VP of engineering, Ryan Owens, work sometimes from home. So Ryan used to do a couple of days a week from home. And I got this picture from one of the engineering all-hands meetings he was hosting from his home office with his amazing Bobblehead collection. It's even more impressive today. And I got him to send me a picture just for, that's the latest version as of yesterday, how that looks like is getting out of control, but it's quite cool. Or Jesse Ling, another of our directors of engineering who was based as well in our DC office, but used to strategize from home every so often with us in her cat form, as you can see. So, but even today, when I propose engineers to become team leads, they question if that is possible given that they work from home. And it should not be an impediment if the right support and commitment is in place for them. Culture grows through shared experiences. That's why it's important for even the office-based employees to work from home occasionally, especially on days when they have meetings, so that they can have the same experience as the home-based team members. Eventually, the whole team needs to work in the same style, whether they're local or remote. And this is another place where individual team members helped to shape the living social culture by choosing to work in ways that worked for everybody. Likewise, it is important to get the team together face to face, but fight the temptation to use that time to maximize productivity. It doesn't have to all be fun and games either, but the best use of FaceTime for a distributed team is to get to know each other better. That improves empathy and communication and it makes your team more productive even later when they're apart. And finally, you cannot treat remote and inside employees equally, but you can treat them fairly and there's a difference. So each group will have the perks and challenges that the other group doesn't. And as a manager, if you are not vigilant, that can lead to unfairness. Kind of usually that means that you need to be aware of practices or policies that unfairly favor one group of employees over the other and try to find a balance. But as a team member within reason, it's important that you also focus on the unique benefits of your situation. Sometimes we focus more on what we are missing rather than our own privileges and it's important to be aware of the pros and cons of both groups. Once one of my team members who's based on the West Coast was asked to attend a meeting that began at 7 a.m. in his time and as the meeting started, he made a kind of annoyed comment about having to wake up so early. And it was important for him to realize that his commute was from the upstairs bedroom to the basement, but some of the people he was meeting with on the East Coast had had to get up early, get dressed, put on makeup in some cases, brave DC area traffic in order to get to the office by nine for another meeting that they had already had. So it's important that you understand how good you've got it and where the real problems lie and empathize with the other people on the other end of the phone line. Other examples are, for example, important decisions must be made in a setting where all the stakeholders have a voice. So lunchtime at the local restaurant is probably not the best place to have a strategy meeting or an architecture kind of review. It also doesn't mean that you have to limit the social aspect of a team, like just because some people are going to miss out, so local employees still should be able to go for lunch together and enjoy the fact that they are together. But remote employees can also find ways to engage in social events. So at FreeAgent, we have Wednesday's remote coffee where a group of people, if they are free, they just get together, have a coffee or a drink and then just talk for a while. The same that if you were going to the path after work or for lunch. During health and well-being month as well at FreeAgent, we have specific sessions to address the challenges of remote employees so that they can keep healthy because it's different what they might do if they are at home, but if they have to commute to the office every day. Part two, communicate intentionally. The point here is that on a distributed team, communication doesn't just happen by itself. Look, people are great at communicating face to face. So good that it happens automatically in ways that you might not even notice. Think about it, you notice facial expressions and tense postures or smiles, high fives and other signs of success. You notice who's talking together a lot lately or what reference books are appearing on colleagues' desks. All of a sudden, you overhear conversations in the hallway or in the break room and in all of those ways, you implicitly pick up on things that are happening in your team and those things don't just happen by themselves on a distributed team. You have to compensate in at least two ways. You should plan for important changes and decisions to be communicated widely and repeatedly and you should make opportunities for more casual and serendipitous communication to happen through the team. That might all sound like just a lot more work that you have to do, but the casual implicit communication patterns of a co-located team have their problems too. Sometimes important decisions leave out crucial stakeholders. Often, they're not communicated as widely or clearly as they need to be and nearly always the rationale and thought process behind the decision gets lost. Let's face it, every team would benefit from being more thoughtful and deliberate about their communication patterns. And in one respect, it's fairly obvious why communication is vital because on a software team, that's how we get our work done. But there's a less obvious reason and it's because communication is how we build trust within a team and without trust, a team cannot be successful. So Patrick Lenzioni identifies absence of trust as the primary problem with dysfunctional teams. So when we trust each other, we can be vulnerable with each other and when we are vulnerable, we admit our mistakes. We ask for help, we tap into each other's experiences and skills more easily as well. That's why blameless cultures are so important. But all this leads ultimately to making better decisions and delivering better solutions for our customers. But as importantly, when you trust your team, you feel accepted and you are more comfortable and you ultimately enjoy your work more. So as a manager, trying to build a cohesive team or as a remote employee, most of our efforts should focus around building that trust. And trust is important in several directions. So it can be downwards if you are leading a team, kind of with a team that you support, it should be upwards with your manager or other leaders in the company. But as importantly, it should be upwards with your peers. And those are not just other engineers, it's with peers across the whole organization. So I spend a lot of time trying to understand kind of what are the problems of the head of sales? What are the problems that customer services have? What are the problems that marketing has? And I try to make sure that I build those relationships and understand those problems every day. So regular one-on-ones is a good tool for this and an important way to compensate for losing some of that accidental communication that Glen was talking about in the office environment. With a one-on-one, you get a chance to truly get to meet your teammates, your manager, kind of know more about them, kind of their interests, aspirations, issues, and have some life-hearted conversations. And we do this because the better you know the people that you work with, the easier it will be for you to pick up on certain cues. Are they happy? Are they lonely? Are they stuck? Is anything bothering them? And if you are in an office, as we were saying, you probably get those clues from bumping into them in the kitchen or by the lift. But if you don't know about it, you won't be able to address those issues. And there will be people, like you can see here, in your team that don't find it easy to proactively reach out to you or others. Like, for example, Kent Beck. And it's everyone's job, not just manager's jobs, to make sure that everyone in the team is successful. So the takeaway here is that out of sight should never be out of mind, so we need to make sure that we are present in people's minds, hopefully, for the right reasons. We've talked about committing to good tools, but internet-based audio and video tools can be a real challenge. It's worth learning the ins and outs of the tools that your team chooses so that you can help meetings to go smoothly. You don't want, as a remote employee, or even just a member of a distributed team, you don't want meetings that involve remote employees to seem like a bunch of extra hassle. Also, whenever you can, prefer video to audio-only conversation. One-on-one, it conveys so much more personality and helps geographically separated people get to know each other better. In meetings, especially when several of the participants are in one room, video is even more beneficial. It helps the remote participants put names to faces and voices. Just seeing facial expressions and lip movement makes voice more intelligible over a noisy audio channel. And even just seeing who the people in the room are looking at makes the flow of a meeting much easier to grasp. And choose the right tool for each situation. I think of communication tools as fitting somewhere along three different axes, synchronous versus asynchronous, low bandwidth versus high, as in text to video, and persistent versus ephemeral. And depending on where a tool fits in that space, they should be used for different purposes. I don't stress about this. Remember, if you choose it, it will be the right tool for the job, trust David. But there's no universal rule. But I find that when you're exploring ideas that aren't well understood, you need people communicating fluidly in real time. In other words, a video conference or an in-person meeting. When asking questions you think others will know the answer to, fire off a message in group chat so that you don't interrupt anybody, the right person can respond, and other people who might benefit from seeing that answer can see it as well. And when communicating important decisions, use a persistent, searchable text-based channel to maximize the spread of the message and minimize ambiguity, possibly supplemented by a recorded or video announcement. Different time zones and different work schedules make syncing up for meetings much more difficult. Time zones are a bigger challenge for a distributed team than sheer distance. Time overlap on a team is desirable so that communication can be more synchronous when possible, try to build teams with compatible time zones, at least three to four hours overlap during the work day. But even time zones aren't all bad. At Living Social, we benefited from having round-the-clock coverage. Maria and others in Europe and Australia saved the sleep of many U.S. engineers when things went wrong during our nighttime. But you should also learn to work in less synchronous ways, write stuff down, circulate proposals for review, solicit feedback, and so on. Getting good at this kind of thing can make your team more effective with less time spent in meetings or blocked waiting on meetings. So another way of building trust is showing your work, so letting people know what you are up to, and being good at communicating and writing is very important in distributed teams, but being remote doesn't mean that you have to give up the stand-ups, retrospectives, demos, planning meetings. There are solutions to run all those things in effective ways in a distributed context, and those are great opportunities to really show your personality and kind of share your interests with your team. So sometimes, unfortunately, the tools let us down, but don't let that stop you. You know, get a little bit creative, because as they say, if there's a will, there's a way, and you can work around those problems. So those team gatherings are really key to building kind of the social aspect of the relationship between team members when they are apart. So Sarah Fleming here at Living Social was incredible at doing just that. Kind of she and others in our team contributed immensely to our culture just by not being afraid of being themselves. So demos in our merchant team at Living Social came with our guest DJs at the beginning and at the end of the demo, and really was a big part of keeping all of us up to speed with what everybody was working on, but also learning and sharing that knowledge and kind of having fun together on a Friday at the end of the day. So if you can do a distributed conference, kind of key note via hangouts like this, you can really do anything. And if you are going to showcase your work, just you can make it memorable as well and fun for everybody. Part three, be clear. Even if you do everything we've already said, it will still cause problems if your team doesn't understand how the distributed team should work. If you're a leader, it's your job to provide that clarity. If you're clear about the goals and plans, the team will help you make it work. If you are not a leader, ask for clarity about these things. These are the areas that we've found demand clear expectations set by the team leadership. The first is about how work is measured and evaluated. One of the good things about distributed teams is that managers have to learn to evaluate productivity based on actual results rather than perceptions of busyness. So set clear expectations about how work is measured and evaluated and review those regularly. It's also likely that in nonfully distributed organizations, there will be some positions that require being in the office. If that is the case, leadership as well needs to be very upfront and clear and explicit about it. And it might be very senior executive roles or it might be more junior or entry-level positions. In occasions, you might decide that you need to have senior engineers in the office to mentor those more junior ones because they know what is the point of asking the more junior people to be in the office if they don't have anybody to learn from. Or it can be a specific roles that require kind of intense collaboration with other people in the company that are not set up as well for distributed work. If most of the business is co-located, which is something that is happening in quite a lot of these companies that are starting to embrace distributed, it starts with engineering, but the rest of the company are not quite ready to work in that way. It's important that engineering has a presence in the office so that they can interact with the rest of the business regularly. It's also very important, and we know that from experience, to know who you can actually hire based on the location. So not having a good understanding of different countries and states, intellectual property, employment, and tax laws can get you in trouble down the line. This is normally not a big issue for big companies that have big legal departments and big HR departments, but that can become a problem for smaller business and quite expensive as well. And it can also be flagged as a risk during investment rounds or IPOs. So acquisitions. So acquisitions, yeah. So it's worth doing it, but kind of look at the implications of bringing people from areas that maybe you haven't hired before. The same goes for your budget. If you are responsible for the money, for the budget, for the team, you need to have a very clear picture of the cost of having a distributed team. So how are you gonna budget for the tools? It's not the same buying tools for five people that for 200 people. Kind of what is, you're always gonna have to be investing the most you can in the best tools that you can so that you can guarantee that communication. And it can get expensive, so you need to be prepared. What about home office setups? Are you going to pay for it? Are you gonna pay for co-working spaces? That's not a right answer. So it's okay to choose not to or to do it, but you need to be prepared and you have to have a clear message for your team. But most importantly, travel for face-to-face kind of basis of the team. And that can get quite expensive. It's normally, again, not a big problem with five people, but what happens when you have 200 engineers that need to kind of all get together in a location and you're based in Washington DC or San Francisco where accommodation is extremely expensive. So it's important that you plan for those things. Budget is normally not a big problem where things go well with a company, but what happens when things don't go so well? We have, unfortunately, some experience with that. And those are the first areas a business looks to cut costs and that can be very damaging for a distributed team. So what I like to do to manage this a little bit of some tips is to set a clear budget per person to travel to head office a number of times a year. So I normally budget at least for four trips, more if it's not kind of too expensive to get to the office. That budget is allocated to the cost of employing somebody rather than being part of the travel budget so that if then we decide to get travel budget that doesn't affect kind of the money that is available to bring those people into the office. So when we hire people remotely, we account for that expense as just the cost of hiring somebody. Also think about your strategy to set salaries depending on location. There's no one perfect formula, but think about it and decide what works for you. I like to have a common bond across everybody and then have a specific adjustments based on location. For example, for expensive location like London we'll pay a premium at 20% from what we pay in Edinburgh. So that if people happen to move, that will happen, then you know how you can adjust the salary accordingly. Because it's a little bit unfair if you're paying a lot more money for somebody in London and then they decide to move to Edinburgh and they keep the same salary and suddenly you have a team with completely unequal salaries in the same location. So it's important to do your homework because people will move about and they'll move home and go to other locations. And companies finally need to start setting those clear expectations during the recruiting process so that people know what they're signing up for. And if you are not in a leadership position, what you can do here is when you decide to join a distributed team, ask some of those questions proactively during the interview process so that you know what you're actually signing up for. And we have some examples here. So for example, you could ask how is performance managed? Who works from home? Are there any roles not suitable for working from home? Are the people, other people employed in this same state as me or this country? Does my compensation change if I move between states or between countries? So what tools work best for retrospectives or team meetings? Do you actually do those things with remote people? How often are you gonna want me to travel to the head office or to meet with other team members in person? So the key here is to get as much clarity as possible during the interview process so that you know what you're actually signing up for. So we've been talking for a while now about all of the challenges you'll face and we've been showing you some of our battle scars. But we are fans of distributed teams and we wanna close on a more positive note. We'll conclude by telling you what we love about this kind of team and what you'll get out of it. Living Social was able to build an extremely talented team that went from 12 to over 100 engineers in less than a year, in large part because we cast a wide geographic net. A distributed team strategy today can be a strategic competitive advantage. That's especially true if your company is located outside a tech center. But it can also be a big win if you're in a tech center. Those cities are usually expensive and there's a lot of competition for good employees. A distributed team can reduce costs even when you factor in travel expenses and increase retention. And even in bad times, there are silver linings. For us at Living Social, it eased the burden of having to do a big layoff. We didn't flood a specific geographic market with a large group of people with similar skills. That made it easier for our team members to find new jobs, not to mention that they all had good remote working skills. One underappreciated benefit of a distributed team is that it can make organizational change easier. Once everyone on the team is working in a distributed style, it's easier to organize teams more dynamically and fit the team structure to the work. For traditional organizations, Conway's law here is a constraint. For a distributed team, it can be a tool. You still need to be careful because you don't want to treat employees like interchangeable parts, but nevertheless that organizational flexibility is an advantage. And as I said when discussing communication strategies, even though that seems like a lot of extra work, every team would benefit from thinking hard and being more deliberate about communication patterns. The work that a distributed team puts into this can produce improvements throughout the larger organization. And finally, a distributed team strategy can potentially help you build a more diverse and engaged team, as long as you're not left-handed, apparently. It is not a silver bullet, but it can be a powerful tool by removing certain barriers and provide extra flexibility for those that really need it. So both at Living Social and at Free Agent, I've seen from surveys and retention figures that remote employees are consistently more engaged with the business. They appreciate the flexibility and they see themselves having longer careers there. So almost seven years ago, and time really flies, so this happened to me. At the time, I was commuting every day to the office in Edinburgh. After a few months of maternity leave, I decided to go back to work and I really, really struggle with the fact that I really wasn't spending hardly any time with my little baby. So my husband and I considered different options. One of them was going part-time, but I really enjoyed my career and I wanted to continue working full-time. It was then that the opportunity to join Living Social Engineering Team working full-time from home came about. So after joining the team, I started spending all mornings with Ethan. I would drop him at daycare about 1 p.m. in the afternoon and then work East Coast hours the rest of the day. My husband was also at the time working from home and he could pick him up at five o'clock when he finished his U.K. hours. We both, during all that time and up to today, have managed to spend a very good part of our lives with Ethan and continue developing our careers. And I am 100% sure that my career would be in a very, very different place today had I not had that opportunity over six years ago. And this is applicable not only to mothers, by all means, it's applicable to anyone that needs that extra flexibility because, for example, they are the family main carers or they have a disability that prevents them from commuting easily to an office or just working effectively in an office. But having the opportunity to work from home by itself is not enough. Kind of without the commitment of my manager and without the commitment of my peers, the rest of the engineers to make it work, I and those that were in the same situation could not have been successful. So it goes without saying, however, that when you are working, it's important that you give full attention to your work, especially with young children. You shouldn't be attempting to be doing both things at the same time. So when my husband and I are both working, we make sure that we have childcare covered. But inevitably, work and family will sometimes mix up and anyone that has ever worked from home knows the drill. I mean, show your hands. So in my first, I'll let you enjoy this, it's priceless. In my first senior leadership meeting, my husband decided that it was a very good idea to walk into our home office after a shower in his dressing gown gown. So as you can imagine, I was kind of mortified, but at the same time, I was so relieved that it hadn't been any worse than that. But, you know, so don't do that, try to avoid it if possible. But sometimes mixing things up is just what the team needs to finish out something. What's your name? Gordon, and what do you want to show them? So this is Ethan. He came home from the school one day whilst we were doing one of those merchant demos. And he had a demo too. I know, he was so proud of his pictures that he wanted to show to everybody. And in that context, it was actually a fun thing for the team to see and kind of gave them a glimpse of my life and who I am. And everyone enjoyed it, as you can see by the chat on the side. And it really helps, those kind of things helps to create a bond kind of within the team. It works in the right context, so I wouldn't recommend you do it during a board meeting, for example. But if it happens, just be gracious about it and handle it with some fun. And the same way, just to close kind of, my manager and peers had a huge influence in my career. Every single one of us here has the power to impact positively and more importantly, negatively, those we work with. So don't underestimate the importance that every policy, every decision, every engagement with each other has on building a company's culture distributed or not. So don't leave things to chance. This talk was conceived and written and mostly rehearsed remotely from Dallas and Edinburgh. And I think we have two or three minutes for questions. So the question is, you wanna get the whole team together face to face, local and remote sometimes. But how do you handle sensitive things like having to lay off somebody that would be best done, that you really wanna do face to face? I can take it. So when we've had some situations like the layoffs at Living Social, we kind of the management team, we had to fly into Washington DC more than anything to spend some time with the Char and kind of to get some guidance and counseling. But obviously we couldn't bring everybody that was gonna be impacted by those situations kind of to the office. So we are still there, we did it through kind of the same way that we do our work every day, hangouts and a call. We try to be sensitive on the time zone so that people waiting to start hearing about kind of what's going on and then they're waiting seven hours or eight hours till it gets to them. So we try to follow kind of as people were waking up to make sure that we talk to the people as quickly as possible, that we got them into a hangout and that we were kind of as sensitive and accommodating and trying to be as empathetic as possible with them. But that is the way that we worked anyway, during normal, a layoff is a big kind of a specific situation but sometimes you have to do as a manager kind of some kind of behavioral issues that you have to address or performance issues and we just make sure that we were all very comfortable with communicating video and be able to address those things successfully. And there's a flip side of that. During one early incident, an employee had to be let go. It wasn't a layoff situation, it was being let go for other reasons. And because of conventional wisdom, right, the hiring manager had him fly to DC and he meant well but he said afterwards the employee said, I've never lost a job before and now I have to go sit in an airport away from my family and my support system and travel home having received this news and it would have been better if you'd done it over video. My advice is always put people first and really think how it impacts them and how can they be best supported when you're gonna share some bad news with them. One more. Anyone? Okay, I guess we answered everybody's questions and that's all. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.