My radicalization on the subject of remote work

Over the last few years I have watched myself in the mirror and I can clearly see my radicalization.
I am becoming a remote-work extremist. 

I always liked taking an extremist point of view in a discussion because it helped me better define/understand the full space of options, arguments. It helped my better understand the middle ground. 

But this is/was something different. After being part of a company that played a meaningful role in the enablement of remote work I also became increasingly confident on the inability of non-remote work to peacefully co-exist with remote work. It was as if what was good for one was bad for the other.  So I find myself practically getting thrown out of rooms, conversations because of me slowly turning into a militant :
What is the diff between an xxx-ist and a militant xxxist : the xxxist beleives in xxx. The militant xxxist believes that anyone believing the opposite is an idiot or enemy or a bad person etc...
You can guess how quickly being a remote-work militant can make the friendliest meeting, social gathering turn ugly.

Let me explain what I mean. I believe the world will be a better place if all companies become all-remote. When all work is all-remote. That is a significant step forward from where I was 5-10-15-20 years ago when I was dreaming of remote work and getting inspired from my cofounders "work is no longer a place" slogan. I have realized that this will never happen when  companies become remote friendly or remote first or remote happy. It can only happen when and if companies stop allowing any form of non-remote work.
Why I believe that?

After 40+ yrs of remote asynchronous working groups in academia, open source, 10-20 yrs of companies like odesk, mysql, automatic and 5-10 yrs of a few dozen true all-remote companies with $0 in office rent in their G&A budget - the world has still not seen companies successfully grow, IPO, employee thousands of people AND managed to stay all-remote. And that has to do because as remote companies grow they are still doing the mistake of allowing non-remote groups to exist,, some time as a department, some times as an acquisition, some times as an team of co-founding co-habiting friends - that grows into an co-habiting executive team that grows into an HQ. These little compromises act like a cancer growing within the organization increasingly reducing the inherent advantages of an all-remote company to a point that the company eventually becomes remote-friendly as in "friendly to people with some form of disability"... the inability to come to an office and work like normal people, locally. And yes, being a militant means that I throw "remote-friently" companies to the enemy camp too :-)


Mostly joking :-)

Mostly.

So what does it mean that a company should "not allow non-remote" work or "disallow local" work?
Thats a very long answer that would take many posts to cover... but I want to give some hints:

- It means that the company cannot take on a lease and pay for offices. If people want to get paid for their working environment - you should make sure that your staff is well paid so as they can afford a good working environment.
- it means that the company cannot build a "local" IT infrastructure, buy computers, printers, servers, backup drives and take ownership of the hardware computing environment for some people. It should pay enough people so as they can afford good equipment. The company should not become an expert in furniture picking, printer cabling, reliable wifi maintaining or secure paper shredding (unless if thats what their product is :-) )
- it means that the company should not hire people that don't have a powerful enought laptop, or they are unable to manage it by themselves, or unable to find reliable high speed broadband internet or spend a good part of their day wearing headset with mic (or alternatively working from a sound insulated environment).
- it means that the company cannot be directly or indirectly financing happy hours, meal programs. It should be paying its staff enough for them to be able to live a healthy life. When the company chooses to finance socializing/travel activities it should done in a way that is global and it should be accounted as part of the cost of the corresponding teams
- it means that its noty the company's responsibility to finance or enable the immigration of people from country to country no matter how (I will get fire for this :-|.)
- it means that the company cannot be differentiating its benefits based on whether someone is a employee (as defined by the country's labor laws)  or not. Salary/Overtime/PTO all these practices have to be applied across staff independently  of whether the staff is a local in-state/citizen vs a remote out-of-state/non-citizen. When that is practically impossible (eg how can I pay for the health insurance of someone that lives in a country where everyone gets it for free) you have to treat the benefit as part of the cost - and use the loaded cost of the staff member including all paid benefits

Most of the above  positions are counter intuitive - many sound wrong or unfair. I have come to the conclusion that they are necessary sacrifices - that if a company doesn't make it ends up losing the massive advantages of an all-remote company.

So, join me and become an all-remote work extremist :-)

Whiteboards are considered evil

I feel I need to make again and again this argument.
I am getting upset seeing whiteboards in meeting rooms. Whiteboards are making any meeting/conference room remote unfriendly.
This realization first happen almost 10 yrs year ago, when the ceo of my company,  right after I returned back from my annual vacation to my home country, greeted me with a smile telling me (thinking that he took an initiative that all engineers would love) that he installed wall to wall whiteboards in all the conference rooms so as I can stop writing on the walls with markers ( i had done that). I  tried to fake a smile and a thank you saddened with the realization that we just made  one more major step backwards in my efforts to make our "head-quarters" more remote friendly.

Remember how many times you have been in a meeting room with a few remote people on the hangout when one of the "local" people, often the manager. gets up, grabs the marker and tries to illustrate a point on a whiteboard, or even worse try to present a whole idea/solution by sketching it out on the whiteboard.

So, whats wrong with that? Let me count the ways
1. the remote people cant see what you are writing
2. the speaker moves away from the mic and he becomes harder to hear
3. the rest of the people on the table turn away their faces from the mic making them harder to hear harder to see
4. attempts to keep the remotes in sync (taking photos and sharing links, pushes the remotes out of the active loop at best - they can no longer be active participants in the discussion
5. remote people cannot grab the marker and do what the local people can, they are second grade citizens. they can not "sketchout" "present" their solutions. They have no whiteboard
6. the local team is trained at looking at a whiteboard as opposed to an online real time collaborative document
7. the only way for the remote team to get access to this important information is to ask the local team to remember and get a photo. They are at their mercy
8. in heated discussions there is no better way to establish " I speak now" status but to get up and wait and then grab the marker.. even if you just intent to point to the whiteboard (or write unintelligible scribbles - my favorites) Remote people, who always find it harder to jump in, be heard, cannot "grab the marker". Again they resort to a listening role.
9. the person that often uses the whiteboard is a person of a certain authority - which means the remote people wont even complain every time this happens

I can keep in going on for ever on this.

But my cofounder would say.... I love white-boarding. I cannot even think of a group or solo brainstorming session without a whiteboard. (he even considered/tried to do a startup for a better digital whiteboard at some point). So my position (throwing whiteboards to the junkyards) was either an anathema or just another argument in the direction "Ok. lets stop using whiteboards for the benefits of remote work and make the rest of us less productive in the process".

So several years later - I find it so surprising how easily we got to believe that lie that we actually need sth that we don't.

Whiteboards are as needed for brainstorming as the smell and feel of real paper is needed when you want to write a long essay.  They are just a problematic habit in the outopian new all-remote world, they are a paper book whose place is on a fake bookcase they are a horse in the highway.

It has been years since I have used a whiteboard. And definitely I have not stopped brainstorming. And I have done that in spite of still having lots of whiteboards around me still littering the walls with dried up ink and markers. Group brainstorming happens in hangouts where everyone presents both camera and screen. My whiteboard is my own laptop's shared screen , where I hop around a webpage to showcase designs issues, or a spreadsheet to show cells, or a google doc where both me and others are often typing and talking over each other. My solo whiteboard was evernote and is now workflowy, my newest toy, allowing my to capture my infinitely nested bullet-list thinking.

Whiteboards are dead and the world is much better from it.
Now I said it :-)

A technical cofounder manifesto and protest

( to "business people/consultants/sales /...)

A friend that is now a startup founder (and was a well paid ivy league consultant in their previous life) asked me.... what things I feel she didnt learn well from her previous experiences.

I  responded to the question with a tirade that I titled after the fact a technical cofounder manifesto.

• You have not learned to be patient
• You have not learned to trully think long term (5-10yr out)
• You have not learned to build from sctratch (you have learned to find existing state and change/improve)
• You have learned to be pragmatist - you have not not learned to have faith - you have not learned to dream
• You have learn to change and abandon - we have learn fail and retry - perseverance is not sth you have learned
• You have not learned to look at less quantitive aspects - 2nd and 3rd order effects, pay it forward, do no evil, none of these , none of these had a place in your learning
• You have not learned to be engineering minded - building better than needed, expect scale before you see it
• You have not worked close with engineers - how to avoid the typical eng- consultant interface pitfalls
• You have not worked in an environment where you high prestige background is considered a drawback/disadvantage (thats how engineering orgs see ivy-league consultants)
• You like meetings - eng orgs hate meeting
• You like 1-1 - and friendly talk - eng like straight talk
• You like EQ we like IQ
• You like PPTs - eng hate ppts- the only office tool that would be cool would spreadsheet
• You like MSFT bay area hates msft - we like open source aws and google
• You like talk - we call it bs - we like action
• You talk - we code
• You like patents we hate patent trolls
• You like email blasts - we hate spam and respect privacy
• You write your prpoposals with curly fonts on white background - we write our code with fixed fonts on dark background
• You like word processors - we like editors
• You like to work in the day - we like to work at night
• You like to drink beer or wine - we like coffee
• You get attracted by harvard, yale and ivy league - we dream stanford/mit/cmu/caltech but we just as well learn on your own without prestigous institutions
• You like fancy and sport cars we like electric cars and self driving cars
• You like money and fame - we like respect from our peers
• You like big salaries and $bonuses - we like a part of the equity
• You like to manage - we we would prefer a world where mgr are not needed
• You read wsj and economist we read hackernews and reddit
• You are always well dressed we like/are misfits - literally and metaphorically

and if someone feels that they dont fit the stereotype perfectly the last line really says stereotype misfits are cool this side of the fence.

Reverse bucket list

I was talking to a friend and I realized that in spite of my quest / interest in a thin identity, i have slowly accumulated lots of things that I dont want to do ... kind of ...ever in my life.
So I started writing it, trying to capture things that I have said at least once that "this is not me" I will not force again/ever myself to endure sth like that again... so I started writing and writing and writing to a rather embarassing length. Here how my reverse bucket list looks like:

I never want to do in my life

• karaoke
• acting
• public speaking
• going to live comedians
• bangi jumping
• parachuting
• air gliding 
• rock climbing
• climbing  
• skiing
• running
• spa-ing
• massaging
• pedicuring
• dancing in dance clubs
• playing poker
• playing any cards/games that involve money
• doing the vegas thing (whatever that is)
• roll-a-coasters
• waiting to see the next Disneyland attractions
• going to gym
• doing any gym like activity
• aerobics, samba dancing
• classical dancing or any form of dancing
• watching artsy movies
• do drugs of any sort
• work in cold-calling telesales
• be a door knocking salesman

So after looking at it for a while I realize what should be me next challenge:
Instead of writing down a bucket list and making sure that I check some boxes every year... I should make it my goal to obliterate my reverse bucket list. And contrary to the bucket list where  you suffice to do "swimming in the great barrier reef"  exactly once - to clear your reverse bucket list - it takes more effort than that. You need to do karaoke more than a few times... til it is no longer a hateful experience - but it is something that you can enjoy...

Hm, maybe I should remove some of the items that are less about experiences and more about life choices from my reverse  bucket list before I start....

Pokemon GO

https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/13/pokemon-go-tops-twitters-daily-users-sees-more-engagement-than-facebook/

My kids are glued on this all day long since coming back from Greece

Articles like the above completely underestimate what is actually going on
and the importance / revolutionary impact of the particular game.
I arrived at the USC campus for a parent orientation Tue morning.
At that point I have never heard of the game besides some weird comments
of my son at 5am in the SJC airport mentioning "they are here" "here too".
So picture this, you are at  big university campus and everything feels surreal.
You are surrounded by 1000s of students on campus half of them with ribbons
like ours  but it feels diff. The diff is : they all hold their phone diff and
they are kind of following it. Phone slightly raised at a bit of a distance
as if they take a photo but not exactly and they are by themselves alone in the
field surrounded by hundreds of other in a similar trance. If you have seen
the Surrogates movie it was kind of like that. Anyway a third of the campus
population was in that state on Tue - and on Wed.. it felt as id EVERYONE
was like that!!

On the way back I was unable to hold a normal discussion with my son. He would
continuously mumble things like " I got xxxx (some pokemon thing)"
"STOP (while driving down Almaden Expwy). There is a "siamese" here!!!".
(I should probably admit that my son was pokemon addicted (as in playing this game
only and watching these cartoons again again only for several years of his life
to the point of worrying us about his mental state :-) )

White pasta recipe

Capturing here my pasta recipe the way I had to text-explain it to one of my kids that decided to play-cook at home:

White Pasta Recipe

Ingredients

- half a pack of spaghetti
- 1 eggs
- half a cup milk
- half pound of gouda cheese

Instructions  

1. Cook pasta, and drain it - make sure that the pasta is not too cooked.. its better to be "a la dente" (slightly uncooked) since it will be cooked a bit more in the frying pan

2. in the frying pan put the amount of pasta that you want to eat and add milk, the pan's bottom should not be visible - (better to put more milk than less)

3. Turn the heat to full , and mix the pasta and let everything boil until the milk appears to be less (some goes on the pasta some evaporates)

4. Meanwhile cut the soft parts of gouda cheese in a bowl and put it in the microwave for 2 mins to melt - you may need to take it out half the way and mix it.

5. When the cheese is ready..., the pasta is ready (as above) you turn down the heat to low and throw in one egg (2 eggs if you have put pasta for 2 people). Use the wooden spatula and keep on mixing.

You should keep on mixing until the milky-eggy liquid starts thickening up - if it thickens too much throw a bit more milk . the pasta should be juicy. It always thickens when the eggy-milky mix touches the bottom of the pan because it has egg and the eggs becomes solid in heat.

When ready turn off heat throw all the hot cheese from the microwave mix and pour out of the pan into a bowl.

At that pont you can add some parmesan shredded cheese as well

4-yr stock portfolio

After some heated discussions with some friends of mine we made the following bet.

If you were to put a fix amount of $ and you can spread it as you want buing amazon, apple, google and facebook, knowing that your stock will be illiquid til 4 yrs from now at which point all shares would be sold at the the then price... how exactly would you spread your money?

Here are the choices:
ot
AMZN - 64%
GOOG - 27%
FB - 9%
AAPL - 0%

sk (amzn:aapl 6:1)
AMZN : 85%
AAPL : 15%

ia
AAPL: 50%
FB: 20%
GOOG: 20%
AMZN: 10%

pp
GOOG :50%
AMZN : 50%

Since this is my blog let me add my own explanations for my choices:
I think amzn at about $150B is still has lots of room to grow within the retail segment. walmarts and targets etc.. hold comparable valuations and in my view amzn has a more efficient model which means that it can produce more profits (in spite of its profitless history) when it it will end up devouring these companies. So I can easily see amzn being > $500B  within 4yrs and being the worlds mega retailer (as opposed to the worlds biggest etailer). I think that its profitless history is related to its 10+ yr bets (see its efforts into content, into infrastructiure (aws), content delivery and such. I think these efforts while aspirational they are mired with tremendous competition so it may very well be the case that another company would be the leader in (content delivery infrastructure enablement (aws) etc.. , ie I wouldn't bet on these. Nobody comes even close to challenge amzn status as the worlds best retailer.

Google is a much less clear story. (Unfortunately I don't seem to have captured somewhere my thoughts of what is the achilles tendon of each one of these 4 companies... should do so shortly..)
I see its ads dominance having reached a plateau and I see it being challenges in two very different ways from platforms that own the transcaction (amzn) and social platforms that know the user (facebook). The reason that I believe however that google is with us to stay in the long term (as a $300-$500B company) - is because it has attracted 10s of thousands of great engineers and has created a an extremely efficient software generating machine - probably one of the most efficient such "machines". The only comparable company is Microsoft.... so I think that Google is with us to stay for the same reason that I would (should) have said the same for microsoft. 10yrs ago when Bill Gates was about to leave.

The reason I put Apple at the bottom, is because I think that Apple at $650B is currently the most overvalued company in spite of its rock bottom p/e. My primary concern with Apple is that they have trained the market to expect a high profit margin company - which ties their hands. All it takes is one market timing miscalculation and their still great-selling products can become low margin ones.
I-watch is an example. In smartphones, Apple has 40% of the market and 90% if the profits (I am not being accurate). In smartwatches, msft's Band and LG's G may very well tilt the market and force apple to sell its watch at a price point that is consumer success but not a wall street one. And for manufacturing companies the value diff between DELL and APPLE (or GM v TESLA  etc etc) can be orders of magnitude..

FB is where it is because I don't really understand it. While it seems that FB eventually should be able to become a consumer decision influenter comparable to Google.. so a comparable valuation is meaningful, On the other hand the internal culture of FB is in from my few interactions with them less healthy than google. And looking at its consumers, it appears to be losing the youth audience (and the early adopter one) (and gets it back with increasingly expensive acquisitions...). So I really can't tell what is the future for FB..