Press the Issue

When the WordPress block editor was introduced, it raised questions about how and if page builders would still be used to build sites. In this episode, Devin and Aurooba chat about their feelings about the two options.

In this episode, Rob and Brian review the biggest new features of WordPress 6.2, the integration of the Openverse image library into WordPress Core, discuss whether "Full Site Editing" is really ready to move out of Beta, and whether the Openverse is proof that web privacy regulations have become a hindrance rather than a help for the typical web user.

Allie and Nyasha just got back from the first ever WordCamp Asia in Bangkok, Thailand. In this episode, they each share their highlights from the event, as well as things they hope to be improved upon next year.

At State of the Word a few weeks ago, Matt Mullenweg announced plans to begin labeling plugins in the WordPress directory based on cost and backing from the community. In this episode, Allie and Nyasha discuss the pros and cons to this plan and the ways in which this plan may affect plugin developers.

"Freemium" is the idea that a product is free, with the goal of upgrading customers to a paid or premium version. It's a common model within the WordPress ecosystem. In this episode, Nyasha and Rob discuss what goes into building a freemium model, using their own first-hand knowledge.

Despite the success of Kids Camps in past years, WordPress doesn't do much to intentionally introduce young people to WordPress. In this episode, Allie and Topher discuss both the challenges and possibilities surrounding bringing younger generations into the WordPress community.

AI, or artificial intelligence, is a growing field in tech where computer software has been trained to make assumptions about the data its given. In this episode, Topher and Nyasha talk about the morals and ethics of AI and the potential problems of inherent bias built into it. In the conversation, they discuss specific examples of proprietary code causing not only general problems, but very specific problems.

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg's annual State of the Word speech was held December 15, 2022 in New York City. In this episode Allie Nimmons and Rob Howard recap the highlights of Matt's speech - things they are excited about, things that confuse or worry them.. and together they try to answer the question: what is the biggest challenge facing WordPress right now?

In our final episode of the year, producer Allie Nimmons takes you through the highlights of her favorite episodes, with a glimpse into why they stand out. We really hope that you enjoy our final episode of 2022, and we cannot wait to press more into issues with you in 2023.Press These LinksListen to the episodes mentioned in this episode: A Look Back at WordCamp US 2022 How Other Open Source Projects Raise Money Screen Readers and Beyond: How Web Accessibility Makes Lives Better Toxic Scorekeeping: The Case Against ‘Five for the Future’ Is Working from Home a Trap for Women Does Market Share Matter? How Did the Pandemic Affect WordPress Contributors? Episode TranscriptMonet Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show at masterwp.com/presstheissue. Press the Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash visit learndash.com. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code, to design, to business turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts. Find the workshop for you at workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code Podcast 10 for a 10% discount. Allie Nimmons: Hi, I’m Allie Nimmons, and I’m the producer of this podcast, Press the Issue. We launched this podcast on June 1st of this year, 2022, and in the past six months, we’ve produced 25 unique episodes all about issues that we wanted to explore in WordPress, open source, and beyond. In our final episode of the year, I’m going to take you through the highlight of my favorite episodes, with a glimpse into why they stand out to me. I really hope that you enjoy our final episode of 2022, and we cannot wait to press more into issues with you in 2023. One of the biggest things to happen in WordPress this year was the first back to in-person WordCamp US since 2019, and so this episode definitely feels like a highlight to me. In it, we took a different approach to our usual episode structure, and had multiple team members weigh in on what made the event so special for them. For me, it felt like a homecoming, so I loved hearing others talk about this event being their introduction to WordPress events. Here’s Devin Egger talking about how this camp was his first, and what that was like for him. Devin Egger: I was really excited to go to this, and the opportunity to meet so many people in-person in the WordPress space was just so exciting and so awesome to meet. So many people that I’ve either worked with online, or met online, or watched their videos, or taken their classes, it was just an awesome opportunity to meet these people in-person. And getting the chance to see everyone face-to-face really sets in the idea that it’s a community, and that we’re all a part of this WordPress community, and a good reminder that we’re really all in this together, and we’re all here because we dig WordPress, and we’re all about the same thing. So my least favorite thing coming back from WordCamp US actually came after the fact, and when I got home and I realized that all the workshops in the surf room weren’t actually recorded and available for future playback, and I just didn’t have enough time to go see all the things that I wanted to see, and get to attend all the events and the sections that I wanted to go to. And so I was really hoping when I got back home that I’d be able to catch the workshops that I missed, and just a little bit bummed that I didn’t get to do that. But that being said, the ones that I did get to go to and participate in were very educational, and I learned a lot more than I expected going into it. So I’m happy that I did get to go see the ones I got to see, and I’m really excited to go to my next WordCamp. Allie Nimmons: So much about producing this podcast has been about finding hard questions to answer, and in the WordPress world, we aren’t short on those. I wanted us to look at things like the economics of WordPress, things we struggle with as an open source community, accountability, and all that kind of stuff. So in this topic, looking at how other open source projects make money, is a great summary of what Press the Issue was all about this year. In this clip from the episode, Brian Cords and Rob Howard, look at an example of Vue versus WordPress, and how each one handles producing content and information from a financial perspective. Brian Coords: When you look at Vue, how do you see their ability to be very popular in the open source world, but also very clearly an opinionated private… A lot of private interests in that group. Do you see the similarities or differences between Vue and WordPress? Rob Howard: Yeah, I mean, I think from a code standpoint, they largely are similar in their philosophies and what they’re building. And I think, again, there’s this just acceptance within the vue.js world, that, “Hey, we have sponsors paying for stuff, here they are. We want you to be a sponsor, here’s where you can type in your credit card number to be a sponsor.” So they make it just very easy. Again, the approach of accepting money, it just makes everything more efficient. But of course, the flip side of that is then once you accept that money, you have to have a mechanism for accounting for it in a way that the community can accept as fair. So I think that probably is maybe the hardest part psychologically, is saying, “Okay, if somebody gives me a million dollars to help with WordPress, now I have to show that I’m using it in a way that is legit and fair.” And actually, there’s quite a bit of work associated with that. Allie Nimmons: One of the biggest problems facing WordPress right now, from my perspective at least, is how we handle accessibility. I’ll give an honorable mention to our How Accessible is WordPress episode, which basically took an hour to say not accessible enough. But something that I wanted Press the Issue to do is to pose solutions to problems as much as it identifies and asks questions about them. Here’s Teron Bullock and Devin Egger’s Screen Readers and Beyond, How Web Accessibility Makes Lives Better. In this episode, they talk about the issues with WordPress accessibility, and the work still yet to be done. So let’s listen to a bit of that. Teron Bullock: Why can’t I just maybe make the website black and white, or puts a button in there that toggles the experience or something? Why isn’t that enough? What would you say to that particular web developer? Do you think that the tools, and thinking about it basically from the bare minimum mindset is enough? Devin Egger: I don’t, because first of all, there’s a lot more work to be done. I think that’s one of the bigger points is that I don’t think we’re ever done thinking about accessibility, and… Just for example, in my article, I talk a lot about website accessibility, but that’s not even going into the idea of authoring tools being accessible, and one of the people’s qualms with WordPress, is that it’s not exactly very accessible as an authoring tool. I didn’t have time to get into that in the article because it was already way too long, but there’s a lot more work to be done. Teron Bullock: Right. Devin Egger: And if we’re always taking a retroactive stance to it instead of a proactive stance, so if we’re always playing catch-up, then I don’t think we’re really doing anything justice, because we’re not really thinking about it in the right way. And I think the right way to think about it is just to look at your website that you’re building. And again, whether you’re a designer, or whether you’re a content writer, or whether you’re a developer, there’s a chance for you to sit down and look at the thing that you’re creating, and go, “Well, what if I couldn’t use my arms? What if I didn’t understand things quite as well as people…” The disabilities that are more overlooked, such as cognitive abilities, or learning abilities. Like I said earlier, it’s easier to just close your eyes and think, “How would I interact with this website?” But if you’re making a website that has this crazy design, that one thing’s over here, and one thing’s way over there, and the typical buttons are not in the typical places, and this button is really small, or whatever, those are all things that we don’t really think about in typical website accessibility, like adding alt tags, or adding visually hidden elements that are screen reader only elements. The organization and the structure of the website is not something we always think about, but it’s also very important. Allie Nimmons: The MasterWP team has come under a bit of fire this year for attempting to kind of shatter some rose-colored lenses when it comes to WordPress. In this episode, which was honestly a bit nerve-wracking for me to publish, myself and Rob Howard discussed the case against the Five for the Future Initiative. I’m really proud of this episode, because I think we tackled a complex problem, and pick apart our issues with it, as well as pose resolutions that sit right with us as invested community members. Here’s a bit of that episode. Rob Howard: It’s very difficult to unpack and navigate even who works for whom in a lot of these situations. So I think that that is not necessarily an issue that is at all solely related to Five for the Future, but I think that that need for more clarity all around also applies to this question of, well, is this 5% number an appropriate thing for us to be measuring and keeping track of? Allie Nimmons: Yeah. And I think about it too like, “Is this Five for the Future thing appropriate for everyone?” I think there’s value in an individual looking at it like, “Okay, yeah, this is something that I can work toward. If I decide I’m going to start with 1%, then next month I’ll try for 2%, and something to build toward as far as making the time to contribute.” That’s not the same experience as a giant company like GoDaddy to look at, and say, “Well, maybe we should do that too.” Sometimes I wonder if Five for the Future should be something that is aspirational to individuals, and there’s maybe a different system of accountability for larger companies and organizations, because I think what we owe to WordPress is different. As a woman who has worked from home since 2016, I feel very attached to, and fond of this next episode. It’s Nyasha Green and Sammi Sim, Is Work From Home A Trap for Women. It’s an extremely thoughtful and introspective episode about some of the emotional aspects of being a woman in tech in 2022. This episode helped me understand a lot about how working from home benefits me, and makes my life harder. So here’s a bit of Nyasha and Sammi sharing their thoughts about how culture affects women and their work. Sammi Sim: I think a lot of how I feel and what I do is because of my upbringing. Some people may relate, but for me, culturally, the expectations started at an early age. I think we were always just taught that we always needed to tend to household chores, cooking, cleaning, while still always taking care of everyone around us. It becomes overwhelming, because it just seems like it’s out of habit, you can’t help but to naturally feel this way. Nyasha Green: Yeah, I definitely understand that. Just a little bit about me, I was raised in… I still live in the Southern United States, so the culture here is that women do household chores, women take care of children, some women don’t work, but in this day and age, especially financially, you’re expected to do all of that and your household chores and taking care of people, and things like that. And ever since I was a child, it really did seem like a trap for me, watching my mother work 12-hour shifts at a factory, and still having to cook, bathe us, do our hair, watching my grandmother, or listening to stories of her be a full-time housekeeper while raising nine children, especially when my grandfather passed away, it just always seemed like a, “No, I don’t think I can do that.” To me. How much of your culture do you think played into that? Sammi Sim: I think a lot of it. Even now as an adult, I think those expectations still sit very high, especially from the men in my family. I still get up, and make sure I get my kids ready, bring them to school, and I come home and I do a little bit of chores. I log into work, I’m working, and then I still have to make sure I have dinner. It’s almost like it’s expected of me, and if I wasn’t doing it, I’m not doing what I need to do as a mother, as a wife. Allie Nimmons: There are things I know a lot about when it comes to WordPress, and there are things that go right over my head. When it comes to economics, market share, business, all those sorts of enterprise level, long-term businessy focused topics, I struggle. But thankfully, because we share the load here at Press the Issue, there are other people, aside from me, ready and available to talk about these things with a level of expertise. In this episode, Rob and Brian team up again to discuss whether market share in WordPress really matters. Here’s a bit of that episode. Rob Howard: It’s really hard, so if you look at Shopify, they were zooming during the pandemic, everybody thought that they were the future. And in many ways, that’s true, they did have a ton of success, they still have grown a lot, but if you look at their stock price, because their growth has slowed down, everyone started selling their stock. So even if they have the correct mindset, they’re still constrained by this need to grow fast so investors buy your stuff. So I think that is just one of the downsides of being a public company. Certainly WordPress benefits from, number one, not having too many public companies who were stuck in that quarterly mindset. Allie Nimmons: One of the main goals when we started this podcast was to take a wide sweeping view of WordPress topics in more highly produced editorial style episodes, as opposed to the more common conversational style. This episode was the first one that we did in that style, and it’s probably the episode that I’m personally most proud of. The editing by Monet Davenport and Teron Bullock absolutely shines in this episode, and I’m able to explore a seriously important topic with other members of the community. Here’s veteran WordPress developer and event organizer, David Bisset, sharing his perspective on how the pandemic affected WordPress events, and what we can learn from that experience. Allie Nimmons: So how did the move to virtual affect people’s relationship with creating and using WordPress software? David Bisset: I had someone tell me that, “Thanks to seeing people from Taiwan on the meetup.” And the people from Taiwan giving comments that they would… These people, it helped them appreciate that the plug-in they were developing or writing, they maybe should add some additional translations or features to make it easier to use, just because they heard other WordPress people on the meet-up from another country. Allie Nimmons: What kinds of effects, in terms of challenges, came to organizing within the pandemic experience? David Bisset: So while there is a drop-off on our meet-ups, there’s always the same core people that you see every time, some of them only have one or two hours to spare a month just to be there sitting and listening. As a volunteer and an organizer, I don’t think we should ever take that for granted. That doesn’t mean there weren’t any challenges, however, I would probably say that virtual meet-ups there, there’s a struggle sometimes some of the instructional experience, some tutorials and walkthroughs from speakers could be better in-person. But on a positive note, thanks to the virtual meet-ups, organizers are able to secure speakers that specialize in skills. So the person that wrote this plug-in, or the person that’s worked on WordPress core, they can virtually speak to the meet-up. Allie Nimmons: Thank you so much for listening with me. Please let us know on Twitter what your favorite episode of Press the Issue was this year, what kind of topics and issues you’d like us to explore next year, and we’ll see you in 2023. Monet Davenport: Thank you for listening to this episode. Press the Issue is a production of MasterWP, produced by Allie Nimmons, hosted, edited, and musically supervised by Monet Davenport, and mixed and mastered by Teron Bullock. Please visit masterwp.com/presstheissue to find more episodes. Subscribe to our newsletter for more WordPress news at masterwp.com. The post 2022 Highlight Show appeared first on MasterWP.

The pandemic ushered in a new era of remote work. And there was a huge disparity between how different companies adapted to the change. In this episode, Rob and Topher dive into their experiences with all types of in person hybrid and remote office settings. they discuss the best settings for managing remote teams, how the sudden shift to remote work has affect how we live, and if we should push for an all-remote future.Episode TranscriptMonet Davenport: Welcome to Press the Issue, a podcast for MasterWP, your source for industry insights for WordPress professionals. Get show notes, transcripts, and more information about the show@masterwp.com/presstheissue. Press The Issue by MasterWP is sponsored by LearnDash. Your expertise makes you money doing what you do, now let it make you money teaching what you do. To create a course with LearnDash, visit LearnDash.com. Our mission at MasterWP is to bring new voices into WordPress and tech every day. The new MasterWP Workshop series does just that. Our new live and recorded workshops on everything from code to design to business, turn WordPress fans into WordPress experts, find the workshop for you @workshops.masterwp.com. Use the code podcast10 for a 10% discount. Monet Davenport: The pandemic ushered in a new era of remote work. And there was a huge disparity between how different companies adapted to the change. In this episode, Rob and Topher dive into their experiences with all types of in person hybrid and remote office settings. they discuss the best settings for managing remote teams, how the sudden shift to remote work has affect how we live, and if we should push for an all-remote future. Topher DeRosia: Hey, Rob. Rob Howard: Hey, Topher. How’s it going? Topher DeRosia: It’s going great. Today we’re going to talk about the future of remote work, and I have some really good questions for you to kick it right off with. Rob Howard: Excellent. We have been doing remote work for a long time, so hopefully I’ll have some good answers for you. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, let me ask you that. I’ve been doing it for 12 years now, almost 13. How long have you been remote? Rob Howard: So I started freelancing from a home office in 2005, so it’s been a long time. It’s been basically my whole career. I had very few office type jobs early on, so I’ve always by nature enjoyed the home office life, and I’ve even had chances to do the big office thing and chosen not to over the years with different business partnerships and stuff like that. I’ve always liked it, and of course, the world changed very rapidly a couple years ago and work from home became a thing that everybody was doing, whether they were experienced or not, or whether they liked it or not. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. I did about 13 years at a desk in an office at some point in my career. Rob Howard: Nice. Topher DeRosia: So we all know COVID pushed many into remote work abruptly, and many people individually are finding it to be a better work style. They’re like, “This is better than me at the office.” But I know some corporations are saying now we need to get everybody, get everybody back in the office. What would make a company choose that? Why would they choose not to keep their people remote if they already are because of COVID? Rob Howard: So I think there are some benefits obviously, to the company, and I think there are some drawbacks, especially if you are just not used to managing people who are not physically in front of you. So I think that’s the majority of where CEOs and other leaders are saying, “Hey, I don’t feel like we’re as productive. We got to get back to in-person.” I think what they’re saying in large part is, “I can’t tell what you’re doing and it’s harder to manage this group of people because we’re not in the same room together.” For me, I’ve always been operating and working that way, so it wasn’t really a change. I can get in their heads and be like, “Yeah, that would be hard.” But that was not a change for us, so in a way, the companies who were already remote actually ended up being light years ahead in terms of their management skills because there is a very different management style and set of behaviors and mindsets that you need to manage people who are not in the same room or even in the same city as you. And then of course, we have companies that manage remote workers who are all over the world in Asia and South America, and Europe and North America. So there’s a lot of different skills and techniques for that. I think the first people I heard saying it were the JP Morgan, Wall Street folks who were like, “We got to get back into the office and crush it with our investment banking work, and that has to be done in person.” It reminds me of the movies where everybody is in a room and they’re screaming on their phones and they’re selling stocks, and it’s a mad house atmosphere. And then you also hear it from Silicon Valley. Twitter and Elon Musk tried to bring people back, then they abandoned that idea, but they’re certainly not the only ones who are doing that. And I think that there definitely has been a push to get workers back in the office who are doing these, quote unquote, knowledge work, office work type jobs. And I think it’s mostly a question of tradition and surveillance. That would be the two big things that I think are pushing people. They won’t say that out loud. They’ll say, “Oh, we’re more productive in the office,” but you ask them for data to support that, and that data is minimal if nonexistent. But I think the idea that a manager should know basically what you’re doing or be able to look at you all the time and check on you is definitely a part of that, and I think that’s an old school idea that obviously, isn’t necessary and isn’t really even good for a lot of employees and a lot of managers, but that’s how people are used to operating so they’re eager to get back to that. There’s also challenges just around geographical pay structures as well, which I think companies are quietly struggling with. So this question of, “Okay, If we’re in San Francisco and I hire you, you’re going to get paid an outsize salary because of the nature of the housing market and the cost of living in that particular city.” So if you look at these companies that are based in… [inaudible 00:05:07] Topher DeRosia: And then you move to Oklahoma. Rob Howard: Yeah. If these companies are based in California, they’re often pegging pretty high salary numbers because they are assuming that that employee needs to rent or buy home in that area. They’re going to be exposed to all these higher cost of living things. But like you said, you moved to Boise, you moved to Oklahoma, and all of a sudden you might have been getting paid $350,000 at Google, but maybe 50% of that was really a San Francisco location bonus or increase. So obviously, the companies are struggling to figure out… It’s hard to give somebody a pay decrease when they move. That’s just not good for morale. But they’re also saying, “Well, if we could hire people anywhere, why are we paying exorbitant rates, because based on this peg to this general location?” Topher DeRosia: Why do we even have an office in California in San Francisco? Rob Howard: Exactly. So obviously, there’s several ways you can go from there, but one of the ways you can go is, “Okay, everybody just has to show up in San Francisco.” And that’s obviously not the only city, but it’s certainly the biggest spot in the tech world where this is happening. But I think you could say the exact same thing about Wall Street and people living within commuting distance of Manhattan and stuff like that. Topher DeRosia: One of my previous jobs was at a company called Big Commerce, and they were an everybody in the office place. I was remote, but out of 800 employees, less than 1% were remote. It was really, really rare. And I would go to the office maybe quarterly and spend a week, and I experienced some people that actually thrive in the office environment. They really did well talking to people face-to face, just get up, walk down the hall, ask them a question, go back to your desk, that sort of thing. And so I can see where there’s room for not remote work, but then again, there are people like me. So then when COVID hit, they all split up. Of course, everybody went home. And now that it’s over, some people are going back to the office, but certainly not all. Way more than 1% are staying at home now, because for those people it works better to stay home. Rob Howard: I think it’s also a different skill set. So the skill set you described, managing by walking around, it was actually innovative in the ’50s and ’60s, this idea of we should be a community of employees. That’s something that emerged in Silicon Valley in the Hewlett Packard days many decades ago. And that style is not incorrect, but it is a completely different skill set from what we do, which is managing a remote team. And there’s different tools, there’s different techniques and strategies. One of the things that I do is even with 20 or so employees, I do a lot of one-to-ones with every employee. And that is a component of a remote management strategy that I think works to get the best parts of the management by walking around system without requiring everybody to be in the same place. And there’s other stuff like that too. And we’ve even seen just being good at using Slack and other asynchronous tools is a skill set, and we’ll often start working with a client or another organization, and we’ll be like, “Oh my gosh, nobody here at this other organization knows what they’re doing with these tools.” And you actually see people who get frustrated by asynchronous communication. So they haven’t developed that skill set of communicating effectively via asynch yet, and they’re asking, “Hey, can we just hop in a quick call, or whatever?” And that’s where you get friction between a team that’s all in on remote work and a team that’s still learning. That being said, I think for me, the benefits outweigh the negatives by a lot. And I think the biggest benefits really flow to the people who don’t want that 60 plus hour per week work week structure. So if you have young kids, or if you just have a life that it does not include 60 to 80 hours of office time per week and two hour commutes back and forth into the city, there’s 100 reasons that you might not want that lifestyle. And what remote work does is opens up the opportunity to achieve these higher value career goals or aspirations without necessarily having that requirement to do the brutal commute and the brutal hours in the office, and spend time away from your loved ones, or ignore your physical and mental health in exchange for more time in the office and you’re sleeping under the desk and stuff. That’s a very common archetype in the Wall Street and Silicon Valley lifestyles, pre-COVID. I think if you want to do that, more power to you, but I never want to do that regardless of my… When I was 23 and single, I didn’t want to do that, and now that I have a kid, I don’t want to do that. And it’s like that was never my thing, so I definitely cannot identify with that as a badge of honor. But some people do think that is a power move to work in that way, so they’re certainly welcome to do that, but I think the increased prevalence of remote work opens up more career opportunities for people who don’t want to be, what I would describe as unnecessarily, performatively intense workers. You want to do good work, but you want to also have a life. And I think working from a home office is conducive to that. Being able to move to a different city that is a better fit for you. It’s not just cost of living, it’s also, “Hey, I actually want to live near my aging parents, and they can’t live in San Francisco. It’s insanely prohibitively expensive, but maybe I moved to the Denver suburbs or I move to New Mexico, or Phoenix or something, and now I have different and better family and social connections in those places.” Obviously, there’s a lot to unpack there, but I would definitely say that I think the CEOs of the Big Wall Street and Silicon Valley companies probably were overly optimistic about getting people to come back because there’s just a lot of benefits to not having to commute and not having to be physically in a certain chair, in a certain office building. Even this morning we’re recording this, it’s 10:00 AM my time, and I just finished dropping my son off at school and running errands for an extra hour this morning. That would’ve been impossible if we both had to meet up at a certain office in Denver instead of being in our respective home offices. Topher DeRosia: I do have to say, as a developer, some of the most powerful programming I’ve ever done was paired programming, sitting elbow to elbow with another developer and looking at the code together, and there’s a big draw there, but the people I know who do it full time also want to work remote. And so there’s been a bunch of progress made in the last few years for remote paired programming where you don’t have to sit and share a screen. And that’s really exciting. That feeds right into part of the future of remote work. Rob Howard: Yeah, that’s awesome. Topher DeRosia: I think that’s going to be a huge thing when we work that out. Rob Howard: And that’s a good example of the thing where that is clearly a solvable problem like, “Hey, I want to work with Topher to write some code, but we are in different cities.” Obviously, you can figure it out. Using basically the same technology we’re using to do this podcast right now, you could do pair programming or something similar to it. So that’s the kind of thing where I think earlier in the pandemic, there were a number of people who were just… They would throw their hands up and be like, “Oh, we’re never going to be able to collaborate again.” But I don’t think that’s panned out in reality. I actually think that thinking about our team and the other remote companies that I know, we’re doing a pretty good job. We’re still creating cool stuff. I really don’t think that the myth of the spark of creativity that can only happen in a room together has actually been demonstrated to be real over the last few years. And obviously, I can’t prove that an invention that would’ve happened failed to happen. That’s a falsifiable statement. But I haven’t noticed in the teams that we’ve worked with that are, let’s say above average in terms of how good their remote work. They seem to be enjoying life more and collaborating just as much as they would’ve in an office, in my view at least. Topher DeRosia: All right. So my next question, we both know many companies that do remote only, and it’s great for them and us, but is it so inherently better that we should work to change society to work that way, to make companies who are perfectly happy in office switch? Do we have any responsibility there? And the specific example I’m thinking of is if everybody worked from home, there’d be a ton less gas burned. Rob Howard: True. Topher DeRosia: You know what I mean? Rob Howard: Yeah. Topher DeRosia: That would be great for the environment. Rob Howard: Yeah, that’s definitely true. And I also think it would change the way that we build housing and the way that we choose where we live, which could have positive or negative effects environmentally, but I think certainly, a world with less gas burning vehicles would be a better place in the long term. I bought an electric car recently so I’m super pumped about never using gas. Obviously, there’s different side effects, but I think it’s overall a better thing. I think it certainly would be better in some obvious ways, but I’m also hesitant to say that there’s no weird externality that we’re not thinking of that would offset that. But I think for me, I’m pretty hesitant to try to externally force other companies to do something from a societal standpoint. But I think what we can do is say, “Let’s compete and see who gets better employees,” and it makes recruiting easier and it creates better staff and ultimately, creates a stronger company. And I think what we’re going to see is the companies that have flexibility are going to attract, for lack of a better word, better employees and better talent because of that, in most situations. And I think we’re going to see them thrive in different ways than the companies that are, quote unquote, stuck in the workplace. And obviously, that being said, even the people who can work from office jobs are still a minority of the total working populations, so there’s still always going to be commuting, there’s still always going to be movement of people within cities and suburbs, and exurbs and everything. But I think particularly, for the reasons that I mentioned about, just increasing flexibility also tends to increase diversity within an organization and allow people who might otherwise get burned out of a high intensity office workplace to stay and thrive, and build great careers. To me, that’s really the biggest thing. I think the questions about housing, and traffic and commuting, there are so many different complexities to that. I don’t think remote work is necessarily a cure all for those things. However, I do think that it is a cure for a lot of the burnout problems and a lot of the sort of… I’m not sure exactly what the word is, but if you think about who is… There’s this huge gap where people start careers in their 20s and 30s, and then eventually, there ends up being a tremendous gap between the earnings and career trajectory of the people who work 60 to 80 hours per week versus the people who work 30 to 40 hours per week. And you see that in women who take time off after having children. You see that in people who just opt out of the high intensity Wall Street style work structure. And what you end up with is a divergence that is not simply a linear arithmetic of, “I work more hours and I get paid more,” but it’s in fact, that people in many industries tend to progress to higher levels of the corporate ladder because they are workaholics essentially. So if we can remove the workaholic advantage, I think that actually is better for everybody because ultimately, when you hear somebody talk about, “Oh hey, I slept at the office last night and whatever,” they always try to frame it as, “Because I’m so dedicated and I’m like, “I want to teach people that you can really be devoted to the mission.” And I’m like, “What is your mission? You guys build an app where you can type things on the internet. This is not a life altering experience.” It’s one thing if you’re a medic on the front lines of some really horrible situation where people genuinely need their lives saved, but there is no job where you’re moving stock money or you’re moving code that is worth that in my view. There’s a lot of delusional statements and behavior around that, and I would love to see the of weird facade of workaholism just start to break down. And those folks who are in that weird world, either are exposed for just BSing the people around them, or maybe they choose a different and healthier lifestyle. I think that’d be better for everybody. So that’s more of a lifestyle change and a culture change than it is a change to the physical world, but obviously those things all interrelate with one another. Topher DeRosia: All right. One last question, pull out the crystal ball. It looks like COVID launched remote work ahead a big step. We were forced into it. Can you think of anything else, societal, financial, business that would give it another shove? Can we advance without thousands of people dying? Rob Howard: Hopefully, we’ll never have anything like that happen again. And I will also say that as you were saying that, it also strikes me that, while I think it worked really well for office work, I also think it worked really poorly for school, for kids, for example. A lot of kids just weren’t into it, didn’t get what they could have gotten had there’d been no pandemic and they’d been in normal school situations. I think that’s also an inherent flaw in the whole idea of move the world to Zoom. That being said, I think where we’ve ended up is there’s a bunch of companies now, Zoom being one of them and many others, Slack being another that we talked about earlier, but there’s dozens of these companies now that really are incentivized to make remote work better. I forget what the exact numbers were, but pre-pandemic, it was in the low single digit percentages, so maybe 2% of people worked from home pre pandemic, and now it’s like 20 to 30 or something like that. Still not anywhere close to everybody, but it’s a lot. And certainly, if you’re in a social circle where most people are office workers, most of your friends probably work from home. So I think that we are past the inflection point in growth where it probably will continue to spread and grow, and I think for the reason that we talked about. If you’re applying for jobs and one is remote and the other forces you to come into a building in Chicago every day, which one are you going to choose? People have even said that they’re willing to pay cuts to work remotely. Most people don’t explicitly want to take a pay cut, but if for example, you’re choosing between two options, the premium value of a remote situation is significant. The Chicago office workplace will have to pay you a lot more to make that worth your while. So I think that just competitive nature of different firms. Trying different things, getting better at different techniques will ultimately show that, at least for some industries and some types of jobs, and some types of work, you can do remote and be equally as good if not better. And it generally is going to be cheaper for the company in a lot of ways, less real estate costs. And those are clearly not offset by the cost of Zoom, which is much less than the cost of a nice office building. And just more access to high quality workers who are going to be happier at the company because of the remote nature. That being said, there’s also a ceiling because there really are a bunch of jobs that require a physical presence, so you’re never going to get to a place where you have 75% of people working from home because that would just be essentially a physical impossibility for a big percentage of jobs. Everything from doctors to people who work at restaurants and stores. It’s all across the income spectrum, all across the education spectrum. There are always going to be physical, in-person jobs, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think I enjoy interacting with people in person, but also because we do web development, we are fortunate to be able to have a team that is spread around North America as opposed to just being in Denver, for example. And I think that that gives us more opportunities. It gives us the ability to improve the lives of more employees, and their families and their loved ones. I think it’s great for us. Obviously, if you’re in a position where you’re thinking about, “Should my staff be remote or not,” I would say, “Try it and get good at it, but also recognize that there are a lot of different skill sets at play that you might not have needed to get good at in a physical office space.” Topher DeRosia: I agree with you about all that stuff. None of that sounds quite to me like the lunge that COVID was. It’s more reasonable growth through experience. Rob Howard: I agree, and I think what’s going to change is that because we are now growing from a higher starting point… Growing 1% per year if you’re starting at 20% is a big difference than growing 1% per year if you’re starting from 1%. So I think because we have critical mass now, it will seem like there is more growth even if the rate doesn’t really change. But we’re also going to bump into that ceiling of there’s just only so many jobs that can be converted. That being said, I think a good example of one that has changed a lot is real estate. So when I bought my first house 12 years ago, we had to go to a physical place and sign a bunch of paper, and it took three hours, and it was boring and weird. But now it’s all online. We refinanced our mortgage during COVID and we did it all online. Somebody came to our house wearing a mask and notarized two documents and left. And it was like, “This no longer needs to be an in-person thing.” And there are people who are buying houses site unseen and filling out all the paperwork on the internet now. And obviously, I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t have to. I’d rather go kick the tires of the house physically. But all of that administrative stuff that really was done with reams of paper in offices even a few years ago, clearly doesn’t require that anymore. That’s a good example of one of those jobs where it was convertible, even though nobody was really doing it online before the pandemic, they rapidly figured it out. I think there is space for that kind of stuff, and online ordering from stores is a similar idea, but at the same time there’s a lot of jobs where people need or want to be physically in a place, so that’s not going to go away. And ultimately, you can’t remotify every single job. And I don’t think that’ll good for us to do that. But we are really lucky to be in an industry where a lot of people are remote and it’s widely accepted. And I would even say that being remote already when the pandemic started was a big benefit for us because there was way less learning curve. And since everyone was suddenly remote, there was nobody competing with me who had the fancy downtown office because that was irrelevant. So weirdly, it actually made the companies that were already remote seem more prestigious, whereas in the past there was definitely this vibe of like, “Well, where’s your office? Oh, you don’t have one? That’s weird.” I would definitely get that from clients from time to time, and now we never get that because everybody thinks it’s cool that we’re remote and wants to know how we do it. So that that’s been a big change, but ultimately, we just got lucky that we were positioned for something that suddenly happened. And it wasn’t anything that we predicted. It was just like, Hey, this is how we like to do it, and then suddenly everyone was doing it that way. Topher DeRosia: I thought through that question myself and reflected back on that the thing we talked about with there’s less gas burned the more people were from home. And it occurred to me that the government could offer tax incentives to companies to say, “Hey, have more people stay at home in order to reduce carbon burn.” And I don’t know if that’ll ever happen. I’m not enough of an economist to know if it’s even a good idea sort of thing abruptly change it, I think. Rob Howard: And where that stuff gets tricky is the city wants people to buy lunch in the city. So they actually, in some ways, benefit from the presence of office workers, because now you’ve got sales tax, now you’ve got property taxes on those cafes and stuff like that. So it’s a tricky balance between, and this is true of all environmental and transportation and housing stuff. There’s this tricky balance between, “We make money off of action taking place in the city through taxes, but we also want less congestion and want less pollution.” But I agree with you. There’s definitely something there. And I think remote work definitely has… I actually don’t know if it’s actually changed driving a traffic patterns in a positive direction, but there’s certainly an opportunity there to think about what are those side effects that seem not directly related, but actually the number of people going to an office every day makes a big difference towards those different numbers. Topher DeRosia: Yeah. Well, that’s all the questions I had you. Rob Howard: Excellent. Topher DeRosia: You have any [inaudible 00:30:12] out there? Rob Howard: We’ll keep working remotely for now until we find a better way to do things. And it is always a pleasure to talk to you, and I look forward to the next time. Topher DeRosia: Yeah, me too. See you. 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