FounderQuest
FounderQuest
FounderQuest Predicts The Future Of Work
Show Links:
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Full Transcription:
Josh : Speaking of remote controls, I told you about the ridiculous garage door I put on my home gym.
Ben: I am jealous of your garage door.
Starr: Wait, You did? I never knew this.
Josh : I did. Yeah.
Starr: When was this?
Josh : Let's see. Well, the whole thing took a while to install, but yeah, I finally gave, it was finally completed this week. But it's been in for a while.
Starr: Okay.
Josh : So it's this like, it's like one of those full, they call it a full view, but it's like, it's all glass for the most part. Like it's framed like glass panels with a metal frame.
Starr: Oh nice. So you can look outside.
Josh : Well, it's the glass, it's like opaque, like it's fogged or whatever. So you can't actually see through it. But it lets a lot of light in. So the light is awesome. It's the brightest room in my house now, I think, from the natural light. So, I might actually just move my office in there and then I just, never have to leave. But, so I got the garage door opener that goes with this system. It's like one of the top of the line. Residential ones, anyway. It's a LiftMaster and it has wifi built into it.
Ben: Oh yeah. I have one of those too. So awesome.
Josh : So do you have the... What did they call it?
Ben: MyQ?
Josh : Like the garage hub,though?
Ben: Yes.
Josh : It goes with?
Ben: Yes.
Josh : Okay, so you can open your garage door with Siri.
Ben: Yeah. So awesome.
Starr: So you all know garage doors opener, garage door openers don't have a stellar record of security?
Josh : Security. Yeah, I do.
Starr: At least the old style garage door openers, basically, it was like a four digit code. Like they transmitted like a four digit code so somebody built a device that just transmitted all the four digit codes and so you could just walk down the street and open everybody's garage doors.
Josh : Yeah. And I've known people who've done, I never, I never did that, but I always wanted to. I never got my hands on one.
Starr: I'm sure that since it's got wifi you can SSH in and use a private key on there.
Josh : Right.
Starr: Use a key pair for authentication.
Josh : Just transmits a public key for authentication.
Starr: Yeah, no, I mean, your little remote would transmit the public key and then the hub would like check it against the private key.
Josh : Yeah. Well I'm sure Apple does something like that.
Starr: Oh, probably. Yeah.
Starr: I mean, it's Apple though. Nobody tries to break into Apple products cause they're just too cool.
Josh : Yeah. Yeah. I mean if windows had a garage hub, I'd be extremely worried. Microsoft, Microsoft garage. But yeah, it's cool. And then, whenever it opens, I also get note of it. Cause through HomeKit, I guess. This is my first HomeKit device. So, I am officially a connected house, which I swore I would never do. But, I'm probably going to do more now.
Ben: Of course, you are.
Josh : Cause now I want to control my front lights. So that they're, put them on a timer or something.
Ben: Oh yeah.
Starr: Is HomeKit like the Apple home automation thing?
Ben: Yep.
Josh : It is. Yeah. So it's all integrated in a MacOS and iOS. And so, when my door, when the garage, if anyone opens the garage door at any time, I'll get a notification. The garage door just opened like on my computer.
Starr: And then you'll see the garage door open.
Josh : Or I'll be in there. But like if the kids open it. Yeah. But if my office is in there, I'll just see it.
Starr: So, what are we talking about today? We were talking about maybe doing a sort of future of work thing where we're talking about remote working and all that. But then, also, Josh suggested that we, since we have a new job opening and we're a remote company, you could say that Honeybadger is the future of work. Do you think that's too bold?
Ben: No, that's right on.
Starr: That's just bold enough. Okay, we are the future of work and we have a new job position. So I think we're going to use that as like a lens to discuss the future of work. Is that correct?
Starr: Yeah, that sounds good. And I don't even know. Yeah, I really don't think it's that bold, because we're one of the companies that are, I think, pushing the boundaries here.
Starr: Okay. That's good. That's good. Listeners can't see this, but everyone's looking at me like I'm so full of crap. Right now.
Ben: Maybe we need to ditch the whole remote thing though. We should all work from Josh's garage.
Starr: That's a good idea.
Josh : We're going to going to do the central office again. Yeah.
Ben: In your garage?
Starr: No, but it's in a garage. Like garages are where things happen. Garage is where innovation happens.
Josh : The future of work is my garage, that's what we're saying, right?
Ben: Yeah, exactly.
Starr: Exactly.
Starr: I mean think of all the great companies that were started out of garages. Amazon, Tesla, Hewlett Packard, Apple.
Ben: HP.
Starr: HP?
Ben: Yeah.
Starr: Like those are companies that are actually started out of garages though. I was trying to think of the most ridiculous one.
Josh : We didn't start in the garage, but I'm obviously moving that direction so it might, it might not be the future, but it's my future.
Ben: Nice.
Starr: Yes. The thing I don't like about garages is like the sloped floors. This is, we just covered the real, the hot issues at FounderQuest.
Ben: But that is one of the issues of remote work, right? Is finding a nice place to work. Right? We talked about this before, like how we each have different situations. Starr's backyard office because his house is a little cramped. I totally fled my house and I'm subleasing an office and Josh is now going to make an office out of his gym.
Josh : And also, apparently I'm like putting desks in every room. I'm basically putting them everywhere. I can't just, cause I like to move around. So-
Ben: And that's one thing that we've offered with our new jobs. When we've published jobs in the past and this was, as well, as we've always offered to new employees that we will pay for a coworking space if they don't have a suitable place to work.
Starr: Wait, we do that?
Ben: We do that. Yeah.
Starr: Has anybody taken us up on that?
Ben: Actually, Kevin did for a little while.
Starr: Okay.
Ben: Because he was getting a little stir crazy at his house. Because he, previous to working for us, was not working from home. He was working in a traditional employer office kind of situation. And he discovered, after a while, that he was feeling lonely and stuff, just being there. And so, he decided to try out his nearest co-located, coworking space. And it was working fine until some sales guy moved in to the desk next to him. And was like, on the phone 24/7.
Starr: Oh, is that what happened?
Ben: Yeah, that's what happened.
Starr: We said that's the future of work? That doesn't sound very nice.
Ben: So, Kevin made some adjustments and found ways to get that stimulation that he needed. And then now he's back at his house and he's happy.
Starr: So should we talk a little bit about what the job opening is? Like, what are some of the reason that we have a job opening and what we're kind of looking for? Maybe some of the history around it.
Josh : Yeah. So the job opening. The last developer we hired was Kevin. And he was kind of like, that job was a little bit more, I think, general. Just kind of, basically, add extra development to the capabilities to the team. Lots of backend, like Ruby and full stack stuff because we have a Rails app and most of our stuff is built in Ruby.
Starr: I just wanted to say that Kevin's done an amazing job at that, by the way. In case, you're listening, Kevin, you've done an amazing job.
Josh : We are extremely happy with Kevin.
Starr: Like dark mode. Oh my gosh. I never knew I wanted it until I had it.
Josh : If we could get another Kevin here, that would be great. So yeah, the only shift with this position is that there is, we are looking for someone who likes JavaScript a lot. Which is, JavaScript, not everyone loves JavaScript, but some people really love it. Some people dislike it extremely. Extremely dislike it. But we have a lot of open source JavaScript projects that we manage. And currently, I am pretty much the sole maintainer of these projects. In addition to a lot of other open source projects in different languages. So, there's, kind of like, a polyglot aspect to this job. So basically, we're looking for someone to come on and help me reduce some of my workload and take on some of these open source maintainer type positions and push forward our open source libraries to make improvements and fix bugs and interact with the community and all that sort of stuff that comes along with that.
Ben: Yeah. Right now our Ruby library is the best of our client libraries. And then, from there, we have a variety of levels of support and features in the various libraries. I think, bringing them all up to par is one of the early tasks for this job. And then, of course there's going to be plenty of development work to go forward, right? So, even if all of those things were done, which never will be, we still have plenty of backend stuff to do. So, we're still looking for people that enjoy being in a variety of languages and especially doing Ruby as well.
Josh : Yeah. And I think, that's the thing, I think we've talked about that. We want everyone, I'm pretty sure we want everyone to have, somewhat of a full stack background still. Just because, a small team, this will be what? Number six, in total, including us founders. So obviously, we don't have enough people for each of us to completely specialize in one very narrow thing. But we try to have a couple core areas where that's like our strongest route. Say, Ruby and JavaScript. And then we can, as time permits, be able to have a broader knowledge of other things that we have in our toolkit.
Ben: I think that the polyglot thing is really important to bring out. Because we do have, as you said, libraries and a variety of languages. Like, this person should be expecting to say, "Oh, can you take a look at this Elixir stuff?" And we don't expect an Elixir pro, necessarily. But someone whose like, "Oh yeah, I'd be happy to take a look at that and figure that out."
Starr: So, here's the question for you. Is there anybody out there who can meet all these requirements?
Ben: No.
Josh : Yeah. No.
Starr: It sounds like a lot.
Josh : Yeah, it is a lot. And I was going to say, one of the cool things, like I'm not getting rid of this job or you know, I'm not trying to look, I'm not looking for someone just to take. So I can get rid of my job. I have five jobs I'm doing. And I can't go on like this. But, one of the really cool things, when I was first starting this, getting into managing all of this stuff. Because I didn't know any of this stuff. I was pretty much, JavaScript and Ruby I had done. Before Honeybadge, I was mostly PHP freelancing and couple of years, like, two or three years of Ruby and Rails, I think.
Josh : So when I got into, I didn't know like anything about Elixir, Python, Node, Go, Java, the list goes on. But I got to learn that stuff. And I think, what we're saying is we're, I think, one of the, if nothing else, this person needs to be interested in learning new things and not necessarily becoming an expert in all of them. But learning and exploring the landscape and being able to think and understand those things properly in their proper context. So yeah, I don't know. One of my fondest memories of, Honeybadger open source, when I got to, we wanted to support Go and Go was kind of a new thing. It was kind of hot. Everyone is talking about it. I didn't know any anything about it, but just because we wanted to support it, it fell on me to go learn the language and then build the integration library to report errors to Honeybadger. But that's what I did and it was a lot of fun.
Starr: Yeah. So, it sounds like, coming in, this person would be primarily, sort of taking on JavaScript. And start taking the JavaScript, like client library stuff off of your plate, Josh. And maybe, some backend stuff that goes with that. And then, sort of as time goes on, as it makes sense and stuff, they might branch out into other things. Just sort of depending on the circumstances. Does that sound about right?
Josh : Yeah, it's funny. Out of all the, because a lot of these, we've got, I don't know, like 10 or so major open source client packages for reporting areas of Honeybadger in different various languages. And out of all of them, they have, aside from Ruby, they have pretty much, feature parity and they're relatively stable. But it seems like JavaScript, it's one of those languages. But it seems to be the majority of the work is maintaining it. And also, there's a lot more we want to do with JavaScript just because it's such a large ecosystem. It's so popular. And there's just a lot more we could do and I really want to do a lot more with it and I just don't have the time.
Josh : So that's part of the reason, I think, that this is going to have like a heavier JavaScript focus. Especially, in the beginning. And specifically, I think, our Honeybadger JS is our client side JavaScript integration for error reporting. And we have plugins that you can plug it into your React app or a view or whatever. But there's a lot more work we can do on that to bring all of that up to speed and keep pace with the JavaScript community. Which is constantly changing, so we want to stay on the edge.
Starr: Maybe that's a good point. It's like, we kind of need a ringer because keeping up with the JavaScript is kind of exhausting. There's always new frameworks coming out. There's always new ways of doing things and you know that the language itself is not a normal fricking language where you have a single version of it running and you can trust that that version will behave in the same way across multiple computers. There's 20 different implementations of it running in people's cars and crap. It's insane.
Josh : Yeah. I don't think I have cars in the CI built yet for cross browser testing. But maybe, I should get, if you all want, I will buy a Model 3 just so I can build Honeybadger in it. Just to make sure.
Ben: I have to interject at this point for legal and compliance reasons that Honeybadger is not warranted for use in vehicles or aircraft or marine vehicles. So, yes please.
Starr: Is that in our insurance? That's on our liability insurance.
Josh : I think it's also, it's probably like a compliance, a requirement too, right? Yeah.
Ben: Yes. Our software is not to be used in life threatening situations.
Josh : Yeah.
Starr: Yeah. Please don't, we don't want that money.
Ben: I mean we write good stuff but come on, give us a break. But yeah, I think back to the point of no person is going to know everything that we would like that person to know. Of course, when you write a job description, you write the wishlist. Right? But I think, that one of the key attributes that we look for in any person who's interested in HoneyBadger would be someone who's excited to learn. Right? So, it doesn't matter as much what you know as it does, what's you're willing to learn. And how much energy you're willing to put into that.
Josh : Yeah, totally.
Starr: With the caveat of, you have to know something already.
Ben: Yes. That's helpful.
Josh : Yeah. We're looking for your senior level in something. I was going to give the example of, we are a Rails shop, we're Rails developers and that's what our stuff is built at, built in. But if a senior level Laravel developer was really interested in this position for instance, and they, with the caveat that they were also interested in learning Rails. Laravel to Rails is, I mean that's a no brainer transition. They're very similar systems. You can totally learn Rails if you're expert in Laravel.
Starr: But they are also very good at JavaScript.
Josh : But they're also very good at JavaScript.
Starr: And Cobol.
Ben: But hey, we don't need to be an expert in Linux administration.
Starr: No, just 8086.
Josh : Right? Yeah. So?
Starr: So, I think now that we've scared everybody off. So, there's some good things about working for us, right?
Ben: Well, there are some good things.
Starr: These are all good things. I mean learning is great.
Ben: But there is something that we should mention. Another, maybe, potentially scary thing, but potentially good thing, I guess it depends on your personality. One thing that Kevin brought out, as we talked to him, as we started the process of this new hire. We asked Kevin, some thoughts that he has since he was the last person to be hired at Honeybadger. And one of the points that he made was that he was surprised just how independent we are in our work habits here at Honeybadger. He, like a lot of developers, were used to working on a team, that you go into the office and you talk to your coworkers about whatever, right? And as you have issues with your projects you might lean over and ask somebody a question and we don't do that at Honeybadger. For the most part, like we are very independent in our work. We just pick a task and we go and do that task until it's done, basically. And that can be disturbing to someone who's used to a more collaborative kind of environment.
Starr: I mean, we can still ask questions out, right?
Ben: Oh yeah.
Josh : We do. I mean, we communicate, obviously. But yeah, what Ben is saying is, and we talked about this, I think, in the past and I've talked to about it at various places, I think on The Indie Hackers interview I did, we've discussed a lot of our freelancing background and I think we tend to operate a lot like freelancers still. We are working from home on, kind of, individual projects and we're not doing a lot of pair programming or constant. We're not usually working together on the same projects within the company at the same time, constantly.
Starr: Can I tell you guys a story?
Josh : Yeah.
Starr: One time there was a one person who contacted me, maybe a couple of years ago, who was writing some sort of book or something about remote work. And I guess, since we had a blog post about that, they contacted me and were like, "Hey, do you want to be interviewed for this book?" And I'm like, "Sure." And then, we get on this call and he's really nice. He's, all these questions and he's asking about our process and how we like coordinate things and all this stuff. And I'm just like, we just work on independent things and we don't really talk about it except like, you know, when they're done.
Starr: Honestly I felt like I felt like I was doing such a bad job as an interviewer or interviewee. I was just like, we just kind of like don't really collaborate. That's our collaboration strategy. I mean we do collaborate but in a much more high level way, right? We'll collaborate and be like, okay, you do component A, I'll do component B and somebody else will do component C and then in six months they'll all come together and it'll be beautiful.
Ben: That brings up a good point too. The, the six months things like, typically our projects are pretty short actually like six months that that would be an incredibly long project for Honeybadger. We have very few projects that actually go that long. Right?
Josh : So like Ben just took on a project that I didn't have time for apparently and like shipped it in a day. So it's like, it's like dark launched right now as we're speaking.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh : So that this was, this was yesterday by the way.
Ben: Yeah, that felt so good. Like in the morning I'm like, I'm going to do this thing and then by, by afternoon it was like, it's done. It's launched. Enjoy.
Starr: Yeah. I'm always impressed by how fast Ben is.
Josh : Yeah. I'm really, I'm really glad. I like I finally threw up my hands and asked for help on something cause I had like, you know, a bunch of, I had multiple projects that I wanted to do and I could, I hadn't, I knew I would kill myself if I tried to multitask. So I was like, Hey, does anyone want to like, you know, take one of these? Like does this sound interesting and Ben's like, "I'll do it".
Ben: So that's, I guess that that describes the collaborative environment that we have. Right? We're all willing to help out and pitch in and do a variety of things, but just let us go work in peace. Right?
Josh : Right. Yeah. And I mean we come together like when, when we, like if we have problems, I think that's like, and we're trying to get better at that too. Like when, when we're actually struggling with something, that's when you ask for help. You know, and, and then we're all happy to like pitch in and that's when we would jump in. You know, we jump on a, on a zoom call or or whatever or, or chat in Slack or something. Yeah. But otherwise we like to be heads down.
Starr: So I'm getting, I'm getting some ideas in my mind about a book we can write about the future of work and you know like, Hey, have you guys ever heard like in like in Buddhism, I'm going to botch this. So I'm, I apologize to any Buddhist who is listening. But you know how like in Buddhism or maybes in Zen Buddhism there is like, there's this concept of like no mind, right? It's like you're there and you're, you're, you obviously have a mind but then it's like, like the, I don't know, like the key to the, the stuff that they're doing is to embrace this idea that there's no mind, right? So I'm imagining this very kind of like new agey future of work book that we do and it's like the process is like no process, like collaboration process, right?
Josh : Yeah, I like it.
Starr: I mean, I think some people would buy that and like fall for it.
Josh : You don't like all the pages it could like use a negative space like to the maximum. So like, like each page just has like, like one sentence on it about, about work.
Ben: Maybe. Maybe the title of the book, is this page intentionally left blank.
Josh : Yeah.
Starr: Oh, there you go.
Josh : And it's a one page book.
Ben: It could sell for like $1,000 on the Amazon marketplace.
Starr: I like it.
Ben: So the future of work, I do think that we're going to see more remote work happening. I mean, fortune tellers and prognosticators have been saying this for quite a while now that we may having more remote work in the future. I think it's not a new trend, but I think it will continue because we have great technology to help it. Like right now, right. We're chatting via Zoom, which is a fantastic technology, which makes it really easy to collaborate when you need to. But also I think that the nature of the work at least in and the work that we do in software development and, and I think in a work that requires you to do a lot of thinking and a-
Josh : Which is more like a lot more work, is that type of work, these days.
Ben: A lot more thought work these days. And I, I just don't see that a lot of need for people to be co-located all the time. And I think as we as more companies realize that they can leverage technology and allow people to have more flexibility to be where they want to be, I think that's just going to become more and more prevalent.
Josh : Yeah. Well we should talk about the work hours that we do because not only are we remote, we have all this flexibility but we work 30 hour weeks.
Ben: Yeah.
Josh : Sometimes last for that matter, like 30 hours is the maximum for Honeybadger.
Starr: I'm convinced Ben works like 80 hour weeks and he's just like,
Josh : Well Ben might work, some of us might work more than 30 hours, if we want to. And I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but that 30 hours is, especially for employed, our job positions like 30 hours is what you're committing to.
Ben: And there was, there was some conversation about this on Twitter recently about, the hustle people celebrating that culture of like, , Silicon Valley and 80 hour, 100 hour work weeks and it's so horrible and that's ridiculous. And I agree, but at the same time, one person made the point that I agree with strongly is, sometimes people work those 60, 80 hour weeks because they enjoy it, right? That's what they want to do. And I'm more on that end of the spectrum where I enjoy working so that it wouldn't be such a chore for me to do that. Now I don't actually regularly work 60 hour plus weeks, but I can see people who would enjoy that. And because I enjoy the work that I do. And so I think, give some, give some leeway to people who actually do want to do that and you know, let them go wild.
Ben: But yeah, we don't, certainly at Honeybadger, and I think more generally speaking, I think as we a move more into this information economy and the way you thought work, I think we should get to the use the idea that it's the 40 hour week is, is outdated. Like I was talking about this actually on an upcoming podcast episode for Heroku, the Code[ish] podcast, I was talking with Mike about this and I think that expecting someone to, to sit their butt in a chair for 40 hours a week and be productive is ridiculous. I mean, they're not, they're not tying pieces of thread together. They're not screwing parts of the car together. They're actually doing a lot of work in their brains and to, to expect someone to do that, all day, every day for eight hours a day. It just doesn't happen.
Josh : Well that's that. And that's the part. The other thing is like I probably do 20 hours or you know, probably less than 20 hours of like actual, like solid focused, like real work, like programming or something. But it's not that I don't work the rest of the week, it's just that I'm, I'm investing in other areas. And even if those areas you know, because we work, we have 30 hour weeks. That doesn't mean I'm taking 30 hour weeks and going and like sitting on a lawn chair in my yard or something. You know, the other 10 weeks I probably still work like quote unquote work a 40 hour week. But those, those other hours are spent in personal improvement learning. I've been learning, like I'm learning marketing, I've been learning marketing for the last like whatever, two or three years as a like, concerted effort.
Josh : So I'm reading, I have a gym, I built a gym in my garage so I didn't have to commute to the gym and save myself an hour every weekday. Working remotely saves a ton of time and then you can divert that time back into like personal development that is still, it's still building something but it's not necessarily all about the company. You don't always have to be slaving away for the company.
Starr: Can I mention something that I find a little bit disturbing about the sort of remote work trend and kind of the vision for the future?
Josh : Sure.
Starr: So first of all, just to say, I like working from home. Like I probably like it more than most people do and I really dislike working in offices. But one thing that I'm just thinking about all this and I'm just imagining this world where everybody just kind of wakes up and brushes her teeth or whatever and goes into their living room or their dining room table and fires up the laptop and goes to work and then gets home and then goes to the kitchen and gets dinner and then watches TV and then goes to bed. And it's like, at what point? Do you just never leave your house? At what point does this become jail?
Josh : Yeah, that's, that's a good, that is a good question. I do, I do find some weeks that I, I don't leave my house and, and I think I'm the same as you. I have to make a concerted effort not to be a hermit. So, I like the isolation, but after a while I do realize, Hey, I should probably have somewhat of a, some kind of social life or it's going to get bad.
Starr: Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like in the moment, it's fine. It's like, okay, I had a good day today, but then, a year or two later you wake up and you're like, I don't really have any friends or I do have friends, people, this is, this is hypothetical. I just want to say, I have friends.
Josh : This is something you have to deal with to avoid ending up in that position. And I think, I think you're right. You have to think about those things more when you're working remotely because it's not just handed to you. The water cooler at work is not just handed to you. It's not, just happens to be there on the way to the bathroom or something. So you have to actually, we have to build that into our company culture to provide more opportunity for social interaction but also just on a personal level. You have to think about getting out and it's not that you just stay at home.
Starr: Yeah. I did the digital nomad thing for a while and right now I have a house and a family and so I've got lots of, sort of, outlets for interacting with people. But back when I was doing the digital nomad thing, sometimes you just kind of in a room by yourself typing on a computer and it can be a little bit bleak at times.
Josh : Yeah. I've noticed, one thing I've noticed about, I guess this might be going back more towards the discussion about, when Kevin had tried switching to the coworking space or sometimes people, for whatever reasons, home life is not conducive to a work from home kind of situation. And then that's when you get the office or find a coworking space that works or whatever, go to the coffee shop even. But I think, those situations tend to change. I mean, they definitely changed throughout times of your life. Back when my kids when they're super young and actually they're super young now, they're just getting out of the phase where it's constant, constant crying and screaming, which try to do some programming...
Starr: You're going to look back on that fondly.
Josh : With a kid screaming in either ear.
Starr: It's scary how people pay for that.
Josh : Right? You've got stereo children. But yeah, during that time, I was trying to work from home and I was like, I just can't get anything done here. This is just not working. And so, I started going to the office and I went to the office for like whatever, four or five months or something. Until, I was realizing, it's been getting better at home. My wife's like, things had been a lot more stable here, and she's like, it would be really cool if you came back and gave it another try. And so I did. And now, I've been home and I'm loving it again. So I think, you shouldn't be in the mindset like you have to pick one and just stick with it forever. I think you should adapt the workplace to whatever is best for you at the time, if that makes sense.
Starr: Oh, totally.
Ben: Yeah. And I think being intentional about socializing is, is important. As we, as we talked about, if you're in that situation where you're not going to coworking space on a regular basis if you are, if you don't have a family. Cause like for me going home, hanging out with my family, my kids are older, they're great conversationalists. I get a lot of my socializing right there, right around, we have dinner conversations every night that are fantastic.
Ben: I go to the gym and see some people there. I go to church every week and I hang out with people there. Right. So I have ways that I get my socializing but, but if you don't have that built in, then you have to make some plans around that. If you're going to be switching from an environment, especially if you're switching from an employment environment where you were in an office and now you're contemplating remote work, you have to make some plans. Maybe I need to go find a local group that plays basketball every week and I just go play basketball. Right. I make that part of my plan so that I don't go crazy with lack of human contact.
Josh : I really, at the risk of starting to get into like the thought leader-y side of this future of remote work discussion.
Starr: I mean we're already there, Josh.
Josh : Are we just there? I can just run with it. But I really liked it. You know like for a long time there seemed to be a trend. I don't know if as a result of industrialization and stuff, but the trend was people moved from having more local community to moving to a work community where things revolve much more around the workplace. And a lot of people these days, they don't have any kind of local community, church or, or whatever. Other civic groups or anything that people used to do.
Josh : But now, I think that, that is becoming a lot more important if you are working remotely, like in your home, like location, physical location. You're not moving around a lot. I think it's a lot more important to start to go back out and like find start finding, like rediscovering that stuff again to maybe fill some of that void of like not having the like the community.
Starr: Yeah. Cause those people are going to need the ones who like have your back when stuff hits the fan, right?
Ben: So can I make a plug, then? I totally agree with you Josh.
Josh : Sure, sure.
Ben: So, I've got to make a plug for a website called justserve.org. It's a website where you can go and you can find local groups that need volunteer help. Right? So if you, if you want to get connected with your community, with their local people around you in a way that's helpful to others, go to JustServe, they have projects from a variety of nonprofits who are just looking for people to help. And I think, if you have no other way, and even if you do have other ways, but if you're looking for a way to add more interaction, that's a great way to do it.
Ben: Get to be hanging out with people who are also interested in giving back to the community. It's a fantastic, you don't have to use JustServe but rendering service in general. Like when I was a kid, I was part of the Rotary. I hung out with them and did some service projects with my local rotary and that was great, right? I got to meet people I wouldn't meet otherwise and it was a lot of fun to you feel like you're really contributing to people who could really use it.
Starr: And you know what? You can do that with your 40-30 hour week. You can't do that with those like 60-hour week jobs. Right?
Ben: Well totally. And being remote and with us like with the flexible schedule, like you know, if someone wanted to go and hang out at a soup kitchen for two hours in the middle of the afternoon. Cool.
Starr: So I feel like we did. We started out kind of rough, selling this job, but I think we're coming around in the end. I feel like in the beginning or a little bit maybe scaring people away, but now I feel like if they made it this far, like maybe people are a little bit more on board with us.
Josh : And that was part of the test all along.
Starr: It is, I mean like a life of community and love and support and just being in fellowship with humanity. Like that sounds pretty great. And that's the spirit-
Josh : I'm not saying I'm going to do any of that stuff. I live on the internet, so just to, just to be clear.
Starr: Yeah?
Ben: Honeybadger does care.
Starr: Josh is trolling people on Reddit right now as we speak.
Josh : Yeah, yeah. But no, I mean, I have been thinking about that lately because it's like, you get in this bubble of just people. I know pretty much like most of the people I know now or like, or like software developers and technologists, it's like what. I remember having, relationships with other types of people, normal, non non-technical. There are complete, all other kinds of people out there. And it offers a nice perspective when your circle is not just the people that are exactly like you.
Ben: So I think we'd say like for the work of the future, I think we could argue the point that in a very thought leader-y style, that remote work will bring us back to the people. It will help build our communities, strengthen families and improve self confidence and self esteem.
Starr: I love where this is going. Okay.
Josh : It was beautiful, Ben.
Starr: So go to honeybadger.io and sign up for our seminars. We're coming to a town near you. We'll help you build self confidence, will help you improve your social life.
Josh : We'll send Ben to your garage.
Starr: I'm sorry I started making jokes that I really, really actually liked that Ben. So I'm sorry, I just can't not make jokes. It's just my way. Well should we end it on that? Y'all have any anymore like prognostications?
Josh : No. Well, for our listeners to learn more about that job, hopefully there's, hopefully there's some people out there who have made it this far. What is it? honeybadger.io/careers?
Starr: Yeah. So, if you just go to our site honeybadger.io and scroll all the way down to the bottom. There's a link that says Careers, I think.
Starr: Okay, well it was great talking with you guys and if anybody wants to go give us a review at, Apple podcast or whatever, that'd be great. And if you are interested in writing for us, if you do software blog posts or something, we, we actually might be interested in talking to you about that and we actually pay people. So yeah, you can learn more about that. If you go to our blog and I'm looking at the top nav and that's honeymeta.io. Yeah. So you'll find it, you'll find that's the first test. So I'm sure you all pass. All right. So I will talk to you guys later. And yeah. Future of work, like we are the future of work.
Ben: It's bright.
Starr: It's bright. It's so bright. We got to wear shades. Future so bright, you got to wear shades. You got to be a certain age to remember that song.
