Removing barriers
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00:00
HierarchyBitAreaOffice suiteRight angleData managementRule of inferenceWordLevel (video gaming)Statement (computer science)FingerprintRegulator geneLattice (order)Vapor barrierForm (programming)Distribution (mathematics)InformationPoint (geometry)Physical lawBit rateExpected valueProduct (business)Hierarchy
04:34
SummierbarkeitRule of inferenceOffice suiteUltraviolet photoelectron spectroscopyTelecommunicationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Lattice (order)EmailMikroblogBlogContext awarenessGoodness of fitTerm (mathematics)InternetworkingOffice suiteAbsolute valuePoint (geometry)TelecommunicationGroup actionVapor barrierPressureWeightVotingRule of inferenceMultiplication signJava appletExterior algebraTraffic reportingSeries (mathematics)CoroutineBoiling pointMoment (mathematics)Reduction of orderArithmetic progressionPlug-in (computing)Real numberCollaborationismTrailRight angleUltraviolet photoelectron spectroscopySingle-precision floating-point formatSystem callGenderBlock (periodic table)Online helpCodecInstance (computer science)Complete metric spaceArmXMLComputer animationJSON
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Attribute grammarNewsletterTrailDynamic random-access memoryHierarchyMultiplication signShared memoryThread (computing)Data managementTelecommunicationContext awarenessDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Data miningInformation overloadSoftware developerConfluence (abstract rewriting)Process (computing)Level (video gaming)Coordinate systemNewsletterMessage passingFlow separationRevision controlBitInformationSingle-precision floating-point formatPoint (geometry)EmailAnalytic continuationDecision theorySoftware bugInstance (computer science)TrailKey (cryptography)Cellular automatonTerm (mathematics)MereologyProjective planeArmCuboidDirectory serviceGradientCore dumpCentralizer and normalizerPlastikkarteMappingJSONXML
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Data managementVideo gameWeb 2.0Process (computing)Type theoryCentralizer and normalizerForm (programming)Moment (mathematics)Point (geometry)Online helpWordData managementSoftware frameworkMultiplication signMetropolitan area networkTerm (mathematics)Machine visionInternetworkingLevel (video gaming)Object (grammar)Series (mathematics)MereologyGraph (mathematics)INTEGRALFormal languageContext awarenessConnected spaceCodeReal numberBasis <Mathematik>Insertion lossSoftware developerInformationTraffic reportingScaling (geometry)EmailCuboidUniqueness quantificationProduct (business)BitCASE <Informatik>Right angleDependent and independent variablesXML
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CAN busPoint (geometry)BlogWordMultiplication signDifferent (Kate Ryan album)View (database)Interactive televisionSlide ruleParameter (computer programming)Right angleGame controllerSet (mathematics)CASE <Informatik>40 (number)Rule of inferenceArithmetic meanDeadlock
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Level (video gaming)MathematicsVideo gameData managementLattice (order)Goodness of fitRight angleProcess (computing)Different (Kate Ryan album)Proper mapMultiplication signLevel (video gaming)EmailWritingCodeVapor barrierMathematicsThread (computing)WordSelf-organizationDependent and independent variablesArithmetic meanFeedbackService (economics)Coordinate systemWhiteboardReading (process)Internet service providerTask (computing)Doubling the cubePerspective (visual)Context awarenessArmComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
Okay, so welcome everyone. I'm so glad that you stayed until the Friday afternoon from the session second to last to listen to me. Much appreciated. I know I've bribed some
00:21
of you, but the rest of you that I haven't, thank you. This talk is a little, I'll set the expectations. Don't expect anything groundbreaking, earth-shattering or innovative or anything like that. It's very much the blatantly obvious. So having said that, I
00:43
don't want to hear any complaints. I also say in my talks, normally I apply the law of two feet, which basically means if you're not happy, get up, leave. I'm not offended. Just make sure you press the green button. But I've made it even more comfortable
01:01
for you guys today. So if you don't want to get up and leave, I have some earplugs here. So there's a whole bunch. I think there's enough to fill for everyone. So if you get tired, just raise your hands. I'll throw one over. Okay. Already? Okay.
01:23
So what is this talk about? This talk is a little bit about, often I've heard how people think about barriers and how these barriers are actually walls that prevent them from doing great things. And they would love that these barriers were removed. And we're
01:43
going to discuss a little bit about that. And it's about my experience working in a few companies, but lately for the past six years, I've been working at JetBrains and some of these barriers that we have or don't have and how it works and the challenges and barriers and the good sides and the not so good sides. Note that that's a politically
02:02
correct way of saying not the bad sides. So let's talk a little bit about these barriers. So everybody here probably hates horrendous hierarchies, the hierarchical and the middle management barrier that we all always love to complain about. We also basically hate
02:23
any form of management, especially in the form of micromanagement. We all believe, and when I say we, I don't mean JetBrains or me, I say all of us, we generally believe that this is not such a great thing. We also don't like reporting because reporting sucks. Why do I have to constantly tell you what I am doing or what I am not doing?
02:43
Inflexible hours suck. Why can't I have the freedom to work when I want? Bureaucracy is invented to make people busy, because other than that there is no real value to it. And of course pointless meetings, because we all hate pointless meetings.
03:03
So imagine that you get rid of most of these barriers, and if you do, then I could kind of say, like, yes, welcome to JetBrains, because that's kind of the thing that we have. And we started at like three people, and now we're a lot of people. We're right now close to around
03:21
600 people. We're somewhat distributed, so we have offices in quite a few places, and we have a bunch of people that are remote. My team is entirely, mostly, entirely, mostly remote, whatever that means. And we really don't have much hierarchy. We have the leadership team or management, and then we have team leads, and then we have
03:44
everyone. So basically kind of like a three-level thing. And of course, but at the point of speaking to each other, everyone's equal. You can talk to anyone and ask information about anyone, and you can ask anything, and nobody feels superior or anything like that.
04:05
So we kind of are distributed into smaller teams. So we have product teams. So IntelliJ's got its own team with its own marketing, its own support, its own QA, and all of that. And then we have shared teams of people. Notice that I don't say the word
04:24
resources. We have shared teams of people such as web, advocacy, sales, and somewhat marketing. Rules and regulations. Basically, it boils down to work whenever you want, work on what you want, get stuff done. Okay. Fantastic. Right. Brilliant. So basically I'm saying it's paradise. Yes? Yes?
04:47
No, it's not. And it's not for many reasons. And I'm guessing that, you know, I would never come up here and say that this is paradise. Because it's not that easy. It really isn't. Now, some things are really easy. We actually don't have a clock in terms of clock in and
05:03
clock out times. You can literally work at any time you want. Most of the offices are, I mean, the office in St. Petersburg is 24-7. There are people that come in at 3 in the morning that leave at 8 o'clock at night. There are people that have more sane hours. But there
05:23
isn't really any restrictions in terms of times. There is just basically a few rules. One of them be there at any meetings, which would be necessary. And in Bavaria, which is in Germany, and you know how the Germans love their rules, you're not allowed to go to the office on Sunday.
05:41
Any Germans here, by the way? Okay, good. So that's basically a rule enforced that you're not allowed to go to work on Sunday. So the office is actually closed. Other than that, there's no real rules in terms of work. And in essence, it kind of gives you a series of benefits. Because if your kid is sick, no issue. You don't have to explain to anyone.
06:04
You don't have to say to anyone, I can't come in because my kid is sick. You can tell your colleagues if they're expecting you, but you don't have to say it to anyone. You will need to do some paperwork, which in Germany, apparently they do. Again, they love their bureaucracy as well. It's not a problem. You don't have to say anything to anyone.
06:21
So it does have a series of benefits. And does it actually work? Pretty much, yes, it does work. Really, we don't necessarily see any downside. Now, personally, I work remote, so I really do work any hours I want. I do set up a routine for myself, which is, you know, I normally get
06:43
up at seven, throw the kids, well, when I'm home, throw the kids out, that means send them to school, and then start work, and then finish at whatever time. So you can set your own routine, and there really isn't any downside to it. So my vote in terms of flexible hours, absolutely. And we also do customer support, and we manage to do it. There aren't customers
07:05
waiting for us to do support. Now, a lot of the other things that people complain about and they consider barriers are meetings, right? So I've seen a lot of articles and talks around meetings. And, you know, these are some that I picked up off the internet. Some I invented.
07:23
You can't tell the difference. You know, nine reasons meeting sucks. Meetings should die. Boring meetings. Meetings kill souls. That one I made up, but I think it's actually quite good for a new blog post. So how many of you love meetings? Well, there you go.
07:41
I should just take a picture of that and put it here as well. Meetings are good. Bad meetings are bad, right? It's that simple. And sometimes we try and confuse the both. We say, no, meetings suck. Meetings suck. No, meetings don't suck. It's what you do at a meeting sucks. So meetings kind of like, normally has two purposes. It's
08:03
either to coordinate something or to provide a status update, right? So in terms of coordination, why would I want to coordinate something? Well, because I want to maybe raise awareness about something that I'm going to do in collaboration with other people. But it's very important that when we're doing these meetings, and we try and do this a lot at JetBrains, is that we only set a single topic for the meeting. Only a single topic. And
08:25
what's more important than a single topic is action points. So we always make sure that when you walk out of that meeting, you walk out with action points. Therefore, the meeting has actually served a purpose to do something because we love to just have meetings for
08:41
nothing. Just sit there and talk about absolute bullshit. Sometimes we do that as well, but then it's fun. Now, the other aspect of meetings is status updates. Now, how many of you do standups? How many of you love standups? How many of you think it's an absolute, complete, crap waste of time? I do as well. I really think that standups
09:06
are a waste of time. The regular standup is kind of like, you know, what have you been working about? What have you been working on? What did you do today? What did you do yesterday? Why are you stuck? I've found over the years that standups have
09:23
become me just waiting for my moment to say something and then just blacking out the rest of the time. Yeah, does that happen? It's really become a pointless, it's become routine. If you have an issue that you cannot solve, a standup necessarily won't solve that because
09:41
you can go to the person after the standup and say, I have this issue, can you help me? You know, I hear sometimes people say, well, no standups are our way to help communication. I'm sorry, if your team only communicates for 15 minutes a day, a standup isn't going to solve that problem either. So then what does a standup reduce to? What is it about? Is it about a progress report to
10:05
make sure you're doing your work? So does it boil down to basically a trust issue in that I make sure that you're doing your work? And then you get that peer pressure of, you know, if I go in there and say, I haven't done anything today or yesterday, they're going to think I'm slacking off. No, by and large people notice that you're slacking
10:25
off whether you say you're doing something or not. And again, that's not something that's going to be solved at a standup. So, you know, in my team now in Jeffery's, there's a lot of people that do standups. I would say probably most of the teams do standups. I don't, I actually don't do standups. We started to do standups on my team and then we
10:44
switched away from that. And we found actually alternatives to standups, right? There's a weekly summary. If you want to have awareness of what's going on, what people have been working on, just send them a weekly summary. You can do it in email. You can actually have a weekly standup kind of thing. Or there is this other thing, and probably you've heard
11:02
of, it's called tracking tools, right? Issue trackers, Jira, Utrack, TFS if you really want to go there. You know, there are ways in which you can actually see progress on things without having to put people through this silly ceremony of standing up. In fact, I saw a recent plugin for Slack. How many of you use Slack?
11:24
Which was basically a plugin which was called standups, which meant that you just post your thing to Slack, as if that's really going to help the issue. So we, in my team, we actually switched to what we call the weekly what's ups, right? And we're remote. So how many of you have heard of what's up, the Bud Beer ad?
11:45
Right? It's like, yeah, it's called what's up. Oh, no, just sitting here having a bud. The idea was that when you joined this meeting, you would say, what's up? And the tone in which you said it kind of set the feeling for the rest of the people. You know, if you go and say, what's up? They all know you're in a pissy mood.
12:01
For me, it doesn't work because I'm always in a pissy mood. But, you know, if you go in there and say, what's up? They go, oh, he's happy. Okay, great. So we switched to what weekly what's ups. Nobody actually says what's up anymore, which kind of sucks. But for us, it was more about socializing and it was socializing because all of us are remote. So we really don't get to see each other that frequently,
12:22
unless it's as conferences. And normally we're not really sober to get to see each other that frequently. It's also about raising awareness of what we're working on, but more around raising awareness of what's going on in the community around us. Because for instance, in my team, we have people that are in the PHP community. Some people are in the .NET community. Some
12:40
people in the Java community. And it's kind of raising awareness about what's going on in different communities. So we use it in that sense. So that's kind of in terms of the meetings. We try and not have that many meetings in terms of just daily, what are you working on? Now, the other big issue is as you grow, and even with smaller teams, communication is an
13:04
issue. And you all know that. And guess what? Communication is still an issue at JetBrains. And we've not entirely solved that problem. And we've noticed actually, as people grow, communication becomes a bigger of an issue. How many of you have heard of this saying? Right? Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
13:29
Here's another version. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance. And by ignorance, I don't mean stupidity. I mean by not knowing. A lot of times we found that communication issues or conflicts or things have happened
13:47
and misunderstandings have occurred because there's been a lack of knowledge between different teams. And the more people that come, the more the challenges. So you don't know who's who anymore.
14:04
If I want to do something, who do I have to talk to? Who needs to know? Because we don't have that many levels of management. We don't have those many people that are central coordinators. So there isn't a certain person that says, oh, I know what everything is going on around. You kind of start to lose that when you break down those levels of hierarchies.
14:23
Because we always think about hierarchies, and I'll mention this later on, but we always think about hierarchies and management as evil people. There's actually a picture of that. But sometimes they play a role of coordination, of a status update, of a status point, of knowing, of raising awareness, of having the awareness. So when you get rid of this,
14:43
you lose some of this as well. And you don't know what the left hand doing from the right hand. There could be potentially any time at JetBrains, one person doing something and another person doing pretty much the same thing. And if they don't know about it, that's a problem. Because it's duplicate effort. It's like sending the wrong message externally as well.
15:05
You know, what am I doing here? What am I doing there? Why are you doing the same thing? Have we solved communication issues? Absolutely not. But we work towards it. One of the things that I personally believe is in the push versus pull, right? Which is, generally people don't want to constantly be reading things and getting new information.
15:24
So you kind of try and push certain things out to them. Yeah? So what we do, for instance, is we have an internal newsletter that tells us about what the other teams are kind of doing. What's going on? What the other teams are working on? What's going on in the community?
15:40
You know, again, a lot of the developers mostly are focused around development. And as much as they would love to, and as much as they should, don't always get the time to interact with community or see what's going on around community. So some of us collect information or raise awareness about what's going on and we send this out. And one important aspect, which I think that all of us should be doing, is talk about revenue. So we talk openly about
16:04
revenue. Inside JetBrains, everyone knows how much the company is making. And we talk about it. And I think it's very important to connect everyone to revenue. Because a lot of times, as developers or as QA or as what have you, since our work isn't directly impacted by revenue,
16:24
we lose sense of things. We lose sense of priorities. We lose sense of what's valuable and what's not valuable. You know, at the end of the day, we're getting our paycheck, doing our job. And if we don't know how the company is doing, if it's not doing so well, if it's doing great, how do we know what impact we actually have? Or how do we know
16:45
how we could impact that? I always say that it's really important. I think that all of us, at some point in time, should run our own business to really start to value things. And then next time when we make decisions about, hey, should I use AngularJS or KnockoutJS or
17:01
this or that, think about if that was coming out of my own paycheck, how would I make that decision? So it's really important to connect people with the revenue, with the status of the company and how the company is doing. So we send this in a monthly newsletter as well, you know, have we had good sales, less sales, how's it going, how's it not going, etc.
17:24
We also hold an internal conference. And in this conference, despite being like, out of the 600 people, I would say probably roughly around 400 people at JetBrains, 350 are technical. They love to code, they're developers. But in this internal conference, the main thing that they want is non-technical talks. They want to know about
17:42
how the company is doing in the overall, what the roadmaps are like, what sales teams are doing, what the marketing team does, which, believe it or not, we do actually do something. So we try and make it always a good balance of technical and non-technical. But it's more around
18:00
kind of getting and understanding what is happening in the company. Then we have things like technical Wednesdays, which I'm sure a lot of other companies have, which are basically weekly things where we can bring internal speakers or external speakers and a little bit share between different teams what different teams are working on. Because once you grow to a certain size, there is enough people diverse that allow you to
18:22
kind of do this. Now, some things that can help with communication are tools. Slack, we use Slack. We use Confluence. We use JetPeople, which is an internal tool, which is more like a people's directory. And now we're trying to focus quite a little bit more in Slack and trying to integrate more things with Slack. Personally, myself and a lot
18:46
of other people are trying to move away from email, and we're moving again to issue trackers. So we use YouTrack. There are many issue trackers, but we actually use YouTrack for pretty much everything at JetBrains, not only for projects or bugs. We use it for managing
19:04
sales inquiries, not sales inquiries, shows, whether we're going to show, whether we are going to exhibit at a conference or not, travel, everything that you could potentially think of, we've tried to put into YouTrack because it allows you to mold and create workflows.
19:21
Now, the beauty of this is that it then allows you to track items individually and follow up with those items and not get things lost in email. And then it has features like the ability to tag people that you feel need to be notified about these things. And I say YouTrack, but of course you could do this with any kind of issue management tracker.
19:41
But it moves away from the aspect of continuous email, and then people can opt in, opt out at any time, and really kind of separate things into single threads. Now, I say that tools can help, but tools can also kill. Except our tools, of course, but in general, tools can kill.
20:02
Because notifications can be ignored. And this is happening right now even with Slack. We're just getting bombarded with notifications left and right, channels going up and down, so much information overload that you're starting to ignore things. In fact, recently I just sent, I included a colleague of mine on an issue, and a week later
20:23
he says to me, what happened with this thing? I said, I notified you. He says, I get like a hundred notifications every day. You think I read through them? This is a problem as well, just like too much email. So having too much reliance on tools isn't a good thing, because it can be very counterproductive. So you need to limit the information as well
20:46
that you're sending out, and not just make everyone aware of everything necessarily all the time. Now management, this was the graph that I was talking about, right? I mean, yes, this is really funny, and it's great. And it's like, you know, managers, all they do
21:02
is piss people off and make life difficult for others, right? That's, yes, bad managers do that, just like bad developers are bad developers no matter what language they use. You know, a lot of times we sit and we bitch about web forms and say how web forms is bad technology
21:20
and makes crap. Okay, that's true, bad example, but it's not the same for all languages and frameworks. It's a lot about the person as well. So we don't really have in that sense in terms of management, because we really don't micromanage. In fact, when people join my team, I say if you need micromanagement, don't. I hate being micromanaged, and I don't want to micromanage.
21:44
I don't need to know what you are working on every moment, and I don't need to set the pace of what you're working on every moment. And I definitely do not want micro reporting, because you know what I do with long reports? I delete them. I don't read them. And there's no real permission required. You don't really have to ask for permissions for
22:03
things. You can ask for guidance, but you don't need to be, you know, constantly asking for permissions. Now this is good, and it's also bad. What we do try and do is like set objectives, right? So we just set a series of goals. So people that join my team basically know what they have to do, right? They have to go to conferences and drink. No, they have to help
22:24
people acquire knowledge of our tools, onboarding and people already using the tools. They know the top level objectives of what they have to do, and they agree with those, because otherwise they wouldn't be part of the team. So then what we try and do is then provide guidance. If they need help, if they need any guidance in what or when or how I should do something,
22:44
do that. And the most important thing is removing obstacles, right? Is making sure that they're getting their job done by removing any issues that they potentially have. That's what you really should be doing as kind of like a team lead, enabling others to do things.
23:02
So I kind of compare this to scrum master, but I hate the word scrum, and I hate the word master, so I don't compare it, especially those that you obtain in two days. Trust, basically that's the key point. Trusting people by setting objectives and making sure that, you know, everyone is happy doing that. So what is needed for this? Well, you need people that are
23:25
self-organizing, otherwise it just doesn't work. And I've had people that aren't self-organizing, and I tell you what, it doesn't work. If people constantly need you to tell them what to do, it doesn't work. In this layout, it won't work. You get frustrated, they get frustrated. You need discipline, and that's so much easier said than done,
23:45
so much easier. I mean, I work from home. My desk is here, the fridge is here, and the Xbox is here. Now, fortunately for me, every time I've gone to switch on the Xbox, it's required like a 16 gigabyte update, so I've solved that problem by having a crappy
24:04
internet connection at home. But, you know, it is really hard. It really is hard to have that discipline. And the responsibility, because, you know, people put trust in you and they say, you know, this is basically your show. You need to be responsible. You can't just
24:24
piss around. What else is needed? You need to know how to prioritize within different contexts. One thing is to prioritize your work on a daily basis. But what about prioritizing it in a longer term basis? What about when you look at the two-month roadmap, in accordance to not only
24:45
your own work, but in accordance to the work of other people? It's not easy to always prioritize this type of work. I'm challenged all the time every day by like, should I really be working on this now, or should I delay this and put the other one first? And the
25:02
question that we always really should ask ourselves, and I always ask myself, is are we adding value? If what we're doing is adding value, adding value for the team, for the company, for the long-term vision, and for ourselves. And it's sometimes really hard to distinguish an individual value as opposed to the longer-term vision value. Because the problem with having too much
25:26
freedom is that it comes with a cost. When you have too much freedom to decide to do whatever you want to work on, whenever you want to work on it, sometimes your vision is blurred. And sometimes it just doesn't work out. I'll give you a simple example. Working on fun stuff.
25:42
Yeah, that's what we do. We work on fun stuff. Therefore, I want you to work, I want you to be happy. Everyone works, everyone's happy working on the stuff they like to work on, which is great. And should I work on it now? It adds value, absolutely. I love to work on this feature. It's fantastic. It adds value. Or in my case, I want to do some Slack integration. Writing code is brilliant. We're going to need it. It adds value. I even enjoy it. Fantastic.
26:05
But what about in the larger context? Does it add value in the larger context? Is there something more important that should come before that might not be so fun, that might not be so engaging, that might actually be crap that I need to do, but I need to do it?
26:22
As humans, it's kind of hard sometimes to make that distinction. So it's not really easy. You always have to constantly be asking yourself, does it add value to me, to the team, to the product, to the company, if I do this now or I delay it? And more importantly, does it put other things on the back burner that should come first? So that's not so simple when you say,
26:46
you know, work on what you want, whenever you want. We start to lose sight of this. And that's another reason you've got to connect people with revenues. Right? Managing versus leading. Big words, right? Yeah, I don't manage, I lead.
27:00
I actually asked my colleagues on my team, I said, do I manage or lead? You know what? One of them didn't know what to say. He said, do you want a beer? Because it's hard to call yourself a leader. What is a leader? I don't know. I don't claim to call myself a leader. What I do know is what I do in my team is I'm learning to delegate.
27:24
It's really great to be the central point of attention that everything has to come through you, that you're the big man or big woman, you know, that you're, you're it. It feels great. You feel empowered, but it also doesn't scale. And it doesn't allow you to do great things
27:43
because, you know, you can't do everything. And if you want to do great things, your team's got to do great things. Not just you, you can't be the bottleneck because if you're the bottleneck, it just doesn't work. And most importantly, I've found that it's, it's not easy to listen,
28:03
right? We say we listen, but it's important to be heard. So this has probably happened to all of you and a lot of times in passionate arguments. You start to talk to your spouses.
28:20
They start to talk back. You, at one point in time, lose, stop hearing them. You're just waiting for them to finish, to respond with your own words. You stop listening. They're not being heard. And it's really important to listen. It's really important to
28:41
sometimes listen and not respond immediately and think about things and think of it from different views. And that's not an easy exercise, really isn't. There's no command and control. Team leads don't really have command and control, even in times of how you'd like decide what potentially could end up as a feature or what could not end up as a feature
29:04
or what we do and what we don't know. How is it done? Through listening, through reasoning and through convincing. If I'm there and say to you, okay, I'm the team lead, you do this, this, this, this because I say so. It's not going to work because what happens at the end of the day, people are going to be unhappy. They're going to hate you. And then they're not going to care. You've got to convince people. And when you try and
29:25
convince people, often you find that actually what you're trying to say is absolutely wrong. Right? And they convince you of the contrary. And this is great. And it sounds fantastic and it works, but you know what? Sometimes it backfires because people are passionate
29:40
and people care about what they're doing, just like you. And then what? And then there's a deadlock. So there's no command and control, but often you really need to put your foot down and say, okay, fine. I've heard you, but you know what? We're going to do it this way. That's also important because it's not all a bed of roses, right? Although many claim that it
30:03
is. And I think one of the most important things is just caring. And most of all caring, you know, what I do now with my team is we have a monthly one-on-one and we just, it's not about, you know, technical things. It's not about work things. It's just about how you're doing,
30:22
like how you're doing now, how are you doing? And is, are things well, are things not well? How is interaction with other people? How's the interaction with people on your team? And I asked the same with other people, you know, like, how are things going? You know, are you happy? Are you unhappy? Do you want to continue doing the work you're doing? Don't you?
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Do you want to move somewhere else? Because show people that you care, but be honest about it. Because if you care and they're not bad people, they'll care back. So a lot of these people ask, you know, is this about, is this a cultural thing? I mean, you know, do people are born, are people born with these genes and will it work with all
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people? I don't know. I can tell you that probably not. But I think one of the most important aspects is really believing what you're doing. Because if you don't believe in what you're doing, then it will never work. You might produce, you might be efficient,
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but you probably might not care that much. If you don't believe in what you're doing, you're not going to give your best. And if you don't believe in what you're doing, not only you don't give your best, but you're not happy either. And that's not fair on you or your team or your company. So this is the most important aspect. It's believe in what
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you're doing. And of course you have to be passionate. Yes, because passion is a good thing and you have to care. But the problem is that passion can also be problematic. And we go back to that example of, you know, I'm working on this tool. I'm really passionate about it. I love it, but I lose sight of other priorities. I lose sight of other needs.
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So passion can backfire as well. And as someone recently wrote, you know, passion, you can be passionate about one thing, but doesn't necessarily mean you're great at that thing. So just saying be passionate isn't enough. You know, and care and trust is a two way
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thing. If I care, if I trust, or if Joe cares and Joe trusts, I need that back. Because if I don't get it back, then I feel cheated. And if I feel cheated, then I'm unhappy.
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And if I'm unhappy, then I get grumpy. I'm not cheated. That's why I'm not always grumpy. That's a different issue in my case. You know, a lot of people say be treated as adults. Okay. And we will be adults. So I read a blog post some time ago about
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relationships in the workplace, you know, and beer in the workplace. There shouldn't be either, because it's just wrong. It's going to create havoc. It's just going to mess the company up. So what you're effectively saying to me is that if I spend the majority of my time at work
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with colleagues, that I should, you know, stop being human. Should I? Because potentially I might fall in love with someone and form a relationship. Why? Be treated as adults, be adults. JetBrains right now is roughly 40% women, right? And the rest
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men. Okay. I told you this is a blatantly obvious talk, right? And there's a lot of relationships. There's people that are married. One person that's married with another person from another
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team. And it's fine. It's absolutely fine. There's no issue because we believe that you separate one thing from the other. Right. And I often talk to the people I'm like, you know, when you go home, you know, like I was talking to Eugene once. No, no, I don't talk about TeamCity when I go home with my wife and they both work on the same team.
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Set your own rules, set your own boundaries, but don't expect the company to act like a watchdog. Be understanding because different people have different cultures. You know, and again, I go back to the slide of never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance. You might say something to someone, they might misunderstand it. I'm sure you've
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all seen this chart, right? Of what the British say is not what the British mean, which is really accurate. You know, that's not bad. You, the British mean that's bloody good. And what the rest of the world understands is that that's quite poor. In fact, just today, I was talking to Paul and Andrea said, thanks a million. And I said, why is she being sarcastic?
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Paul says, no, she's Irish. She actually means thank you very much. Whereas if you say that in England, it's sarcasm, right? Someone says to you, thanks a million. You're kind of thinking, well, what did I do wrong? And, and we, sometimes the way we communicate with people,
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we don't take this into account. And again, that leads to, you know, bad relationships and bad issues because of just the lack of proper understanding of different cultures, because culture isn't only, oh yes, you know, I like to drink beer and play ping pong at work and write code. Culture comes with a lot of background. It comes with a lot of upbringing. It comes with
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a lot of traditions, whether we believe the traditions are good or bad. It's the fact of life. Different countries, different people have different cultures. There's the no bullshit at any level. You know, we try and be very honest. We'll give feedback. Again, that cultural
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thing sometimes comes into play. You know, that the way you give feedback is important. Sometimes I have heard directly say, oh, you know what you did? Yes, it's shit. Okay. Now, if I were working in a, in a, in a different company, they might say to me, you know, you know what you did? Yes. I think there's might be better ways that we could look at that.
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No, here it's shit. Okay, fine. It's shit. But then, you know, top it off with some constructive criticism and tell me how I can improve. But more than negative aspect of just like, you know, you're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. You're doing it wrong. I believe that positive feedback is good as well. Not the bullshit positive feedback of a pat on the
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back and say, Hey, great job. Positive feedback that allows you to understand that you are adding value because knowing that you're adding value isn't always something you can detect yourself. Sometimes it needs to come from external people as well. Right. And you know, that can often be
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lacking also. Be the change. Now I can tell you that when I arrived, I, I, I came from a different kind of mindset and technology to the company. And it was about, you know, if something isn't working, moan up the corporate ladder, you know, talk to their manager and the manager doesn't understand, talk to their manager. Right. It's a, it's how we're brought up. Yes. You call a
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phone company. If you're not happy with the service, let me talk to your supervisor. Right. Well there, you can't be the change, but in a company and JetBrains, I realized that no moaning up the corporate ladder will only get me thus far because there is no corporate ladder. Right. It's more about trying to be the change that you're asking or saying that I don't like
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this. Let's do something about it. So you see something wrong, work towards fixing it. Don't just moan. Moaning doesn't always result in anything. And sometimes, you know, you say, Oh,
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they're wrong. They're doing it wrong. Don't always say they're doing it wrong. Sometimes ask yourself if you, maybe you're misunderstanding. And I've seen this happen to myself a lot of times. Like I've read something or I've seen some email and I'm like, Oh, you're, and I quickly want to reply. No, step back, really step back and look at it from
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a different perspective and see maybe you're misunderstanding. Maybe they're not wrong. Maybe you don't know it all. And I found a lot of times delaying, well, okay. Yeah. Delaying a response often helps. I used to be the first person on an email thread. I would
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be the first one that would reply. Now I'm not so much, but culture, like everything is really hard to keep. It really is. And like tumors, it can metastasize. So if you're not familiar with the word metastasize, which I'm sure many people are tumors start to grow and they start to expand to other organs. Once that happens, it's over. And if you don't treat it,
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it can kill. So when new people come on board, how do you treat, how do you show them the way or the way that you do things? Well, you do it by infusing the culture. And how do you do
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that? By leading, by example, showing, being an example to them, providing them guidance, which sometimes, you know, yes, we lack, but it's important to be the example because that's the only way that you keep it. But the other aspect of culture is sometimes it's
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also all right to not think that everything you're doing is great and let outsiders show different ways because otherwise we just constantly believe that our way is the only right way. So it's a double-edged sword about keeping the culture because sometimes we block out every
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other thing. We think the way that we're doing it is great. And I'm sure that what you're hearing today, you can come to me later and say, actually, you know what, what you're doing there is wrong. And I'm very happy to listen. So in summary, you know, removing barriers really sometimes comes at a cost. It's not that simple to just say, yeah, let's get rid of
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meetings. Meetings suck. Let's just produce a lot of awesomeness because meetings suck. No, it doesn't. You know, let's get rid of management. No, management, good management often leads to better coordination, to better awareness, to better communicating between different departments
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and different teams. It doesn't always imply bad people doing bad things and being showstoppers. So not all barriers are necessarily bad, but if you do remove them, you have to make a lot of effort for other things. It's not easy. Thank you. Any questions? No, great.