A Pragmatic Hero’s Journey: James Stanier
Interview With the Author of Effective Remote Work
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Interview With James Stanier
📚 Pragmatic: Welcome! Thank you for taking the time to talk with us! Please introduce yourself, so everyone else knows who you are as well.
🖋 James Stanier: I’m James. James Stanier, Director of Engineering at Shopify, and I’m the author of Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager and, most recently, Effective Remote Work. I’ve only been at Shopify for a few months. The previous ten years of my life were spent being a seed engineer at a startup. We grew that all the way through to acquisition this year. It took about a ten-year journey.
In terms of what sort of things I’m interested in, obviously remote working is something close to my heart. I relocated to a very remote part of the UK about a year and a half ago to be near family.
Outside of work and software and technology and all that kind of thing, I’m just an average guy. I like spending time with family, my dog, going for walks, and being in the countryside.
📚 Pragmatic: What books have you written for Pragmatic and what are they about?
🖋 James Stanier: Book number one was Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager. It’s about people making the transition into engineering management for the first time. It is the journey from the first day in that new job, all the way through to building the tools and the skills to be effective in that role. The book very much came out of past experience, when I went through that journey myself. At the time there wasn’t a huge amount of material out there in the same way that there is these days. I felt that book is a great hands-on field manual for anyone who’s looking to make the transition.
The second book is Effective Remote Work. That came together in a much shorter space of time. In the previous company I worked for, we went through that transition from being fully co-located to being remote. In my current role, we are a fully remote company. Again, I wanted to have that field guide, that kind of toolkit manual for anyone who wants to become more effective in our new world. It does need a mindset shift to be effective remotely. That’s very different from when you are physically co-located in an office.
📚 Pragmatic: What is the big difference between working remotely and working co-located in a group?
🖋 James Stanier: The biggest difference is that learning, or any collaboration by osmosis, is just not possible in the same way: everything from company culture to the way in which teams work together, to the way individuals work together and seek answers to questions and get help. The office facilitates that because everyone is within earshot of each other. They have many opportunities to bump into each other or simply walk across and talk.
Remote working is very different because you have to move away from in-the-moment synchronous conversation and really work on a model that’s much more asynchronous, more written, more explicit communication. This suits some people. They find it easier and they work that way. Other people find it a lot, lot harder. I think it’s not just about working in your house or working from a co-working space. It’s very much a complete change in your mindset that you bring to work and also a change in the tools in which you use to get your work done.
📚 Pragmatic: You talk about it being a more explicit situation. Is that a net positive? Is it something that adds to the work environment or do the costs make that something a little bit too hard to attain?
🖋 James Stanier: Yeah, that’s a good question. This kind of revolves back around to why I wrote the book. I think that by using the kind of mindset and tools and ways of working that you need to work effectively remotely — I think those things do produce better cultures, more transparent information, more written documentation, more artifacts for people to build their work upon and discover. And, especially if you’re onboarding and you have great remote culture, then all the information you need should be there. In the same way that if you start a new job in an office, you have to rely on asking lots of people and shadowing people.
The reason the book exists is because without people really making that mindset shift, they can struggle. I think with the pandemic, so many companies had to go remotely very, very quickly with little planning, with little idea of how to do it. I think that remote working is here to stay. We can tell by the workforce that people want remote work. For it to be sustainable in the long term, it does require a different way of working. That’s very much all the tools and techniques that are written about in the book.
📚 Pragmatic: What are some of the ways and the ideas on how to do this successfully?
🖋 James Stanier: One of the core chapters in the book draws out this spectrum of different types of communication. On the left-hand side of the spectrum, we talk about synchronous interaction. We talk about face-to-face meetings. We talk about video calls and we talk about chats and so on. And on the other side, the right-hand side of the spectrum, we have asynchronous and more permanent things like Wikis and READMEs and documents and so on.
I think the physically co-located world has always been on the left-hand side of that diagram. They have spent decades working with synchronous chats, keeping information in people’s heads, and going over and working with people physically in order to get things done. This meant that there hasn’t been enough documentation for new people, who are theoretically based anywhere in the world, to come on, to explore, to understand how they contribute to the company. How they are effective.
Core with these skills is talking about how every day, every week, every month you can really start pushing to the asynchronous side with what you do. For example, instilling a culture of writing great design documents to each other. When you are thinking of adding new features to your codebase, how can you capture decisions that you’re making in how you’re structuring your code? How are you thinking about your tooling? If you think about historical cultures, we’ve learned from the past via archeology because we discover artifacts that these cultures and civilizations have left behind. If they hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t know anything about them.
The mindset of these skills is we need to start creating all these artifacts that people can discover from the ways that we work. If a new engineer joins the company tomorrow, if there are three years worth of design documents that explain how the product has evolved and the decisions that we’ve made, then that’s a fabulous thing. Not only is that documentation we can use in the moment when we build something and we can discuss reasons about things, but we’re also leaving gifts for the future: to help onboard people.
📚 Pragmatic: What are the qualities of a company culture — by that, I mean, whether they already exist or that they can be developed — that contribute to being a good match to creating a successful remote work environment.
🖋 James Stanier: The ones that I think of, in cases of success, are certainly transparent company cultures. Those that are internally transparent with regards to everything, from information to progress, to financial information, to everything pretty much up and down the whole company org chart. When you have a transparent culture, you can then have a transparent documentation of that culture. That makes you a good fit for remote work.
I think also in terms of how a company decides to go remote is a key indicator as well. It’s far, far easier to be completely fully remote — we have no offices whatsoever — than it is to be hybrid. If you are hybrid and you have some offices, but you also have remote workers, then you’re continually trying to make a really great office experience, but also a really great remote experience. And those are two very separate things.
So where I’m at the moment, Shopify has no offices at all. My interface to the company is through my computer and my webcam. My microphone is exactly the same as the CEOs. It’s exactly the same as the newest member of staff at the company. And we all are normalized by the tools that we use.
So certainly if a company wants to go fully remote, they’re in a better position because they have to get on with improving the remote culture, because that’s the only option you have. A more traditional company that does see the executive all in one office or at one location, they struggle with the kind of culture needed for remote. They have such a central gravity for the company near them. So having everybody remote in the company means that it’s much fairer and much more inclusive and equal for everybody.
📚 Pragmatic: What are some of the great features that make a successful remote working design and how do you use those to support your remote workers?
🖋 James Stanier: I think people who are reading or listening to this already have a good idea of collaborative software and Slack, webcams, microphones, and so on. To have the tools you need to get the experience done. But there are lots of cultural elements that I think are more important in making it a great experience.
It’s all the extra things that remote work can bring to you. Having everybody working remotely and working in a more asynchronous way means that there’s less pressure on specific hours of the day that you need to work. People can design their days better, which means that for parents of young children or caregivers, you have more flexibility. Therefore you have a much better working environment where people can support their lives as well as getting the work done.
In terms of that sort of shift to asynchronous, [you build] a culture of recording company meetings and re-streaming them in different time zones. It’s just like you would for a live concert. All of these media and broadcast things that you see out there in the TV world, you can bring them into your company culture as well. You reduce the amounts of time that everyone has to be online at the same time. It allows you to be truly global because you can use re-streams or recorded information to propagate that around the company
📚 Pragmatic: To wrap up, what are some of the quality-of-life improvements that you’ve discovered that are related to doing remote work?
🖋 James Stanier: For me personally, there are quite a few. My partner and I, our families have always been across two different sides of the country. By going fully remote, for both of us, we have been able to unite our entire family. My parents moved up to the area of the country we live in now, and we’re all close by to each other. I’ve certainly never had a position in my life where all of our family are very, very close to each other. So that’s a massive benefit.
Also, I think it gives society as a whole more flexibility in where they want to live. You can not have to live near an office anymore. Which typically means a city. Which typically means expensive property prices and busier places. You can design your life more specifically around what you’re interested in — as long as you’ve got a good internet connection.
For me as well, all the little things like being able to walk the dog every day in a really nice countryside place and being able to work more flexible hours. And to be in my own home as well, which is a real blessing. There are just so many amazing advantages.
What I’m hoping in the next ten to fifteen years is that we don’t see the technology industry as something where if you grow up in a rural community or you grow up in somewhere that is not near a city, that you have less chance of making a career in technology. With remote work and with the increase of the next decade or two, I think people growing up anywhere, as long as they’ve got access to the internet, have just as much of a chance at a really great career. They’ve got all the tools that they need right there.
📚 Pragmatic: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
🖋 James Stanier: No problem.
Effective Remote Work is available in beta right now and hopefully, the full version in print should be available in early 2022. Very, very nearly done. We’re just going through review right now.
If anyone’s interested in getting into engineering management, then I’m going to highly recommend my first book, Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager.
Both are available on Pragmatic and pragprog.com, or your local bookshop. If anyone wants to follow any of my other writing, then they can go to theengineeringmanager.com, which is my blog. Or follow me on Twitter @jstanier. It’d be great to keep in touch with everyone.
The office isn’t as essential as it used to be. Flexible working hours and distributed teams are replacing decades of on-site, open-plan office culture. Wherever you work from nowadays, your colleagues are likely to be somewhere else. No more whiteboards. No more water coolers. And certainly no Ping-Pong.
So how can you organize yourself, ship software, communicate, and be impactful as part of a globally distributed workforce? We’ll show you how. It’s time to adopt a brand new mindset. Remote working is here to stay. Come and join us.
