ShipTalk - SRE, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Software Delivery

ShipTalk - S02E08 - Home automation, the remote worker to manager gap, and living in an RV - Scott Lee - Arch Mortgage Insurance Company

• Jim Hirschauer • Season 2 • Episode 8

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In this episode of ShipTalk, Arch Mortgage Insurance Company's Head of Infrastructure and Operations, Scott Lee, discusses his home automation solution, deep dives into the massive gap between remote workers and their managers, and share a story about that one time he lived in an RV for 18 months with his wife and 2 dogs.

Introductions
Just for fun #1 - Automate all the things at home
Main topic - A doctoral discussion on remote working
Just for fun #2 - Scott's life in an RV and how he incorporated home automation

Jim Hirschauer:

Hello and welcome to ShipTalk. I'm Jim Hirschauer, your host for today. ShipTalk, it's a DevOps podcast brought to you by Harness, the software delivery platform. My guest today is Scott Lee, Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations at Arch Mortgage Insurance Company. Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Lee:

Thanks, Jim. Glad to be here.

Jim Hirschauer:

So Scott, we go back a long ways. We used to work together, so I know a little bit about your background, but why don't you go ahead and fill in our listeners on your background in just like one to two minutes.

Scott Lee:

Yeah, sure. Absolutely. You know you mentioned, we go back a little ways. We both worked at Wells Fargo Wachovia together. Yeah. Back in the day. That was a lot of fun. We had a great time there. Yeah. I've got a little over 30 years experience in the IT industry and around half of that has been in some sort of a leadership role. So I've been doing this for a long time. I've worked on some great projects like the Intel video phone way back in the day that brings us the technology we're using today to do video and voice over the internet on the H323 stack. Nice. All the way up through financial services where I'm at today and, and have been for about the last 15 years.

Jim Hirschauer:

Outstanding. All right, so, Scott, I know you're familiar with how this show works. We have two just for fun segments. We do one at the beginning, we do one at the end, and then we sandwich in the middle our main topic. So we're gonna get started with that first, just for fun segment. I remember you mentioning that you like to geek out a bit when it comes to home automation, so why don't you fill us in on that?

Scott Lee:

I've been doing some sort of home automation for a few years now, and I've done some fun things and I've learned a lot, and it's sort of a way to keep my, my fingers on the keyboard, if you will, after having gone to management. So, yeah, it's been a lot of fun.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah what type of software do you use?

Scott Lee:

So I, I use quite a few different things. I've tried different hubs and different hub software for several years. One of them is SmartThings. Mm-hmm. I, I've used some smart things in the past Hubitat. Right now I'm trying out the Amazon fourth gen. With ZigBee and Matter. So working to move all of my stuff away from Z-Wave and ZigBee into matter, cuz it seems like that's gonna be the more universal protocol. So yeah, working on that and some home assistant on Raspberry Pi and that sort of thing.

Jim Hirschauer:

Nice. Yeah, I'm a big fan of Hubitat, personally, that's what I use at my house and I have Hubitat integrated with home kit via home bridge on a raspberry pie. And actually I did a little upgrade yesterday that was recommended by Apple. I noticed they were like, Hey, there's this new version that you can upgrade to. So I upgraded it and then it broke part of my home automation system because they didn't tell me that, oh, they're deprecating iPad as a hub. So I had an iPad running part of my system, communicating with some devices. So that stopped working completely. So they're forcing people to go to the HomePod mini, or the bigger home pod as a hub that can control certain devices. So I thought that was interesting. And that switch is actually because of matter. That was one of the underlying changes. So, you know how it goes with these things sometimes progress sets you back a little bit.

Scott Lee:

Yeah, it's true. Every time you upgrade you kind of have that fear of, okay, what's gonna break when I do this? Right?

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, exactly. Well, why don't you gimme some interesting examples. There's so many things you can do with home automation. How about you gimme some examples of what you've done? Yeah,

Scott Lee:

sure. So one of the neat things I have right now is I also use Ring, which is very compatible with the Amazon stuff, as you know. I've got nine cameras around my property and it's not because I'm paranoid or anything like that, but I've got about an acre and a half worth of property and I wanna know when something's coming and going. So all those cameras have motion sensors set up and when one of those motion sensors triggers, not only does it trigger the recording, but it also lets my phone know it blinks a few lights in the house, and gives me some audible messages in the house that someone's either coming down the driveway or there's a package on the front door. You know, those are some pretty basic ones that come somewhat native in ring. But I've expanded those a little bit to turn some certain lights on and things like that. So when someone walks up to my front door and it's dark outside the front, porch lights are already on, but they're only set to 20%. And when someone walks up, I'll go ahead and increase those to a hundred percent just so they have good lighting when they come up. So that's nice, easy things like that.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, good stuff. I actually set up something new the other day. I have an electric car and occasionally, either myself or my wife will, when we bring the car home and it's pretty low on electricity, we might forget to plug it in because we're doing something. So the other day I went ahead and set up an automation where if it is below 30% when I come home, I have these light switches that have LEDs in them so that you can get notifications right through the light switch that's in the wall. And so it actually like pulses a, a purple light if the car is too low. It's handy. I'll see it. I'm like, oh, okay. I need to go plug the car in. So I love home automation. I love making life easier, even though there's a bit of work to get it going, you just can't beat it for making life better.

Scott Lee:

Yeah, I tell you it's true. One of my favorite automations has nothing to do with making my life better, except that I'm an Organ Ducks fan. And every time that the Oregon Ducks football team scores a touchdown, I use IFTTT to flash my hue light screen in yellow.

Jim Hirschauer:

Oh, nice. That's a good one. I like that. I may have to look into that for my favorite sporting teams.

Scott Lee:

Yep, yep.

Jim Hirschauer:

All right. Cool. So, listen we're gonna transition right now. We're gonna transition to our main topic and I think you told me actually that you're in an MBA process right now. Is that right?

Scott Lee:

Actually, it's a doctoral process. Oh, I'm working on my dissertation.

Jim Hirschauer:

That's right. Yeah. It's a doctoral process. Well, congrats. What is that about? What's that on?

Scott Lee:

Yeah. So my problem statement is around some data that Microsoft Research came out with not too long ago, just a few months ago that says 87% of remote or hybrid employees feel that their performance has improved since moving to remote or hybrid. Yeah. But 85% of their managers disagree saying that the performance has degraded. So I wanna understand that more. I wanna understand why that's the case, why those managers feel that the performance has been negatively impacted and the employees feel that it's, it's better and really understand what employers can do if they're moving to a remote strategy, which I think in this economy and in this work environment that we're in today is sort of a necessity, right? Gallop says nine out of 10 people who have remote eligible positions really want to work in some sort of remote or hybrid role. Yeah. 80% of those expect that to be the case and 64% say if that is not the case, they're gonna look for another job. So those are statistics that are just too big to ignore and we need to really understand that.

Jim Hirschauer:

I had no idea there was such a huge divide between perception of managers, of remote workers and the actual feeling that remote workers have about themselves. What does that come down to? I know you're studying that right now, but have you drawn any initial conclusions on that?

Scott Lee:

It's a little early in the process for definitive conclusions, but anecdotally, I can say there are a few reasons I think this is happening. First, I think managers look for traditional signs of productivity. So when you're in the office with your team members, you're gonna look at them throughout the day as you walk by, you're gonna have conversations with them. You're gonna see that they're at their desk, they're doing something. It doesn't necessarily denote productivity. But it does mean that they're there, they're working, they're, they're doing supposedly what they're supposed to do. Those signs, those visual cues are gone. Yeah, and managers of remote workers are, some of them are using what I call managed by the dot, right? Where they're looking at either Slack or teams or whatever to see are they available, are they away? Are they in a meeting, right? What are they doing right? And that's not the right way to do it. We have to shift from a visual cue of what performance looks like over to a deliverable queue. What are they delivering for the company? I don't personally care when they deliver it. Yeah. As long as it's on time and it's what we need. Right. That should be the theory.

Jim Hirschauer:

Right. I think you said that you have an article coming out with maybe some tips on how to manage remote employees or, or is it how to be a remote worker? Or is it both?

Scott Lee:

It's more for the leadership side. It's coming out in CIO Review magazine. It's called Adapting to the New Normal IT Leadership Strategies for Managing a Hybrid Workforce. I lay out several different tips in there, one of which is, To provide regular feedback. If we can talk to our team members and really understand what they're going through, they can understand what our expectations are, have those regular feedback conversations throughout the month, not just once or twice a year, that's really gonna make a huge difference.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, for sure. So this is a really timely conversation. Since the pandemic, there's been a massive shift towards either fully remote work or at least some sort of hybrid work. Personally, I've worked full-time remote for over a decade at this point, so it's interesting for me. I've kind of built my own habits and I've built teams globally as well. And they've been all fully remote. So I've built a lot of my own habits throughout that time. But I'd love to hear your perspective. What are those most important habits that either as a, leader of remote workers you should be looking at, and obviously communication was one of those big things that you just mentioned, but are there more, and then potentially even as a remote worker, what can you do to help improve this perception?

Scott Lee:

Yeah. So there's a lot in that question. Certainly the habits are very important and like you, I've been remote myself for quite a long time. In fact, my shift is actually going back to the office a little bit in my role at Arch. So it's been a little bit of an adjustment for me to, to go into the office a few days. I've been fully remote for quite some time now, long before the pandemic and leading remote teams. And the biggest habit that I've come to personally for being a remote team member is to ensure that I have my workspace set and my family knows when I'm in my workspace, I'm working, don't, don't come in, and at least check before to make sure that I'm not on a video call or something along those lines. Right. Because those distractions can really disrupt the day. Yeah. From a manager perspective. Understand that if team members are working from home, that means they are gonna have some of those disruptions, and that's okay. They're still getting the job done. I was getting a mortgage not long ago for my house and my mortgage broker on the other end, she was a new mom and her baby was there, and sometimes I would hear the baby Yeah. As a customer. That doesn't bother me. I'm okay with that. Right. And so we kind of have to understand that this is sort of the new normal we're gonna be playing by these rules for a long time.

Jim Hirschauer:

One of those things that you mentioned about interruptions has become an important part of my habits from working at home. So one of the things that I do with my family is they know if my door is shut to my office, that they're not to interrupt me. I'm probably in a meeting. Or doing what I do right now. We're on this podcast. I've got my door shut so they know, Hey, let's not let's not interrupt. And I have dogs also, so let's try and keep those dogs quiet. Right? And, and it's another big part of working at home. You hear the dogs in the background all the time on Zoom calls. Yeah, and so I've done that. But one of the other really great things that I've picked up as a habit is I have this little notepad, and my notepad list three little categories. The first category says super important. The second category says, then do this, and the third category says, chill, this can wait. And I went searching for something like this and every single morning what I do is I think through my day and I think about what are the things that I need to accomplish today? And to me, this helps keep me on track. Right. It's one of those indispensable productivity hacks for me. And then I actually keep track of all of this work in some online software. There's lots of different online software for tasks that you can manage all your tasks with, and I use that for reporting. So, some of these items that I write down, maybe a sub-task within that bigger task, and I'm using that, so that I can give complete visibility to my manager.

Scott Lee:

Yeah. You know, that's a good one. I do prioritize my day in a similar method. I'll go through and I think to myself, every time something's coming in, what box does this fall in? Is it urgent and important? Well, then that's a fire drill and I try to avoid those things. Is it important but not urgent? Well, that's the box I wanna play in because that's keeping the fire drills out. Yeah. Right. And then is it urgent but not important. That means it's somebody else's fire drill. Right. And then is it not urgent or important at all? These are the things that are setting the foundation for the future. Right?

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, that little four box prioritization is a great tool to use for sure. Yep. So what else? Is there anything else in the article that you wanna mention, just little teaser. I wanna read the article personally, but you don't need to say everything that's in it.

Scott Lee:

Yeah. It's funny cuz one of the things that we know with the statistics I threw out earlier about how many people are expecting to work at home. Most CHROs are saying that technology positions are going to be the most difficult to recruit in the next 12 months. And one of the reasons for that is now those are very, very remote positions. Yeah. A lot of people know that they can do that from anywhere and they have the technical skills to do it successfully. So with that, a lot of companies are saying, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna move to a remote policy and we're gonna start letting people work at home. The question I ask is, why? What does it look like when you're successful with this policy? If the policy isn't working, how are you gonna know? Yeah. And a lot of companies aren't taking that step to really identify what success looks like from the remote and hybrid policies. So that's one piece of advice that is out there that I say is golden. If you can identify how you're going to measure the results of your policy, you're probably on the right track.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, for sure. As a manager of remote employees, I look at output. I know that we collectively, this team, we need to drive certain activities to completion in order to align with achieving company goals. And so if the folks on my team, if we're collectively delivering on that, if the individuals in the team are chipping in their portion, I don't care when that happens personally. That's just me. It doesn't matter if they work, midnight to 8:00 AM or nine to five or whatever. That's almost irrelevant in my mind. What's much more important is they're doing the work that they're supposed to be getting done and that it's a high quality output. And then besides that, I don't necessarily believe that they must every single day work eight hours. Maybe on a certain day they can work six hours. Maybe on another day they might have to work 10 hours because hey, sometimes that happens. But yep, trying to maintain that work-life balance. I think becomes an important thing, especially for stay-at-home workers. It's one of the traps we can get sucked into. I know I've done it personally where I started working all the time as a remote worker, and that became very unhealthy for me. So I'm not sure if you've, are you looking into that portion of that, like that perspective at all as well?

Scott Lee:

Yeah, a little bit. Wellbeing is certainly a tremendous factor, and this is one of the big things that remote workers are looking to achieve, that commute is a killer for a lot of folks. I know personally working in Charlotte, I lived in Indian Trail, North Carolina, and on a, on a day with no traffic, we're looking at 45 minutes to get into the office. Yeah. There's no day in Charlotte that there's no traffic. So you're anywhere from an hour and 25 minutes to two hours, depending on what time of day and what day you're at. So that commute each way, tremendous waste of time for a lot of people. And they're looking at that as, Hey, I get that time back to spend on my own projects, to spend with my family, and it's not dedicated to my job. 10 hours a week is a lot of time. Yeah. So that's, that's what people are looking for.

Jim Hirschauer:

Well, and what about the, the flip side of this coin? What about people who either, either they don't like remote work personally, right? They just don't want to be that isolated or folks that maybe have a tough time self-motivating and keeping themselves on track. What do we do if we have a work environment that encourages remote. And we end up having some people on the team with those challenges.

Scott Lee:

Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of the research that Gallup has done has found that people who prefer hybrid they prefer it because, Of the interaction, the personal interaction. This is one reason I think managers are looking at remote workers as not being as productive because they're not contributing to some of the water cooler conversations that happen in the office. Hmm. And I think that's a reason that we're seeing a lot of hybrid positions come open as opposed to full-time remote. So it's an interesting dilemma. How do you balance the will and desire to stay at home with the interaction for people? And my answer to that is from an employer's standpoint, give them a reason to come in. If you're gonna have town halls or team events or some sort of workshop or training, you know, these are reasons people are gonna come in, they're gonna collaborate, that sort of thing. So, I mean, it's gonna happen every week? Probably not, but at least once a month, once a quarter, those types of things tend to bring people back into the office so they can see each other, even if it's not full-time.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah, really interesting. I was having a similar conversation with one of my friends last week, and he mentioned specifically that he really loves a hybrid model. He worked from home four days a week, and then that one day a week he would go to the office and he would have conversations where, quite honestly, sometimes folks get really busy, you may request something from them. It may slip their mind or there may be some reason why they don't respond to you. And he was like, I just wanna go in and have these conversations face to face. I want to go and talk to people. And he felt like that one day in the office he was able to move the needle, move things forward a little bit. And so I thought that was a great use for him in his particular circumstances. Not everyone's gonna be in that same situation, but for me. It underscored the value of that potential of offering that hybrid type of work environment.

Scott Lee:

Yeah, you're absolutely right, and that's, that brings up another thing that Gallup research has found is that hybrid teams are a lot more successful in their policies when they let the team members determine what those policies are. Mm-hmm. What days do you want to come in? How often should you come in? These are things that the employer can dictate all day long, but it's not gonna bring people back in. But if they collectively come in and say, Hey, you know what, Tuesdays are a great day for everybody to come in. We can see each other and then, you know, whatever after that. But those Tuesdays are really important. Then you're gonna get buy-in from those team members and they're all gonna come in and see each other.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah. Great point. What else, Scott, is there anything else we need to add to this conversation? What did we miss?

Scott Lee:

The last big thing, and this has come out since I've written my article and it's been in editorial review. But Gallup has done a lot of research here and they've got a lot of great data. One of the really interesting things that I picked up from a conference last week at at Gallup was that managers are having trouble obtaining training on how to manage remote employees. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And you and I both know that it is a skill that you pick up over time. It's not something you're getting gonna jump right into. You can't do it the same way as if they're sitting right across from you. And the statistics there are that 7% of companies right now have required training or coaching for remote leaders. Seven. That's a really, really low number.

Jim Hirschauer:

That's, that's very low. Yes. A lot of opportunity for improving there.

Scott Lee:

For sure, and we can even go to the other end of that spectrum that that means that they are requiring it. On the other end of the spectrum is that they don't even have it available. That's 57%. Wow. Huge shift. So I think there's a big opportunity, and I believe this is where my research is gonna go as I perform my dissertation studies and things like that. Is it's gonna lead to better training for leaders and managers to have those conversations with the team members, manage them better from a remote perspective. And it's all gonna boil down to communication. You gotta be able to communicate with your team.

Jim Hirschauer:

Yeah. Like so many things in life, it just really comes down to communicating well, doesn't it? That's right. That's right. All right, cool. So how about you remind us one more time uh, name of your article and where that is going to be published?

Scott Lee:

The article's called Adapting to the New Normal IT Leadership Strategies for Managing a Hybrid Workforce, and that'll be out on CIO review, I would think, in the next few days to a week or so.

Jim Hirschauer:

Okay, so hopefully if you're listening to this, it's out now. If it's not out yet. Keep checking back for it. So now let's, let's go ahead and transition back to something a little bit fun again and lighthearted for the end of the show here. When we were talking before the show about, potential topics, you mentioned camper van life and, you know, living for a little while, at least in a camper van, and it's something that I'm really interested in. I don't want to go live in a camper van. Let me get that straight. But I do want to travel more with my pets who are terrible at flying, and that's probably gonna take something similar to a campervan. So tell me your story about living in a camper van.

Scott Lee:

So when I picked up this job at Arch, it was right in the middle of the pandemic. House sales were going crazy and so I thought, well, I'll put my house up for sale, I know I have to move up to the Winston-Salem area. Let's just see how long it's gonna take. I'll do it for sale by owner. Little did I know I'd have multiple people within a week offering me what I want, and then some. So we sold the house really fast. Too fast in fact, because we weren't able to find a house that we wanted to buy up in Winston. So we decided to buy a lot and build a house, which is why I just got my mortgage recently here. Yeah. So to bridge that, I figure it'd be a little bit easy maybe to rent. So we went out and looked, well, there were no rentals either to, to speak of that were of any quality. So we went ahead and bought a 3235RL Winnebago travel trailer. So it's 36 feet long. It's got two opposing slide outs. It has about 264 square feet, which doesn't seem like a lot and, let me tell you, it's not. Yeah. So, yeah. Luckily it's just my wife and I and our two dogs, so it wasn't the whole family, but it was an interesting experience to say the least.

Jim Hirschauer:

So it sounds like maybe a little bit more than what I'm thinking of a, as a camper van. A little more on the larger side towards an rv, but still, yeah. That's small. And you lived in it for how long?

Scott Lee:

It was end to end, about 18 months.

Jim Hirschauer:

Wow. That's a really long time. Yeah.

Scott Lee:

Oh yeah, that was, it was definitely a long time.

Jim Hirschauer:

So you said you didn't have any animals living with you in the camper van, is that right? Or?

Scott Lee:

We did. We had, we had two dogs. Oh, you had two dogs? Yep. So my wife's a seven pound Pomeranian. That wasn't a huge problem, but my two year old 30 pound border colly full of energy. Yeah. Was a huge problem. So that was a challenge.

Jim Hirschauer:

So I'm curious, you've got these animals in the RV and you leave. Do you keep track of'em at all in the rv?

Scott Lee:

Yes, absolutely. I had to disconnect all my home automation from the old home when I sold it. So it put a little bit of automation back into the rv. So we used some remote thermostat controllers and some remote temperature gauges and humidity and that sort of thing so that we could tell if our living area was too hot or too cold for the animals, I could adjust it remotely. We also used Solar. We have 200 watts of solar with some batteries. So if the power happened to go out, which happens more frequently than you might imagine at a campground, our trailer was set up that some basic life support type of features would still be available. To keep the dogs comfortable.

Jim Hirschauer:

That's amazing. And for internet, how did you get all this communication functioning?

Scott Lee:

Well, so the first part, we had decent, I wouldn't say good, but decent internet access at the campgrounds that we were at. And towards the end of the experience, we actually did get onto starlink, which allowed us to, as long as we had power, which my inverter would provide power to the starlink modem. So we were able to get connection that way.

Jim Hirschauer:

Nice, so I have a device at home that I think would be perfect in that setup. I have a product called Furbo. And it's a cool little device that is a, it's not only a little camera, it's an internet camera, but it also can pan around the room and it can track my dogs. It's made to follow your dogs around the room. And the other thing it does, which is really cool, is it flings treats at your dogs if you want to. So you just like swipe up on your phone screen and all of a sudden you see a treat fling on the camera. You see it fling out of the device and the dog gobbles up the treat. And I love this device. So I think that would be an amazing addition if you ever end up in that situation again. And certainly if I'm in that situation, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna have one of these in there. I love all the stuff that you had working with the understanding the temperature. And I'm not trying to plug this device. I don't get any, I don't get any royalties here, but I just think it's a really cool device. They also had some intelligence to figure out, and this is one of the really nice things about AI. That intelligence is starting to be able to figure out, oh, hey, your dog is playing. It's exercising right now, and it lets you know, or Uhoh, your dog is actually under distress of some kind right now. You might wanna check in and possibly rush home because your dog is under distress. So it's pretty amazing where we're headed with technology and how some of these things impact our lives. Even with something as. I don't know. I don't wanna say simple, but with a relationship that we have with our pets.

Scott Lee:

Yeah, that's a great tool. I, I did see that out there and if we ever get into our situation again like that, we'll definitely be looking into that. Although my wife would tell you never gonna happen.

Jim Hirschauer:

All right, so here's, look in every one of these segments I usually try and get to, Hey, what, do you have some tips? So, what did you learn during that time?

Scott Lee:

I learned that living in an RV is hard. Yeah. And you know, it's good if you can get to camp grounds that have full hookups because then you don't have to worry about at least those things. But you know, prepare yourself. It's not gonna be an easy road, but you can make the most of it if you go places that are fun and you'll meet a lot of nice people. So that's what we, that's what we took from it.

Jim Hirschauer:

Nice. I love the people aspect of it. After all, it's all about the people. Yep. So listen, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show, this topic for me. I know it's a little bit of a departure from the normal tech talk that we have, but I think it's incredibly relevant right now and it's becoming even more relevant as time goes by. So it's really been an absolute pleasure speaking with you. So thanks again for coming on the show.

Scott Lee:

Well, thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to be here.

Jim Hirschauer:

Alright, and to all of our listeners, if you wanna share your DevOps stories as a guest speaker on ShipTalk, please send us an email to podcast@shiptalk.io and we'll get back to you. That's all for now. Until next time.

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