Building the next wave of remote working tools (quickly), with Monday.com’s startup ecosystem leader
You are reading Compiler, a software engineering newsletter by Triplebyte editor Daniel Bean that delivers regular reportings and rantings on the industry's top news, trends and interesting players.
Happy Friday, everyone! I don’t know about you, but I’m excited about capping off another week of working from home (WFH) to get into some solid homing from home (HFH). And that’s basically me sitting on this same couch I’m writing from now, but with Hulu and Zynga Poker in front of my face instead of an open Google Doc, Slack, and Jira.
Anyway, speaking of terrific remote working tools: I recently spoke with Monday.com’s startup ecosystem leader Matt Burns, and he gave me some deets on how his company has hustled to build new features and apps to meet the recent boom in distributed office communications. Matt also talked about rally troops (employees) during these tough times, gave thoughts on where remote tools have trouble replacing face-to-face working, and submitted some of his own personal tips for staying alert and focused while working at home.
You can check out some of our conversation below. (Edited for brevity and clarity.)
I think it's an interesting time to be in the business of remote collaboration software, so I'm wondering how things have changed for Monday.com in the last month.
Yeah, absolutely. With remote work being as high-priority as it is these days, we've been in a pretty privileged position to help millions through the iteration of our tools.
We just made this new framework, which is very similar to the way Apple and the App Store work. And we put together a hackathon internally to get it done over the course of, like, two and a half days, which means we had hundreds of developers all working towards this initiative that kind of put a pause on everything else. We kicked things off with seven apps, but we will work with developers around the world to build new things that cater to the remote space.
Earlier this month, we did a user survey that kind of filled in the story for the need for these new tools. For example, 50% of people are missing their work-life separation right now, and 27% particularly say they have started to get hazy on when working hours start and end. So we built an add-on to be able to set your working status to make it easy to let people know when you're separating your work, your life, and your family time.
We also made a Zoom integration that allows every workspace inside of our tool to have its own unique Zoom Room. Word Cloud is another app. And if you're familiar with Excel, there's these things called pivot tables, which can really transform how you access information. So we made what we call Pivot Board, which gives everybody the ability to dissect that data inside of their own remote boards.
Like most every company today, Monday.com is also working remote. You even had to do this remote app-building hackathon remotely, which I thought was maybe … poetic? Anyhow, are there apps for your platform that your now-remote dev team decided to build just because they themselves wanted or needed?
Yeah. We made a whiteboard app. The reason that we included that as part of our initial app rollout was because during our interviews, especially on the R&D side and the engineering side, we always had a whiteboard in the interview room. We would draw out what we were doing, and we would test candidates by giving them a marker and having them kind of spec out things during the interview process. So when we went fully remote, and our engineering team needed to bring on, you know, database engineers and infrastructure people, we didn't have a whiteboard, and people were like, “This kind of sucks.” So that was the first thing that we made, because we needed it.
Is there any kind of, say, new inspiration or rallying cry among your developers these days? I’m thinking like, “Hey, we’re building things that are really in need right now!”
You know, if we did get a renewed purpose, it definitely didn't start that way. It started with some fear and anxiety. Because we, too, were like, “What does this mean for us? How's the company doing? Are we going to keep our jobs?” But we actually published a blog recently about that process, about communicating to the team that everything is going to be okay.
There’s that HBO show Silicon Valley, and they kind of make jokes about how every startup’s pitch is, “We're here to change the world.” And that bit is funny because it's true, right? Everybody wants to go make a positive impact on the world. But, you know, companies that are in kind of the remote collaboration space really do have that kind of opportunity right about now.
But as far as how we’re working, what we're seeing in our customers kind of mirrors that. People are saying that their work from home experience is productive: 41% of people in our survey said they're more productive. But 25% said it's far more exhausting. And we see that, too. We feel more productive, yet we're also more tired.
What would you say will be the hardest part of work communications for software collaboration services to completely replicate if this whole mass remote work thing continues for an extended period of time?
I was recently talking with an engineer in our client base, and what he was talking about was creating and maintaining culture, particularly in onboarding. He’s trying to figure out how to utilize all the different tools at his disposal to really give support. He called it the mentoring loop. But it was so much easier to mentor new engineers, look at their work, review things together, and teach them when you're in person. And when you're remote, it's really difficult. You know, you can have the best tool in the world – which, obviously I'm biased and think we have a pretty great tool – but it still takes that intention, I think, which is an interesting lesson to think about when we're talking about this space.
Do you have any WFH tips you want to pass along that have helped you personally?
I think being intentional about your time, like I mentioned earlier, is probably the biggest ongoing lesson. I can tell you now that this is what you should do, but doing it every day and having that discipline to do it is incredibly difficult. And so, setting out time where I say, “Okay, I am working for a period of time, I'm taking a purposeful lunch break at this time for dinner, I'm going to sit and read for a little bit,” is helpful. Having that time to be in a different physical space where possible is good, but also a different mental space. I couldn't function without doing that.
Oh, and also keep showering.
In Other News
It seems the tech workforce reshuffling hasn’t found its bottom yet. Proof: Two of the largest companies in tech transportation, Uber and Lyft, were attached to new big-chunk layoffs. While Lyft outright announced Wednesday it was cutting or furloughing over 1,000 employees, some software engineers included, it’s been reported that Uber is planning to let go of a whopping 20% of its staff, including up to 3,000 engineering positions. Both companies have seen sharp declines in their centerpiece rideshare services amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Elsewhere, Kayak and OpenTable (both under the Bookings Holdings brand) were forced to layoff, furlough, or cut the hours of over 400 employees. TripAdvisor also announced it was laying off 900 workers (25% of its company).
A new report from Silicon Valley Business Journal shows that, overall, software development jobs have now dropped 30% below where they were this time last year, even though, as I’ve written about a bit in this newsletter, there are still plenty of tech companies still hiring in this space.
Quick Hits
High refresh rate rendering on Android. Android Developer Blog
Open source can thrive in a recession. TechRepublic
Google CEO tells employees return to office won’t happen until at least June 1. CNBC
The IBM mainframe experts who are keeping COBOL modern. The Stack Overflow Podcast
NVIDIA’s chief scientist developed a low-cost, open-source ventilator. Engadget
Major R language update brings big changes. InfoWorld
From Triplebyte
If you’re lucky enough to be working during this pandemic, you should still consider sprucing up your hirability. A new blog at Triplebyte explains why today’s nervous job market + all this shelter-in-place time on your hands = a recipe for improving your candidacy for when you next need it. Long-game jobseeking advice included: Find your north star, work on your career story, reinforce basic interviewing skills, and work on some meaningful non-work.
You can read more here.
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