We have made the decision to work remotely for an entire year, to focus on our work and societal safety, removing our team’s uncertainty about what is next. We are very lucky to work in software, an industry that isn’t negatively impacted by working from home.

We filled 2 key roles via FaceTime without interviews. We got right to work. This moment has killed pretense and artifice. We wanted to see and experience their minds at work, in realtime, and not in a contrived way. We will not go back to the rigamarole, song and dance interview routine.

The tech team's productivity is even with our pre-covid productivity. We were at 15% remote so we are starting to think of going 50-60% remote-- why spend millions on expensive real estate? But even if we achieve increased remote work, people will want to come in from time-to-time so we have a Hotelling problem. People want to know if a desk or room has been cleaned since last use.

Clients can't focus for more than 90 minutes in remote design thinking sessions. We have to be way more clever and explicit with our prompt design and watch for muting. We have to work a lot harder to moderate and document. The silver lining is getting to know people in more human ways.

There are no U.S. standards for consumer masks and there is a need for education. People don't understand the difference between masks that protect users and those that protect others. China has a consumer mask standard.

This generation of technology practitioners is the next generation manager and in no other industry does that cause a problem. Imagine a Rust programmer in 20 years managing a PhD in quantum computing without a clue about what that person is doing.