Chris Lattner

On the one hand, you can hire people from wherever they are, and you can attract amazing talent even if they live in strange places or unusual places.

On the other hand, you have time zones.

On the other hand, you have everybody on the internet will fight if they don't understand each other, and so we've had to learn how to have a system where we actually fly people in, and we get the whole company together periodically, and then we get work groups together, and we plan and execute together.

Well, so when the pandemic first hit, I mean, I'm curious about your experience too.

The first thing I missed was having whiteboards.

Yeah.

Right?

Those design discussions where you're like, I can high intensity work through things, get things done, work through the problem of the day, understand where you're on, figure out and solve the problem and move forward.

Yeah.

But we figured out ways to work around that.

Now, with all these screen sharing and other things like that that we do, the thing I miss now is sitting down at a lunch table with the team.

The spontaneous things, like the coffee bar things and the bumping into each other and getting to know people outside of the transactional solve a problem over Zoom thing.

And you're bonding, yeah.

Well, I mean, being in person is a very different thing.

It's worth it, but you can't always do it.

And so, again, we're still learning, and we're all still learning as humanity with this new reality, right?

But what we found is that getting people together, whether it be a team or the whole company or whatever,

is worth the expense because people work together and are happier after that.

Like it just, it just like, there's a massive period of time where you like go out and things start getting frayed, pull people together.

And then you realize that we're all working together.