Remote work is the New Normal

0:04 Me again. You're not done. So we are waiting for a few people to join. I guess it's a bit early to start, but people who are here have the luxury to ask a few questions. I guess we are here for that. So if some people have already a question, Francis, Olivier, Juliette, Céline, je vous vois. It's a bit early for Cal in the morning. So the rule is people who are asking questions can join with us on stage. I've not asked Noemi if it's the rule, but I'll manage that. And if not, I can ask the question. So if people have some questions for Carl. Any question you would have liked, I've asked, because we were a bit limited on the questions for now.

1:13 So it's more open. What is the best question to ask you currently? Oh, that's good. You know, I think you asked some good questions. I mean, the... How, I'm going to ask you a question. How do you think the, you know, the pandemic and the work from home situation is going to affect kind of technology startup culture in France? Because that's a bit of a question here in San Francisco. And the Bay Area has been very important for people to move here for startups. But obviously this year that hasn't happened. Why Combinator has taken startups without making the move to the Bay Area? And there's a question of what the long-term impact is going to be on San Francisco. And about whether you need or there's even an advantage in moving here anymore if you're building a technology startup.

2:22 So I wonder if this pandemic ultimately will be a positive thing for the technology industry in France, in Paris, or wider from it. For me, it's probably... Probably the same, so I'll ask some advice from people here, but I've worked on the question for my company and definitely it's a new normal. So there's a new normal. We are not back to previous. Previous remote was okay for one day a week. Now it's definitely... two, three days and on our company we have no rules which is some people will be back full time, some half time, and some will are willing to get full remote. And we can't avoid that anymore. So but I see no difference from France and others. So if some people have other answers, but I see three cases from my point of view.

3:26 Yeah, I think what I'm interested in is, do you think in the case, in last year, do you think French founders might have felt they had to, for certain kinds of businesses, might have had to move to the west coast of the US, to San Francisco, and now it just seems much more plausible to stay and do that where they are. I wonder if that's going to see an increase in kind of technology startups in, you know, in France, in staying in France with French founders. Good, so let's try a first question by Hugo. I don't know if Hugo, if you want to get on stage, if Noemi can manage that. You have to raise your hand, I guess, to let us go on stage or... Let's try that one once. Okay, it worked. Yeah, it worked. So yeah, my question is, I do succeed to create KPI aligned with strategy in each team, included the team, like platform team that are not

4:39 that have a different view on the business, like, you know, ops team and so on. How do you, are you saying like what kind of, how do we measure that? Or? Measure and how do you align the people? I mean, Some people are in some team and they don't see the direct alignment of their stuff, like, I don't know, re-architectural platform and the business itself. Yeah, I think that's it. I think part of my job, part of our jobs as leaders is making sure people understand how their work is important, impactful, why it matters to an organization. And I think that that's always been the best way to kind of motivate engineers of any kind is to show why their work matters and how it contributes to the larger whole.

5:45 And in general, I think the most motivated teams are ones that understand how what they're doing aligns to the mission or the goals of the business. And I think that if it certainly if you if you as a leader can't figure out how you would express that to any individual team, then you need to take a take a step back and say, like, oh, is what they're working on actually really impactful to the business? And so that's something you should always be able to express for any given project that's happening of why are we doing this. But I think there's something I've found very important for my organization over the last... Decade is making sure that no part of the organization gets too far from the customer in terms of of understanding what the customer problem is, understanding why we're building something or what it's important for. That's much easier for us as an organization because we're building a product that we use. But I think we started out more or less for small and medium business, for small teams.

6:50 That became more challenging as we started, as Slack started being adopted by large enterprises who have very different needs, especially, you know, kind of government, healthcare, financial services, where there's a lot of regulatory compliance stuff that just doesn't apply to us as a company. And so in that case, we found it really useful to get engineers meeting with our customers to hear their problems, hear why, you know, the challenges they were having or the things they were trying to solve. And so making sure there's not a huge division between, you know, ultimately whoever your customer is and whoever your engineering teams are and that they understand what it is we're doing, why we're doing it and get aligned around that. And so, you know, I think a big role of any kind of leadership is, you know, organizational alignment. And that's just a human communication problem. So it is a fundamentally difficult problem. But, you know, that's ultimately what we're here to solve. Good. Thank you. Thank you, Ego. Maybe another one later on.

7:50 We have Damir, maybe for one question. You can close your camera. You go to... And it's good. Let's try to move with some people. I don't know how long we have 12 minutes more or something like that. I don't know. Damien. Hi, Karen. Yes. Loic. Loic. It's a random question, so it's good. Perfect. Hi. It's a drink with... I have a question. I saw a very inspirative documentary these days on emoji and the impact of Unicode choices on the society and some minorities. With 3.5 billion of users, it's the double than the English language, for instance. And Salesforce is a committee member of Unicode. And perhaps Slack is a more mainstream usage of emoji in the Salesforce ecosystem. So do you plan to represent Salesforce in the Unicode committee or do you have some ideas to make the decision process of Unicode more open and really more free for the global system?

9:04 That's a great question. It's not something that we've talked about with Salesforce, but I have been, I'm friends with a lot of people who are on the emoji subcommittee of the Unicode consortium who do the emoji steering. And I've been talking about joining that subcommittee for a while, you know, and Slack being more of a sponsor of the Unicode consortium. I would definitely be interested in that. I am personally. fairly obsessed with emoji, you know, and it's how they came into Slack to begin with. And it's, you know, an increasingly important cultural kind of aspect, I think, of how we communicate. And yeah, there's no particular plans to share there, but I think it's, you know, as I don't know if this is accurate, but, you know, the primary tool that pushes emoji in the workplace. And I think that it's important for to have work representation on the subcommittee there. So, yeah, that's something I'm pretty excited about and about having a little more influence directly as opposed to indirectly on.

10:08 So, at least you are concerned by this subject. Yes, I am obsessed with the subject, to be accurate. Thank you, Loic. Is Damien around to ask a question? Yes, up, good, make. Can I? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. You have to just activate your camera and you'll be on. Damia. Hello, Carl. Hello, Dimitri. Cheers. Hello. So soon you're going to be part of Salesforce, as you said. And for you, what's going to be the change in your day-to-day work as a CTO? What's going to be the main change for you? Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know exactly because I'm still going to be the CTO of Slack. I won't be a public company officer anymore. And that's good. That removes a whole bunch of administrative work. But, you know, I'm still doing the same job and I'm still having the, you know, my boss is still the same person.

11:12 My coworkers are all still the same people. I think the... What's most interesting is figuring out what the opportunities are to be able to leverage things that Salesforce has built and vice versa as well. And to get our... We're very much in the kind of employee to employee space and they're in the you know business to consumer or business to business space on the customer side figuring out how we can marry those two together better, you know, we already see that Many of our customers or maybe all of our large customers, the Salesforce customers, and we see some of our customers use, you know, Slack with Sales Cloud or Slack with Service Cloud to be able to, you know, close sales faster or support their customers much better. And we want that for more and more companies. And as I kind of talked about earlier, we're very advanced users of Slack. And I think sometimes we forget that as well. And we assume that everybody who uses Slack uses it like we do.

12:12 And that's definitely not true. And I think we need to kind of shift that window towards more people. Getting the benefits of say how we we use Salesforce in slack into a into a wider audience, you know, because we There are we definitely have this with some customers It's the think of the CFO of stripe or maybe it's the head of sales from stripe said once they have a slack shared channel with a customer they know they're gonna close that deal and they know that it's gonna work and You know, so there's some companies that feel that already and I think we need to need to have more of our customers and understand how we see those things being used together and how that can accelerate their business ultimately. Thanks, Cal. And I'm also very excited about being in the same company as Quip, as I don't know if many of you have used the product Quip, but it's really fantastic, and I think I want to integrate that well with Slack. What it is?

13:15 Just waking up. Like a G Suite, like Google Docs, spreadsheets, slides. It was an acquisition four and a half years ago, maybe. It was a company started by Brett Taylor, who was the old CTO of Facebook, is now the COO of Salesforce. And Quip is just a really great set of products. Good. Celine, I don't know if you can come on stage, raise the hand and let you be a good speaker, I guess. Yeah, Damien, you can close your camera. It will get the room. Hello. Hello, Celine. First of all, thank you for your talk. It was very inspiring. So my question was, as a manager, how can you capture informal interactions between people? Weak signals because since the pandemic they have been so hard to get.

14:23 I'm not in the same room as before. So let me know. I think that is incredibly difficult. I think the something that we have definitely that has been both a good thing and a bad thing for us as an organization for a long time is that we're so heavily used Slack that there's a lot of kind of there's a lot of kind of back channel within Slack discussion you know like there's a lot of engineering individual contributor channels where they you know talk talk about things internally and that's a good kind of pulse on the organization. Something I've had, so the engineering team is like eight, 900 people. And I don't know everybody in the organization, you know, obviously directly. And many people I now have never met because they joined this year. And My leadership staff is my kind of VPs of engineering of different groups, and I have a couple of individual contributors as well, senior individual engineers who are on my team and kind of rotates over time who's on my direct team.

15:32 And I found that very useful in being able to have a kind of finger on the pulse of the organization of gather signal, not just from official channels, but from, you know, the discussions that are happening in the background. Stuff like that. I think the, you know, especially for me, over the last two weeks since we announced the kind of acquisition, that was a time of a lot of kind of uncertainty and feelings inside the organization and people, you know, reacting strongly to it. And so something I did along with my CPO is we did a series of town halls with our organization. Just like 45 minute like zoom calls with no more than more no more than 40 people each time where we just answered questions talk through it and spent a lot of time letting people you know be very open about their about how they're feeling about things and On the one hand, people get kind of Zoom fatigue. They spend a lot of time on video calls. But like spending time, you know, face to face as much as we can with individuals is just hugely helpful.

16:39 And it's, you know, especially at a time of uncertainty or, you know, kind of fear or doubt in the organization, it is time that is. That pays off and is well spent. So spending a lot of time, you know, on calls with people, which isn't the best answer, but like in unstructured, like hanging out type ways. You know, like last night I spent an hour Just having more of a social call with my most my set of senior staff engineers some of the more senior engineers in the company Just listening to what they were worried about or interested about and it wasn't a discussion About slack or about the acquisition but more things they were interested in how they were feeling this year things they're looking forward to you know, and I think it's good to Part of what I said about, you know, like learnings as a leadership learnings this year is being human with your organization as well. And then seeing you as a person who has, you know, similar challenges to them and is going through it with them. And I think that being not too, you know, feeling like you're part of the.

17:41 Part of the same organization as them allows people to be more candid in their feedback and then you know beyond that it's being good at receiving feedback difficult feedback is a real skill and it's like you know the first response when somebody is angry about something or doesn't like it is you've made is to be super defensive about it. And of course, I am, I'm human like anybody else, but it's a learned skill, you know, a real practice skill to be able to hear difficult feedback about the organization or about things that you've done wrong and be like, yeah, that's probably true. I appreciate your opinion and thank you for the feedback and, you know, making sure that you are, you know, if you can do that repeatedly, then you get more candid feedback from people. Thank you for the question. Thank you. We'll have... I will keep the time for tips. Good. Thank you, Céline. I'll have Hugo back. I asked him to ask a question, but I'll change the rule, and you'll ask a question for Hugo, who's a CTO in France.

18:49 So do you have a new question for a French CTO? Oh, yeah. How do you think about geographic distribution now? Where you would have previously had an organization that is in one place, do you see the bounds of your organization wider now? Do you see the whole of the EU as the possible physical location for employees? And to what extent has your view on that changed this year? Yeah. I am in a company where we have four offices in different places. In Europe. So we are in Germany, Spain and France, but even in France we are in Lyon and Paris. But yeah, Europe is quite complicated regarding regulations and some of the stuff about working contract and so on.

19:51 So it's always difficult to organize. Do you, you know, are you thinking about like anywhere in France? is fair game now versus just being Paris Saint-Lyon? Yeah, we used to work with some people in Bordeaux, for example. We are quite open to remote working and it was true even before the COVID. So we just still need one day per week to see each other. We still need that because We still need this energy when we meet each other. I know that some companies are able to work completely remotely and don't see a lot each other, but we need this. Do you, how, this year and how how much do you think there's been a productivity impact that's actually happened this year versus I think what what some people have talked about is that they're

21:02 Productivity this year has been fine, but that some of that is because they are kind of spending the social capital that had been built up over the last few years, and that at some point that runs out and it becomes hard to, some kinds of work like group decision making becomes really hard, because right now we're still working off the plan that we had back when we were together in person. Do you see that happening yourself? Yeah, partly. But it really depends on the different jobs. I mean, developers are really used to work like that and it works quite well. But for salespeople or marketing people, it's more annoying. And yeah, there are. They want to come back to the NTOV offices. Yeah. Good. You had one question before my track now. Yes. My question is... That's a trap. Yeah.

22:03 Good, good. My question was, do you have teams dedicated to developer experience? I mean, do you have... How do you know it is easy to work on Slack itself, on the product side? That kind of, yes. We make quite a heavy investment in that. In fact, I'd say it's varied a little bit over time, but between kind of 10 and 15% of our engineering resources go into internal, maybe even as high as 20% at some points, go into internal productivity. And we... That's an area I think we're going to keep investing in. And when I look at kind of best-in-class engineering organizations globally, you know, like a Google or a Facebook or an Amazon, they put a lot of engineering resources in the long term into that kind of internal tooling, productivity, and process. And I think, so some of the... the ways in which we measure that, we look at kind of dispassionate measures, things like PR velocity, defect escape rate, you know, like ticket velocity.

23:08 Those metrics are usually terrible to look at on a person by person basis, but they work quite well for us at a level up at a team basis to understand how teams are working, especially between different kind of code bases and technologies. But then we also do quite a lot of internal surveying. So we'll, you know, survey our engineers at least once every quarter, everybody. And we'll include things like, you know, what is the, what, you know, understand how people are spending their days, how long different kinds of actions are taking. The things that they find most frustrating, which are nearly all, you know, often around tooling and how, you know, like how long it takes to run tests or how flaky the tests are in this particular code base or how often you can break things while making innocuous changes in this kind of code base. And so I think we think about kind of the developer tools and kind of processes somewhat in the same bucket as the need to refactor code bases as well, because sometimes it's not about tooling, but it's about this

24:11 code base, this service is just too complex to work on over time. And so we think about that as a whole kind of portfolio to invest in and always. Are always spending some amount of effort paying down debt. Making things better. And for us, I think the two really big drivers have been, or maybe three, is over time, we have more employees and the larger the engineering team gets, the more complex any piece of work is. And so we need to make that more simple. Over time, we've also employed kind of more and more junior folks. And I think at first, when the organization was small, I was very skeptical of the value of the most junior kinds of engineers and especially interns. And I think that was a definitely wrong on my part. And now I see it as a. If you are building the tools to be able to make the most junior folks in your organization be safe and productive, then that also benefits everybody in your organization. If anybody can be, you know, can work in a safe environment, that means everybody goes a lot faster.

25:18 And yeah, and that's just kind of an endless payoff. Thank you, Hugo. So is Florence around for... I'll do a chat roulette. Receive or ask a question. We'll do a... You can prepare a new question, Cal. I don't know if... So, Florence, I let Cal ask you a question first. Thank you. Thank you for coming and thank you for answering questions. What do you think when, you know, in a post-pandemic world, when we are able to, you know, when we have the option of safely going back into the office everywhere, what do you think will have changed about how you think about work and how you approach it? Me as a manager or as a teammate?

26:18 Yeah, as a leader. Yeah, or both, I guess, either, you know. I think that since the pandemic, I had more precious time with my team, whereas before I was more in meetings and everyone. And so the control of time was less good than today, I think, even though that there's some overwork in the evening when we are working remotely. But I don't have the answer yet, but I think that we have to be more creative about a different way of having fun together and learning and sharing things. And I think personally, I've never met any war, you know, and this crisis is really great about the fact that we know that there's no certainty about anything and anything can happen. And so we have to be prepared.

27:19 And when we say that there could be a bomb somewhere and how can we deal with it, it's pretty serious now. It's like anything can happen. So I think it's it has humility in my team. Yeah. And creativity. Yeah. Oh, thank you. All right. Well, answer your questions. Yeah, that's great. All right. The other way around. What would you like to ask? Me. What's your question, Florence? So it's several questions, but it's the same topic. So it's how are your teams organized if they're autonomous? And especially from the impressive painless releases. When I use Slack and there's a release, it's like so painless and I really like that. And the second question is, do you use micro frontends to have these autonomous teams if you do have autonomous teams? Yeah. So we do. We try and have all of our kind of product engineering teams are pretty autonomous. And so I'll ignore kind of internal kind of developer productivity and our infrastructure organization.

28:26 But if you just think about a product engineering organization, it's made up of teams of usually. Say 10 to 15 engineers and a product manager and a designer and you know some amount of time of a researcher or analyst depending on the team and they work as a as a pod together and will usually have ownership of some portion of the kind of product so you know they might own a bit of the UI or a particular set of features and That team is also on call for things that break. So all engineers at Slack more or less are on call for whatever they build. So you own it from coming up with the idea to design to, you know, prototyping to release and long term maintenance as well. So. That's how we kind of do long-term ownership. Mike, I'm not a front-end engineer. We try and we do a lot of kind of internal. So our front-end, our JavaScript front-end is all React.

29:29 And both on kind of all of our platforms, on web, iOS, and Android, we have a portion of our infrastructure organization that builds components for other people to use. So it's like it's very quick to build nearly all kinds of UI. So we have very good reusable, very accessible components that people build on top of. In fact, we just had our internal company hack day was, well, the judging was yesterday. So it was the day two days ago. And it's kind of as we've invested more. or in those components for other teams to use. The things which people were able to build in 24 hours were very highly polished from a UI point of view because they just need to, like, the UI is glued together a bunch of things that are already available. And I think that's a really big contrast from one or definitely two years ago where, you know, before we moved to React and before we started building out our internal kind of toolkits, were much more difficult. And I think that kind of goes back to the developer productivity question of what are the things that we can invest in that just make all of the other development go a lot faster?

30:38 And finding out the right balance point, like how many times do teams across the organization need to do something before we abstract it is difficult because you don't want to do it too early or the investment is much more expensive and maybe it wasn't worth it. And you don't want to do it too late because you don't want people to be constantly reinventing the same wheel. And as the organization gets larger, it's sometimes hard to find where we're doing the same thing three or four times. And we're just about to... Join a much larger company that definitely does the same thing many times across its organization. You know, as your tech org gets bigger, like the number of people solving exactly the same problem are going to get larger. So I think a big part of how we view developer productivity is how we find the right balance of when to abstract things for people and what the right level of abstraction is. Good. Thank you, Florence, Cal, and Olivier, the next and the last one. And for the new rule, I have a new rule.

31:42 And hopefully, Cal, you won't have to answer first. I'll ask a question to Olivier, and you have two minutes of rest. Oh, okay. But it will be, in fact, the same question for both of you, because Olivier had a position in Apple in San Francisco. So my question is, how do you manage relationship between CTOs and your colleagues during that pandemic? Did it improve or is it harder? So I'm starting? Yes. Cal needs some rest. Actually, I think to me this is one of the learnings of the past two years is like every issue I've hit as a CTO, as an engineering leader, like someone else has hit that issue. Like most of the time when I meet with other CTOs and we exchange like, hey, we're doing a design system or hey, we're experimenting with quads, like most of the time, like for like similar sizes or similar

32:53 kind of companies, like the answer you'll get is like, oh, you too, like, yeah, we are discussing this or we've been We've been playing with that for the past six months, and here's what we found out. So I think that there's been a lot of value for me in connecting with other CTOs, and that's been absolutely, well, probably even more true in the past year. And we're all kind of like learning as we go in 2020. And so sharing those learnings like, okay, when are you, have you guys closed your office? When are you reopening them? Or have you found any good tools for onboarding, extra like all those were really super important exchanges and things I've really enjoyed in 2020. Yeah, I think that's a, it's a pretty interesting topic. And I think, you know, it's definitely true that all of your peers, you know, are solving a lot of the same challenges, especially this year when we're all solving exactly the same challenges.

33:57 And having that network, I think, is really important. And it comes back to the same lesson as developer productivity of like you don't want to be reinventing the wheel constantly. And while some companies, some technology organizations have a real kind of not invented here attitude for technology choices, I think it's pretty... It's a pretty poor idea to do that around organizational problems. You know, like other people are having the same challenges. Something that we did fairly early in the pandemic was we... set up a series of Slack shared channels with other peer companies. And so there's like one with all of the kind of Bay Area tech kind of mid-sized tech companies, CMOs, one with CTOs, one with CEOs. And that's just been really useful through the pandemic of, you know, sharing. What we're working on, what's worked, what hasn't. But I think those relationships with peers and through organizations, you know, in your geographic areas that connect CTOs is hugely important.

35:05 And this year, kind of more important than ever. And I... That's one of the things that I hope will kind of be enduring past this year that we're able to, you know, like people feel like people felt they were forced to this year. But I hope those kind of things kind of continue in a post-pandemic world as well. And that, you know, I think ultimately. I'm not American originally, I'm British, and there are many kind of immigrant expats here in the Bay Area that came here for tech. And I think one of the reasons why the Bay Area here has been great for technology startups. Is because there is such a supportive community of people who are going either going through the same thing or have been through the same thing a couple of years ago and can offer a really good perspective or are about to do something that you did years ago and you can offer that support as well and so it's that network

36:07 and I think that's hugely important and I'm glad that's been able to be you know moved online to some extent this year. Good. So I don't know if you remind your question, Olivier, with all my messy questions. I do. Oh, yes. Sorry. That's what we were doing. Okay. Last question for quickly. And I will thank you a lot. Cal after that. So thanks, Cal, for being with us. My question was like that, like, so picture yourself in December 2019. There's this weird disease in Wuhan, but no one really cares about it at this point. And what is the thing that you would do differently given the crazy year we had in 2020 and probably like for you? Both like COVID and sales for acquisition? Like what is the thing that you'd do differently if you were able to travel back in time a year ago? Oh, so I think it's a non-technology answer.

37:10 I think I would travel more. I would spend time like, you know, I have family in the UK who I haven't seen now in a long time. I would, you know, travel to the UK. I would travel to all the countries that I want to visit knowing that, you know, it's been a... Appreciate it's not like the worst problem in the world out of the problems folks have had But I spend a lot usually spend a lot of my time traveling between our we've like offices in 16 countries around the world Traveling meeting different engineering teams meeting customers as well in all of our customer countries And that's just been so different to you know, wake up every day and barely leave the house and You know, you don't don't necessarily appreciate it until it's until it's gone but I'd love to love to spend more time with my employees around the world and with our customers as well. Thank you. Welcome. Thanks a lot. We have a last question because we are, in fact, I have a really small one.

38:11 What is the size of the code base of Slack? I don't know. That's a good question. I should probably measure it. It's a lot. Yeah. Okay. Millions of lines. And the other question is about how do you manage to get diversity in your teams? It's a hot topics everywhere. And how do you success on that? Yeah, there is no easy answer. There is no magic bullet or one thing you should do. Well, and now let me give you the advice of the one thing you should do is start when you're small and keep putting effort into it forever. Because if you don't start when you're small, it's incredibly difficult to make a change when you're a large organization just because of the numbers. And also who wants to be the first woman to join a team of 100 men? Who wants to be the first person from a minority to join a team with no diversity at all? So caring about it and continually putting effort into it every time, whether it's calibration around promotions, whether it's looking at who you're giving tech lead opportunities to, whether it's looking, taking a hard look at your senior management team and seeing whether that's reflective of the organization you want to build.

39:23 And just like always caring about it and always having it either in the back or the front of your mind. And, you know, It's something that I put a lot of effort into now, 12 years into the company, and keep caring about. And it just has to be something you pour your time into. Good. Thanks a lot. I guess I'm not bothering you for a year. You know, I hope that next year I'll be able to come in person and meet a lot more of you in person and, you know, get to visit France again. With pleasure. So I I guess, Noemi, we can close the session and go back to the tables, unless I've missed some messages, but we are done. And thanks a lot. It was really a pleasure. And maybe we can move on San Francisco also to meet. We'll see. That would be fantastic. Thank you so much, Dimitri. Bye-bye.