• Why is it important for organizations to build a healthy team culture for Developers?
• What company-culture-related issues are developers facing especially in 2022?
• How can team managers improve culture, productivity and employee satisfaction using a healthy mix of technology, compassion and forward-thinking?
• How can organizations build a healthy team culture for Developers?

Have questions, feedback or just want to chat? Send us an email at podcast@devopsinstitute.com

Please find a lightly edited transcript below

Narrator 00:02
You’re listening to the humans of DevOps podcast, a podcast focused on advancing the humans of DevOps through skills, knowledge, ideas, and learning, or the SKIL framework.

Dan Pupius 00:16
[inaudible] environment is how you get people to do their best work because they feel much more connected to the purpose of their work. And they feel much more ownership when there’s a lack of trust. And that’s just going to inhibit a lot of their ability to be creative, to collaborate to get feedback.

Jason Baum 00:33
Hey, everyone, it’s Jason Baum, Director of Member experience at DevOps Institute. And this is the Humans of DevOps podcast. Welcome back. Thanks for making it for another week, we are happy to have you. And this week, I’m really excited to be talking about how team manager specifically can significantly improve culture, productivity and employee satisfaction, using a healthy mix of technology, compassion, and forward-thinking. And honestly, these skills are more than just for managers, I would think but as we are now living in our many people are living in the second year of remote work. And you know, maybe there’s some hybrid sprinkled in there, maybe we’re going back a little bit more, but I think many are still working remotely. This is a very timely podcast episode. So with me to discuss those issues is Dan papayas. Dan is the CEO and co-founder of range, a workplace collaboration software that builds high-performance culture. He was formerly the head of engineering at medium, and staff software engineer at Google. And in past lives, he’s raised snowboards jumped out of planes and lived in the jungle. So he’s led a pretty boring life. Dan, welcome to the podcast.

Dan Pupius 01:56
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. Awesome.

Jason Baum 01:59
Yeah, as exciting as living in the jungle.

Dan Pupius 02:02
I’m sure a little bit by the jungle sounds fun, but it’s really living in a clearing that’s kind of gets kind of muddy, and then looking after people living in tents for three months. So it’s not as uh, maybe, you know, attractive as it sounds,

Jason Baum 02:19
and picturing The Jungle Book in my head. So I don’t know, are fighting a lot of mosquitoes? One of the two. Yeah. Well, thanks for joining us. So let’s just dive right in. Are you ready to get human? Definitely. Awesome. All right. So let’s just start with this. Why is it important for organizations to build a healthy team culture for developers?

Dan Pupius 02:44
Yeah, well, I mean, I think, I mean, culture can often seem like a fluffy word, that’s a nice to have supplied afterward. But really, you have a culture, whether you want it or not, and it’s whether you’re intentional or not. And as organizations grow, things change and issues propagate. And if you’re not careful, you know, the culture can metastasize. And you can end up with a situation where people don’t feel respected, don’t feel safe, don’t take risks, don’t, you know, aren’t creative and communicate well with each other. So really, the goal of, you know, a manager in an organization is to create a culture where you can achieve your goals. And if you’re a modern organization, you need people to, you know, have psychological safety, so they can take risks and grow as a, you know, an individual, you know, hit their goals. And, you know, that’s why you should intentionally focus on building culture.

Jason Baum 03:31
Yeah, I guess when people think of culture, they think of the ability to work with their peers, you know, how they, I guess, feelings, but I like that. How you said it’s to achieve goals because I think that’s, that’s an easier sell sometimes to write when you’re all focused on the same thing.

Dan Pupius 03:52
Yeah, yeah, I think there’s a lot of these people, issues that are held up as yeah, like I said, nice to have. But really, they’re fundamental, and they are tied to business goals. So once you can reframe them, they become a lot easier to support, and much more concrete. And it’s not just about making people happy, for the sake of being happy, like, being happy means you’re engaged with your work, you’re more likely to be loyal and more likely to be retained. And you will actually be more creative and you know, and you know, better at your job. So there’s, you know, there’s a symbiotic relationship between the needs for work and the needs of an organization. And it doesn’t, you know, we’re not living in factories anymore. We’re not, you know, cogs in a machine. We need people to be on the, you know, on the most creative and most kind of inspirational selves and to do that we need to create an environment where they can win they can manifest that.

Jason Baum 04:42
So why do companies choose to not focus on building healthy team culture?

Dan Pupius 04:49
I think the old school would be seen as a nice to have that is not it’s not about the work and you know, we should focus on goals and like, you know, these entire I told engineers who wants, you know, who want this and that, and, you know, just asking too much. So I think that that’s one thing. The second thing is, I think fear or uncertainty, they don’t really know what it means. So they don’t know what they’re doing cuz they’re not trained in this, like, they’re trained as engineers or managers or like designers, they’re not trained in organizational design, or psychology or group behavior or group dynamics. So they just don’t know what they’re doing. So saying, That’s why people would not do it, it’s like, either, they don’t believe that actually has a positive effect on the business, or they just don’t know what to do.

Jason Baum 05:37
Here, you bring up culture, and someone’s gonna be like, I’m not having a conversation about a four-day workweek, like, you know, like, they go instantly to like, the benefits and that, rather than the actual core, talking about,

Dan Pupius 05:51
there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what culture is the culture is that whether you want it or not, it’s essentially the way you behave, and you interact with each other. And one way to measure culture or to observe culture is what you recognize and reward. So if, if you think of like recognition as attention, what you pay attention to is what you reward. So if you only ever work for, like, you know, engineers, if you only rewarding launches, that’s what will define your culture. And then people who are doing some of the other grungy work keeping the systems running or fixing bugs or handling security issues. They’re not getting the attention, and therefore, you know, that’s, you know, it’s out of sight out of mind.

Jason Baum 06:30
So, I mean, you just touched on a couple, are there additional company culture-related issues that developers specifically are facing in 2022?

Dan Pupius 06:39
Yeah, I mean, I think definitely unique times. So you mentioned in the opening around remote work in the pandemic. And so, mass, mass rescue remote workers upended, many people remote work wasn’t new, it’s, you know, it’s been going on for decades. And even in 2008, financial crisis, remote work really expanded. But it wasn’t, you know, 100% of the workforce, 100% of desk workers weren’t working remote, which is what we saw, kind of like last year. So so. So, organizations now having to figure out how to settle in the long term, instead of just, you know, surviving. And that’s like, causing huge changes. The other thing, which you also mentioned, was like hybrid. So some people are starting to go back to the office, but many people aren’t. And a lot of the survey suggests that a significant portion of the population wants to stay remote, at least part-time. What this means is you have a bifurcated workforce, where some people are in the office, some people are remote, and that actually amplifies a lot of the issues that people are facing, then I think the third issue is really about just the long term effects of the pandemic. So people are feeling isolation, fear, you know, anxiety, they sort through an all-time high. And that affects our ability to show up for work and the ability to relate to people. So when you’re thinking about what healthy culture is, it’s like, how do you support people when family members are sick, or they don’t have childcare? Or, you know, they just like feeling really burnt out after two months in a loft apartment, like I like I’m heading and that changes, like how we have to approach work.

Jason Baum 08:04
Yeah, so work as hard as it is, right? If you are, you’re already focused on all these business goals. And now you have to focus on individual personalities, and everyone is different, right? That’s what defines us as humans is we are all unique and have our unique issues. So how like, I mean, specifically for that last issue that you just named, the one that we all are kind of facing, which is this, we all just kind of have been through a major trauma. You know, by many, many people in the mental health industry, I’ve been kind of flagging, as, hey, this is a major trauma that we have all just suffered not just one or two people. And then keeping people on task focused on the goal at hand, but also providing a stable work environment that is open and receptive to people’s issues, whatever they may be, that is an outcome of this. Where did where do you begin with that?

Dan Pupius 09:12
Yeah, it’s super difficult. I think, ultimately, there’s no one answer one silver bullet. I think a good starting point is to focus on people’s needs. So like, how, what do people need in order to be successful at work? And just talk to people to have conversations, you know, where are they struggling? what’s working, what’s not working, both on an individual level and then a team level? And then you can, you can, you can go for that. So some of the things we’ve been doing it range reacting to this as, like, we make sure that we have one extra day off every month. So like the whole company shut down. So this isn’t just encouraging people to take vacation. That means that everyone’s offline, so you know, there’s no email, there’s no slack to catch up on. And that really helps people switch off for a long weekend. We’ve also laid in, you know, a new set of benefits including, you know, therapy support and stipends for make your home office a little bit nicer, just to make the environment feel like it’s changing, so it doesn’t feel so static. And then we also just think about, you know, how people work. So what type of projects are suitable for someone’s mindset at a certain point in time, if they’re really struggling, you probably don’t want to put them on a really Greenfield app, you know, you know, abstract projects, you want to give them some more like concrete work streams, where they can just like churn through tasks and feel a sense of accomplishment. And then when they have, you know, some wins under the belt, maybe you can give them some things that are more, you know, more, kind of more creative and more, more like, you know, Greenfield?

Jason Baum 10:45
Great. Yeah, and I wanted to talk about windowed work because this is something that I have not heard of before. But as a term that when we, we were chatting, you threw that word out. So I would like to dive into that a little bit more. And what are these benefits? These other therapy benefits such as windowed work?

Dan Pupius 11:09
Yeah, yeah, I mean, window work is, is pretty straightforward, really. And I’m sure it makes sense to you. So the old way of working was that you’d be in a factory or at a desk nine to five. And if you weren’t at your desk, you weren’t working. And there’s a bunch of reasons why that’s bad in the modern-day. So the first reason that’s bad is that many people have logistical needs, such as childcare, eldercare health things, you know, that don’t mean that they can be at a desk nine to five. The second thing is that when they are sitting at a desk, nine to five, they’re not actually working 100% utilized like we do creative work. And if you think you can sit at a desk for eight hours and be productive for eight hours, like you’re kidding yourself. So it’s important to have breaks and take off. And then the third thing is that different people actually have different energy cycles. So you might have heard of like, are you an owl? Or are you a lark, and this actually maps to your ability to have different types of cognitive function, the different types of the day to what you’re good at in the morning, might be very different from what I’m good at the morning. And like, I might actually be better doing that type of thing eight o’clock at night, because I’m more of an owl. So So having this nine to five, work schedule that, you know, that is uniform for everyone just doesn’t make sense. In knowledge work, it was designed for factories. So the idea of windowed work is very simple. It’s essential to break up the workweek into Windows. So instead of it being nine to five, five days a week, you can structure a schedule that works for you, both your energy and also your logistical needs. So if you want to do really early morning and do two hours, five to seven at home, then go off to the gym for a few hours, and then like work in the afternoon, in the evening, you know, we should be able to accommodate that from a work schedule. If I have childcare needs on Wednesday morning, I can find that my calendar is like a yellow zone. So I’m available for emergencies, but mostly not available. That’s like my childcare window. So really, it’s just about fragmenting and fragmenting the workweek to better suit you. So you can actually, you know, have better work life integration, and then be, you know, be more productive as well.

Jason Baum 13:12
I love that concept. It is true. And like the thing I noticed when moving to working remote, I was remote for a year before the pandemic is that you get so much more work done. At home, I find some people do, some people don’t. But I found that I was much more focused at tasks, because you’ll have people knocking on your door coming in and doing whatever you know, going to get coffee and you get stopped, you know, in the hallway. So when you start adding up all those hours, you realize how many hours you weren’t working at work when you’re there for nine to five. So then all that time it goes into the task and take a shorter amount of time.

Dan Pupius 13:53
Well, that period in the early afternoon, between one and three where you kind of just stare at your computer and everything goes really slowly. Like why not just step away, go for a run or you know, go to a park and just accept that you’re not gonna make you’re not gonna be productive during that time. So, you’re going to be more productive in the evening because that’s when your brain comes online.

Jason Baum 14:12
Yeah, I’m so glad I’m wasn’t the only one that was just staring at my computer from one to three. Yeah, no 100% And now with you know, because kids were home from school, and you know, now many are back but I think in many ways life was disrupted, but it helped us to prioritize. And I from a business perspective, I’m wondering like, you know, how goal setting plays into that when you have this windowed work, I think of teachers out you know, with with with school, it’s almost like teachers hours when you can go find your, you know, office hours or whatever, and kind of need to have something when you can all collaborate at once, you know, when everyone’s on at the same time. But

Dan Pupius 14:54
yeah, I think that I think a lot of the resistance this level of flexibility is rooted in the lack of trust that people are motivated to do the work that you hired them to do. And that seems like a bigger problem to me, then, you know, forcing a nine to five at the desk. So if you if you decouple the flexibility from the motivation, and then accountability as well. Like you hold people accountable for the work they’re meant to do, and the outcomes are meant to drive you motivate them by helping them have a sense of purpose, mastery and connection with the team and the company. And then you and then you use that as a foundation for building these flexible work situations. And then, once you have this flexible work situation, you realize that people aren’t always going to be available to respond to Slack nine to five. So how do you set up the communication protocols that support that? So we think about this in terms of like cadence and rituals? And how do you support you know, a lot of asynchronous communication that is more of a like a Pub Submodel, wherein the morning, I check-in, and it doesn’t need to be synchronously at the same time that you check-in. Like, if I check-in at 911, it doesn’t matter, but the information gets shared. And we just remove the urgency from a lot of the communication because a lot of the time, we don’t need an instant response. We don’t need this to be like synchronously online, and AdMob. Back in 2006, I was working with teams in Zurich, and Japan and like, there’s no way we could always get online at the same time. So we had to figure out ways of working. So really, it’s just using those principles, but applying it to people who may actually just live down the road from you,

Jason Baum 16:31
too. Today’s episode of the humans of DevOps podcast is sponsored by Kolide. Kolide is an endpoint security solution that sends your employees important and timely security recommendations for their Linux, Mac and Windows devices, right inside Slack collide is perfect for organizations that care deeply about compliance and security, but don’t want to get there by locking down devices to the point where they become unusable, instead of frustrating your employees collide educates them about security, and device management while directing them to fix important problems. You can try collide with all its features on an unlimited number of devices, free for 14 days, no credit card required.  That’s kolide.com/hodp enter your email when prompted to receive your free Kolide gift bundle after trial activation. And that that initial culture, right that, I think is Many businesses have still it’s a culture of mistrust, rather than a culture of trust. Right. And yeah, I think that’s what you’re talking about a little bit.

Dan Pupius 17:51
Right? Yeah, definitely. Yeah, the phrase like a high trust environment and a high trust environment is, is how you get people to do their best work because they feel much more connected to the, to the purpose of their work, and the, you know, they feel much more ownership or when there’s a lack of trust, people don’t take risks, they, they worry about making mistakes, they worry about asking questions. And that’s just going to inhibit a lot of their ability to be creative, to collaborate to give feedback, and then you end up with problems that many people have heard of like groupthink, or, you know, like, autocratic decision making all these problems that emerged in organizations can be rooted in this lack of trust and safety.

Jason Baum 18:33
What are some additional things that you do to have a culture of trust? I’d be curious to know.

Dan Pupius 18:41
Yeah, so I think a mental model I really like is from Daniel coils culture code, which is he has a progression. So psychological safety is really well understood now, thanks to Google. But you know, it dates back to the 60s in terms of the research. So Google popularized it, but people still find it a relatively abstract concept, though, Daniel Cole breaks it down, which is that psychological psychological safety requires belonging, a sense of belonging, belonging requires trust and interest requires vulnerability. So you often think that you have to have trust in order to be vulnerable, but it’s actually the other way around, you have to exhibit vulnerability in order to gain trust. And this goes to some pretty basic you know, psychological behaviors such as, like smiling or like showing someone some like body language, which we’re, you know, we’re not enemies, we’re on the same side, like things like handshakes and all these like micro cues, to create the sense of like that listen to like, micro vulnerability moments that leads to trust and belonging. There in the remote world where you don’t see people in the elevator and the coffee in the coffee kitchen. There’s not as much opportunity for these belonging cues, as they’re called so plushy much harder to build trust. So so we think about that as like the foundation and how do we create these moments of vulnerability. And that might be playing games or having silly check-ins where we share, share images of what we did over the weekend, or we have, you know, fun and play is actually a really good way of having very low stakes vulnerability, like it requires vulnerability to laugh and play a game. But, and that’s like a good way of building culture. But you know, it’s just all these touchpoints throughout the weekend throughout the month that we think about. And then we’ve even done silly things like we did like a spirit week, which required a lot of vulnerability and silliness. And that’s, you know, that’s how you build that foundation. And then on top of that, people, then you find ones, they have psychological safety, they take risks, they speak, speak up, they push back on, you know, executive decision making, like, I love that like being CEO that people once people question me like, but that’s not a given.

Jason Baum 20:52
Yeah, yeah. No, that’s, that’s great. Something else that you had mentioned was the mind was mind mapping, mind mapping tools and mood mapping? Or I’m sorry, mood mapping? Yeah. And I would love to learn a little bit more about that, and how you’re using that?

Dan Pupius 21:10
Yeah. So the range products are essentially an asynchronous checking tool at the core, which is kind of like a virtual standup. And so in the same way that individual standup you share, what you did, what you’re planning, and then anything that’s blocked. You know, we do all that asynchronously. But what we’ve also added is these, these sort of cultural check ins, and one component is the mood. So it might sound silly, but you select the traffic light, red, yellow, green, and then an emoji that represents your mood. So today, I was like a green cowboy. But yesterday, I was like yellow sleepy. And this is important for a couple of reasons. One, it’s like a moment of like, introspection of like, how am I actually showing up to work today. And that actually is a powerful moment in itself. But then also sharing it with the team is good context. So when you remote, you have no idea like how, how I am, right, and you have all these like little hints through slack and email, or GitHub reviews. And you’ll start writing stories like is Dan pissed off with me is done upset or is down being aloof. And if you just know that I literally haven’t slept last night because my daughter was up. And I have this yellow, these emoji that’ll like to calm a lot of your anxieties. So that’s the mood, the mood sharing in the moment. And then what we can do is we in at all that we have the mood history. So you can see the aggregate moves for the team over time. And this just helps you understand, like how people are faring, and especially in the pandemic, there’s been a lot more yellow and red than there was previously. And then we just use that as a signal of like, do we need to change timelines? Do we need to, you know, rebalance work, or, you know, spend some extra time thinking about, like recovery and repair, or like, it probably like progressed for an extended period of time, and we, you know, ask fundamental questions about what we’re doing to support the team and ensure that people are able to show up to work as a full selves.

Jason Baum 23:03
I love that. It’s like the DevOps principle, you know, like continuous feedback. You know, having that feedback loop is so, so important. I mean, it’s so interesting. So you, like your, your name shows up with a mood next, like, how do people see your mood? Like, how do they know that Dan is feeling yellow today? By the way, I’m so totally stealing this, we have to do we have to? Can we have to collaborate offline about how we can do this.

Dan Pupius 23:29
I mean, he’s right. So yeah, when you

Jason Baum 23:31
know, I would love to use range. So we will have to talk about how.

Dan Pupius 23:36
And then every time everywhere that check-in shows up, whether it be in Slack or email like you see the person’s mood. And then also the avatar in meetings is has a yellow ring, which can, it can be mildly stressful, but also, it’s helpful, because it’s not masking reality. So it gives you something to talk about this abstract. So instead of, hey, you seem stressed today. It’s like, Hey, I noticed you checked in with the lat yellow emoji-like how are you doing? And it D personalizes it a little bit. Whereas it’s really hard to talk about someone that’s like, you seem really aggro?

Jason Baum 24:10
Do you find that people have a hard time initially getting used to it?

Dan Pupius 24:16
Um, surprisingly not. And what we found is it’s like the vulnerability is contagious. So I’m actually surprised that people check in so openly, like around 10% of users check in red every day. Just kind of interesting. Wow. But yeah, I think a lot of people think that that so we have the three colors, but then we also have the emojis which allows like some resolution and some differences. So like the difference between like a sunglasses emoji and a greeting emoji, you know, it has like flavor. And so it makes it kind of like a fun exercise, as well. So it definitely doesn’t feel like surveillance or oversights. It’s, it’s very much about showing with your team. You know the reality of you Your experience today?

Jason Baum 25:01
So do you ever do anything with that, you know, to steer maybe some experiences that you offer the team. So if you’re getting like 25% Read, you’re like, hold on, we need to do an early happy hour or something we need to do something to, although maybe you don’t want to do an early happy hour if everybody’s read. But yeah, like, what do you do with that?

Dan Pupius 25:23
Yeah, we’ve, we’ve never had to have a major intervention like that. But we definitely think about, like, is the pacing too hard, like if a project is pacing really fast, and as the launch is pushing up, and everyone’s running yellow, like just being intentional about that, and you probably haven’t, even without the mood mapping, you probably have a sense that that’s going on. But the yellow makes it very explicit. And it kind of encourages you to take action. So then it’s so you start talking about it. So like, I know, everyone’s pushing really hard this, I really appreciate all your work, it’s really important. And this makes sure to take a break when you know, after launch day. If individuals are read, we sometimes encourage them to drop down to a four-day week, using the vacation to have like some recovery time. So it definitely allows you to create interventions, which I think then basically head off burnout before it gets too bad. Because you have these various stages of burnout. And if you let it get too bad, it’s almost unrecoverable. So if we can get these early warning signs, I think that can be really valuable.

Jason Baum 26:24
I love it, because what it does is I’m assuming you have kids based on what you were saying about childcare. Yeah, so yeah. So so you’re nodding and don’t you I wish my child came with one of those where we can move map mood mapper, it would certainly make my life easier. But I think hers too because it would be, you know, acknowledging is such is sometimes the biggest piece of it is just acknowledging that you feel this way. You don’t have to change it. No one isforcing you to change it. But just I am yellow today. Everyone knows about it now. And we can address it if we need to address it, or we don’t have to address it if we don’t.

Dan Pupius 27:08
Yeah, totally. So my daughter, my eldest daughter uses green, yellow, red, blue, some signs of emotional regulation that come from her school. And it gives you a language and a vocabulary to talk about it. That’s non-judgmental. So I think what’s interesting with them all the list read is both. It basically means out of control, which can be out of control negative or out of control positive. So it doesn’t have any judgment in the color. It’s just about like how much control you have, essentially. And then blue is sad and sad or slow or sleepy. But we are we use that with her every evening actually like we have it’s kind of funny, we have like a check-in a bad time. Like, how are you feeling like, and then we have, you know, we can talk about it. And it’s just like a really nice way of talking about emotions in a nonjudgmental way that doesn’t label them as like stigmas. But it’s just it’s like things you can observe and discuss.

Jason Baum 28:00
I love that. I think I would be blue every day though because I’m at least slower sleepy. I think the majority of the time. At least.

Dan Pupius 28:09
I’m 90 simpler when we do the check-in for sure. Yeah, sorry.

Jason Baum 28:14
I think that’s a panda. I think pandemic has definitely made it worse too. But yeah, putting on clothes these days, you know, it’s life is a struggle. I really appreciate it. And this has been eye-opening. And I want to continue to talk to you about range, because I’m definitely interested, especially in mood mapping. I feel like we could talk about that all day. I think it’s fascinating. And companies need to use this. Because it’s just understanding getting a pulse check of how people feel, is definitely the missing piece. I think nobody’s really asking that. They say they want a positive culture. They don’t really talk about how you’re feeling, though.

Dan Pupius 28:55
Yeah, I think so that’s another thing about goes back getting back to culture. It’s like what you talked about and what you acknowledge, is that how you define your culture. So if you are transparent and open and actually honest, that’s the culture you will create an if you’re reserved, and, you know, we don’t talk about certain things. That’s also the cultural craze. And that will like eat you alive eventually.

Jason Baum 29:18
Yeah, well, you’re taking a proactive approach by using this, which is great, rather than being reactive, which is an I don’t think anybody wants to be reactive. So that’s, or maybe some find it easier. But yeah, I don’t think you want to be reactive towards this. Okay.

Dan Pupius 29:34
I mean, just just one final comment, like, it takes vulnerability to be proactive. It’s much easier to be reactive, and, you know, you have to take risk.

Jason Baum 29:45
So, yeah, we had a whole podcast on productive honesty. And I think in many respects, this is the company being proactively honest and encouraging proactive honesty from employees, and it’s like, Wow, imagine a world where we can all just be adult adults have a hard time with this though so I shouldn’t even say it that way but this is like the fact that you’re that you work on that with your daughter you know and we do the same with our daughter my wife and I not we haven’t used the colors I need to introduce the colors this is great. But we don’t do it enough. I think as adults sharing our moods even just the basic concept of that starts that conversation and allows for proactive honesty. Well, okay, so I want to bring it back to the jungle real quick because we always close the show on something a little more personal but you already shared first of all that you race, snowboards. So you’re just not You’re not just snowboarding but you also race.

Dan Pupius 30:46
I used to Yeah, I was. I wasn’t University race team. That’s awesome.

Jason Baum 30:50
Okay, I’ve I can’t even balance someone. You jump out of planes. That’s something you’ve always wanted to do, too.

Dan Pupius 30:59
I skydive for a while before kids so did around 100 jumps, which was not a lot by like, I skydiver standards. It’s like you either do 1000 jumps or like two. So I did. I did about 100

Jason Baum 31:11
I’m on the I always wanted to. And I think I’m just gonna say that through. Maybe when I’m at I’ll do it. George George Herbert Walker is it when he was like 80

Dan Pupius 31:20
I find it really relaxing. It’s like so so Zen’s being up there. It’s amazing.

Jason Baum 31:25
It’s really the part before it can’t be relaxing. That can’t be there’s no way that can be relaxing. It’s while you’re in flight, right?

Dan Pupius 31:35
The night before and then the bit after, when you pull the parachute not relaxing, but the bit in the middle of a relaxing once the

Jason Baum 31:40
parachutes pulled. And you know, you’re coming down, and it’s okay. Now we’re now we can relax.

Dan Pupius 31:46
But that’s the most dangerous part. Most people injured themselves into fully open canopy. Really? Yeah, because he’s still approaching the ground at say 35 miles an hour, and then low turns. Anyway, it’s the time you’re closest to the ground as well. So that’s why it’s most risky.

Jason Baum 32:02
See, now I can’t even do it. Because now I’m going to be thinking, Well, Dan said that I’m not in the clear just yet. And then you live in the jungle, which you start off by saying wasn’t that it sounds more interesting, but I want to hear about it.

Dan Pupius 32:17
Yeah, I worked for an organization called Operation Wallacea who do biodiversity studies and social engagements around the world. And I worked in Honduras. So I helped run the base camp where we had a bunch of scientists and dissertation students out there doing research. So I made sure people had guides to take him into the jungle that we had food that accommodation, that they were like that if there’s medical evacuation, we had to do the medical evacuation. And it’s like, yeah, three months living in this clearing in the jungle.

Jason Baum 32:47
And in Honduras, Honduras jungle. Wow, that’s okay. What wildlife did you encounter anything cool?

Dan Pupius 32:55
Unfortunately, I mean, not by the camp, at least. They’re mostly birds. There were people trying to trap large, large mammals, but with limited success, so it’s mostly things like bats and insects and snakes.

Jason Baum 33:09
Stay white. Yeah. Cool. Well, yeah. So it wasn’t the Jungle Book. I don’t know. In my head. I’ll still think of it. You know, like you were talking to a bear. And I don’t know what else to do in the jungle. Well, that’s great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a lot of fun talking culture and talking, windowed work and mood mapping. And I definitely want to continue the conversation. I want to learn more about range. Why don’t you tell everyone where they can find Range? And, and, and anything else that you want to share?

Dan Pupius 33:44
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for having us on. That was really fun. Yeah, you can find out about range at dub dub dub.range.co. And, yeah, we’re happy to offer listeners a discount or free trial. Yes, we can configure that after it’s maybe.

Jason Baum 33:58
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And thank you for listening to this episode of the humans of DevOps Podcast. I’m going to end this episode the same way I always do encourage you to become a member of DevOps Institute to get access to even more great resources just like this one. Until next time, stay safe, stay healthy. And most of all, stay human, live long and prosper.

Narrator 34:21
Thanks for listening to this episode of the humans of DevOps podcast. Don’t forget to join our global community to get access to even more great resources like this. Until next time, remember, you are part of something bigger than yourself. You belong