DevOps Institute

[EP65] Is VR the Future of Remote Work? Ft. Jonathan Schneider, CEO

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On this episode of the Humans of DevOps, Jason Baum is joined by Jonathan Schneider, co-founder, and CEO of Moderne. They discuss how remote teams can overcome challenges using VR, the benefits of VR for remote teams, and how VR impacts code quality and developer productivity.

Jonathan Schneider previously led the engineering effort around large-scale automated code refactoring at Netflix, where he founded the open source OpenRewrite project. On the Spring Team at Pivotal, he led the site reliability engineering team and founded the popular Java metrics library Micrometer. He is the author of O’Reilly’s “SRE with Java Microservices.”

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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.

Jonathan Schneider 00:16
I wonder if others feel the same way, but I just know that I missed the experience of being able to sit next to someone not necessarily pair programming, one keyboard and one monitor but being engaged and solving a problem together.

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. Hope you had a great week. I am very excited for today’s episode. I know I say that every week. And it’s true. I’m excited for every episode, believe it or not, I’m a very excitable person. But today’s episode I’m like, extra excited for this is it’s completely outside of what I would say my reality. What I’ve had in the past, you know, my regular reality. This week, we’re going to step into virtual reality. The Metaverse and we’re not in no one’s sponsoring this. So sorry, Zack, you don’t get any credit for this. But with me today, my guests, I’m going to talk about who my guest is shortly. But let me paint you a picture. The image of the developer is sitting alone at his or her desk headphones on coding at all hours of the night. But the reality is that there is significant collaboration and software development, which involves multiple software programmers and architects writing and editing diagrams and code together on a whiteboard. And this type of work just doesn’t lend itself to share Google Docs or Zoom video of a whiteboard. This virtual barrier to collaboration can result in wasted time ineffective frameworks for software code, and poor execution. So faced with this problem, our guest today Jonathan Schneider, who’s the co-founder and CEO of moderne, viewed virtual reality as a potential way to overcome these issues of the remote workforce in software development. How did he do it? Using inexpensive headsets and new VR software, the modern team is now conducting daily 30 minute stand-up meetings in VR, which leads to hours of code creation involving the best ideas and approaches of the team, the quality of the code has already improved. Jonathan has a number of new ideas for further improvement. And guess what he’s here to tell us some of that some of his ideas on today’s episode. So this is going to be I turn up the volume, because you’re gonna want to hear this, trust me. Jonathan was nice enough to send me a headset, and I got the jump in the virtual reality. We’re going to talk about that. But first, let me tell you about Jonathan. So prior to co-founding Moderne, Jonathan lead the engineering effort around large-scale automated code refactoring at Netflix, where he founded the open source open rewrite project on the spring team at Pivotal. He led the site reliability engineering team and founded the popular Java metrics library micrometre. He’s the author of O’Reilly’s SRE with Java microservices. And Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I’m excited to do this. I hope you are.

Jonathan Schneider 03:28
I absolutely am. I’m just I, there are so many things we have to talk about. I’m not even sure we’re going to start but we’re gonna, we’re gonna make an attempt here.

Jason Baum 03:36
neither do I that’s the fun. We’re just gonna dive in. And I always start the podcast by saying, are you ready to get human? And in this instance, of the humans of DevOps, I’m almost kind of maybe we should get virtual. It’s so funny because Jonathan, this is the first time we are speaking to each other. And you know, we don’t usually do a video component of this podcast, but we do for those listeners and breaking down the fourth wall. But we do have our videos on I am talking to you and I can see you. And this is my first time seeing you in real life.

Jonathan Schneider 04:13
Right, I met your avatar first.

Jason Baum 04:15
Yeah, you met my avatar. First I met your avatar first in the in the virtual world. And my goodness, it’s jarring. It’s so different. I feel like I know your cartoon version. So much better. So welcome to the podcast. Are you ready to get human-ish? Let’s get you in. So, Jonathan, first, I guess the biggest question is why right? Why? Why virtual reality? Why did you choose virtual reality for your team?

Jonathan Schneider 04:46
It’s a social art really, is what it is. It’s definitely a form of art, but it’s definitely a social one as well. Multiple people, like you mentioned earlier work together on the same project. It evolves with multiple people work Working on it has to be maintained by multiple people working on it. And so just any, anytime there’s going to be a new opportunity to engage in a different way, I think we have to give it a shot. And I was pretty skeptical when I first you know, I encountered the I think I, you know, I watched Zuckerberg announcement of the name change the meta, and the three-minute presentation he gave where he jumped into a room and I thought, No way, right? It didn’t make any sense to me. But I think you need somebody that you trust to kind of say, give this a shot. And for me, I was listening to another podcast or tetra, and they were talking about VR, and they were talking more about more of the business where, you know, we feel like virtual reality is actually going to start in the, in the enterprise, you know, with companies shipping out these devices, and then move more to consumer. And I thought, well, if this is going to be one of these, you know, changes that happens in the way we work, where you know, you can be the first company adopting a PC, then we need to be one of those companies. So we need to give it a shot. That’s where we just made this low-cost investment.

Jason Baum 06:11
Yeah, it’s extremely forward-thinking but like you said, it’s low-cost investment to at least try. So I think that was, you know, that’s, that’s, I guess, very forward-thinking of you to do it. And, you know, because it’s one of those things now that having observed it and lived in in the virtual reality and participated, it is one of those things that for me, I didn’t get it until I put on the headset, yeah, I really didn’t understand it. It’s hard to, it’s very hard. But once I popped in, we met, and we sat in a work, it looked like an office, in a conference room, you pop in, you know, I popped into a team meeting that you had, and I got to meet your co-workers. And we were sitting at a conference table, looking at a whiteboard, or actually, there was also the circuit, we could meet in a circle, you could change the room line layout, but it felt like I was very present. Like you were all present. And we were actually in the same space sharing a space to gather, which I guess for me is my biggest takeaway is, I haven’t really had that experience in a very long time, I haven’t met in person with people in quite a bit. And that’s something that you just can’t get from a Zoom meeting.

Jonathan Schneider 07:30
And you do really feel like somebody is present next to you. There’s spatial audio. So if they’re to your right, they sound like they’re to your right, if they’re behind you they sound like they’re behind you. It’s differential and volume, it’s, you see gestures from their facial expressions and body movements and hand gestures, it’s very realistic in that fashion, all while looking cartoonish

Jason Baum 07:56
at this, right. It looks cartoonish. But someone had pointed out, one of your team members pointed out that even though it was cartoonish, it felt more real than zoom. And, and I I do tend to agree with that now is that even though like, for example, we’re having this conversation, I’m looking at you, and we’re over zoom, again, breaking down that fourth, fourth wall, but I think it’s important in this conversation, I actually felt like we were closer in space. And it was a different conversation. In a virtual world, where I felt like, you know, you could get up and you could walk to the whiteboard. And all the focus was on you. And everyone was paying attention to what you had to say. And you could lead a conversation you could draw on the whiteboard and everyone’s present. And I think the being present piece again, at least to me was so different, is that the impact that you’ve seen on like your team meetings, for example, how has it impacted those?

Jonathan Schneider 08:59
I do, I remember one of the first, you know, group meetings of more than two people, I suppose that we had in there. And you can have a, a, you know, visual of your screen, your laptop screen in front of you, you can have a keyboard in front of you. And you could absolutely be typing away on that, you know, on your computer and doing other work. And I think we do that on zoom all the time, right, because I can have my video on but I not really watching it, I could be doing some background work and still appear the same way. But it just really occurred to me that they’re in that room. If I’m typing on my keyboard, and my colleague to my left is talking, they can see me typing on my keyboard and looking at my screen instead of looking at them. So it actually kind of forces you in many ways. Just the social norm would be that you look at the person that’s that’s speaking to you and you can’t fake it like you can in this 2d world. You actually have to turn and face them and give them your full attention.

Jason Baum 10:00
Yeah, for the audience at that’s, that’s fascinating. Yeah, I think that is a big piece is we don’t have eye contact in Zoom, right? Unless you’re one on one. And even if there’s eye contact, you don’t really have eye contact, because it depends on where the camera depends on where you are, you’re looking at yourself, too. There are so many things that get in the way. But in the virtual world, you actually do, it does feel like you’re making eye contact with people. You could shake your head, you could give hand gestures, thumbs up, thumbs down air quotes, all the things that yeah, I almost want to go back in now and test it with you guys. Can we give a fist bump? I think or a high five? I don’t I don’t know. Shake hands. Yeah, seems like it. And that is a missing piece of conversation is eye contact. That’s right. Yeah. So

Jonathan Schneider 10:48
the gestures are accurate enough that you really can tell what people intend through body gestures. In the very first time, I was in the room and somebody else joined from the outside, they joined when and just for the Odyssey to understand, somebody else can join without a VR headset. And to the people in the room, it appears like they’re just on a television screen inside the room. It’s like a zoom, like a zoom, like a grid of people just like zoom in the room. And everybody else is, you know, physically in the room. So that’s, that’s how that works. And so that was my first interaction with somebody in VR, I was actually in the VR Room. And the team member joining me was actually through this Zoom-like interface. And of course, the audio wasn’t working. I mean, we aren’t, we’re all used to shorted zoom in our audio doesn’t work. And our mic doesn’t work or whatever. And so I could hear him, but he couldn’t hear me. And so he’s saying, can you hear me? And so I had no way of communicating with him because he couldn’t hear me. So I just started nodding my head. Yes. And I didn’t even think about it. I just it was my natural. That’s what I would do. You know, I was and, and he said, Oh, this is a weird moment where I can see your cartoonish avatar, not happy, but I can’t hear what you’re saying.

Jason Baum 12:05
How surreal is it? Yeah, you could give him a thumbs up too. Absolutely. Yeah. So so how has it like is it improved? Because of the difference of how communication is happening? Is that what’s making it more productive for your team? What’s the direct tie to your improvement? Do you think?

Jonathan Schneider 12:27
I think we just a relay, one of them from last week, I was, there was a problem that was confronting us, you know, kind of a mini production outage. And I joined one of my colleagues also named John in the room, and we just were working on this problem. And so I had projected my screen on the whiteboard, just it’s kind of like a massive screen is basically what you see in the whiteboard. And John sitting next to me looking at his computer screen, he can see my screen on the whiteboard. So it’s kind of like we’re sitting side by side. And we’re working on this problem, which is already cool. And already a unique feeling. But another team member of ours, Kevin just popped into the room thinking now maybe I could help. And quickly he finds that, you know, we’re really engrossed in the problem, he doesn’t really understand the detail of it necessarily. And so he just started working on whatever he was working on. But he’s remained in the room. And he was we could see him just type in way over there kind of minding his own business. But interestingly, like he was you kind of whenever you’re present with someone, you gain somewhat through osmosis, like some knowledge about what’s happening, even if you’re not like fully paying attention. I’ve never had that experience. A on Zoom, you know, you could be screen sharing, but you know, I can’t be also working on something and watching the screen share at the same time. And here. It’s just that’s just kind of the default.

Jason Baum 13:49
It’s almost like walking into a conference room in the office and just even in just plopping yourself down, right. And maybe there’s another meeting going on, if it’s an open door, you know, to the conference room, sometimes that happens, you walk in you sit down, and in a way it kind of we didn’t talk about this, but maybe it’s almost like a silo breaker in some respects because someone could be having that caught you you’re in your teammate could have been having a conversation, maybe Kevin could have said, You know what, actually, you know, this didn’t happen because of X and throw in, you know, a solution that you would have taken like two weeks probably to get to over just zoom for example, he would have to plan a meeting meet about it.

Jonathan Schneider 14:32
There’s a dynamic and I think it’s similar. So I spent many years in the Army and very early on when I was training with this group. The officer that was leading this training liked running a lot. So he would do a run every morning a long run. And he just you could self select into A group, B group or C group. And you know, it just depends on your speed. And so people that are really competitive or really strong are going to be in a house of people are not going to see. And, you know, I, I hadn’t done a lot of like, played sports much before that. So I like, fell right into the be very competitive person but not clearly not in a group yet. And I like really wanting to be, you know, in this age group. And I remember him saying like, you know, if you want to be in a group, start every day in a group, and we’re all running the same route, so we just go with them as long as you possibly can. And when you can’t take it anymore, you just fall back to B and run with B, the remainder of the time, right? But then every day, strive to go a little bit further and a little bit further. And one day, you’re gonna get to the halfway mark and wonder you’re gonna get to the three-quarter mark. Actually, I feel like there’s a similar dynamic in soft, there are so many skills to learn, and so much about how we think and how we reason about problems and how we hypothesize, make and test hypotheses very quickly, that I think a more junior member of the team actually. Like just being present helps them feel like they can kind of like run with a group for a little while, and then it’s theirs, they could absolutely just like start typing something else, right, kind of fall back to me. And that’s I think there’s that dynamic as well.

Jason Baum 16:12
Do you find that some people who might be less vocal on Zoom suddenly become more vocal in the VR Room?

Jonathan Schneider 16:21
What I’ve noticed is, you know, is they don’t notice, you know, that somebody that’s very quiet on Zoom, also winds up being very quiet room. So it’s, yeah, in many ways reflective of their personalities.

Jason Baum 16:39
Yeah, it what’s, what’s interesting about the VR space is, you know, there, with Zoom, we’re very, we’re opening up our world, you can have a fake background, I use a fake background. And that’s, you know, it looks fake. And, you know, you see yourself and it’s not perfect, and we don’t all have green screens. But it’s 2d, in the virtual world, which is obviously 3d. It feels more realistic, even though we’re looking at cartoons, but we’re also not letting ourselves are we, we don’t have to look at ourselves the whole time. You know, in Zoom, you feel the Zoom fatigue, right? That doesn’t exist in the VR world. I noticed it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel like that. Anyway, I’m so engaged in what everybody else is talking about it I’m so engaged in the conversation and being present, that it doesn’t feel like I’m experiencing that, do you find that your meetings are shorter length, you know, do you tend to just get carried away being in there.

Jonathan Schneider 17:42
I think one useful feature right now is the battery life is not amazing, you can get about an hour and a half, maybe on and it is wireless. So in many ways, it’s good, because it kind of limits you charge it very quickly and be back in again. But we tend to use it in a very ad hoc fashion, just you know, will pop in there will pop out. Just know. And it’s almost like I know, there’s been a debate that’s raged for forever, and probably always will about whether cubicles or offices or open floor plan is a better arrangement. And the arguments are obvious, you know, open floor plan, more collaboration, office cubicle, more quiet time privacy sort of thing. Feel like in many ways here, we kind of get the best of both worlds, it’s when you want the open floor plan, you pop into the room, when you want the private space, you just simply take off the headset and you’re in his private as in spaces you want to be Yeah, for me, I’m very social. So I have always done this, I’ve always I have a 13 inch MacBook not a 16 inch MacBook because I’m moving all the time, I’ll pick up the laptop and I’ll go to a coffee shop and then a library and then another coffee shop and then you just like to be surrounded. But I know not everybody is that way you really get to choose your alternative reality outside of the virtual reality, whatever it may be.

Jason Baum 19:04
Do you have office hours, like standing office hours in the VR environment? I think that

Jonathan Schneider 19:08
would be wise. And we haven’t formalized that yet. But I know that you know, we’ve had we have had some you know, early experiences or something like popped in and nobody was there. And so you know, when do you know to join and so I think that would be really helpful.

Jason Baum 19:24
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Jonathan Schneider 20:44
So I’ll explain also how we rolled it out and first headset in November, again, very skeptical. I’m not a gamer, I don’t like I haven’t done a lot of these things. I wouldn’t actually be inclined to it. But I bought one. And it was sent to my and I put it on because I had heard like, well, there’s some rough edges. How rough for these rough edges? Like how well can I see the text on my screen? Does it make you dizzy, you know, these sort of things. So just bought one there about $300 $300 investment. The first person to join me in the room actually joined remotely through the Zoom-like interface. So that was our first test of that level of communication. Then I bought two more. And so didn’t roll it immediately out to the whole team bought two more that group that first three people, like figured out some of the mechanics of this, how do you tune fine-tune the display? How do you get the software working? Do we get extra peripherals, you know, these sort of things? And, you know, then we rolled it out to the next group. So just did it incrementally. So November is when we started that process. And I would say about you know, Christmas is when we started shipping them out the whole team.

Jason Baum 22:02
Okay, so it’s very new. Yeah. And how do the employees feel this? Do you feel like because I think we’re in the middle of everyone knows this, you know, this is such a strange time when you can have employees from anywhere in the world, you can find any job and you it doesn’t matter where you live anymore. You can work, you know, in Shanghai and be in New York and, and vice versa. Do you? Do you think this gives you somewhat of a competitive edge? Do employees really like this as a perk?

Jonathan Schneider 22:33
I think it’s exactly as you’d expect. There’s like a mixture of feelings about it. And you want to be sensitive to that there are some people, they’re going to be like, oh, I want to try this right away, like, you know, and some that like, you know, are gonna it’s gonna take a while to you know, like, suspend disbelief. I think usually when somebody just for a moment suspends disbelief and comes in that tends to be a moment where they’re like, Oh, I see where this is, you know, I like it’s just a very different experience than you would expect.

Jason Baum 23:07
Suspending belief is gas so I want to go in with an open mind I had no idea what to expect my only prior dabble in virtual reality I was telling you is it was a virtual boy when that came out whenever in the 90s by Nintendo and it was very not virtual and it was just an eyesore made you sick after like 10 minutes of putting it out. So that was my only experience with virtual This is not Virtual Boy, this is legit virtual reality. I guess the definition right virtually I was looking this up a virtual reality is truly the suspense is the departure your brain’s departure from reality and being in what it perceives as another place. And after putting on that headset, it is real, you feel presence, you feel like you are there, I had to be really careful because I’m in a small office, all over the place. And it’s very easy to walk into the wall or knock something like they have safety measures, you got to set your boundary and all these others and there’s pass-through so you can actually see your desk or see the wall that you’re about to hit. Sometimes it doesn’t work. I gotta say I did knock over a few things while getting up to the lectern or whatever. But I think having that open mindset, you’re 100% right, I for one, after coming in and doing it for the first time can’t see how you wouldn’t at least be like this is different. This feels different.

Jonathan Schneider 24:42
It’s different. And I think, you know, like resolution could be a little bit better latency could be a little bit better. These are typical like this very much is first-generation PC, but it’s like viable at this point. I feel like enough that we do spend a certain number of hours every week in it by choice. And I can imagine the next next, you know, generation really being the one that’s really hard to resist at that point. So it’s, that’s, I think that’s the state of it. I think the next generation is coming out April or something like that. So just right around the corner. And I expect that’s kind of just it’s, it’s definitely going this way.

Jason Baum 25:25
Yeah, immediately, when we’re in there. We’re like, oh, I wonder if we can have side conversations, it’d be great if there could be breakout rooms would be great. If there could, there’s the door that doesn’t move. We were joking. I was like, I wish I could George Costanza out of the room, you know, like, waved everybody and then peace. You know, or, you know, I think for events, there’s a whole world that is, I don’t know, I know, you can watch concerts and I was looking at some of the other things that you could do with it. But that’s not really the event, I’m thinking of, I’m thinking of networking events, like actually going into the room and tapping someone on the shoulder and interrupting a conversation, things we just don’t have in virtual reality, or I’m sorry, in reality, with Zoom.

Jonathan Schneider 26:10
Yeah, if you know, the next Java user group, I do want to do, I think, present from this actually just open the invite anybody with a headset to join, and then everybody else can join the other zoom sort of thing. So it’s like, I think it could be an interesting way of presenting and be more connected to your, to your audience. We were talking about something which, you know, you know, earlier, which I had an experience years ago, where a colleague of mine Deshawn, Carter, you know, who lived in Kansas City, just put a number of, you know, engineer, sort of acquaintances of his on a bus, and drove them across the state of reserves, about six-hour drive to St. Louis, to just go to a meetup group. And it was like a weird, elementary school field trip almost where like, you know, we stopped at a gas station halfway. So you got 10 minutes to go to the restroom and get, you know, food and stuff like that, you got to be back on the bus. And there was this, like, the cultivation of the conversations and relationships that occurred just on that like six-hour bus trip across state and back, actually lasted for months or years beyond that. I think there’s a similar opportunity here where, you know, we’ve actually had customer engineer, join us in our room, in our workspace, no matter where they are, and just be present with us, we may be solving a problem with them, sometimes they come back. And you know, it’s exciting enough for us to have one customer engineer in there with us, what I’m really excited about is when two or three or five from different companies are there, because then they’re sharing ideas with each other as well. That’s just that I just want to be fly on the wall as they share their challenges and problems with one another as well.

Jason Baum 27:51
Yeah, you can have focus groups in there. You could have like, we were talking like product onboarding meetings. I was I actually saw for, you know, an issue that a lot of companies have right now is like, is employee onboarding because of the virtual workforce? You feel isolated? environment to go to? Right? Yeah, it’s, it’s pretty fascinating. You know, what, what would you say are the biggest benefits of VR other than what we’ve been discussing,

Jonathan Schneider 28:24
I wonder if others feel the same way. But I just know that I missed the experience of being able to sit next to someone not necessarily pair programming, one keyboard and one monitor, but just being able to glance over at the monitor next to me, and be engaged really and solving a problem together. That’s actually what I was hoping to find in this room, which was that if we were all in a line that I would be able to see the monitor of the person next to me, and they are thinking privacy or so you actually can, it’s just like a ghost sort of transparent view. But any one person can present their monitor to the front. And that really does give you that experience of being able to glance over. And that’s for developers, I think that’s really key to be able to do that.

Jason Baum 29:15
Yeah. And we’re talking to a mixture of deaf people ops people, DevOps people. So what would you say to them, you know, as far as like, what VR can do for them with regards to the code quality and productivity just in general?

Jonathan Schneider 29:33
Well, it’s, it’s interesting. Now, I’d say like so modern, you know, just as a little bit of background, we are actually a developer tools company. So we do automated source code repair. You mentioned this thing about refactoring from Netflix, and it’s exactly as we write recipes that automatically go and modernize your code or patch security vulnerabilities or these sorts of things. It seems like a pretty magical technology but It started with, actually, I was working for the engineering tools team, the operations team, at Netflix and to be effective, the most effective you can be as part of a central team, you need to be like an ally, or alongside of the developer, which is really your customer in many ways in that environment. And so how can you be closer to them? How can you join them where they are? How can you be, you know, participatory, Netflix was a very difficult culture and a really eye-opening one to be part of a central operations team, because they have this freedom responsibility culture, which basically meant, you know, a central team could impose no constraints and what product engineers did. Now imagine being a security engineer there and saying, like I know of a particular vulnerability, the easiest way to like, or the first thing we all think is I’m going to break the build pipeline if you know, don’t pass a certain date, right? Or I’m going to, you know, not, I’m going to put gates up. And here they were talking about building guardrails, instead of gates, you know, how do we build an experience that keeps the developer going down this path, and a lot of it’s just being present with them communicating with them. For this particular problem that our company now works on, which again, is around application modernization or security vulnerability patching, we would be trying to push through some initiative. And I would try to generate reports and dashboards and views for the developers to understand the current state and, and communicate what our intent state was. And I didn’t find it to be very actionable, like, people just wouldn’t move forward. And I would go in and abuse them and say, What can we do to help you come along with this on this initiative? And they say, well if you do it for me, I’m happy to do it. You know, and that’s, this is where automation comes from, but like, doing it for them means, you know, both providing the tooling and also being present with them in their environment to help them along.

Jason Baum 32:04
Yeah, I think that that being present in there, right, that’s what we talked about with VR. So I’m going to ask you a question that I saw come up. It made me think about VR, because I just experienced it. It’s Do you think this is a fad? Is VR a fad? Or is VR the future?

Jonathan Schneider 32:23
I think, if you rewind to middle of last year, I would have said VR was the fad, but augmented reality was the future. I really thought that’s how it would go that I could totally imagine, like, discarding my physical monitor, and instead, you know, developing a more dynamic sort of fungible like AR experience. I think, now, I believe it’s the opposite. And I’m surprised to hear myself say that, but I think AR is, is less useful, when when we’re confronted with the possibility that we have with VR, I do think VR is going to ultimately win. And I think one of the really interesting concepts the, how I see this going, really, is that it’s gonna start in the business. I mean, here I am, as a small business, you know, leader shipping out devices, you know, $300 a pop to our team. It’s just like the PC, it started in the business. And then it developed consumer applications later, I see the same thing happening here. With VR.

Jason Baum 33:30
Yeah. And to be and that’s just again like you’re not this huge company, but you’re a small company, and you’re willing to make the investment because you see the benefits, which is, which is interesting, because, yes, it didn’t come out and cost millions of dollars to implement. Yeah. And then there’s no cost once you’re in the app at the moment right now, right? In the metaverse, whatever doesn’t, it’s all free.

Jonathan Schneider 33:56
Yeah. I think like a lot of organizations, we’ve never tried to overly optimize for cost of equipment because it’s just such a, it’s part of, you know, your daily work. So a marginal improvement in daily equipment or the equipment used daily makes a big difference in bottom-line productivity. So that’s, I think we see the same thing here.

Jason Baum 34:15
So now we’re on our way to wrapping up and you know, Jonathan, this has been an experience for me, I hope it translated to our listeners. I believe you had recorded a piece of ourselves in the VR world that we’d love to share with everybody so you can get a sense of what it looks like. Obviously, it’s not it’s not going to necessarily do it complete justice. Obviously being there is you know, sells it but I think it would give you a good idea of what we were seeing Correct.

Jonathan Schneider 34:49
That’s right. So you can see the team members to the right I look over at you. And our producer here Jaida you can see her on the on the TV screen joining us remotely.

Jason Baum 35:00
Yeah, we’ll introduce Jaida, no one, no one. No one has met Jaida. Unless you knew her. Before all this. So Jaida is our producer. So she’ll, she’ll make an appearance for the first time right now humans of DevOps podcasts, rightfully so by the way

Jonathan Schneider 35:14
Yeah. So yeah, hopefully, that’s helpful to visualize it a bit.

Jason Baum 35:19
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jonathan. This is this has been Truly an experience. Just amazing. It’s opened my eyes to a whole new world. A little scared of where we’re going where this is, like I said, I think this is how the matrix began. Yes, it is. So we’d like to get personal before we go. And I was like to ask one question. And I believe we’re going to retire the old question that we used to ask on this podcast, so I’m going to ask you something different. So if you could be remembered for one thing? What would that be?

Jonathan Schneider 35:51
Wow, that’s deep right.

Jason Baum 35:53
We always ask a very deep, deep get to know your question.

Jonathan Schneider 35:59
I mean, I think it’s, I remember going to a So long answer maybe but a seminar a while back on just on speaking and technical speaking. And the presenter. His name is Anne Ricketts. By the way, if you’re in the Bay Area, she’s absolutely fantastic. You should hire her. But you know, and Ricketts Lighthouse communication, I think is what her company is called. They, she said, like, don’t try to be like Steve Jobs. Don’t try to be like, you know, some other famous speaker, what is like your one personality characteristic that you want to come through? Here. I’m like this, like from the Midwest, like we’re all sort of upbringing, I think one characteristic of that area is just, you know, just like friendliness, you know, willing to, to listen, you know, it’d be present with your neighbors. And so I think that’s what I always want to bring through. Hopefully, we made you feel welcome in our local area there today.

Jason Baum 36:58
Yeah, thank you so much. I felt I felt like I’d met your entire team like I was at your office. I got to know everybody it was it’s, it’s truly a unique experience. And it’s, and you do have a sense of feel like that we’ve met before, which is odd to say when I’ve met a cartoon version of you. Well, Jonathan Schneider, co-founder and CEO of modern it’s this has been an absolute pleasure. I really appreciate your coming on and introducing me to the virtual world. Yeah. Yeah, 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 37:50
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

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