009: The Remote Work Revolution: Darren Murph on the Future of the Workplace

Darren Murph (00:00:00) - A lot of people spend their whole life building. It's just the natural instinct. What would the next ten years look like if you excavate it? Replaced build with excavate. What soft skill do you think has helped your career the most? Empathy. Entering every room and asking What do I not know? Entering every conversation and saying, Should I help you solve this? Or do you just want me to listen? This is really powerful. The darkhorse skill of the next decade is low context communication. 

Christopher Nelson (00:00:31) - Hello and welcome to episode number nine of Tech Careers and Money Talk. I'm your host, Christopher Nelson. I've been in the technology industry for 20 plus years, and after climbing my way to the C-suite, working for three companies that have been through IPO and investing my way to financial independence, I'm here to share with you everything that I've learned and also introduce you to people who have done the same thing. And today we're going to introduce you to Darren Murph, who is a remote work expert. Remote work is so important for technology employees because it can provide a lot of relief in time.

Christopher Nelson - Freedom working when you want, when you can work best in also location freedom. I want to talk to Darren and understand his career. How did he come from starting off as a supply chain analyst to becoming a sought after expert in remote work, in organizational design for technology companies and also going through one of the biggest IPOs at 2021 with GitLab. I want to spend the second half of our show digging into what is the state of remote work. There's a lot of noise in the media that remote work is under fire. People are in companies are demanding that that people go back to the office. What is the true state of remote work from Darren's perspective? And also what really is remote work when done and executed very well? I want to end by asking him what are some tactics and some skills that we can build to become remote workers that are sought after by some great technology companies. Stick around for that. I'm so excited. Let's get into this conversation. 

Christopher Nelson (00:02:14) - I am so excited to introduce you today to Darren Murph. Darren Murph, who has been called the oracle of remote work, is now the VP of workplace design and remote experience at Andela. And I know he also worked at Head of Remote at GitLab. We were there at the same time and very interesting story. Excited to share with you. But somebody who sits at the intersection of People Ops marketing, strategic communication and really thinks a lot about org design in this new world that we're living in, which is remote work. Welcome, Darren. 

Darren Murph (00:02:48) - Christopher, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. 

Christopher Nelson (00:02:51) - Well, I'm glad to have you, too. And I think that we're going to get so much value out of this conversation today because, you know, I love sitting down and talking about people's origin stories and especially people that don't have a straight line. You know, I think there's always that perception of, oh, you leave school, then you're an engineer, then you work up and you're in a tech company. That's not your story at all. 

Darren Murph (00:03:14) - Now, I would say the most interesting people in the world have very circuitous paths, Right? I'll take you back to the beginning.It really started with a mindset shift. Most people decide what they want to be when they grow up. You start getting this question really early: What do you want to be when you grow up? Most people decide that early on because that's what society forces you to do, and then at some stage you allow an HR department to tell you where you're going to live. To do that thing you want to be when you grow up. So you want to be a doctor. You apply for a job in Washington DC, and the HR department says, Yep, you can uproot your family and move here. This is how it's going to work. I could never square that. That always seems absurd to me. Wow. Especially in the realm of knowledge, work and digital work. I thought, how are people just blindly walking into this path and handing over immense amounts of personal autonomy and agency at a very early stage in their life? And I go back to The Matrix. I'm dating myself a bit, but the red pill blue pill scenario, it's like, Whoa, everyone is seeming to take the blue pill.

So I did it a little bit differently. I said, No, here's the life that I would like to live. Here's how I want to be present in my community. Here's how I want to be of service to the world. Here's who I want to show up as a son, as a husband, as a friend. And then I'm going to try to build a career path around that, because I think there are certain people, teams and organizations in the world that are progressive enough to see the skills that I bring to the table and allow me to inject them into their org from anywhere in the world. That was my thesis. Now, almost 20 years ago, this thesis was wild and outlandish. Remote work was in its infancy even then. But I thought, I don't need everyone in the world to get it. I just need one team at a time to get it. And that's how the journey began. And I optimized for the flexibility that I really craved. And I was able to visit all 50 states in the first five years of marriage.

We've been to over 50 countries, over 50 national parks, and I actually earned a world record in my profession during all of that travel. And that became a bit of an unlock that there's something to this path, even though most of the world isn't taking it. 

Christopher Nelson (00:05:40) - And so because I know when you came out of school, you were working in the supply chain? 

Darren Murph (00:05:46) - Correct. So I went to business school because that's what you do. I actually wanted to be an astronaut, but then I recognized there's a lot of math if you want to become an astronaut. Yeah, not exactly what I wanted to go into. So quick. Pivot at the last moment to go into business and supply chain management. But during that university experience, what I started to understand about myself is I really loved storytelling. So even though I was in business school, my favorite parts of business school were the stories around business. How are businesses built, how are teams built? And I started falling in love with that part of it.

So anything related to communications, marketing, storytelling in the vein of business I loved. And so when I exited university, I took a supply chain job because that's what you do. I had a supply chain internship, so the pathway was made available. But funny enough, it only took about six months before I started parlaying my evenings into being a contributing editor for a consumer technology publication, because that's really where my passion was. And so my day job was in the supply chain. My evening and weekend job was a storyteller, and of course that was a remote job. And I started to fall more and more in love with that path the second half of my day, which was much more compelling. And that was a very eye opening experience. And the doors after the door from there have led me to today. 

Christopher Nelson (00:07:12) - And so a couple of things that I really, really, really want to sort of distill out of what you just said that I think are so important. And I think the first half was you started having a vision for your life in your work that you wanted to ultimately build one thing at a time, like you weren't thinking, I need the world to change for this to happen. But you said, here's my vision. Why can't this be reality? And in part of that, you said, I want to show people that my skill can be just as valuable, more valuable from a distance. 

The second part, when you started talking about the supply chain, one of the things that is so important and this is that I started working on the same thing. My soft skills at night started working on speaking and presenting. That was something that really helped me accelerate some leadership in my career or into leadership in my career. But for you, you then focused on this storytelling. You have this vision and then the other thing you mentioned it sort of when we were in the green room before this is. If you always think one step ahead. You're like, If I'm going to walk through a door, what's then the door that those doors are going to open? I think those are three fundamental things that it's important that all tech employees really understand is that with those building blocks of building core skills that don't have to be technical skills can be very soft skills.

And then also the vision for your life and work, how it works together that can start opening some doors and creating new career paths. 

Darren Murph (00:08:52) - You can really create a competitive advantage for yourself. If you look at the things that are very necessary in business, in life, but aren't taught very often. In other words, anyone can go get a computer science degree. Yeah, but can you go get a degree in low context communication a little bit more difficult? There's some nuance there. That's something that is more learned over time. Right. And as with anything else, what is rare becomes precious. What is precious becomes valuable. And so that's what I looked for. What are some of those skills that I need to learn in order to elevate myself when I'm competing against people who are willing to uproot their lives and go into an office every day. At the time, I was at a disadvantage simply because I was unwilling to go down the common path. And so I needed to elevate my game just to pull even with the other folks who I might have competed with for a certain role.

Christopher Nelson (00:09:51) - And so then how over time, so you're, you're really focusing on this skill, storytelling that is so powerful in business. And I do want to make sure that we pause and say. Understanding business, being able to tell stories, articulate, you know, strategic communication. Synthesizing that information in technology is so important because arguably it's so complex, it's so difficult to be able to tell the value that if you can do that, well, there's a huge opportunity there. 

Darren Murph (00:10:26) - Well, the truth is narratives run the world and they always have. If you look back at how civilization has evolved, it evolves through documented stories of how things work. And the same is true in business. And once I figured that out, I thought, okay, the better I am at articulating my vision, the easier it is to create influence, to create buy in, to galvanize a team, to move in a certain direction, and also to open up conversations to learn. The better that you can articulate your standpoint, the easier it is for someone to have a counterpoint and then you can learn from that.

Christopher Nelson (00:11:05) - And so then walking back to your career path, so all of a sudden you transition then from supply chain analyst, then you're, you're writing and you're writing full time and then from there all of a sudden you start taking roles and creating roles as as head of remote work and workplace design. 

Darren Murph (00:11:24) - I spent about eight years as managing editor at Engadget, traveling the world, covering as a reporter and an editor the world of consumer technology. Leaving that, I went to the other side of the proverbial fence into a career in public relations. And so now I was on the side where I was working with clients to bring stories to the eyes of reporters. But this was very much an in-office job at the time. And I was able to align with a team that recognized there was power in going to where clients were to embed where they were and to teach them on the ground. And so essentially what I reasoned was, it doesn't matter if I'm departing from JFK Airport in New York or Raleigh Durham, closer to home, if I'm going to be embedded with various organizations around the world, Let me just use the airport that's closest to me.

This is a much more efficient process to get me on board. And so at that time, that was my incarnation of remote work. It was actually a lot of travel, but it made sense. If I'm going to be in a plane every day, that means I'm not going to be in the corporate office every day. Doesn't really matter where the origin point is. And so for several years, I was able to travel the world and embed myself in various organizations and help them understand editorial strategy. Organizations were beginning to realize that people don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it. And they needed help on articulating their own, why it's so easy to get caught up in speeds and feeds and ones and zeros that you really lose sight of. Where is the heartbeat? Where is the human in all of this? And that became a massive unlock for the next phase of the career.

Christopher Nelson (00:13:10) - And so and so you're then at this point where you are now living in Raleigh, Durham, you're living in your home base, traveling to clients now you and you have all the pieces in play.

You've been running remote teams. You understand what it's like to be home based, go to client sites, you understand what it is to be all remote, just just truly producing your work. And now what was how did you bring this all together and said, I now want to run an all remote company or be that organizational design and how they operate day to day. 

Darren Murph (00:13:47) - So this goes back to the original point of just taking it one step at a time. So I got a phone call from a company called GitLab in 2019. At the time, it was one of very few intentionally fully remote organizations, and once I discovered that they had intentionally chosen that org design coming out of a decade plus in makeshift hybrid designs, I knew immediately that I wanted to work there simply because the quality of life upgrade was going to be immense. And so at the time, what they really wanted was a communicator and a storyteller to wrap my brain around what they had built from an org design standpoint and then communicate that effectively internally so people inside the company knew what it was about and also externally so that the outside world would understand what we were pioneering in addition to the product that we were building.

So that was the one step. But I already saw the step ahead of that, which was there's an opportunity to parlay the comms and marketing experience into learning strategy and operations because there's a flywheel here. When you build something and you communicate it, you have to continue to actually execute it for it to continue to be true in this flywheel and. I saw that as the next step. In October of 2019, we hosted a remote work symposium in San Francisco. We did it in person because you got to meet people where they are, right? And on the back end of that, there was a gentleman who attended and he was having a conversation with me and GitLab CEO Sid, and he said, Well, Derrida's doing all of these things and related to remote work, why the complicated title? Just call them Head of Remote, and it's the most GitLab thing ever. Sid went back home, opened up a merge request for my title and changed it to head of Remote. And this whole story again, a very GitLab thing is fully documented in the handbook.

So if you Google head of Remote Origin story, you will wind up in a section that I wrote within the GitLab handbook that covers all of that. But a role was created because there was a need there and there was a team in place that was progressive enough to understand. Taking a risk on this was going to be worthwhile. 

Christopher Nelson (00:16:03) - Well, this to me is one of those stories that you hear about where your work and your passion, your vision prepared you for this opportunity. Like you all of a sudden you saw it. And because you're now your strategic thinker, always thinking, what can open the next door? Now I can communicate. I can become this head of remote. And now I think on the second half of that journey I have to build the processes, the procedures that truly influence operations to say, how do we get this to scale? Because I know in 2019 it was then two years later it was October 2021, that then we went public. So there was a lot of work into building out the operations to get there, wasn't there? 

Darren Murph (00:16:53) - Yeah, for sure. And a lot of that is documented. I think you need a couple of things. One, you need deep conviction and maybe a little bit of crazy to believe that something that hasn't been done before. It's not because it is impossible. It's because no one has thought of it yet. Quick aside, I was at the World Economic Forum a few weeks ago, and when I'm meeting with executives and folks in academia and heads of state, what I recognized is that much of their success just boils down to attitude. They simply don't believe in the impossible. They simply believe that they haven't found the right person to partner with yet to make the vision a reality. Harnessing that and really having a deeply seated belief that you can do anything with the right partners will go a long way. So that's part one that you need. And then part two is you need people who are willing to work with you. So you have to be open, you have to have strong opinions, but weakly held to reach out for advice. It's a collaborative effort when you're building something from scratch, but have that belief that you can do it.

I think a lot of people believe what they're told to believe, or they're put in a certain box and they don't think that the boundaries are expandable. But if you push on them a little bit, some very interesting things can happen. 

Christopher Nelson (00:18:10) - Yeah. Yeah. You soon end up finding that people are happy to help you push or they want to help you push those boundaries. They want to explore it. It's just learning how to partner with them to actually move those sticks, if you will. 

Darren Murph (00:18:25) - Yeah, for sure. It's always a journey. Sometimes it's messy, but the end result is really fun. 

Christopher Nelson (00:18:31) - So, you know, I think this story, you know, your origin story, I think itself is just so interesting of this this passion, this vision, working in a style and then essentially now turning it into not, you know, a very relevant occupation, because I'm sure you start this in 20 2019. Now you're ahead of us. 2020 happens all of a sudden.

I think you went from, hey, there's this guy with this very interesting idea to Darren Murph, you need to talk to Darren Murph. Like there was obviously tailwinds because of that Black Swan event. 

Darren Murph (00:19:11) - For sure. And this goes back to being prepared. I'm an Eagle Scout. The motto is be prepared. And this was a moment where being prepared was so helpful. You can't really plan for Black Swan events, but you can build your experience. You can build on your strong suits. There's this interesting profile within the Cliftonstrengths assessment, and it's called Maximizer. And if you take this assessment and you find that in your professional DNA, you should really latch on to it. And what it means is you look for things that are already strong and then you obsess about catapulting it to the extraordinary. Like you cannot rest until you take something that is strong to the extraordinary. And in this new world of work where it's becoming increasingly distributed and new roads are being paved, new books are being written, that is an incredible skill set.

And so if that is you and you think, yeah, that resonates. I like getting things that already have a strong foundation and catapulting it to the extraordinary. I think that's especially useful in a more remote world. 

Christopher Nelson (00:20:21) - And I do want to take a side note. I have to imagine that when you were at GitLab, you also had the opportunity to do something that was groundbreaking, which was you hosted the first IPO publicly, which myself being a collector of IPOs, if you will, like. That was a very, very special event. And while I wasn't in New York with yourselves, but watching it remotely with myself, I could share it with my family. Like that was an incredible event. Tell us just give us a few soundbites on that moment. 

Christopher Nelson (00:20:57) - A seminal moment in my career, for sure. When I first interviewed with Syd, I picked up on a passion for making history, because if GitLab were able to IPO, it would become the first fully remote company to ever do it.

That's a challenge that I wanted to get behind. So right away, I always bought into that vision. I said, Let's make history. No one can ever take that from us if we do that, and we've done that. But then in the lead up to the IPO, an opportunity presented itself to make history in a second way. So we were talking with Nasdaq about what the IPO experience would be like. And we asked them, hey, have you ever worked with companies that you streamed out what's happening in New York City to the distributed team around the world? Because we have people in a lot of countries, over 50, over 60 countries. And they said, yeah, yeah, we've done that with some IPOs that have people working remote. And then the next question was, Well, can you take the firewall off of the stream? And they thought about it and they said, you know, we've never been asked that. Are you implying that you just want the entire world to be able to see it? We said, Yeah, why not? You already have the technical infrastructure to stream it to people in a variety of countries.

Just make the link public and then anyone can watch it. And it was as simple as that. I will forever remember this conversation because I was actually on a balcony in Kauai in Hawaii talking with people in New York. And when I felt this coming together, I thought, this is going to be just a transformative moment. And we did it. We went to New York, we live streamed it to the world. We recorded it. It's embedded in the GitLab handbook. So now, years after it, you can still go back and rewatch it. And I think what the real takeaway for me there, going back and anchoring on the storytelling is if you go back and rewatch our live stream to the world, our IPO, it was less about what we did and more about why we did it. It was more about the people that made GitLab what it was. It was more about the org design that we had built that enabled an incredible amount of agency and autonomy, but also all of that fed into the product.

It was so rich. The perspectives were all there. It was just a phenomenal product because you have people from 50 plus countries pouring their hearts into it. That cultural influence is felt in the product. So the geographic diversity leads to product diversity. And it was such a beautiful model of what is possible when you take the reins off of We have to have everybody in this zip code or indoctrinated in this culture. When you say who says and you go a different way. GitLab is such an amazing, amazing example of what's possible. And other companies use it every day as a blueprint. 

Christopher Nelson (00:23:49) - Oh, they do. They do. And I know I mean, I would, you know, working at GitLab would get questions from other companies and then they would see what we're doing in our department was doing in our handbook. And then they could ask us questions. And it was such a great contribution. And I do want to say for myself, having had, you know, other experiences, the interesting thing that I experienced in the GitLab is that for most other IPOs, it was about the moment in the sense of, okay, we're floating on the market where I felt like that was a byline to this story in the GitLab story, where it was about, Look what people can achieve, look what people can do together.

And all the little snippets from everybody. It seemed like a Yeah, just a really, really special moment. So I do think from a storytelling perspective, if people haven't had a chance to watch it, I recommend that you go do because that's definitely a cool moment in history. 

Darren Murph (00:24:46) - One other point I want to make is we were so intentional about being as inclusive as possible for our team members around the world. We set up this giant led wall in Times Square, and we just brought hundreds of zoom panels onto the board. Yeah. So as people are walking by in Times Square, they're actually seeing our team live in real time from all points on the globe collectively celebrating with us. This was a very surreal moment to be there in New York, but seeing in real time all of these other people around the world, it was such a celebration of humanity and a celebration of just a contrarian path that has now become more and more a default for organizations that are starting up today. 

Christopher Nelson (00:25:31) - So. So here you are. You have this incredible peak at GitLab. You're continuing to grow as the head of remote. But I think like, like many of us, we get to these points in our careers where we're at a phenomenal company, we're doing great things. But personally, professionally, we bump up against some boundaries and we actually have to start looking outside for personal growth, professional growth. 

Darren Murph (00:25:57) - I'll give you a framework that's been really useful for me in moments like these. A lot of people spend their whole life building. It's just a natural instinct. So you leave university and you put a few Jenga blocks in the tower and you build it a little bit taller and a little bit taller, but all the way. It's still a Jenga tower, right? It's always like 1 or 2 blocks away from this. Oh, you know, it all collapsed on itself. I had a friend of mine share that. He went to a Wild at Heart seminar last year. And the the core question asked to the group was, if instead of spending the next ten years of your life building, building your ego, building your career, building whatever, you instead flipped it on its head and said, What would the next ten years look like if you excavate it replaced build with excavate.

This is super powerful because if you get to certain points in your career where there's been a rapid increase of building, it's worth pausing and asking yourself, Should I deconstruct right now? Should I actually excavate right now? Should I actually turn the dial all the way down to zero so that you start to so that you give yourself time to look at all of the raw materials and you look at what has actually been strengthened over the years that I haven't slowed down to actually pay attention to the fact that I really love this or I'm really good at this. It's actually been way down on the Jenga tower. It actually should be in a different place. And this concept of excavation is a really useful and healthy mechanism to reassess what your raw materials are, see if they need to be tweaked or fine tuned or just marketed in a slightly different way, because if you never stop to excavate, you're going to get to some point later in life and look up and think, I never slowed down. I inadvertently took the took the blue pill and here I am again.

So if you're in that phase where you're feeling a little bit of maybe friction or unusual pressure to keep building, I would challenge you to excavate and see what comes of it. 

Christopher Nelson (00:27:58) - Yes, because I think, you know, in just walking through this. Right. Your career, you know, continues to grow, continue to expand. And there was an opportunity to excavate, to take a moment to to start over and say, okay, I've now built something. Now let me go to a different company. Let me go and architect remote work. Let me go build because. I think, you know, and I've had this experience, too, as I have gone to hyper growth companies. I know it is Splunk and joined them when they were 100,000,005 years where $1 billion in revenue had the chance to then go and start over again. You then have to go look at all your fundamentals. You have to look at your building blocks, you have to look at all of those things and it gives you the opportunity.

And you said something that I just want to tease out. I want to pull that string a little bit, which is you can look at what you've been doing and say, What have I been doing well that I really want to double down on because I'm definitely a move to your strengths guy. What were some of the things that maybe I did in the last 6 or 10 months in that last role that I need to probably bring somebody else in to do that next time, or I need to make sure that I'm not the person doing that because that's not where I'm best suited. Those are the opportunities when you do take the opportunity to reboot and and and take different positions. Because I think, you know, and this is one of the concepts I talk about when you're building your career capital, you're always looking for opportunities to deliver different results. And sometimes when you build something, continuing to add that 10th or 11th story isn't the right thing. It is to excavate something else and build something new.

Darren Murph (00:29:42) - Yeah, the one thing out there is in the excavation process, reassess your zones of genius. If you're not familiar with this Google, this concept of zones of genius, they do shift over time. And what you'll find is that if you spend too much of your career in what is the inverse of a zone of genius and energy vampire, it is incredibly debilitating and it doesn't allow you to do your best work. And so the right framework is how can I choose a role, choose a team, choose a career path where I spend most of my time in my zone or zones of genius, and then I hire people. That actually find their genius in your circle of an energy vampire. And it's so easy to think who would want to do this work? This is the most exhausting thing that I have to do every day. It takes a lot of people to make the world go round and there are people who would love to do that. I had a big eye opening experience when I was on just a crazy hot streak of traveling around the world speaking engagements.

It was just like every other week was speaking somewhere about the world of remote work and advising people on where they should go next. And my wife said, How do you prepare for these things? Just one of these on my calendar would would debilitate me for months. And I thought, I don't even I don't even really think about it. I love doing these things. And this was this great eye opener where what someone loves someone might not. Right. 

Christopher Nelson (00:31:11) - And one of the things I want to touch on is we are going to wrap up the career segment here if you have also, as you develop this very unique expertise outside of the core companies that you work for. You've built a very successful consulting practice and you've built a personal brand. Becomes this base, this foundation. I mean, let's go back to the excavation. Like this is your zone of genius. You have, over time, been able to excavate and build those skills of storytelling, of writing, of now being able to consult people and give them all the skills that you've learned.

Help us understand a little bit on how you did that while working at companies and and having them accept that, because many people come to me and say, well, how do you build a side hustle or how do you have this other, you know, personal brand and practice on the side of your W-2 job? 

Darren Murph (00:32:09) - Every situation is different. And when I think back to the earliest phase of it, it really just started with a conversation where I wanted to do something that was so drastically different from the day job, and it was an hour outside of it that it just made sense. And of course one was in the office and one was remote and that was helpful. But it is certainly a fine line. But I think there is an art to being authentic online so that your personal brand is not really something you manufacture. It just is you. And I think if you start veering into the manufacturing side of it, that's actually where it gets the most dangerous. And so I think if you just stay out of that.

You're in a much better place than most people. Just avoid the manufacturing. 

Christopher Nelson (00:32:52) - Avoid the manufacturing. And then and then I do think that, you know, I mean, I know myself as I'm doing that today is it's about passion in things that you love and how you can help people, because it's obvious to me, you know, this conversation is highlighted, but I knew it even before you love remote work, you love everything it's provided to you and your family. And in the second half of the show, we're going to talk deeply about remote work. And I'm sure you could have that conversation for hours, for days. You love it and you love what it can help people do. 

Darren Murph (00:33:28) - Exactly right. And. When you tap into what you're passionate about and you can weave that into what pays the bills, there's this beautiful intersection of what the world needs and what you're really great at, and the more that you can do in aligning that, I would argue, the more fulfilled you'll be.

Christopher Nelson (00:33:47) - Well, and then to even bring that back around like that. That should be an authentic you. What you can really bring to the world and what the world needs. That's really the framework. Those would be the circles for you or you know, that create the Venn diagram of what is your personal brand. 

Darren Murph (00:34:03) - The other thing that I'll mention here, this is another framework that I've discovered thanks to my wife recently that's been really helpful for me, and it could be helpful to others who are deciding a couple of different career paths. It is very easy for humans to get caught up in the question of what should I do? And you run all these scenarios. Even if this scenario analysis is good and healthy, what are the doors after the door? Which which choice should I make? You can actually go around and around in this vortex and actually end up in a very unhealthy place. Like there's just no great way out of this question, right? So instead of asking yourself, What do I want to do, ask yourself, who do I want to be? And when you really focus on.

When I make a decision, is it going to get me closer to the father, the husband, the son, the friend that I want to be on the other side of it. The path becomes a lot more clear. And oftentimes you realize that if you have landed on 2 or 3 really solid choices, all of them actually get you closer to who you want to be, which is massively liberating because then you can choose one and know that no matter what happens, even if it's a little bit less financially rewarding than maybe you wanted, if it's getting you closer to who you want to be, then you're still marching in the right direction. Life is very long. This is a very long journey and it's a much healthier way to walk through decision making. 

Christopher Nelson (00:35:32) - That's great. And I think I'm going to use that to wrap us up there, you know, because this is the origin story part of this. I want to take a quick break. And when we come back, I want you to put on your I don't know if you have an official Oracle or remote hat, but we're shirt or or scarf.

We're going to put that on and we're going to dig into the current state of remote work and really give people what are some of the skills that they need to succeed there. So we'll be right back. 

All right. And we are back here with Darren Murph, and he has gone on his official oracle of Remote Essence. But remote is a hot topic now. It is, I think, 2020. Opened up. I mean, this vision that you obviously had earlier in your career, now everyone had it, everyone was experiencing it. And now I just think there's a lot of noise out there. I want you to know, you've got your finger on the pulse of this. You get inbound calls that we can't see or hear. What's really the state of remote right now? 

Darren Murph (00:36:37) - We're in a state of flux. I call it the awkward teenager phase of remote work where a lot of organizations thought they were adults. They thought they were grown up. They thought they had everything figured out. And then they're realizing that without some very intentional steps, it's actually quite difficult to achieve as an operating model.

And I think what we're seeing globally is this recognition that many companies treated remote work as a perk or a policy kind of a one pager. We're allowing you to work from home and then they kind of wash their hands of it. Well, I'm just going to work out great. Then what they're realizing is that it's actually more akin to a product or a technology or an operating model, which should not be taken as lightly. It has to have an architect, someone that is stewarding it, someone that is thinking about it, which is testing and evolving it just like any other product. It would be like saying the internet as a policy. No, no, the Internet is a product. The Internet is a technology. If you're going to weave that into your organization, you're going to do it with a great deal of intention. And so I see this. Divergence of paths, if you will, where some organizations, especially those that are steeped in legacy or design, are saying we're not going to put the effort in right now to re-architect our operating model.

We're going to choose this path. I call it the fax machine moment. They're doubling down on the fax machine. Instead of embracing things like email and greenhouse, some of them are big enough that it'll be fine. There will be enough people that see that culture that they're building and they think. I'm okay with that culture and people will work there and it's great. We wish them well. Then there's this other path and a lot of newer organizations are on this and they recognize that this is better in almost every regard. It's more efficient, cheaper to run the business. I have better access to talent all over the world. I don't have to manufacture diversity. It is innate in the geographic diversity. I get many more types of opinions that are. Making their way into the product. And when we need to get together and break bread. There are things called trains, planes and automobiles, and we weave that into our culture so that people can still get together and enjoy each other as communal human beings.

Two different paths. And I don't think that there's necessarily a right or wrong. The way I look at it as is, there is now a de facto third lane in which businesses can operate pre-COVID. It was pretty much co-located or maybe a little bit of hybrid or bust. Right? And so you had people who were largely ostracized from the workforce, military spouses, those with mobility challenges, introverts, people that just wanted to live life a little bit differently. The world wasn't set up for their genius to be injected into it. Now we have a meaningful third lane for this entire subset of people. I think that's phenomenal. 

Christopher Nelson (00:39:43) - It really is. And, you know, this was just an eye opening moment for me because of the fact that I have worked with globally, you know, dispersed teams before in my past. So I am coming from Accenture, I help stand up offshore centers. And so I've worked in sort of a global mode and then working for GitLab was my full all remote company. I think for many of us, like we landed there and what you you just said that I want to make sure that we give the details to everybody is the difference between policy in architected company is tools are processes are ways of working that are so fundamental.

And the one that I think those were was the most profound to me that I leverage now in my little small business where I use remote employees asynchronous meetings. Asynchronous meetings were game changer. I remember I when I started to GitLab, I'd already planned a two week vacation to Colorado, and I was so worried because I was onboarding my team and my manager at the time, Brian Y said, Just async. The meetings go. What goes? Yeah, go to the handbook, look it up. So you go there and this is again, the handbook breaks everything down. So I would start my morning, you know, because I get up before my kids do and I would I had my agenda for everyone wrote down my questions I then go loom the video walk through here's the things here's what I need answers on. Give me the thing. Put it out there on Slack we go have this amazing day in Colorado. Kids would go down in the evening. I'd have a bunch of looms, I'd have a bunch of notes.

And we did that for a week and I didn't miss a beat. But that whole concept that that's where I want to make sure that people understand. When he's saying policy, a policy says take your laptop, go to the house and continue to work without that education, without the knowledge of those key pieces of or key ways to work that are going to then unlock this. And then we always knew, you know, to your point, the head of remote, if we weren't sure of how things worked or, you know, what was working well, what wasn't working well, there was a forum that we could go and and put things on the remote team to say, okay, how should we think about this? 

Darren Murph (00:42:01) - Cannot plus one that enough. Asynchronous workflows truly are the future of work. There was a future forum survey in early 2021, and something like 75% of people surveyed said that they highly valued being able to work from anywhere. But 94% of people said they would highly value being able to work whenever it was useful for them.

The current frontier of remote work is geographic flexibility. The next frontier of remote work is time flexibility. When you can decouple business results from linear time, you're able to achieve something that is a quantum leap above companies and competitors that are fixed on a 9 to 5 schedule. But you have to have systems in place that enable you to do this. You have to have a culture in place that enables you to do this. And truthfully, the secret ingredient, the superpower of any distributed team, really, any scaled team is documentation. You write it down. Yes. Here's an anecdote of how this is so powerful. Let's say McDonald's chooses to open a new location in Singapore. Now, do you think headquarters gets on the phone with employees at an odd hour of the night in Singapore and then verbalizes over a meeting the recipe for a Big Mac or. Do you think they document the recipe for the Big Mac? Oh, yeah. And send it over asynchronously. And I share this tongue in cheek example just to show that we've been doing this for a long time.

But companies have to choose to work in this way. 

Christopher Nelson (00:43:41) - They really do. And what, you know, I think somebody's on this, you know, a pinnacle of remote work and getting all the information, the data that I know you have. Remote workers. What is their job satisfaction or what is their lifestyle satisfaction? I'm sure there has to be some amazing numbers around that. 

Darren Murph (00:44:03) - Yeah, there are. Nick Bloom out of Stanford is a great resource for this. Dropbox has been a huge advocate. They call their implementation virtual first. They have some amazing stats on the retentive nature of designing a system in this way. The tldr is people who want agency. Above all else, people will choose freedom. And when you implement intentional remote work, it gives people more freedom than they could have in any other type of organizational design. 

And when it all comes down, agency and autonomy will rank number one in people's priority list when push comes to shove. Right? And so the best thing an organization can do to attract the best talent and set it up for operational efficiency and create competitive advantage is to choose workflows, to choose cultures that empower people, give them the most agency and autonomy.

And even if you don't have an altruistic bone in your body, if you just purely look at this from a de-risking standpoint, a resiliency standpoint, durability standpoint, your business is far more resilient, far more agile, far more durable. If you can decouple the results that you drive from any singular piece of geography, then you are more durable to things like geopolitical crisis. It makes sense across every possible measure, but it is work. It is re-architecting and organizational design. 

Christopher Nelson (00:45:36) - So let's talk about what you just said, I want to. Are you seeing businesses lean into remote areas because of the business benefit? Like I always thought, because, you know, I'm a big finance nerd. So when I went to work for GitLab, a remote company, I'm like, no real estate. Like no real estate on the expense line. Like, hey, man, like, that's that's a big lift. And then what you just said, like, because, you know, working in business systems, we always had to talk about, you know, business continuity.

And when all of a sudden you have a team that's very dispersed, it's like you have taken that risk down a few notches. So are you seeing businesses lean into remote work because they're seeing some financial and some some different business advantages to it as well? 

Darren Murph (00:46:19) - For sure. Every organization goes to efficiency exercises, and so at its core, remote work will fall into an efficiency exercise. But here's another interesting wrinkle. A lot of the headlines right now are from legacy orgs that are kind of seesawing back and forth on their stance on remote work so they get the headlines. But what's actually happening in stealth is that companies that were born from 2020 onward. We're born into an office less world. They were born without even the knowledge of the way things used to be. And so they're just building. They don't even call themselves remote companies. They're just companies. And then you have to point out the fact that, oh, are you. Does this job require me to relocate? And the hiring manager is like, for what? What? This is the new era and we're only about three years into it.

But I can already see this groundswell happening. What's going to happen is that in 2032 or 33, you're going to turn on CNBC one day and you're going to see this massive tidal wave of IPOs, of companies you've never heard of, and none of them will have offices. And you think remote work was an overnight success of 2033? It wasn't. It started in 2020, and then they were just quietly building. I had a major understanding of the significance of this. In December of 2022, I was on a podcast hosted by Andreessen Horowitz. It was me, the CEO of Safety Wing and the CEO of Deal, a $12 billion employer of record. And the host asked us to wax nostalgic on our days in the office. So I shared a bit. The CEO of Safety Wing shared a bit and then the CEO of Deal answered, I've never worked in an office. That was his entire answer. He runs a $12 billion company and has no legacy understanding of the way things were. This is the future.

And so I say that to say don't get too caught up in this hysteria of the legacy organizations trying to figure out their way. Watch the builders. The groundswell is significant and the efficiencies are obvious and the winning needs no storyline and you're going to start seeing a lot of these organizations. They're just going to win. And you'll have to remind them that they're winning without offices, because for them it will just be the obvious way. 

Christopher Nelson (00:49:00) - It's just right. It's just that it is fascinating that that's the soundbite. That to me is the real news. The real news is, you know, everyone likes to sensationalize, like all the conflict that's happening, but they don't want to talk about what's the real success, what's the real opportunity that's in front of us as workers. And that's amazing. So now thinking about our remote world, how do people need to skill up? Like what are some skills that you know because I think I know when I talk to people about time freedom, what I'm realizing now is that many people moving from just something that's office or hybrid to full remote and especially asynchronous work that could provide them a lot of benefits, that provide them relief, that they just can relax into their W-2 a little bit more.

What are skills that they should be learning that would then set them up for success as individual contributors and managers? 

Darren Murph (00:49:57) - The darkhorse skill of the next decade is low context communication, and this is a bit of a paradoxical term. What it means is that you communicate with a high degree of detail and precision because you assume that the audience has no too low context. In other words, you share and convey and articulate information in a way that assumes people are starting from zero, right? And what that does is it empowers them to loop themselves into a conversation. Have you ever had a meeting where someone says, I'm going to loop you in, I'll bring you up to speed? This is a sign of a broken system. If you have a system where people need to be looped in, that means that people are not communicating right with low context and in a scale distributed setting where it's not practical to wait 12 hours or take a call at three in the morning, it's a forcing function. You have no choice but to communicate in this way.

As the world becomes more and more scaled and more and more distributed, this skill is going to be absolutely vital. And for people that possess it, they will be able to create influence and create buy in and galvanize teams and work more efficiently because they're communicating one time with low context and allowing everyone else to bring themselves up to speed while other organizations are having a series of 6 or 7 ill timed meetings to accomplish the same thing. 

Christopher Nelson (00:51:23) - And I have to say, because I am so I always like to give people very, very tactical advice, which taking what you said, I think the one tool that helped me provide much more context that I think is very effective as loom, I think loom is an amazing tool that when you have some you know, this goes back to my first story, I would have an agenda. We had things on the handbook that we were working on. I could go and walk through and provide very detailed context in this tool. So you're recording a video that that again, allows them to see.

You see some expressions, you can highlight things, and then here's where the magic happens and it still continues to happen for me to this day is then the person who receives it. They receive a five minute video, they can play it at two x speed. So they can then in 2.5 minutes get that contextual information and if they're not sure they can rewrite, they can actually annotate. They could say, I wasn't clear on this particular point so that then we can iterate even quicker on this context to to delve deeper. And guess what? I could take that same video. I could share it with ten people. 

Darren Murph (00:52:32) - It scales much more easily. It's a no brainer. It's a no brainer for me. But I am still continually surprised at how few people truly grok even that workflow. And so if you're struggling with this at work, you may have to dial back a bit to the 101 level and really walk people through how this can be different. Everyone needs that first epiphany, and then once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Christopher Nelson (00:52:54) - And so let's let's I do want to give people what are some of the tools out there? I know the GitLab handbook. I mean, people want to know about remote work. I still direct them there. But what are some of the viable tools? And I'll get links from you and put them in the show notes, too. 

Darren Murph (00:53:09) - Yeah. GitLab Handbook is a great one. Remote Work Authority is a burgeoning publication that focuses on remote work. Love the stuff that they're doing. Work Quake by Steve Cadigan. If you're looking for a book, it is a phenomenal book. Steve Cadigan was LinkedIn's first ever chief HR officer, and his book, Work Quake, is a very eye opening read. It helps you acclimate to the current world of work. 

Christopher Nelson (00:53:54) - That's great. Well, Darren, we do have to put a bow on this at some time. And the way we put a bow on it here, tech careers and money talk is the lightning round. So we're going to hit five questions.

And the first one that we're going to start with is what is the worst career advice that you've ever received? 

Darren Murph (00:53:54) - Squeaky wheel gets the grease. Complaining doesn't do much good. What's better is to bring a proposal to the table that you can react to. Or if you find that you're complaining too much, find a team that is better aligned with you.

Christopher Nelson (00:54:10) - Mhm. That's good. So how do you keep learning? 

Darren Muprh (00:54:16) - Read. Warren Buffett spent something like half of his day reading. I read a lot. I listen a lot. That's the best way to do it. 

Christopher Nelson (00:54:26) - It's great. And so, you know, you do work remotely, but you also do work a lot. How do you recharge your batteries? 

Darren Murph (00:54:33) - Getting outside time with family and friends is essential to me. Hiking, paddleboarding, being out in nature. I'm actually an introvert, believe it or not, and so I love to recharge alone. Some people love to recharge with groups, so if you don't know which you are, take the 16 Personalities test.

It's usually pretty accurate and kind of helpful when you're triangulating things like this.

Christopher Nelson (00:55:00) - I get it. I am definitely the same way. So what advice would you give to your younger self working in tech? 

Darren Murph (00:55:08) - Start early trading your time for equity. Equity is an incredibly powerful force. And I would have loved to have known about it much earlier in my career. It is definitely a piece of advice I'll pass down to my son, who is four now, and so hopefully he'll learn from my late entry into the world of equity. 

Christopher Nelson (00:55:35) - That's great. And what soft skill do you think has helped your career the most? 

Darren Murph (00:55:41) - Empathy, entering every room and asking, What do I not know? Entering every conversation and saying. Should I help you solve this? Or do you just want me to listen? It's really powerful because your default is usually, Hey, I want to come in here and let's fix it. But right, not everything needs to be fixed or not. Everyone wants to be fixed right away. And empathy is something that I think I'll be getting.

I'll improve on it. Until the very end. It's. It's a journey. It's not. It's not a one time event. It's not something that you either have or you don't. But it is something that can be cultivated. And some of the most rewarding pathways that I've ever walked through, the most rewarding relationships I've ever entered into started from a place of intentional empathy. 

Christopher Nelson (00:56:35) - Well, that wraps it up for us. Darren, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and everything that you gave. I appreciate you. 

Darren Murph (00:56:43) - Absolutely. Godspeed. Thanks, Christopher. 

Christopher Nelson (00:56:46) - Well, and that wraps it up for us in this episode of Tech Careers and Money Talk. I want to thank you for listening. And remember, we're a brand new podcast. So our request is please leave us a review. We definitely want to hear your written word. What do you appreciate about us? And then our ask is please, please share this with other technology employees who are trying to answer serious questions about career and money.

Thank you.