Ep. 020: The Data-Backed Benefits of In-Person Development Teams | w/ Special Guest Geoff Vandegrift of Ad Astra

You're listening to another episode of Open Source CXO, the podcast designed to share insights on how to excel in your business using technology, regardless of the industry. Host Robert Kehoe is a self-taught software developer who has grown to the role of CEO. Renowned for his collaborations with organizations such as Stanford University, Nelnet, and Louis Vuitton, he continually seeks new challenges to conquer in the world of tech. Joining him is Don Blackburn, a veteran COO with over 25 years of experience in cultivating diverse relationships and driving innovation in various technical projects.

Each week, they'll be sitting down with some of the nation's foremost technology leaders to develop an open source playbook, drawing from their firsthand experiences in the field. Let's talk some tech. Today we're with Jeff Vandergrift. Jeff is CTO at Ad Astra.

Welcome. It's good to be here. Thank you for coming. So, to start things off, why don't we talk a little bit about Ad Astra?

I'm sure not everybody's familiar, although it's been a company that's been around for quite a while. It is. They are, I think, celebrating their 28th birthday this year. I'm not sure exactly when it is, but so they've been around for a while, a software company for a while.

Their mission, it's one of the few companies I've worked for where I actually can quote the mission. It's to graduate more students faster. So, they are just about building solutions that help higher ed institutions meet their students' needs in a more planful way, you know, from making sure you're offering the right courses in the right format, the right place. It's actually startling how higher ed is not great at being thoughtful and planful about how they build their schedules.

So we help them do that, and as a result, you know, more kids are able to graduate on time. Everybody is in Kansas City. Oh, nice. Okay.

We're in the office, and I think that's a really important part of developing software. I sometimes say that- Couldn't agree more. Developing software is a social endeavor. There's people booing you right now.

I know, I know. I get a lot of hate for it too, surprisingly. One of the categories we like to do on all our podcasts is kind of learn how our guests got to where they are. That's right.

The path to leadership. Path to leadership. How did you get to be an executive in IT? Was this something you set out to do from the time you were a high school student, or is this something that in college you figured it out?

No. Well into your career. Yeah, well into my career. Well, you mentioned you also just really didn't do it for the passion at first.

You really didn't, you know- No, right. I mean, so I was going to be a physicist when I went to college. That was my plan, and life had different plans for me. And I had been sort of a developer hobbyist as a kid, and so it was easy for me to get just fine work.

I started out as a tester for a place in Austin, Texas, and then quickly realized, no, I mean, I can write code. I'd like to write code. That seems like that would be a lot more fun. But at that point it was just like, no, this is a way to kind of put food on the table.

And it continued that way until I had these leaders that sort of pulled me kicking and screaming into, no, no, you'd be good, Jeff. You'd be good. You need to be a manager for us. And they married the architect and manager role.

The title was manager and architect, or senior manager and architect, or something like that. And I did not love it. What part about it didn't you love? I just didn't feel like I had, I don't think I understood what it meant to be a manager.

I thought being a manager meant you're the smartest guy in the room. You got to be able to evaluate all the work everybody's doing, and you have to be able to evaluate the people, evaluate the work that they're doing. And man, I can hardly do that for myself. How am I going to do that for these five, 10 people that work for me?

One of the things I had done, this was all while I was at Perceptive Software where I got promoted. One of the things I had done there is, this is the early days of this thing called continuous integration, which I ran into at a trade show and I was like, oh man, that's where it's at. We've got to do this. And they were kind enough to let me build.

Cruise control was the continuous integration server at the time, and we got that up and running and that felt really good. And because of that, that business lost their testing manager. And so they're like, Jeff, you seem to be really good at this. Maybe you can go kind of get our testing group kind of up to snuff, modern, agile, all that kind of stuff.

Like, okay, that sounds kind of interesting. I'll go do that. And then the Lexmark acquisition happened and there were purchasing companies all over the world. And I found myself with like, well, an org that's bigger than the company I work for now.

And I had managers that worked all over the world, like seven different countries. And it was cool. I got to see the world and everything. But I literally found myself in my office like, what do people think I do?

It was just really hard. And that was when the Milo thing came along and we got to go do Holacracy. And it just transformed the way I thought about how people do work, how management could be done, and realized that management is much different than what I had imagined. It's about people.

It's about this complex system of people, which is really, really interesting. I'm kind of like an economics buff or nerd or whatever. And a lot of the things that you learn in economics, you can actually apply to, well, systems of people and businesses and have to worry about things like unintended consequences and all that. And so I was able to kind of geek out on that sort of thing and worry about the processes and the systems and the incentives that are in place and all that.

And so when, like I said, when the CTO at Ad Astra suggested, hey, why don't you come try all that stuff here? And I did. And at that point, I was like, I think this is my sweet spot. And I don't see myself being a CTO or anything like that.

But then that CTO left. They keep ripping you in positions that you never wanted, man. And then the CEO kept, no, I really need more of your time on the executive team and eventually pulled me there. And that's been fun just because it's totally new challenges, things that I wouldn't have ever really thought to care about before, but find myself actually being kind of passionate about.

And it's fun to worry about the overall strategy and success of a business over time. The big picture. Yeah. Never would have thought of that before.

So that's kind of not, I don't know what's next. I guess, CTO. But you, yeah, CEO. So you enjoy that CTO role.

I do. Yes. I can say without a doubt, Ad Astra, part of it is just me maturing. But Ad Astra is the best job I've ever had.

And I've been pleasantly surprised at how much fun it's been to be CTO. So out of curiosity, though, how far into your career were you before you got your first management gig? I think that's always been intriguing to me is because I talked to some people that, oh, I was a developer for four years and then I became a manager. Yeah, no, no, no.

It's like really four years. That's nothing, right? It was probably closer to 20 for me. Oh, okay.

So you were in engineering for a long time or testing. Let's see. I think like maybe 2010, I guess, so maybe 17 years. That's a long time.

Okay. So you made your way up there. Engineering, senior engineering, lead, all that kind of stuff. Yes, absolutely.

And then worked your way into, pulled all the way into management. Yeah, pulled into management. All right, fair enough. That's always, did you feel like, it's intriguing to me that you spent that much time in there then and you still didn't understand what a manager was.

Do you attribute that to maybe you didn't have good managers, mentors? No, that's the irony, especially at Perceptive Software, I had great managers. In fact, actually you may know him. He's relatively well known in the area.

Hugh Khan is his name. He was a VP of engineering at Perceptive Software, was my direct boss for a while. And so much of what I learned were seeds that were planted by him. At the time I'd be like, that's crazy.

And then eventually it's like, oh, I know what he was talking about. But I think the other thing is I still think there's a lot of manager jobs that just get it wrong. And it should be a very different job than it is. I often say that I think a manager's most important job, got this from Hugh, the guy I was just talking about, manager's most important job, hiring and firing.

How many technical dudes that work their way up the ranks want to care about hiring and firing? That's a pain. It is a pain. But it's very, very important.

It's the biggest lever you have. Hiring the right people. Hiring the right people. Knowing what you're looking for and then intentionally going out and interviewing and hiring for that.

So in that same vein, there's actually a question or maybe even a topic that I'm just curious about because it matches very closely kind of what we do here. You mentioned that you love having a Kansas City team. I'd like to know why. Obviously, development, you're going to bring a thousand different arguments.

Maybe we cut this out. But every time I talk about it, I'm big, big into US-based development. We try to stick here in Kansas City, but some of the tech stuff we need, we do a lot of Laravel and stuff. So we reach, we're still US-based, just in various states.

I'm very curious why you guys chose to stick close to home and why, obviously, there's that, there's the offshore route, the near shore route, there's the domestic route. I'm curious here, your take on all that. Not trying to throw my opinions in that way yet. I'm just asking.

I'm going to get some hate mail about this. Yep, you will. I just believe in being in the office and again, this is something, an intuition I picked up from prior managers, but it was while I was working at Ad Astra, we actually, when I started there, we had a couple of people that had remote days. I mean, so I'm talking about not just Kansas City, but in the office.

Right now we're in the office. That's unique right now too. So three days a week. Oh, okay.

That's a real hybrid. Yeah, it is hybrid. But it's important that we all agree on what the days are that we're in the office. So everybody's in the same room together.

You guys want to work together. Yeah. Okay. If we're going to get the benefit of co-location, we want to do that.

But there's just so many things that have pushed me over the edge on this. And the first thing that just confirmed my intuition, there's a really good book out there called Culture Code. I don't know if you've read it. In that book, he talks about this thing called the Allen Curve, which was a study that was done.

It's been quite a while ago now. Like it was back in the 80s, but it's been replicated since then. But where he discovered that when the finding was, I think I'm going to get this right. The finding was that when people work within 10 meters of each other, the frequency of their communications, both physically, real time, real and virtual email, instant messaging, the frequency of communications skyrockets if you work within 10 meters.

And they found that projects actually get by co-located teams get completed more quickly. I'm digging out that book. I'm going to find it. I got a whole arsenal of this kind of information.

The other study that was really interesting was a meta study of research papers where they looked at co-authors. And I guess one of the ways that the success of a research paper gets measured is by the number of citations it receives. So the more citations, it's considered a better paper. So they basically look to see if the co-authors are co-located, how does that correlate to the number of citations, the quality of the paper.

And again, it was very, very strongly correlated that co-located researchers produce better research. If you've read the book Team Topologies, that's a relatively new book, really interesting. You guys probably talked about Conway's Law before, that your software architecture will reflect your organizational structure. And so there's this interesting thing in team topologies when they talk about different types of teams for different purposes.

One of the tools they give a manager that is worrying about teams is if you want the interface between two teams to be loosely coupled, you should put those teams on separate floors of a building. Then they're not communicating regularly and that will influence the architecture. You lose that tool if everybody's remote. So it starts with, I just feel strongly about, I mean, there's a whole lot more I could bore you with.

So I feel very strongly about just being in the office together. You think it produces a better product, more cohesion. And so that's what's kept me even through the pandemic from going offshore, even just out of state or anything like that. I feel very strongly.

Well, I would think you're in a unique situation then because a lot of people are doing the hybrid thing, but they leave it up to the employees saying, I need you in the office two days, three days a week. You pick the days, but they got to be here. But you're unique in that, hey, we're going to be here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or whatever those days are. Everybody's going to be in the same day.

Can you see, that is interesting. Can you see a difference? Can you see a difference or is it just too small? I mean, did you guys do the same?

Obviously you didn't do it during the pandemic when everybody was. No, everybody was remote during the pandemic. But you went back to it, obviously. And we started the way you're describing, hey, everybody just tried to get in a couple days a week or whatever.

But then what we were discovering is we weren't getting the synchronization we had maybe hoped for. What I found, maybe hybrid, by the way, the only person I've heard talking about this topic very honestly is Adam Grant. He's from early on was looking at both sides of the issue, I thought, very even-handedly and had interesting things to say about both. And what he's been saying for a while is that hybrid really seems to be kind of this great middle space because you get those sort of high bandwidth communication days, but then other days when people can stay heads down and get kind of quiet.

Which might be the most effective, right? Yeah. And so, shoot, where was I going with that? That's the question.

Well, can you tell if there's a drop-off? Yeah, so has it resulted in better software or something like that? I mean, that's hard to measure, right? Somebody had the magic.

But one of the things I've definitely seen is definitely more spontaneous conversations going on. One of the interesting phenomena I've observed is I've heard people say, oh, that meeting, let's do that in the office. Take a day when we're going to be in the office because that's going to be a lot easier conversation to have when we're there, which is like, okay, great. At least we've got that, people realizing the benefit of kind of that high bandwidth conversation.

So yeah, it's, and you know, I mean, people don't want to be in the office, but typically when they are there, they're having a lot more fun. Yeah, than they want to admit. It's funny though how divisive that whole thing is. I know.

I know. There's just people they're so passionate about and just won't listen to. I get it. It's a quality of life thing.

You know, like I've got kids, everybody's got lives and stuff. I totally understand. Yes, for sure. And so there's, I guess, two more thoughts on this.

One, like people will often say, but I'm more productive at home. And my reaction to that is I don't actually care about your productivity. I care about the team's productivity. Oh, interesting.

Okay. I'm trying to care for the system. I'm not the individual. But the other side that I have to come to terms with is I'm competing in a market for talent where people can get full remote jobs.

And so I still claim, I would claim the jury's still out in terms of the market has not made the call yet. And so as long as I can get people into the office and we've, as post pandemic, there's a few people we've hired that they're like, no, I like, I want to be back in the office. We've heard the same thing. We've heard the same thing from various people.

And we have people come in here often enough. Now, we don't. Even when we told them not to, they were still here today. Yeah.

Don't come in. They're coming in. Right. No, and we still had Johnny coming here.

But yeah, it's interesting to me. And I think there's a lot of people that aren't being truthful with themselves or maybe not being truthful with us when they say I'm more productive at home. Because I think- And that's up in the air all by itself. I think there's a certain percentage- I'm definitely not.

That are probably good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It depends, right? Yeah.

Right. I'm one that freely admits I suck at working from home. I'm bad at it. Right?

I get distracted easily. I don't, you know, I do it occasionally and I'm able to focus enough. But if I had to do it every day, I think it would go down and I would go nuts because, well, I'm a very social creature. So I want to hang out and talk to other people.

But that whole thing of, no, no, I'm more productive at home is kind of, are you really? Because- Maybe. I've seen- Probably not. But maybe- We've had some that where you go, you're clearly not good at.

It doesn't help. It's very common this day and age with the open office, the open floor plan kind of a thing. And I don't have my ideal office set up that I would like. What I would really like is a cluster of small offices with doors because software is deep work.

Sometimes you need to be able to close out the world. They wear headphones here. I know we've got sort of that open office concept too, but they put in their headphones and they get lost. And so when people say I'm more productive at home, that's often what I'm hearing.

It's like, I can't concentrate here because there's so much noise going on around me. And I have a lot of sympathy for that. I get that. For sure.

I appreciate the insight there. That was a cool little tangent, I think. No, this was great though, man. And I do appreciate you taking the time.

I hope you felt good about it. Oh yeah, absolutely.