Finding Work: A volatile addiction to work
A volatile addiction to work. Finding work as a tangential thinker and DevOps Engineer. Taken from the Insights Library on cord.
cord helps Engineers direct message other people looking to hire them. But finding work isn’t just about access to hiring managers…
Finding your best work is a life’s journey uncovered through an ongoing conversation with ourselves and the world around us.
The Best Work Stories podcast hosts conversations between Ben (Co-founder and CEO of cord) and Founders, CTO’s, Software Engineers and people in tech who are on their own journey to find their best work.
Transcript
Sacha Rice (00:00):
… If you build yourself on hiring only the people you can work with or relate to, your diversity will be zero.
Ben Henley-Smith (00:08):
How would you describe your relationship with work?
Sacha Rice (00:12):
Volatile. Probably one of the most passionate relationships that I have other than with my wife. Because for me, there’s all the cliches of wear your heart and your sleeve and all of that, no, for me, I’m truly all. In no matter what it is. I don’t go all in on many things, I’m not a habitual gambler. But for me, when I do, I really invest myself, my soul. I actually had to print on my arms the words family and friends to remind me that there are other things other than work. That’s how obsessive I was back in the day. I actually had to have it written on my arms so that whenever I’m typing on my keyboard, as a developer I’m always typing, so I was like, actually, recenter myself.
Sacha Rice (00:55):
So my relationship with work is volatile, but in the best way, because it’s highly collaborative. I never fit in. I’m someone who probably is more of an abnormality in the businesses I work in, being an extrovert, not only being the first thing that always tends to make me different across the 20 years, it’s been 20 plus years now. I started when I was 13, left school at 13, and started my first posting company with money from my parents. That was how I started in IT. I was an agoraphobic, obese, tiny individual that couldn’t cope in general society. So I got signed off school forever and my parents were happy to support me to become an IT person. So that’s what I did from 13. I started a hosting business. And that has stuck with me.
Sacha Rice (01:46):
So to get back to the answer, a lot of people would describe me as tangential. And that for me is a pro not a con because I’m always answering the question you’ve asked. I just may go to different places to find the right answer or to get to where I’ve got the answer that makes sense. But I find it very hard in traditional corporates. So in traditional pyramid schemes, for want of a better way of describing them, no matter how open or forward thinking or whatever other buzzword that the marketing team comes up with, everyone is a pyramid scheme, every business. I’ve yet to find one that’s truthfully not. And so what I ask people is, “Is this a collaborative team, or is there someone at the top whom will give you the order and you must follow it? Is it traditional?”
Sacha Rice (02:31):
And even in startups, I’ve yet to find a company that is anything above that. But what I hope to find, particularly through cord, and I’ve been lucky to find it to a degree, is that startup mindset where we are all in this together. You are not just prisoner number 123, you’re actually a person. You are Ben, I’m Sacha, we’re real people. I have a real life. You have a real life. You have a family, wife, kids, whatever it may be, but that all shapes you to be who you are. And in order to properly extract the best of you, we need to build those relationships with each other.
Sacha Rice (03:08):
My backstory of how I ended up in England was I was born here, moved to South Africa, my parents were very successful. I was very lucky, I had a very privileged childhood. Very wealthy and that was great. We then had an armed robbery. We lost absolutely everything. My parents couldn’t function in society after that because we were all tied up and guns and God knows what. And we moved back to England with a rucksack. Basically homeless. We lived in a tent illegally on a camp site where the owners took pity on us, where my parents went from being CEOs selling to Tesco’s in the UK to cleaning toilets on a campsite.
Sacha Rice (03:41):
But they always reminded me. I never saw pity on them. I never saw that there was anything less about them because of that. For me, I saw more of them because of that. Because it was a chance I got to spend time with them and see how family mattered more than anything. Didn’t matter what you had, what you earned, if you could keep that unit together through all of that.
Ben Henley-Smith (04:02):
How has your fractious relationship with work caused you problems day-to-day?
Sacha Rice (04:11):
Ooh. Ah. So I find, because I’m approachable, I tend to be the guy… You remember Shawshank Redemption, there was Morgan Freeman and he was the guy that could get you things. And that tends to be me because I’m so outspoken. And I tend to know everybody, people come to me when they need something that someone else is telling them no. So I tend to be busy almost all day helping other people. Which I love. But it means that getting my work done is really hard because it’s like, “Oh, there’s just no time.” I have to wait until 8:00 PM at night to find an hour where I can do my own work. But I don’t mind that.
Ben Henley-Smith (04:49):
So day-to-day, how would you know when you’re doing your best work?
Sacha Rice (04:56):
I get lost in it. Imagine falling into almost a void, but love every minute of it. Like when people talk about being in the zone or whatever. For me, my wife could probably identify it because probably singing to myself, probably listening to Westlife or some kind of sing along, love a good sing along because I just have to have something going in the background, love it. Yeah. And I just get lost and I’ll lose track of time. It’ll be 2:00 AM and I’ll be like, “Oh wow, okay.” But at no point does it feel pressured. Doesn’t feel expected. You just feel great and you don’t struggle to sleep, you don’t struggle to wake up. I’ve only ever been a four to five hour sleeper every night for decades. And I wake up and if I wake up happy after one of those sessions, I go, “It was a good one. The void was good.” Why be fearful of traveling into a black hole?
Ben Henley-Smith (05:49):
How do you optimize for finding your best work now?
Sacha Rice (05:53):
I’ve identified that it normally happens at night. It normally happens once you’ve got through the rigmarole, not in a bad way, but of the daily meetings, the stuff you need to do, your standups and all of that. I then try and block out meetings in the morning, meetings to end the day, focus time in the middle. And that focus time is where I just go through what I’ve got. The stuff that you have to do, the stuff that you need to do. And then you try and hopefully leave yourself with the stuff you’d like to do. If your day feels like you have no time to be yourself to remember why you do what you do, you will never deliver your best work.
Ben Henley-Smith (06:35):
How do you know when you are not doing your best work because of you, or when you’re not doing your current work because the circumstances that you’re in aren’t giving you the best shot at doing it? How do you know when to decide to move on and put yourself in a different environment?
Sacha Rice (06:57):
I would say that probably used to be harder to identify. Now that my kids and everyone’s back at school or work, I found it’s much easier because the house feels cold. So if I’m buzzing and if I’m enjoying what I’m doing, I wouldn’t notice anything around me. You could set up a nuke behind me and I probably wouldn’t even realize. But when I realize that whatever task I’m working on isn’t driving me, the house will start to feel clinical and I’ll drink loads more tea. You want to give people time to breathe for their best ideas. And my best ideas certainly come out of me when either I’m under pressure, but I’m under pressure that I’ve asked for, that for me is yeah, prioritization, ordering, some structure. Compartmentalization isn’t always a bad thing. Just making sure you have your in and your out tray. You go, “This is what I need to do, have to do, want to do.”
Sacha Rice (07:51):
And then you hopefully get to your final category, which is the stuff I really want to do, which is the stuff that is hard to realize business value from, but could be valuable. And that’s the kind of stuff where you can’t even explain why it could be valuable, but you’ve just got an inkling. You’ve got this idea and you’re like, “I think this could work.” Some of the best companies I worked at have a day a week where you can do that, or a day a month, where it’s, “We will not disturb you, annoy you or anything, if everything’s running fine, turn your Slack off and stuff, keep your phone on just in case. But other than that, go off and think.” And at my current place, we have an hour a day where we can go for a walk, go for a run, cycle and think of any problem and how we’ll solve it.”
Ben Henley-Smith (08:37):
Can I take you back to a moment, perhaps your last moment, when you were looking for work, how did you go about figuring out whether that place was going to optimize for your best work?
Sacha Rice (08:52):
So I became very candid and this was recently actually, so this was only a month ago, two months ago. So I’m starting a new role, thanks to cord, in January. But I remember looking at the different companies and you’d go through interviews and I was very lucky, I am very fortunate, I was able to get through them. But I remember being able to very quickly identify that the people that were interviewing me were either the polar opposite of me or had become so detached from the process that who I am was largely irrelevant. It became almost a test based thing of you could excel, you could get 100% of the answers right but on the day they don’t like the way you talk.
Sacha Rice (09:38):
So I remember I got to the final stages of a bunch of interviews and it was flattering and they all said the same thing about tangential and, “We can’t see the point.” And I said to them all, I said, “Leave it with me and the point will come. And anyone who hopefully works with me will tell you the same, they’ll go, ‘It may seem largely irrelevant, but there is a pattern.’ And there is a logic to the flow of my mind. It’s just you’ve got to be willing to go with it, go along for the crazy ride through this land.” But I started saying at the beginning of interviews, “If after two minutes or five minutes, you know I’m not the kind of personality you’re looking for, tell me, and let’s end there.” And I became very candid with the recruiter, with the-
Ben Henley-Smith (10:22):
Did they ever tell you?
Sacha Rice (10:24):
No, but at least we threw it out there. But I always said to them, I said, “Just be honest.” I said, “I won’t take any offense because just like in real life, when you’re picking a partner, you know immediately, within even less than five minutes, within 10 seconds, I think it is, you’ll know that you will either A work with this person or B you won’t.” But the company I came to accept the job with, we aligned on all those levels. We aligned on the honesty level where they were like, “Oh, thank you. Thanks for letting us know. And we will let you know if we think this is not going to work.” And it didn’t feel like I was being examined like a lab rat. I went through some five stage interviews, which were exhausting. You have seven, 10 hours worth of interviews and multi stages. And that for me… It was exhausting. And I’m quite happy to work 20 hours a day and be that person, but it was just exhausting.
Sacha Rice (11:15):
And so to come to this company that I’m going to work with in January, it was a couple of hours. It was very personal. We were honest with each other. We went down the tangents. And what I found to be fascinating about the journey is you have your different tiers, if you will, not tiers, but levels where the first one is the, “Would you be a good fit?” And I usually get great feedback from that because I’m really open and honest. But then I meet the engineers who are the opposite, real introverts, not always, but most of the time, real introverts, and they go, “Oh no, we couldn’t work with this guy, we’d be exhausted. He’s so all over the place.” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s me.”
Sacha Rice (11:52):
I don’t take any feedback as a negative. And one of them said, “Could you work on the tangential?” And I went, “Nope.” I went, “Because for me, it’s not a character flaw. It’s not that I’m afraid of [inaudible 00:12:02].” I said, “I’m a firm believer in that people are adaptable.” People don’t change. People are who they are. And it’s important that they be who they are.
Ben Henley-Smith (12:11):
When you have a conversation with someone, how do you determine whether you’re picking up the culture and the practices of that person or whether you’re picking up the cultures and the practices of the whole company?
Sacha Rice (12:30):
This one I’ve found to be harder in some ways, but also easier in others. So because companies are pyramid schemes for businesses, or almost always pyramid schemes, you’re very rarely picking up the culture of the company. You’re almost ultimately always picking up the culture of the line management or the manager. So micromanagement often is not a company culture, it’s an individual culture. Tone of voice is so indicative of a type of personality. So people who are quite direct and assertive, they tend to be very heavy handed managers.
Ben Henley-Smith (13:04):
So if it’s hard to understand the company culture from the individual that you’re talking to, because pyramid scheme and everyone’s different, how do you understand what it’s really like to join that company if you can’t get it in that moment?
Sacha Rice (13:20):
You have to meet as many people as you can and keep an eye on who isn’t there or who was there and no longer is. So a company that hides behind the people who aren’t there, that have left, is usually a strong indicator that happiness is low. Because if you hide behind the fact that people leave your business, it means that you’re basically not confident that they wouldn’t tell you something that was positive. They would tell you negative things. And I think that’s one thing that is so common in companies, as they scaled, the values and what they believed in got lost along the way.
Ben Henley-Smith (13:56):
What data do you use to help you make these decisions? So many of the people you use cord are people who make decisions with data.
Sacha Rice (14:05):
Well, yeah, it is a fair point. So for me, my data points are very personal heavy. So they almost solely rely on human contact and interaction. The external data points for me are things like Glassdoor. I love the idea of Glassdoor. I wish it was truly anonymous and truly honest. But again, often people review things in fits of passion. You can send someone the best products in the world, but if it was two minutes late, they’ll give you a one star review. So it’s never quite fair. But you do get a good sense of… You could do just your basic Google search and find out about churn. Churn is a solid indicator. Solid indicator of poor culture or poor fit in companies, poor hiring practices. But Glassdoor, you often get real mixed set of viewpoints.
Sacha Rice (14:58):
So people often go, “How do I know who works there?” It’s like, “Just jump on LinkedIn. You can find the first 150 staff. You can then find out how long they’ve been there. You can then also find out did they ever worked together before.” And then you go, “Ah, okay, this person hires the people he worked with before. So therefore, this is someone who tends to bring people along with him. And a lot of companies are very much built like that. Engineers are often very much the case, they are referral based. We’re a bit like prostitutes. We leave our calling card and then our friend hires us for another gig. And so now I try and spend more time, I spend a lot more time researching the company to go, “How much of this is just utter BS?”
Ben Henley-Smith (15:31):
If you could summarize your due diligence process down into practical steps, what would it look like?
Sacha Rice (15:37):
In terms of finding out about a company before?
Ben Henley-Smith (15:40):
Yeah.
Sacha Rice (15:40):
Practical steps, get to know them. So look at the Glassdoor. Get to know them from side A get to know them from LinkedIn, see what they portray. Look at the staff, so look at who works there, identify how they know each other, if you can. But you can actually build lots of great charts if you’ve got draw.io and various things you can build a great chart showing how everyone knows each other, six degrees of separation. It’s fantastic. So I would say get to know them on both sides, see what they’re selling and then try and work out if it’s snake oil. If it’s not snake oil, then if you are lucky enough to get through the interview process, try and get to know, don’t just be the one being asked questions, ask as many questions as you can and ask real left field questions. Ask things like, “How many people have left?” Because that is a real world question.
Sacha Rice (16:29):
It is, “How many people have left and why? If this really is this great utopia, why is everyone running for the doors?” Are they running or are they drowning? Because again, are these people leaving in fireballs or are they leaving because… It’s okay for people leave. I always know this. People leave. That’s okay. It’s not a bad thing. Never be afraid of people leaving because peoples’ desires change, their needs change. The same way we all buy bigger houses or small houses, or we move to another country. Just because someone’s leaving doesn’t mean that they want to burn down your organization or they hate your business. It’s most more often than not quite the opposite.
Sacha Rice (17:05):
So ask those difficult questions of people and you can usually tell, again, just by… Video calls are where it’s at. No phone calls. Avoid the phone calls. Have the face to face because if you can’t have it in person, have it over a vehicle. Because when people are lying, most of the time you can spot it straight away and you can go, “Wow, this person really believes this BS they’re telling me. They really think that their company is going to change my life and I’m going to feel like I’ve never felt before.” But more often than not, you break through it and you go, “Okay, this company has a reasonable level of churn. Their staff are generally happy. And that’s not a bad thing.” You find that mid ground. It’s not the Tesco’s Finest, but it’s not the budget range. You find the mid ground and you go, “Okay, cool.” That tends to work.
Ben Henley-Smith (17:51):
Sacha, you are outrageously incredible. Thank you so much for taking the time out and sharing it with me.
Sacha Rice (17:58):
Likewise, mate. I really loved it.
