#76 – What it’s like to be a Software Engineer at Levels (Mike Haney & Jeremy Phelps)

Sometimes you have to work in a toxic environment to learn what you don’t want in a job. Continuing episodes where we get to know the team, Mike Haney, head editorial director at Levels, sat down with Jeremy Phelps, one of the earliest software engineers on our team. The two of them discussed Jeremy’s backstory, including the stressful roles that taught him what he was looking for based on what he didn’t enjoy.

06:33 – Harnessing a sense of urgency

Jeremy grew up in a small town, but always knew he wanted to live in a bigger city. The high energy and lack of forced interaction are things he appreciates.

I think I just need a higher percentage of that energy. I think we all need the time away to drive a couple hours outside the city and walk through nature and stuff like that. It’s not go, go, go all the time. But in my mind, it’s kind of a sense of urgency. If I’m doing something or walking somewhere or interacting with someone in a small town, it’s very okay, let’s stand here and chat. “How’s the family?” But in a nice big city, it’s, “Okay. Here’s the thing. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Have a good day. Goodbye,” right? And I like that. But what falls away though, is those really rich community connections, and you have to seek that out in a big city. But the nice thing is that it is available, it’s just buried a little bit deeper, whereas in a small town you’re sort of forced to interact with everyone, whether you like them or not.

08:22 – A self-taught developer

Jeremy taught himself how to write code and started taking on jobs in high school before he eventually went to college and then grad school.

I for years was a self-taught engineer. I literally just went to phb.net back in high school and read the documentation and made stuff. I had a friend that ran a hosting company. So I had a server available to me so I could make my stuff public. It was all terrible, right? But it mostly worked. It was full of horrible SQL injection exploits and everything, but just learning anything else, I iterated on that, learned some more, and then it really came down to someone at a company just taking a flyer on me, hiring the kid who’s been slinging computers for three years to help out with a website or an app or what have you. Like all first breaks, it kind of came because I knew somebody that worked at the company that got me the interview and that’s about it. So yeah, everything else was mine, but I didn’t actually get a computer science degree until years after that. So that was Circa 2007, and I did my master’s in computer science and finished that in 2015. So I was a self-taught developer for quite a long time for a pretty good portion of my career.

12:54 – Hunger is a great motivator

Jeremy juggled working full time with going back to school.

I was broke. Hunger is a really, really good motivator. I was working full-time, but as an entry-level engineer. And this was Circa 2006/2007, right? And it was kind of before a lot of really, really big tech companies came in and started paying people a ton of money. And so entry-level salaries for an engineer, especially in a tiny town in the middle of Illinois, honestly, I could have went and… I had friends who were plumbers that made more than me. I’ll put it that way. So I had to finish my degree. I was like, “If there’s any chance of me making more money, I’ve got to get one of these degree things that everyone thinks is important.” But I’m entirely on my own. My family doesn’t have money. I grew up in a really blue-collar, working-class family. I didn’t have them to support me. So I just kept working because I needed to pay the rent.

17:24 – Learn what it’s like in a toxic environment

After undergrad, Jeremy started working in algorithmic trading. It was a toxic environment but taught him a lot about what he didn’t want in a job.

I learned what it’s like to be in a toxic environment. That was the big one, for those who haven’t been on or sat near any kind of trading floor, whether it’s an exchange back when that used to be a thing, or in a company that’s just has a floor full of traders, it’s pretty aggressive. Think men’s locker room. Sometimes, literally, lots of screaming, lots of swearing, lots of yelling. It’s pretty toxic. You learn a lot and you have the ability to make a lot of money, but in terms of your mental health and wellbeing, not great. The tech and the work was incredible. I got to kind of learn how to tease signals out of the market and how to evaluate them and how to implement them. I did execution for a little while. So those are still skills that I use every day. Everybody’s an options trader these days, but I actually know how they work. And so I did get to transfer a few skills out, but in general, a lot of it’s really, really sort of industry-specific. And so I didn’t see myself staying in the industry for another 25 years for the rest of my career. And so figured it’s better to get out sooner rather than later.

22:46 – Learn common CS language

After his stint in finance, Jeremy went to grad school full time for computer science so that he could learn the concepts and language that his coworkers knew.

When you’re a self-taught engineer, you don’t learn the theory and the principles behind what you’re doing, right? Much in the same way that you could be an apprentice electrician and help out doing stuff as a set of hands, but you don’t really understand all of the concepts behind what you’re doing. And so I learned that about myself. Before I left finance, I was running into some fundamental problems, which was, first of all, I wasn’t speaking the same language as my coworkers. They all had CS degrees. And so I knew once we’d finally agreed on terms, I was like, “Oh, okay. I know that thing,” right? But it was just Rocky because every time they would refer to, I don’t know, some kind of algorithm or principal or what have you that I just didn’t know because that’s what you learn in school. And so I said, “All right. Well, I will learn that stuff.”

28:49 – Finding a better work environment

After grad school Jeremy worked at a series of startups with stressful cultures, so he started a company to show company culture information to job hunters.

I found a co-founder and we built a company together. It was small, but importantly, what it was, was we tried to identify cultures within companies. So think like Glassdoor, but better, I guess with actual data about what it’s like to work there. And so in doing so, we identified a lot of internal company values. These values being, even something as simple as, “Oh, we have a junior developer program,” all the way up to, “We’re fully remote, we’re async. Maybe we have unlimited paid time off, or this company is run and founded by engineers,” for example. All of those things we found to be very, very important to candidates because we went out there and we talked to a whole bunch of people who were looking for jobs as engineers. And they said, “These are the things that we care about.” And so that got me thinking even more about values and when the pandemic killed that startup, I was pretty sure that I was just going to start another one, maybe in a different space or slightly tweak the product, whatever. And I just happened to cross levels and happened to have a phone call with Andrew and found out, “Oh, this is exactly what I’m looking for,” right?

31:56 – Uncover company culture

When interviewing you have to speak to a lot of people to really get a sense of what a company’s culture is like and whether it’s a fit.

This is something that’s unfortunately really, really hard to put into words. It very much is a feel. It’s a gut feeling. Fortunately the Levels of recruiting process then as now involves basically a million conversations with different members of the team. I’m pretty sure I spoke to every single person that worked at Levels before I joined. So what I’m doing or what I was doing when I had those conversations was first of all, I’m looking consistency, right? If one person has one value and the other person has value that’s different, and the other person has a value that contradicts both of those then yeah, maybe they’re not necessarily putting their money where their mouth is, right? With Levels, I found phenomenal consistency. Everybody was on the same page. Everybody knew what the values were and what they were going to be. Especially when having an employee zero or a founder at startups in the past, you kind of learn to smell BS, right? And I didn’t even have the tiniest whiff of that.

36:16 – Figure out how people will fit in

To succeed in an asnyc work environment, team members need to embrace and learn from it.

The other thing that I think helps a lot is being candid about what it’s like to work here, right? So for example, we’re an asynchronous company. That’s kind of a new thing, and it’s hard. We have challenges associated with that, right? We have projects that probably honestly, would’ve gone better if we were co-located in person. Because you have that type feedback loop, et cetera, et cetera, right? But we think that on balance, it’s more than worth it. And so if I get questions, for example, about our async culture and like, “How does that work with outages?” for example, then it shows that people are thinking about the culture. And if they’re thinking about it, odds are, they probably are a better candidate and probably share more of our values than you would think. If they focus entirely on the technical, I can’t learn a lot from that. I can learn that you’re a great programmer, but I can’t learn whether or not you’re going to sit in here and be happy here ultimately. Because I think the worst thing that we can do is hire somebody and then three months later, they just leave because they don’t like it here.

39:09 – The benefits of async work

Async work at Levels creates a more deliberate and thoughtful approach to tasks and communication.

My phone doesn’t ring, which is nice. Yeah, and in fact, I don’t know that it ever has. I’ve gotten one or two texts to say, “Hey, go look at this. It’s urgent.” But other than that, I’m mostly left on my own devices. You don’t have anybody walking up to your desk obviously because we’re fully remote, which is fantastic. That was my number one complaint when I worked in an office was some salesperson walking up and saying, “Hey, can you do this thing for the $100,000 contract I’m trying to land?” It’s like, “Well, okay. Yeah, I guess I’ll do the thing.” Async I think forces us to be more thoughtful and deliberate about the way that we do things. For example, I’m the directly responsible individual for a small project right now. And since I know that we’re async, if I need feedback on a document, for example, I know that I have to get that request for feedback out several days before I need it. And so it sort of is this virtuous cycle that keeps things from becoming urgent because it forces you to prepare ahead of time.

44:30 – Consistently take vacation

Levels has a mandatory one-week per quarter vacation policy. Jeremy is consistent about taking his because he wants to set the example that this is a true part of the culture.

Yeah, certainly it wasn’t hard, right? Vacation is not hard. Let’s be real. I definitely felt a little bit twitchy turning things off back when we were still using Slack, turning those notifications off. Turning off the notifications from my work email, that made me a little twitchy. That was weird because I’ve always been on small teams where it’s me or nobody. And so not having that connection was really, really strange to me, but I learned pretty quickly, time off is nice. I am consistent about taking it because for that same reason, right? You went back and looked at the calendars and you noticed that I was consistent and I want every person who joins Levels after this to see that same thing that we actually do this, it’s not marketing hype. We actually take the time.

Jeremy Phelps (00:00):

With Levels, I found phenomenal consistency. Everybody was on the same page. Everybody knew what the values were and what they were going to be. Especially when having an employee zero or a founder at startups in the past, you kind of learn to smell BS, right? And I didn’t even have the tiniest whiff of that. For me, weirdly, joining Levels was a little bit disorienting because when I joined Levels as employee 10, it was already the biggest company that I had worked at in the last five years. Yeah, it’s a little bit different for me, I guess.

Ben Grynol (00:45):

I’m Ben Grynol part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level. As our team’s grown, we’ve started to lean into this idea of having team member episodes, ones where different members of the team sit down with each other and chat. They learn more about their backgrounds, and they talk more about the work they do. Some of the philosophies they have. Well, Mike Haney, head editorial director at Levels, Jeremy Phelps, one of the earliest software engineers on our team, the two of them sat down and they chatted through Jeremy’s backstory, how he came to Levels, where he grew up and the way that he thinks. Well, no need to wait. Here’s Haney with the intro.

Mike Haney (01:43):

I’m Mike Haney, editorial director at Levels. And I was employee I think, 13 here. And I mentioned that because that feels pretty early to me. But Jeremy Phelps, who we’re speaking to in this episode predated me. I think he was around employee 10, as we find out in this conversation. And because of that, Jeremy, somebody that I’ve looked to you as a bit of a touchstone for how Levels works and how people here live the Levels culture. So I was excited to sit down and get a chance to learn a little bit more about Jeremy’s path here. What he was bringing into the Levels’ culture, what he’s learned in the time that he’s been here. So in this episode, we go from his circuitous journey here from the small town, corn fields of Illinois, to an algorithmic trading desk, through a masters in computer science and a startup that was focused on company culture, which is what ultimately led him to discover Levels and find that this was exactly the kind of company he was interested in, and interested in helping to build. So this is where Jeremy and I kicked it off.

Mike Haney (02:55):

Well, I don’t really have a strong expectation for this episode and I suspect you don’t either. I think this falls into the genre of episode that we’re exploring, which is Get To Know The Levels team. I think we all have a high bar because I think one of those first was Matt talking about being in the NFL and unless it’s [crosstalk 00:03:12] your history, I don’t know. And I don’t want to go all Mark Marin, where did you come from? But the only bit of research I’ll confess that I did coming into this was to look back at your user guide because you and I both predate the spotlight articles, so we don’t have that nice little profile of us. And I think I remember discussing this a little bit when I first started and we chatted, but we have very similar upbringings. I was a bit north of you, but you grew up in the small town, Midwestern corn fields.

Jeremy Phelps (03:40):

Oh, yeah. Like I said, I’ve lived in Illinois my entire life, and both parts, right. In middle of nowhere, and in the middle of Chicago. Two very, very different places. But that was a long time ago.

Mike Haney (03:55):

It looked from just your trajectory like you had a sense fairly early on that you were going to get out of the small town and go to the other part of Illinois. Is that fair, or did that come over time?

Jeremy Phelps (04:06):

Oh, yeah. No, I knew. I didn’t really fit in in the small town. Never really dated, and I was constantly pushing up against the conservative morays. Because when you grew up in a town of 3,000, 4,000 people, if you don’t agree with the politics or the way that people do things in a place like that, you’ll be pushed out. You just won’t feel like you belong. And so a lot of kids, what you do is you go to the big city and I’m still here.

Mike Haney (04:33):

Do you still have family in the small town?

Jeremy Phelps (04:37):

Oh, yeah. Both. My parents are still there. My sister and her entire family is there. My brother’s about an hour away. So yeah, I’m the only one that left.

Mike Haney (04:45):

Oh, wow. So you still get the taste of it when you go back.

Jeremy Phelps (04:48):

Yeah. Thanksgiving, Christmas. I get the reminder of why I moved where I did. Yeah.

Mike Haney (04:54):

Yeah. I had very much the same. I left and went to Minneapolis, was my nearest big town, a couple hours away, which I went to for school. Same thing, folks still in the small town. I go back, I can squint and look at the small town in a very positive light and go like, “Oh, the Main Street, a couple of stores have come back and they have a coffee shop and it’s kind of charming.” And then I open my eyes a little further and I’m like, “No, it’s a dumpy, little manufacturing town in the middle of the corn fields.”

Jeremy Phelps (05:21):

Yeah. Look, my entire family lives there and they’re very happy. If it suits you, there’s no better place. Just doesn’t suit me.

Mike Haney (05:29):

Yeah. That was my experience. And we ran the experiment. We left New York city and moved to upstate New York to a town similar size of what I grew up in. Much nicer, just sort of because of where it was and whatever, wealthier town, I would say. Within a month of being there, all those feelings of being 17 and wanting to get the hell out of town came back and I was like, “Oh, no, oh, no, I can’t do the small town thing.” We stayed there for three years before we sort of escape, but it was very clear to me right away.

Mike Haney (05:57):

No. Some people, like you said, obviously there’s people for whom that’s absolutely the right place to be. And we knew a lot of folks in that town who had moved there from Brooklyn and loved the escape from the big city back to the small town. But I’m curious if you find this, what I really missed was, and what I get from the bigger city is just the energy. I would say New York is like walking around inside a battery. And San Diego’s not quite that. Chicago’s a little closer because you’ve got the density.

Jeremy Phelps (06:22):

Yeah.

Mike Haney (06:23):

And that’s when I went to a small town. The overall level of energy surrounding me is just lower. And for some people, that’s awesome. And I was like, “No, I need that to keep myself going.”

Jeremy Phelps (06:33):

Yeah, I’m totally with you. I get it. I think I just need a higher percentage of that energy, right? I think we all need the time away to drive a couple hours outside the city and walk through nature and stuff like that. It’s not go, go, go all the time. But in my mind, it’s kind of a sense of urgency, right? If I’m doing something or walking somewhere or interacting with someone in a small town, it’s very okay. Let’s stand here and chat, “How’s family?” Right? But in a nice big city, it’s, “Okay. Here’s the thing. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Have a good day. Goodbye,” right? And I liked that. But what falls away though, is those really rich community connections, and you have to seek that out in a big city. But the nice thing is that it is available, it’s just buried a little bit deeper, whereas in a small town you’re sort of forced to interact with everyone, whether you like them or not.

Mike Haney (07:22):

Yeah, yeah. That’s right. That definitely resonates. It’s one of the things we’ve been here in San Diego for two and a half years now, but the bulk of it, COVID times. And so we still have no community here because we moved here and started to get to know people and we were in our house for two years. And it is kind of a funny paradox that the more you are surrounded by people, the harder it is to actually find that community.

Jeremy Phelps (07:44):

Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think it was hopper, his Nighthawks at the diner, that painting, that resonates with people. The loneliness of urban existence is a thing. And so if you’re not naturally an extrovert, you don’t automatically get those connections that you would have in a smaller town.

Mike Haney (07:59):

Well, there’s a part in your bio here that I’m curious to learn more about, which is you went from circuit city to, “I got my first programming job in 2007.” I’m always asking about how people find programming, because it’s not like I went to law school and then I became a lawyer. So how did you stumble into programming?

Jeremy Phelps (08:15):

Yeah. Well, this is great. Now everyone knows how old I am. Yeah.

Mike Haney (08:19):

I’ll edit it out.

Jeremy Phelps (08:19):

Great. Sure you will. I picked it up on my own. I for years was a self-taught engineer. I literally just went to phb.net back in high school and read the documentation and made stuff. I had a friend that ran a hosting company. So I had a server available to me so I could make my stuff public. It was all terrible, right? But it mostly worked.

Jeremy Phelps (08:40):

It was full of horrible SQL injection exploits and everything, but just learning anything else, I iterated on that, learned some more, and then it really came down to someone at a company just taking a flyer on me, hiring the kid who’s been sling computers for three years to help out with a website or an app or what have you. Like all first breaks, it kind of came because I knew somebody that worked at the company that got me the interview and that’s about it. So yeah, everything else was mine, but I didn’t actually get a computer science degree until years after that. So that was Circa 2007, and I did my master’s in computer science and finished that in 2015. So I was a self-taught developer for quite a long time for a pretty good portion of my career.

Mike Haney (09:24):

I want to ask more about that masters, especially given sort of where in your career you got it. But I’m curious, just going back, what drew you to programming in the first place? What was the sort of connection that you felt with it or what sort of itch within yourself did it scratch?

Jeremy Phelps (09:37):

It’s a little bit different for me. When I was a kid, middle school, high school, right? Just was always fascinated with computers, and I think that’s a fairly classic story. I was drawn to them for whatever reason. It was really exciting. And if you think about the period of roughly 1998 to 2005, that was a really, really exciting time in computing, right? You have the dot com run up and the burst and then kind of coming out of it a little bit. And so there was a lot going on, things were changing really quickly. There was a lot to learn. And it really excited to me. It was the only thing that I was excited about learning. It was a little bit rough because my high school didn’t offer anything. We had what we called an intro to tech class and it was mostly TAD. I actually wrote my high school’s HTML curriculum. That was my project for a semester, was just writing an HTML class because I knew it. And none of the teachers did.

Mike Haney (10:28):

Wow. I’m going to date myself. My closest high school class was HyperCard. Have you ever heard of HyperCard?

Jeremy Phelps (10:35):

No, I’m not quite that a old.

Mike Haney (10:38):

HyperCard was like the web before the web. It was like, “Hey look, we can make this thing where when you click on a thing, it makes another thing happen.”

Jeremy Phelps (10:45):

Yeah.

Mike Haney (10:46):

“Oh, my God, this is revolutionary. This is crazy. You could make “interactive presentations.”

Jeremy Phelps (10:52):

Really, right?

Mike Haney (10:53):

Yeah.

Jeremy Phelps (10:53):

Yeah. I mean it’s PowerPoint.

Mike Haney (10:55):

Exactly.

Jeremy Phelps (10:56):

You just love it.

Mike Haney (10:58):

When you first started getting professional gigs and doing this as a job, what was the plan at that point? Where did you think this was headed or was it just like, “This will pay the bills until I figure out where I’m headed.”

Jeremy Phelps (11:09):

Yeah, no plan. It was all very ad hoc. I started out freelancing and stuff like that. So it was basically anybody who was willing to take a chance on me before I actually got the actual full-time programming job at a real company. Yeah, it was tough. It was tough.

Mike Haney (11:26):

How so? What was challenging about that phase of it?

Jeremy Phelps (11:30):

Proving yourself, right?

Mike Haney (11:31):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeremy Phelps (11:32):

There was no portfolio. People didn’t really have portfolios back then for the most part. And I didn’t have any real references. You can use your freelance clients as a reference, but what’s that really worth, right? And frankly, I didn’t know. I was a 19, 20 something year old kid. I don’t know how the world works. I was still in school. So I was working full-time, I was taking classes part-time and then later full-time the entire time. Instead of sitting at my desk, eating lunch or going out to lunch with my coworkers, I drove to the local community college and took an economics class for an hour. Don’t do that. I don’t recommend it.

Jeremy Phelps (12:10):

Honestly, I didn’t know enough about the way the world until I was out of school. But I was lucky in that I had been working the whole time, so I actually had some experience and figured out how to function in an office and in a company. And what companies want from me, right? Prior to that companies were a source for a paycheck, and you just had to convince them to give it to you because you were desperate, you’d been eating raw meat. And so I kind of figured out how to behave as an adult, just through trial and error and a lot of awkward exchanges.

Mike Haney (12:39):

As you said, that’s not necessarily the recommended path to work full-time as you’re going to school, to sort of mix those two things. What was motivating you to do that? You must have had classmates and friends who when you had to go to work were out partying or doing something else that seemed more or fun.

Jeremy Phelps (12:54):

Yeah. I was broke. Hunger is a really, really good motivator. I was working full-time, but as an entry level engineer. And this was Circa 2006/2007, right? And it was kind of before a lot of really, really big tech companies came in and started paying people a ton of money. And so entry level salaries for an engineer, especially in a tiny town in the middle of Illinois, honestly, I could have went and… I had friends who were plumbers that made more than me. I’ll put it that way. So I had to finish my degree. I was like, “If there’s any chance of me making more money, I’ve got to get one of these degree things that everyone thinks is important.” But I’m entirely on my own. My family doesn’t have money. I grew up in a really blue collar working class family. I didn’t have them to support me. So I just kept working because I needed to pay the rent.

Mike Haney (13:47):

Yeah. That’s another bit of overlap I can relate. I did the same thing in college and I learned graphic design sort of through a work study job and loved it, and just kind of wanted to do it all the time. And so I did the same thing from basically sophomore year on. I worked full-time while I was also in school, and then had that same experience of getting out and being like, “Yeah, I’ve already done like three years in the professional world. I know how this works.”

Jeremy Phelps (14:10):

Yeah. It was a weird thing because when I finally finished school, obviously it took me a little bit longer. When I only had a job, I was like, “What do I do now? Why is this so easy?”

Mike Haney (14:21):

Yeah.

Jeremy Phelps (14:22):

And so turning that off, I actually failed in turning that off. So I went to grad school. So I only actually had a two, three years in between my undergrad and grad.

Mike Haney (14:31):

Well, yeah, that’s the next part I want to hit on because I love this, that you took a hiatus from building software and spent a couple years in the algorithmic trading industry. I assume this flowed out of your BS in finance that you thought, “Okay, I’ve got this degree in this thing. Even though I’ve been working in this other profession, I should go to this sort of tangential or related financial take on this.”

Jeremy Phelps (14:52):

Yeah. What led me to that I think was that I already had some programming experience. And do I really want to go through and convince these people that I know this stuff? And the answer for undergrad was no. And the other part of it of course is just cold, hard cash, right? When they asked John Dillinger why he robbed banks? He said, “That’s where the money is.” Yeah, that’s where the money is. There’s these guys making tons of money being algorithmic traders. The industry was a little bit newer back then. Not quite as crowded, and there were a lot of people making a lot of money. “Well, I want some of that money.” It also helped that I was in Chicago, right? And so we have the options exchanges here.

Jeremy Phelps (15:33):

At least the original biggest one. Futures exchanges are here. All huge banks, hedge funds, right? There is an ecosystem here for quantitative finance in the way that there’s an ecosystem for tech in San Francisco. So it’s one of the strengths of being in Chicago was that I was able to do that, right? There were direct internship opportunities with my school. “All right. Well, I’ll go learn this thing.” And I did. The timing didn’t really work out that well. I was only in the industry for a couple of years and it was shrinking then. So I said, “Ah, you know what? I’m going back to tech. It’s a much more positive environment and I think there’s more room to grow.”

Mike Haney (16:09):

Yeah. It’s funny you mention that about Chicago. I feel like Chicago, at least in the sort of cultural’s zeitgeist gets overlooked a lot and people forget the amount of industry that there is. And those things like that there is a robust finance industry in Chicago. It doesn’t get the credit it deserves.

Jeremy Phelps (16:24):

Well, yeah, look, I’m a Chicago and I know that. Look, we’re in the middle of the country. People often fly over us, they don’t think about us. But the reality is that we are a big diversified economy. There is no one giant industry. Finance is a big part of it, but so is manufacturing. So is tech now. There is no industry that dominates it in the way that… Let’s take San Francisco for example, right? If you pull tech out of San Francisco and Silicon Valley, what do you have, right? I don’t know. Not sure. But that was me hedging a little bit again, right? I knew that in Chicago, no matter what happened to the economy, because I moved up here during the financial crisis, right? And what I knew is that I was getting callbacks for interviews in Chicago and I definitely wasn’t anywhere else. And so here I am.

Mike Haney (17:11):

So what did you learn in that couple years doing algorithmic trading? About not just sort of how to do algorithmic trading, but what’d you learn about working and about what you want to do with your life?

Jeremy Phelps (17:21):

Yeah. A ton, is the short answer to that. I learned what it’s like to be in a toxic environment. That was the big one, for those who haven’t been on or sat near any kind of trading floor, whether it’s at an change back when that used to be a thing, or in a company that’s just has a floor full of traders, it’s pretty aggressive. Think men’s locker room. Sometimes, literally, lots of screaming, lots of swearing, lots of yelling. It’s pretty toxic.

Jeremy Phelps (17:51):

You learn a lot and you have the ability to make a lot of money, but in terms of your mental health and wellbeing, not great. The tech and the work was incredible, right? I got to kind of learn how to tease signals out of the market and how to evaluate them and how to implement them. I did execution for a little while, right? So those are still skills that I use every day. Everybody’s an option straighter these days, but I actually know how they work. And so I did get to transfer a few skills out, but in general, a lot of it’s really, really sort of industry specific. And so I didn’t see myself staying in the industry for another 25 years for the rest of my career. And so figured it’s better to get out sooner rather than later.

Mike Haney (18:32):

It’s really interesting that exposure to a toxic culture that early, because there’s a part of when you’re working, even though you had your professional experience as a programmer before, this is still kind of your first “real” job out of school where you’re sort of putting your degree to work and you’re probably going into it at least thinking like, “This is my job now. This is my career.” And then to realize over time that, “This isn’t really the environment for me.” I feel like when you’re in your first job, you just go like, “Well, this is what working is like. This is just how the industry sort of operates.” How long did it take you of being in that environment before you went A, “This isn’t normal,” and or B, like, “Yeah, this isn’t… I just don’t for thrive here. This is not the sort of water I want to swim in.”

Jeremy Phelps (19:12):

Yeah. It was really fast. No more than a year, I would say. When you’re not sleeping well, you’re thinking about what positions you have on, and whether the guy covering the overnight is going to… Who knows what he’s going to do, right? Maybe he’s going to sell it all. Maybe he’s going to buy a whole bunch more. I don’t know. What am I going to wake up to? It’s rough and it’s not supportive, right? So if prop trading, which is what I did proprietary trading, which is trading for the company’s account, there are no outside investors. It’s not like a hedge fund. It’s just a company, a pile of money and a bunch of people trading. If you’re not making money, you’re going to be gone more quickly than you would think. And so it’s very much, if you haven’t worked in the industry, if you think of like the hot sales guy, right.

Jeremy Phelps (19:56):

The guy who’s really just crushing it, bringing in all this accounts and all this revenue, and then there’s the other sales guy who isn’t, there’s the golden child and then there’s everybody else. And so trading is very much like that. Your chopped liver, unless you’re absolutely crushing it. So if you get to sick, you have a draw down or whatever, don’t expect any sport from the company or your coworkers, because you’re not making them any money and so you’re useless.

Mike Haney (20:21):

How were you at it? Were you good at it?

Jeremy Phelps (20:24):

Oh, well it depends. So I was pretty terrible at execution. Execution being buying and selling whether in an automated way or by hand or both. I did learn about myself in that I am not super great at coming up with solutions to things really, really quickly under pressure. I am not someone who can price options off of a curve in under a second. And so if you can’t do that, you’re in trouble, right? I actually had one job interview one time where I sat down in front of these two guys and they sat there for, I don’t know, about 20 minutes. And one would ask me, “Okay, so what is 236 times 48?” And then I would give them the answer. And then the next question would be, “Okay, what’s 384 times 27?” And I would give them the answer.

Jeremy Phelps (21:08):

And we sat there for 20 minutes and then those guys left, two more guys came in and they did the same thing for another 20 minutes, right? So yeah, I’m not good at that. Few people are right. It’s just a really, really tough thing. I was much better at the quiet more data sciencey quant work, which is just analyzing huge masses of tick data and then taking the signal out of that and then implementing it in code so that we can actually execute against it in an automated way, which is a lot more comfortable for me.

Mike Haney (21:41):

So when you finally decided that was not going to be your future, that’s about when you went back to grad school?

Jeremy Phelps (21:47):

Yeah, actually. So I left that and then I moved into tech at the same time, right? So I think it must have been fall of 2013. Left trading in fall of 2013, took a job at a health tech company of all things, out levels, obviously. Yeah, also went back to grad school full-time which my wife was really, really thrilled about because we were planning a wedding at the time.

Mike Haney (22:10):

What was the driver to go back to school?

Jeremy Phelps (22:13):

I think I needed to prove to myself that I know what I’m doing. I think that it would be easy for me to present myself in front of a hiring manager for example, and they could look at my experience and go like, “What on earth are you doing here, right? You were a programmer for a little while and you did this trading thing. What? Why are you here?” And so I just figured it would be easier and it would open more doors if I could just wave my masters in computer science around. At the same time, I didn’t run up being in school forever. And so I decided to do it full-time and had no life for a couple years.

Mike Haney (22:45):

What did you take out of it?

Jeremy Phelps (22:46):

I think a lot of the theory. When you’re a self taught engineer, you don’t learn the theory and the principles behind what you’re doing, right? Much in the same way that you could be an apprentice electrician and help out doing stuff as a set of hands, but you don’t really understand all of the concepts behind what you’re doing. And so I learned that about myself. Before I left finance, I was running into some fundamental problems, which was… First of all, I wasn’t speaking the same language as my coworkers. They all had CS degrees. And so I knew once we’d finally agreed on terms, I was like, “Oh, okay. I know that thing,” right? But it was just Rocky because every time they would refer to, I don’t know, some kind of algorithm or principal or what have you that I just didn’t know because that’s what you learn in school. And so I said, “All right. Well, I will learn that stuff.”

Mike Haney (23:35):

Do you like being in school? Do you like just the act of sort of being there and take a part of this sort of hecticness that introduces into your life, which just the act of being in school and taking classes?

Jeremy Phelps (23:45):

No, I hate it. It’s awful. I have never been a good student, honestly. I actually just barely passed high school. I was in the bottom 10% of my class. So yeah, I’ve always been terrible at it. Undergrad, I think, took me six or seven years to finish. Grad school is the only one I finished on time. I don’t like academia. It’s all very, I don’t know. There’s a lot of hoops that you have to jump through. And most of it isn’t applicable to the real world. It’s just sort of… I don’t know. There’s a lot of Naval gazing kind of impracticality built into academia and that always bugs me because I want to do stuff. I don’t want to write papers.

Mike Haney (24:20):

Yeah. You don’t take moops in your spare time just for kicks?

Jeremy Phelps (24:24):

No. Look, let’s be fair. I do enjoy learning, right? I’m currently learning three languages, right. So learning is important to me, but school and academia, meh.

Mike Haney (24:37):

Yeah. That’s what I was kind of getting at because I know just… I’m glad you mentioned the languages thing, just knowing you a little bit, it does seem like you are in many ways just sort of constant student, travel’s part of that language learning, obviously. I know you’re an avid reader, which I want to get to. That’s why I was curious about how you feel about school. I completely hear your points about the sort of environment of academia, and my wife works in academia now. I kind of see the view from that side. And as a work culture, boy, coming from a place like Levels, it is maddening for her to [crosstalk 00:25:08] kind of bureaucracy. What I found, especially by the time I went back to grad school, I sort of liked the learning thing. I could see myself being one of these guys who retires and then just like goes back and gets another master’s or a PhD or something just because I don’t know, it would be cool to just think about medieval literature for two years.

Jeremy Phelps (25:28):

Yeah.

Mike Haney (25:30):

That part, I really kind of took… It occurred to me at one point I think in college, I tried to impress this to my son that the cool thing about that is you just pick a thing and you go, “I want to know more about this,” and there’s some guy who’s like, or woman who’s just studied this all their life, and they’re like, “All right. Let’s talk about theology and the 14 entry.” And you’re like, “Cool, is this like-”

Jeremy Phelps (25:50):

Yeah, yeah. That’s fantastic, right? But heart science, I’m not so sure, right? Maybe I certainly would consider it, like I said, and I think if it’s the best way to learn something, then sure. And the nice thing about academia is, it’s easy in a way, right?

Mike Haney (26:08):

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jeremy Phelps (26:08):

Because people tell you what to do and then you do it. And then they tell you how you did, which is very, very different obviously than the working world where often you have to figure out what to do and then do it. And then maybe somebody will tell you how you did, but that’s not really the point. The point is that you did the thing.

Mike Haney (26:27):

Yeah. Well I’m curious. I know you bounced around a bit. Well, that’s probably not a fair way to say it, but you had some different jobs sort of between school and when you landed at Levels. Bounced around makes it sound like you were fired a lot and had to restart your career, which is not what I wanted to imply, but what was the kind of path to ending up here? How did you figure out what industries or what kinds of jobs you wanted to work in?

Jeremy Phelps (26:52):

Yeah, that took a while due to my [inaudible 00:26:56] mentioned upbringing and everything, being broke for so long, I just continued following the money. And so I didn’t account for work environment, who I’m working with, what product I’m working on, how that product affects the world, none of that stuff. It was, “Who’s going to give me the biggest paycheck?” And so surprise, surprise, right? I ended up in more toxic environments that taught me that, it really does matter who you work with and what company you work for because it’s your life, right? You’re spending a third of your waking hours usually every week, and so it matters.

Mike Haney (27:34):

Yeah. Well again, like that’s a lesson that some people A, sort of never get the opportunity to learn, to even step back from the places they’re working or the environments they work in, I think, to realize that what they’re working in is not the only way it can be. I mean, even the sort of bureaucracy side of things, which is not the same as things like a toxic culture, but my wife works with folks who have only ever worked in academia, and I don’t think it would ever occur to them that you could run a company the way we run Levels, for instance, or even say a bigger startup, it’s maybe more elegant. Something the size of a university because it’s just, again, it’s the sort of water they swim in. And it’s fortunate to get that experience to sort of be able to jump around places. And were you sort of inching closer to a place like Levels or did you get to Levels, and was this a pretty fundamental shift in culture from where you’d been before?

Jeremy Phelps (28:25):

Oh, no. I was looking for it. After a couple of toxic jobs that paid really, really well, I did a startup and that was with somebody that I already knew and I knew that shared most of my values. And so that worked really, really well. And I saw flashes and was like, “Oh, this is what it could be like, right? Jobs don’t have to be constant suffering.” And so after that startup, I decided, I was like, “All right, well, I’ll do this myself.” And so I found a co-founder and we built a company together. It was small, but importantly, what it was, was we tried to identify cultures within companies. So think like Glassdoor, but better, I guess with actual data about what it’s like to work there. And so in doing so, we identified a lot of internal company values. These values being, even something as simple as, “Oh, we have a junior developer program,” all the way up to, “We’re fully remote, we’re a sync. Maybe we have unlimited paid time off, or this company is run and founded by engineers,” for example.

Jeremy Phelps (29:30):

All of those things we found to be very, very important to candidates because we went out there and we talked to a whole bunch of people who were looking for jobs as engineers. And they said, “These are the things that we care about.” And so that got me thinking even more about values and when the pandemic killed that startup, I was pretty sure that I was just going to start another one, maybe in a different space or slightly tweak the product, whatever. And I just happened to cross levels and happened to have a phone call with Andrew and found out, “Oh, this is exactly what I’m looking for,” right? Because on the first call we were completing each other’s sentences, right? And so I said to myself, I was like, “Oh, maybe I don’t have to do this myself,” right? “If I were to build a company Levels would be it. So let’s just join. It’s already here,” right? “All these great people are here. They share my values. I trust them. I think they’re competent. The product is fantastic. The mission’s fantastic.” What more do you want?

Mike Haney (30:30):

Well, this is something I’d love to get at. Especially knowing that’s what the company… You were thinking about this and trying to sort of build a company or in this idea of sussing out a company’s culture, because you predate me here, which is an increasingly smaller percentage of the company. I think I was employee 13, I want to say, and you were here and established by the time I came on, which means you were joining an even smaller team than that. How many people were here when you joined?

Jeremy Phelps (30:55):

I go back and forth on this. I think I was number 10, but that’s if you count five of the founders, so I don’t know how you want to do that math.

Mike Haney (31:02):

Right, right. So what’s interesting about, I think, about joining a company at that stage, because I know I had these thoughts even with 13 people is, how much you can really know about what a company culture’s going to be when it’s that small, right? It’s like you and your buddy starting a company, the company culture is just you and their shared values and how you two interact with each other. And that’s different than when it’s a very large company.

Mike Haney (31:27):

So in some ways, I guess what I’m getting at is, when there’s 10 people there or nine people there, five of whom are founders. A lot of it is, you’re just sort of taking the word of these people that they mean what they say about how they want to run this thing as it grows. I’m curious what you learned both through your previous company and coming here about how do you know when you’re joining something small? How do you suss out? How do you kind of analyze not just what the culture… What they say they want the culture to be or what it is with that very small group, but what it could grow into.

Jeremy Phelps (31:56):

Yeah. This is something that’s unfortunately really, really hard to put into words. It very much is a feel. It’s a gut feeling. Fortunately the levels of recruiting process then as now involves basically a million conversations with different members of the team. I’m pretty sure I spoke to every single person that worked at Levels before I joined. So what I’m doing or what I was doing when I had those conversations was first of all, I’m looking consistency, right? If one person has one value and the other person has value that’s different, and the other person has a value that contradicts both of those then yeah, maybe they’re not necessarily putting their money where their mouth is, right? With Levels I found phenomenal consistency. Everybody was on the same page.

Jeremy Phelps (32:40):

Everybody knew what the values were and what they were going to be. Especially when having an employee zero or a founder at startups in the past, you kind of learn to smell BS, right? And I didn’t even have the tiniest whiff of that. For me, weirdly joining Levels was a little bit disorient think because when I joined Levels as employee 10, it was already the biggest company that I had worked at in the last five years. Yeah, it’s a little bit different for me, I guess.

Mike Haney (33:08):

What’s changed in the time that you’ve been here. I mean, we’re now approaching close to 50. How have you seen the culture evolve?

Jeremy Phelps (33:15):

Fortunately, the culture has only evolved to be better. At least from my point of view. I was worried, right. Sort of rightfully so. At smaller companies previously, I told myself, “I’m out,” before we’re big enough to have an HR department. That was my line. So obviously Levels’ kind of passed that now. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised, but actually, you know what? I wasn’t surprised because when I was interviewed and certainly after I started, the founders immediately had trust from me. I could tell. Basically what I was telling my wife was, “These guys get it. These guys know how to put together a company culture that people want to work at, and I want to work there.” And so I have not been horribly surprised at how things have grown. It’s been amazing, right? And a lot of that comes through, I think, the hiring process. I interview a lot of candidates and we have had phenomenal engineers that haven’t made it through the process because we got some indication that they don’t share our values.

Jeremy Phelps (34:17):

That’s how important it is to us. Most companies would not do that, right? They’d be like, “Oh, but that person has… They can give me the code. I want the code. Give me the code,” but that’s not how Levels operates, right? They really do put their money where their mouth is when we say that culture’s important.

Mike Haney (34:33):

I’m thinking a lot about this hiring question now because I’m hiring a position in the thick of candidate interviews at various stages. And indexing to your point, indexing on this so much more heavily than I ever have in the past. I mean, I’ve done a lot of hiring. I’ve built companies, and it’s an area I’ve never felt particularly confident in because I could tell you a story of all the genius people I hired, and I could tell you a story of the people I’ve hired that did not work out well at all. And I’ve never quite known what the right… Just never known how to sort of suss it out. I feel like it’s always a little bit of a, do you just sort of lean heavily on the technical challenge? Do you lean heavily on the vibe?

Mike Haney (35:09):

And I’ve had both of those puristics betray me where it’s like, somebody is technically great, but then you realize six months in, to your point about sort of culture and values like, “Ugh, we just don’t click.” And I’ve hire people with whom I clicked and loved working, but just didn’t fit the job. And so I’m trying to think a lot about how you suss out that sort of culture part. I’m curious what you’ve learned, if there’s any questions that you’ve found really help elucidate that point when you’re talking to somebody or areas of conversation that you go into or ways to sort of probe or just signals that you pick up, what have you learned about interviewing for culture?

Jeremy Phelps (35:45):

Yeah. This is again a bit of a feel thing. You have to find ways to ask people about the things that they don’t like. And not only do you not… You have to find out about things that they don’t like, but you have to kind of press them a little bit on the answers that they give because if you just let people talk, then what they will do is they will take the job ad and then they will read it to you. And that doesn’t help me because I know what our job ad says, right? I want to know how you feel about our job ad. I want to know how you feel about potentially working here. The other thing that I think helps a lot is being candid about what it’s like to work here, right? So for example, we are asynchronous company. That’s kind of a new thing, and it’s hard.

Jeremy Phelps (36:28):

We have challenges associated with that, right? We have projects that probably honestly, would’ve gone better if we were co-located in person. Because you have that type feedback loop, et cetera, et cetera, right? But we think that it on balance, it’s more than worth it. And so if I get questions, for example, about our async culture and like, “How does that work with,” I don’t know, “outages?” For example, then it shows that people are thinking about the culture. And if they’re thinking about it, odds are, they probably are a better candidate and probably share more of our values than you would think. If they focus entirely on the technical, I can’t learn a lot from that, right? I can learn that you’re a great programmer, but I can’t learn whether or not you’re going to sit in here and be happy here ultimately, right? Because I think the worst thing that we can do is hire somebody and then three months later, they just leave because they don’t like it here.

Mike Haney (37:19):

Yeah.

Jeremy Phelps (37:20):

No one’s happy about that, right? They certainly aren’t happy because they left a job that maybe they liked, or maybe they didn’t. And now three months later they’ve got to find a new one. We’re unhappy because we’ve invested all this time and effort in somebody and they ultimately weren’t happy and unhappy people are not productive. So it’s just lose, lose, lose. Avoiding that is by far the most important thing.

Mike Haney (37:41):

Yeah, it’s a really great point. I like your phrasing of they’ll read the job ad back to you because I’ve been doing some of these early culture calls, sometimes Sam or Mis does and I’ve done some with my candidates. And I’ll talk about we’re asynchronous and here’s what that means. And for instance, it’s not a great place to be if you want to find your social circle at work. Yeah. Then I’m always sort of hedging and going, but we are actually pretty connected.

Mike Haney (38:05):

I feel more connected to my teammates than I thought I would at this much of an async, somehow through threads or whatever, the stuff we have. I do have a sense of knowing people, but I do get a sense often that people, that’s pretty clear what the right answer is. If you’re in a job interview, it’s because you want that job or at least you think at that point you want that job. And so they’re going to go, “Yeah, no, I’m good. I can make friends elsewhere. Yeah, not looking for that here. And oh yeah, documentation. I’m a big fan of documentation. That sounds great. Yeah, absolutely. We should definitely document things.” So I like your sense of probing on that a little bit further and seeing what kind of questions they ask to get at where they’re not just reading the job ad back to you.

Jeremy Phelps (38:43):

Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes you get more insightful questions that are like, “So how much of your time do you spend reading documentation?” And I’ll spoil it for you, it’s a lot. Basically anything that shows that they’re actually thinking what’s going on here instead of trying to pass a test, usually is a good sign.

Mike Haney (38:59):

I’m curious, how does the async remote nature intersect with your job as an engineer in ways that are markedly different than places you’ve had in the past?

Jeremy Phelps (39:09):

Yeah. My phone doesn’t ring, which is nice. Yeah, and in fact, I don’t know that it ever has. I’ve gotten one or two texts to say, “Hey, go look at this. It’s urgent.” But other than that, I’m mostly left on my own devices. You don’t have anybody walking up to your desk obviously because we’re fully remote, which is fantastic. That was my number one complaint when I worked in an office was some salesperson walking up and saying, “Hey, can you do this thing for the $100,000 contract I’m trying to land?” It’s like, “Well, okay. Yeah, I guess I’ll do the thing.” Async I think forces us to be more thoughtful and deliberate about the way that we do things.

Jeremy Phelps (39:44):

For example, I’m the directly responsible individual for a small project right now. And since I know that we’re async, if I need feedback on a document, for example, I know that I have to get that request for feedback out several days before I need it. And so it sort of is this virtuous cycle that keeps things from becoming urgent because it forces you to prepare ahead of time. Outages of course are a completely different thing, right? If something breaks, then we have plans for that and how to handle that. That’s all fine. But those are rare, right? Most of the time, we’re all just kind of kicking around, doing our thing and we’re able to do so in a peaceful way, rather than kind of lurching from fire to fire.

Mike Haney (40:24):

What surprised you about working in this culture? What do you know now that you would’ve been surprised to think a year and a half ago before you started, or two years before you started here?

Jeremy Phelps (40:34):

I was surprised that the async thing, first of all, actually works, right? We actually ship incredible product and a tot of code and it’s just amazing. This is by far the most productive team that I have ever been on, and I’ve been an engineer for 15 years. So that was surprising. I don’t know why it surprises me because of course it works if you think about it. And yeah, I think that the idea that I don’t have to have my butt in this chair, I’m actually standing up right now, but that I don’t have to be present from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM every day. I don’t have to constantly watch my Slack notifications like a Hawk. I don’t have Slack notifications because we don’t use that, and I can kind of live my life, right?

Jeremy Phelps (41:16):

So this morning, for example, I got LASIK three months ago, and so I had a follow up with my eye doctor this morning. I didn’t tell anybody. It’s not even on my calendar. I just went and nobody missed me. At previous jobs, that’s certainly not the case. Somebody would’ve noticed somebody would’ve been like, “Hey, where the hell are you? What’s going on? I can’t find you. Help, help help.” And so everyone tells you when you start out at Levels that that’s something that you can do. That we’re focused on output and not how much time you’re working. But after a very short time here, I learned that that’s actually how things are you actually can get up and go to the doctor if you need to in the middle of the day. Nobody’s going to bother you about that.

Mike Haney (41:56):

That’s such a great way of putting it, that in some ways the culture is sort of the sum of people learning that lesson for themselves and those lessons continuing to be true. That each person who starts goes through some version of that, “Oh, people do actually take time off.” Or, “Oh, I can actually work the sort of hours I want to work or direct my own project priority to some degree,” and that kind of stuff. It’s funny, I feel like everybody who starts here probably has a story like that of like, “Oh, a couple months in, I sort of realize oh right, this does actually sort of work like this.” And I guess we are all sort of unlearning our priors from other jobs.

Jeremy Phelps (42:34):

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. For me, a lot of it comes just from trust and leadership. When I started, we didn’t really have a vacation policy. It was just, “Take time if you need time, put it on your calendar. It’s fine.” Then we brought in the new vacation policy where we have to… This mandatory one week per quarter that we have to take off. And here’s how the rollout went for that, right? Sam who’s our CEO said, “Hey, this is our vacation policy now. You need to take off one week per quarter. Also, I’m taking next week off,” right? There’s a difference between being a boss and a leader, and the Levels’ leadership fortunately is all leaders and not bosses.

Mike Haney (43:11):

It’s funny you mentioned the vacation. It’s the last thing I wanted to touch on with you. So when I was here maybe six months or so, I’d take some vacation, but I don’t think I’d done my week yet, because that was one of the things I was a little skeptical about because not everybody in the company does, right? Just timing wise. And I don’t know, people have sort of different priorities. And so, it was clear to me when I started that it was not 100% consistent that everybody took that week for core.

Mike Haney (43:35):

And so just for my own learning, and I think we were sort of discussing this with Mis and Sam and stuff, I went through and did an audit. I went back and looked at the vacation calendar for the… A year prior or something and just looked at how many people were taking their week per quarter. And you were very consistent that you were taking the week per quarter. And I’m curious if that was hard for you to do, or if it just sort of fit well into how you wanted to live or what you were already doing even before that policy existed.

Jeremy Phelps (44:03):

Yeah, certainly it wasn’t hard, right? Vacation is not hard. Let’s be real. I definitely felt a little bit twitchy turning things off back then. We were still using Slack, turning those notifications off, turning off the notifications from my work email, that made me a little twitchy. That was weird because I’ve always been on small teams where it’s me or nobody. And so not having that connection was really, really strange to me, but I learned pretty quickly, time off is nice. I am consistent about taking it because for that same reason, right? You went back and looked at the calendars and you noticed that I was consistent and I want every person who joins Levels after this to see that same thing that we actually do this, it’s not marketing hype. We actually take the time.

Mike Haney (44:53):

Yeah. And it definitely served that way for me, right? To see the handful, you were not the only one, there were definitely a handful of folks who did it, but to see that, and to see that those were people who my sense was, were respected senior members of the company who were doing that. It wasn’t like there was an aura of like, “Oh, that’s Jeremy he’s take a time.” I was like, “No, Jeremy’s one of our top dudes. And of course he does this because it’s kind of what we do.” So I think that signal part’s right. But the twitchiness is the thing I guess I was getting at, when I say, is it hard? Because that’s sort of just struggled with because it is. And again, I’m sort of a department of one in some ways. And so that idea of kind of walking away from things, but also trusting the like, no fire drill ethos we have here of, it’s okay, the world’s not going to end, and there is some redundancy and the whole point of this exercise is to find out what breaks.

Jeremy Phelps (45:43):

Yeah. And candidly, that is one of the motivators for the vacation policy is that, you’re going to find gaps. You’re going to find places where, “Only Jeremy knows this stuff and you know how we found out? Because we couldn’t get ahold of him for a week.” The surprising thing, I think, is that it’s rarely disruptive. Maybe that’s because we designed our processes and systems in a way that it’s resilient or maybe it’s that we have resilient people. Maybe it’s all of those things, but yeah, general, it’s going to be fine.