#96 – Finding meaning and connection in life and work (Ian Schumann & Mike Haney)

When you’re a people-person, remote work can seem daunting. It can seem even more intimidating to join a remote team during a pandemic. Ian Schumann, Levels Software Engineer, found his way to the team as a people-first engineer who comes from a world of travel and linguistics. Levels Editorial Director, Mike Haney, sat down with Ian to talk about how Ian’s world travels led to where he is today, how he transitioned into a career in engineering, and how he can still be people-oriented while working remotely.

04:22 – Discovering linguistics

Ian spent his college years sampling different courses until he found a path that he enjoyed.

I guess, technically, I came in, in the college of communications because I am communication-oriented and people-oriented. And I thought that in the college of communications, we would be talking about stuff like that. But it was a more narrow kind of vocational focus than what I was expecting. I wanted more theory and more soft squishy philosophy and concepts and ideas, and that was a little more practical. And since I had no career ambitions, I had no use for practical education. So I ended up, my freshman year, kind of sampling around. I took a couple of intro astronomy courses that I found completely fascinating. And for a semester I was going to be an astronomy major. Then I found out that auditorium-style math classes are terrible. Even though I like math, I couldn’t keep going through the auditorium-style math classes. And at the same time, I stumbled into a linguistics intro class. I also found it fascinating. I was like, “Well, I’m just going to roll the dice on this.” Sort of similar to some social sciences, linguistics is an interesting intersection of hard concrete STEM thinking and more soft, squishy, relational, or liberal arts thinking. There’s some philosophy, there’s some cognitive science, there’s logic, there’s acoustics. It’s got a little bit of everything, and I just really enjoyed it there. That’s kind of the story of how I ended up there.

13:27 – Searching for ultimate purpose

Career anxiety led Ian to join a community that provided real human connections and unforgettable experiences.

In my case, when I was in college, I kind of entered into a religious phase. I fell in with a very winning, thoughtful crowd of Methodists on campus at UT and for the next, a little more than half a decade, getting closer to a decade I guess, about seven or eight years, I was in a Christian world. And that was how I thought of my path unfolding. And so looking back on it, one thing I can certainly comment about is that the lack of career ambition and the anxiety about the few future, it was certainly like a search for meaning and a search for ultimate purpose in the world. And certainly, without affirming or denying any truth claims, like finding this crowd and this religion, certainly scratched that itch in a really helpful way, provided me with a community of thoughtful people who were asking big questions about what are we doing here? What is all this for? And so in that stream, and in that culture, after school, I did a round the world mission trip of sorts and was able to visit three or four continents, twelvish countries, and do various kinds of volunteer work. Some of it was more practical and concrete, some of it was a little more ministerial, a little more Christiany in different places. But I spent the year after doing that. And that was a great way to reject the vision of this incoming undifferentiated mass of nine to five work that it seemed like the rest of the world was having to sign up for.

15:52 – Settling into a career

Traveling and side projects showed Ian which career paths weren’t right for him and he found himself back where he started, in Austin.

I did think for a while about staying in ministry. Somehow, I think a lot of us out there did because some of the work that was being done was so captivating. Some of the people that we were serving were in such obvious need, victims of human trafficking, that sort of thing. When I got back, I did briefly do an apprenticeship, sort of an informal apprenticeship with a documentary filmmaker who lived in Colorado Springs, and that was about two months. It was a lot of fun. I got to travel to Northern Iraq. This was before the rise of ISIS, and we shot some video and I edited some stuff and it was for a nonprofit. It was working in Kurdistan. That was a great experience. By the end of it, though, it was to me that I did not have this position to sit for hours on end being an editor. I was proud of the product that I created and I was good at it, but the lack of social stimulation and the heads downness of all that I found to be crushing. So I ended up settling back down in Austin and kind of defaulting to taking a support job in software because luckily, in retrospect, luckily software is the dominant industry in my hometown of Austin, where I grew up. And so it was easy for me to get this little foothold in an industry that was going to be exploding over the next decade.

17:41 – A sense of human connection

Humans have the same needs everywhere, and that’s a lesson that stuck with Ian from the year-long worldwide trip after college.

I was surprised to find just a kind of a permeating sense of common humanity after I finished this up. The first few weeks, or couple months that I was out there, I hadn’t done much in the way of international travel before that. And it’s silly that one has to learn this, but in every place people are people and their needs are relatively constant. There are places to get food, there are ways to travel, everyone cares about seeing their friends and family. And in some sense, some English-speaking expat that we met up with in one of those early countries said that he doesn’t believe in such a thing as a language barrier. And he means that obviously metaphorically. But the things that are most important to communicate about are shared across cultures and languages. And I found that resonated. I find that it’s not that hard for me to imagine being on the ground in places that seem distant and tortured by disasters or atrocities. Like right now, there’s a war in Ukraine and I was in Ukraine and I saw how beautiful of a place it was. And so it’s not that difficult from me to mentally locate myself there again, and to have a little more sense of solidarity with the generic human in the world, wherever they may be.

31:57 – Learning to soak up what’s in front of you

Traveling taught Ian to appreciate living in the moment and recognize that moving geographically doesn’t leave your problems behind.

I think it’s also that no matter where you are, if you’re not engaged in that practice, like what you just said, of soaking up what’s right in front of you, you can become bored and want to move on to the next place. So I had this distinct experience of noticing when I was halfway through the year, I think I was in India at this point or maybe East Africa, of feeling bored and then being like, “What on earth? What is wrong with me? I’m moving countries once a month. I’m having the adventure of a lifetime and I’m bored. Something is wrong here.” I think it’s also a pointer to the idea which I find probably crucial for a digital nomad to take on board, which is that whatever emotional baggage you have is just going to follow you. Right? You’re not going to solve your problems with satisfaction or meaning or connection by moving to a new place.

36:43 – Transitioning into engineering

After moving up the ladder on the customer-facing side of software, Ian hit a wall and decided to try engineering.

I mentioned a little while after getting back from that world travel, I got a foothold in the software industry. I moved up through the customer-facing side of the industry for several years, ended up doing consulting and implementation and project management and that sort of stuff. And I knew in the background that I had a lot of aptitude with computer things, or as we say it internal to Levels, I knew I was good at a computer. But I shied away from that for a while because of the fear of what I mentioned earlier about video editing, which is that I was pretty sure that doing heads-down work on a computer full time would be crushing to me. So I stayed on the people-facing side of the industry and by about 2017, which is about seven years into my career, I felt like I was hitting a ceiling in terms of what I was being asked to do versus what I could actually do. I was pushing up against the boundaries of what that role or that world required for me. And I wanted something to more technical or more challenging. And so that was when I decided to jump the fence into engineering. By that point, I had discovered that you could do engineering and still be people-oriented. You didn’t have to be a neckbeard, I think is how I put it in my spotlight article.

37:58 – Learning about Levels

As a mission-driven and people-first engineer, Ian was eager to combine all of his passions and skills into one role.

Early 2018, I switched into engineering and that went great. I ended up feeling like, I maybe shouldn’t have waited so long to do this. The material took hold very easily. And this ties into Levels because when I made that switch, one of my great hopes was that I would get to use these technical skills that I was in the process of acquiring to somehow build this future at some cool company, a few years down the road. Or another way that I’ve put it to myself is build something that the world needed, as opposed to just building something that represented a market opportunity. I figured it would take a little while to be competitive enough as an engineer to join, what I imagine, would be a very competitive company, a very cutting edge company, doing something cool, attracting lots of candidates. But the first few years of my engineering career went very well. And I learned about Levels, I guess it would’ve been early last year, spring of 2021.

39:43 – Aligning with the culture

The Levels blog, podcast, website and larger community all showcased the team’s values and Ian immediately connected to the culture.

Initially, I was a beta customer. I thought the product was really cool. Then I started to listen to the podcast, this very one that I’m on now. And I think that was where I really started to feel a connection with the personalities and the culture here. And that was much more important to me than just the product on its own. The mission of this place, the reason that the founders and the leaders and the senior people, and really everyone, the reason people are on board really resonates with me. I think the values of transparency and humility and low bullshit and all these things that contribute to the vibe here. Those all just felt like such a bullseye to me. And so the more I listen to the podcast, the more I started to read the excellent content in this content effort that you’ve been helping out with. … The more exposure I had to that, the more I was like, maybe I just need to work here. I keep talking my wife’s and my friends’ ears off about this. Maybe I should just see if they’re hiring. And of course, we were hiring for people with my skillset. And so here I am.

43:21 – Getting to know the team

Ian found that media placements and impressive branding are the shiny wrappings around a grounded team of individuals who care about each other and have fun working together.

I would say that my expectations were high coming in based on the available information, like you alluded to. And the expectations I think were exceeded for the most part. I really like the people here, and that is just one of the most important things. As you said at the start, everyone has said such an interesting story. Lots of people have come here by indirect or nonlinear paths. Everyone is thoughtful and funny. In varying degrees, obviously. We’re not uniformly funny or thoughtful. But I just have enjoyed getting to know everyone here. And that matters a lot to me. I think I’ve and surprised to find again, I’m going to call back to this sheen of prestige and sophistication. I think the media production, the level of polish on the podcast and in blog posts and so on. And when we get featured on external publications, it makes Levels feel from the outside, like it’s a place for fancy people, and we do fancy things here. And I would say on the inside, it is a lot of humility and approachability. There’s the cultural norm of short toes, which is an allusion to stepping on people’s toes. I have written a lot of things in threads and proposed a lot of changes to culture and I’ve contributed to things here along the way, and I’ve found it very difficult to step on people’s toes. It’s almost like I keep trying and I can’t find any toes to step on. And that is not really what I expected. I expected to find maybe people who were more easily offended or had stronger opinions that were also strongly held. And I hope that’s coming across the right way. I just have found people to be easy to negotiate with, and I’ve found it easy to form consensus with people and to move forward because ultimately, I think we’re in a phase where velocity matters as much or more than anything else.

49:09 – Working async and remote

The ease of working remotely at Levels was a welcome relief for Ian, as someone who thrives off social connections and teamwork.

And I think most people want to feel a sense of a crowd that they are within. And the easiest place to get that in today’s Western world, adult working world, is your job. Right? So that shift of, I found a crowd outside of work during the first year of the pandemic, which was very helpful for me. And then when I came in here, I think I was braced for a workday that would feel pretty transactional with people, and that probably gets to what you’re talking about. I was braced for, yeah, I’m going to have to assume best intent on the part of these people, because I will not really understand their tone because I will not really know them. And to your point, I found I was braced for a bad outcome that never came. I found it really easy to feel connected to people here. I think one of the other key ingredients, which I think we screen for effectively, is you need to be able to feel that connection receiving and sending social vibes from people in text and in asynchronous formats. If you can only feel close to someone from synchronous conversation, I think a place like Levels will be tough. But if you’re okay with putting some tone into your writing and laughing at some joke that somebody made in the same way that you would on, I don’t know, Reddit or whatever, well, this place feels like that.

an Schumann (00:06):

Most people want to feel a sense of a crowd that they are within. And the easiest place to get that in today’s Western world, adult working world, is your job, right? One of the other key ingredients, which I think we screen for effectively, is you need to be able to feel that connection receiving and sending social vibes from people in text and in asynchronous formats. If you can only feel close to someone from synchronous conversation, I think the place like Levels will be tough. But if you’re with putting some tone into your writing and laughing at some joke that somebody made in the same way that you would on Reddit or whatever, well, this place feels like that.

Ben Grynol (00:58):

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.

Ben Grynol (01:24):

When you can find a connection between work and life, a meaningful connection, very much an overlap in the way that you think about both, well it gives you a lot of fulfillment. For Ian Schumann, he recently joined our team as one of our engineers. He sat down with Mike Haney and the two of them dug into this idea finding meaning, connection between life and philosophy. No need to wait, here’s Haney with the intro.

Mike Haney (01:49):

I’m Mike Haney, editorial director at Levels. And one of the things I’ve loved about working here and watching this team grow is just about everybody who joins the team seems like one of the most interesting people I’ve ever heard about. We do this great thing here called spotlight articles we started about six months ago, and they’re basically many profiles of the person who’s about to start. We have a journalist interview them and then write up an article. And every time I read one, I come across some unique, odd thing. We have a person who’s an aerialist. We have people who have traveled all over the world. We have people who have been outdoor instructors. There’s always some interesting aspect to everybody that comes through these doors. And today’s guest, Ian Schumann, an engineer here at Levels for about the last two months, is no exception to that. Ian took a circuitous path to get to Levels, as so many folks here do.

Mike Haney (02:38):

He spent years traveling around the world. He came into software through the customer support side, the people facing side of it. It was really where he felt was a good fit for his personality before realizing that he could do engineering and still have that kind of people connection. And so we talk about what that’s been like at Levels and how you form social connections here, despite our async, remote nature of the company. But he also is trained in linguistics. That’s where his undergraduate education was, at UT Austin. And that’s where we began this conversation, was talking about what linguistics is, what it means and how he thinks about it before we got into the rest of his career. So here’s me and Ian.

Mike Haney (03:21):

Well, I did go out this morning and spend some more time with your spotlight. I remember reading that when it first came out. But I went back to look today to remind myself of everybody that we hire at Levels has such an interesting, unique backstory. Nobody seems to have this just straightforward kind of linear path to get here. And there’s a lot of things I was fascinated by in yours, but the one I wanted to start with was linguistics.

Ian Schumann (03:44):

Yeah.

Mike Haney (03:44):

Which I know you studied in college. How does one land on linguistics? How is it, as a college freshman run around UT campus, do you go, “You know what I’m going to study?”

Ian Schumann (03:55):

Yeah. Well, it wasn’t exactly as a freshman. So yeah, when I came into college, I had no particular career ambitions. I had some friends that just knew they were headed for the business world in some form another, so they went in the business school at UT. There were engineering types I was friends with that knew they were going to do CS. And then there were a bunch of liberal arts kids like me. You too, yeah. And so I guess technically I came in, in the college of communications because I am communication oriented and people oriented. And I thought that in the college of communications, we would be talking about stuff like that. But it was a more narrow kind of vocational focus than what I was expecting. I wanted more theory and more soft squishy philosophy and concepts and ideas, and that was a little more practical. And since I had no career ambitions, I had no use for practical education.

Ian Schumann (04:49):

So I ended up, my freshman year, kind of sampling around. I took a couple of intro astronomy courses that I found completely fascinating. And for a semester I was going to be an astronomy major. Then I found out that auditorium style math classes are terrible. Even though I like math, I couldn’t keep going through the auditorium style math classes. And at the same time, I stumbled into a linguistics intro class. I also found it fascinating. I was like, “Well, I’m just going to roll the dice on this.” Sort of similar to some social sciences, linguistics is an interesting intersection of hard concrete STEM thinking and more soft, squishy, relational, or liberal arts thinking. There’s some philosophy, there’s some cognitive science, there’s logic, there’s acoustics. It’s got a little bit of everything and I just really enjoyed it there. That’s kind of the story of how I ended up there.

Mike Haney (05:49):

Yeah. I feel like that’s one of the great things. I try to communicate this to my kid, that one of the amazing things about college is that ability that you’ve got this place that’s full of experts, and more than at least at any other time in your education up to that point, you’ve got this freedom to go, you know what might be interesting to learn about, and you just go sit in this room with an expert talking about it. And maybe you realize two weeks in, this is totally boring and I don’t care about this at all. And maybe you have that kind of experience where you go like, whoa, there’s this whole thing and it’s incredibly deep. I remember having that experience with a geography class that again, stumbled into. I didn’t know what geography was, but happened to have a super dynamic young teacher, got totally fascinated by it, took all his classes and for a month, thought I was going to go to grad school for geography. And then realized like, maybe a little bit too academic for me.

Mike Haney (06:37):

But when I think about linguistics, I think about it more from, or I think about the aspect of it that is like anthropological, if that’s even a thing. I think about it in the sense of, why does language work the way it does? How did we end up talking this way? What aspect of linguistics did you find yourself drawn to?

Ian Schumann (06:55):

Yeah, I think the subfield that you’re pointing to, some of it is what you’d call historical linguistics. There are a lot of social and historical forces that come to bear on societies and civilizations at different times that change the course of language evolution. In English, we have a long history of mishmash of a bunch of crap getting thrown into our language for different historical and military reasons, right? So another element of historical linguistics, and this intersects with a subfield called phonology is because I guess one of the fundamental ideas in linguistics that sort of under wise the field, as I learned it, is that human language is not some series of statistical accidents, but it’s actually a set of relatively predictable phenomena that play out across every language, with some regularity.

Ian Schumann (07:53):

You could study language as a linguist, the same way that a physicist might study the constants of the universe as a physicist. That’s a prologue to just is set up one interesting corner of these regular rules is that languages tend to change along predictable patterns by sheer repetition and usage. The way that people have a funny accent in the Midwest, stereotypically is part of something called the Great Vowel Shift. And this has happened in languages of the world more than once. It’s not an accident that it happened that way. Anyway, the really interesting part of historical linguistics and the study of phonology is that if you have descendants of a language that are alive today, you can look how different related words have ended up today, and you can trace back what the word might have used to be in a language that nobody speaks anymore.

Ian Schumann (08:54):

And so for instance, language families all the way from Western Europe to South Asia, they all belong to this massive language family called Indo-European. And there’s this hypothetical language called Proto-Indo-European, which is the granddaddy of them all. It was spoken by some small population some time, a long time ago. And because of the way language has changed regularly, a lot of work has been done to chart out what this granddaddy language, Proto-Indo-European, actually consisted of. And so we actually have a pretty clear picture of what that language was, even though the last person who spoke it died 6,000 years ago or whatever. And I think that is a little bit of magic. So a long explanation for your question, but I found that kind of like a magic power to be able to peer back in history like that.

Mike Haney (09:48):

Is it something, is it a topic that you remain engaged in, even though you’re not working in it? Do you find yourself reading or listening to things about linguistics?

Ian Schumann (09:56):

Not really at all. In fact, if there are any canny linguistics listeners in our audience for this episode, they might correct me on several of the things I just said, because my knowledge is up to date at the undergraduate level, as of 15 years ago. That’s how engaged I am. So maybe one day I’ll be more tuned into it. I’ve wanted to get into computational linguistics or natural language processing in the engineering world at some point. And that would certainly put me more in touch with modern linguistics. But I haven’t had any contact with it since college.

Mike Haney (10:24):

So as you’re studying this in college, are you having any thoughts about what this is going to lead to post-graduation, or you were just enjoying the study of it?

Ian Schumann (10:33):

I think I was enjoying the study of it and trying to avoid thinking about the future. As I said, I had no career ambitions. And I think what that really was, more than a lack of ambition, it was kind of an active anxiety about what I was supposed to do after I got out of college. The tracks were about to run out and it was like this flippant, now I’m just supposed to be a working stiff. This is how my life goes now? So that was my state of reflection while I was studying it.

Mike Haney (11:03):

Yeah. I can relate to that. I remember having the revelation sometime in senior year, specifically about the lack of seasonality that I was about to encounter. You realize how seasonal your life is when you are in school. You follow this very predictable calendar. And I just remember having this realization, “Oh, I don’t get summers anymore. I guess I could go teach or something, and then I sort of would.” But it’s just a continuous thing. And I remember that being very paralyzing in the way you’re talking about it like, “Oh, so this is what I just go, do a thing forever now?”

Ian Schumann (11:38):

Yeah. My life becomes an undifferentiated mass and then one day you’re 45 of 60 or whatever.

Mike Haney (11:45):

Yeah, exactly. And I guess what is hard to appreciate, and this gets back to your path, when you’re that age is that no, it’s not. You’re going to do different stuff. Probably, most of us I think, will end up doing 10 different things throughout your career. And there will be ups and downs. There will be weird paths and there will be different things that you get into. For most people it’s not get a job and then just do it every day forever.

Mike Haney (12:10):

So when you left school, you kind of kept on that spirit, of like not committing to the daily continuous slog?

Ian Schumann (12:17):

I did. Yeah. I was going to say in the midst of that, I’m in touch with some younger, I have a few friends that are younger today and a couple relatives that are more just coming out of college age, that sort of thing. And what I’m trying to pass along to them is this intel about the future that is sort of an outdated model, that you find a career and do it for your whole life. But I didn’t have that intelligence when I was in college. And really, both my parents did pretty much the same thing for their whole careers. My dad was an architect and one way or another, he was an architect the whole time. My mom was a speech pathologist and she worked for the Austin School District pretty much her whole career.

Ian Schumann (12:55):

So it probably would’ve taken a lot of pressure off helpfully if someone had told me, you don’t have to choose anything long term right now. Whether someone told me or not, and they didn’t, that is certainly what ended up happening. Right? And to your point, I think that’s what a lot of us end up doing these days, is the market is not offering these long stable careers. And certainly, they can still be found here and there. But I think increasingly, it’s a lot more fun to be able to pivot and change things as we go. In my case, when I was in college, I kind of entered into a religious phase. I fell in with a very winning, thoughtful crowd of Methodists on campus at UT and for the next, a little more than half a decade, getting closer to a decade I guess, about seven or eight years, I was in a Christian world. And that was how I thought of my path unfolding.

Ian Schumann (13:52):

And so looking back on it, one thing I can certainly comment about is that the lack of career ambition and the anxiety about the few future, it was certainly like a search for meaning and a search for ultimate purpose in the world. And certainly, without affirming or denying any truth claims, like finding this crowd and this religion, certainly scratched that itch in a really helpful way, provided me with a community of thoughtful people who were asking big questions about what are we doing here? What is all this for? And so in that stream, and in that culture, after school, I did a round the world mission trip of sorts and was able to visit three or four continents, twelvish countries, and do various kinds of volunteer work. Some of it was more practical and concrete, some of it was a little more ministerial, a little more Christiany in different places. But I spent the year after doing that. And that was a great way to reject the vision of this incoming undifferentiated mass of nine to five work that it seemed like the rest of the world was having to sign up for.

Mike Haney (15:04):

Did you, during that time, sorry, I’m going to keep asking the same question, but I’m just curious when the shift into career thinking happened. Did you have any inklings during that time of, maybe I will go into the ministry, maybe there’s a sort of full-time life in this kind of leading missions or in doing nonprofit work or that kind of work around the globe, or were you still sort of very much living in the moment and just not looking out ahead?

Ian Schumann (15:29):

No, I think by that point, I was definitely starting to think about the future year. I think a lot of us that went on that trip or went through that program were doing so as a way of giving ourselves a system shock to think clearly about the future. This is a big adventure for sure, it’s going to be life changing. And hopefully afterward we will be informed somehow to make a better commitment for what we’re going to do next. I did think for a while about staying in ministry. Somehow, I think a lot of us out there did because some of the work that was being done was so captivating. Some of the people that we were serving were in such obvious need, victims of human trafficking, that sort of thing. When I got back, I did briefly do an apprenticeship, sort of an informal apprenticeship with a documentary filmmaker who lived in Colorado Springs, and that was about two months.

Ian Schumann (16:20):

It was a lot of fun. I got to travel to Northern Iraq. This was before the rise of ISIS, and we shot some video and I edited some stuff and it was for a nonprofit. It was working in Kurdistan. That was a great experience. By the end of it, though, it was to me that I did not have this position to sit for hours on end being an editor. I was proud of the product that I created and I was good at it, but the lack of social stimulation and the heads downness of all that I found to be crushing. So I ended up settling back down in Austin and kind of defaulting to taking a support job in software because luckily, in retrospect, luckily software is the dominant industry in my hometown of Austin, where I grew up. And so it was easy for me to get this little foothold in an industry that was going to be exploding over the next decade.

Mike Haney (17:14):

Going back to that trip, those years that you spent traveling, what stayed with you now that you’ve got quite a distance from that period of your life? You mentioned knowing at the time this was going to be life changing, and I’m sure that you feel that it still is. But how so? What is your reflection on that time in what you saw and learned?

Ian Schumann (17:33):

What a great question. It can be a podcast of its own, just to ask someone who’s been on this trip to reflect on what happened out there and what they learned. A couple things jump out to me. I was surprised to find just a kind of a permeating sense of common humanity after I finished this up. The first few weeks, or couple months that I was out there, I hadn’t done much in the way of international travel before that. And it’s silly that one has to learn this, but in every place people are people and their needs are relatively constant.

Ian Schumann (18:04):

There are places to get food, there are ways to travel, everyone cares about seeing their friends and family. And in some sense, some English speaking expat that we met up with in one of those early countries said that he doesn’t believe in such a thing as a language barrier. And he means that obviously metaphorically. But the things that are most important to communicate about are shared across cultures and languages. And I found that resonated. I find that it’s not that hard for me to imagine being on the ground in places that seem distant and tortured by disasters or atrocities. Like right now, there’s a war in Ukraine and I was in Ukraine and I saw how beautiful of a place it was. And so it’s not that difficult from me to mentally locate myself there again, and to have a little more sense of solidarity with the generic human in the world, wherever they may be.

Mike Haney (19:05):

Do you find that sense inoculates you at all against the default polarization or, or dividing that I feel like has been worsening over the last decade here? Does that global perspective of that experience help when it’s applied to a much more local environment?

Ian Schumann (19:23):

Yeah. I haven’t considered before whether that contributes to this sense in that area that you’re describing. I do naturally gravitate toward an attitude amidst arguments of trying to translate and to bridge gaps between people rather than to villainize one side or the other. That might also be driven by my need to be liked by everyone and my insistence that most disagreements can be bridged through the finding and charting of common ground.

Ian Schumann (19:57):

I don’t know if those ideals were fostered on that trip, but it certainly is possible. I certainly interacted with lots of people from different cultures. And even from different subcultures within the US, I went on this trip with a few dozen other young people. We were not all together in that big blob all the time. We were usually in much smaller groups, but I got to know everyone in this group of about 50, and we ranged all over the political and cultural spectrum that you can find in North America. And yet, I came to feel like kin with these people. Not to mention feeling occasionally very close with the people that we met in country, wherever we went, who came from different points on a much larger cultural spectrum than what can be found in North America, cultures that are not nearly as individualistic, for instance, as what we find in the Western world and so on. So it became certainly easier to find that common ground with people who I might otherwise think are very different from me.

Mike Haney (21:05):

One more question about the travel side and then we’ll move on, I promise. But I’m fascinated by travel.

Ian Schumann (21:09):

Yeah, sure.

Mike Haney (21:11):

It sounds like you went to some pretty interesting and off the beaten path types of places during this travel. What did you learn practically about traveling and about being on the ground in places that are not… It’s one thing to go to Paris with a credit card with a decent limit, that’s one kind of travel. Being in Kurdistan or being in other places in particular, when you’re working with populations that may need help or may not be top of the socioeconomic ladder, that’s just a different travel experience. So what did you learn just practically about yourself and about how to travel and has any of that stuck with you in the way that you travel now?

Ian Schumann (21:46):

Yeah, sure. I don’t know about that very last hard about what has stuck with me. I think that before that last caveat, I’d say, I think that we, and that’s a very broad we, but let’s say the people who might be listening to this and you and I, people in this little corner of the world, I think we underestimate our resilience in the face of hardship. I think usually, it’s the case that the fear of what might go wrong, or I should say the fears of everything that might possibly go wrong, those fears can inspire this implacable anxiety, right? How do I prepare for everything that might go wrong? You can’t. And so instead, you just feel anxious. But inevitably, what will happen is that just one thing might go wrong or two things, not everything. And so when that one problem arises, wherever you are, maybe the small bus that you’re using to drive across the foothills of Southern Kenya, the engine goes out. You all have to get out of the van and wait for a sec while the radiator cools down and the driver does something inscrutable with the engine.

Ian Schumann (22:58):

Whenever that one thing goes wrong, it is much more concrete and easy to deal with than the previous anxiety of everything going wrong. And I think that as far as I know, the literature and positive psychology also suggests that we are way more adaptable than we give ourselves credit for. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the proposition that… You know about the amputation versus the winning the lottery? Have you heard of this one?

Mike Haney (23:26):

No.

Ian Schumann (23:27):

So as far as I’m aware, and somebody who’s deep in psychology will correct me in our audience I suppose, but if tomorrow, you split the universe into two different timelines and one Mike Haney wins the lottery and the other Mike Haney is in a horrible car crash and has both legs amputated, a year from now, your level of happiness is likely to be the same in both timelines. And that’s because of the hedonic treadmill, it’s because of, a more positive way to frame it, is because of human resilience. You might think that your problems are over when you win the lottery, but we know well enough that, that’s not true. You might think that you’d be in misery forever after losing both of your legs and suffering this horrible accident. And yet, you’ll find new ways of constructing meaning and finding joy in your life. And those forces will tend to even out. And so on a shorter time scale, when you’re traveling and something goes wrong, I think just to point toward humans tend to be more resilient and adaptable than we give ourselves credit for.

Mike Haney (24:32):

Well, that’s the thing. I totally agree and that’s the thing I was thinking about when I think about how it continues today. Because again, I’m just thinking about my own experience. And I’ve not done as much travel in those spaces as you have, but a little bit. My first international trip was to South Africa when I was a college freshman, very early post apartheid days and worked in some interesting communities there, some different kinds of communities and had an experience there, exactly as you just said, where the train we were on going from, I don’t know, some place to some place broke down and we literally had to walk several miles along a dusty train track in the middle of nowhere to get to the next bus that was going to take us to a place. It was just a very typical thing that might go wrong.

Ian Schumann (25:09):

Yeah.

Mike Haney (25:09):

And that has always stuck with me as, I just think a foundational example of, I think it was the moment I learned that lesson you’re talking about that, it’ll probably work out. And if it doesn’t, if something horrible had happened there, well, that’s just a whole different scenario. But most of the time, that kind of thing is going to work out. And it was super interesting and we’ve met people and it was like, all fine. And I think about that all the time now. When I walk out the door to go on a trip, I feel my pocket. I’m like, if I got a credit card and a license and I have a backpack to carry my stuff, I’m kind of invincible. I could probably deal with anything that is going to come up. Whatever I forgot, whatever train goes wrong, whatever.

Mike Haney (25:55):

And it’s sort of built out of that foundational experience and it makes travel much less anxious for me now, in a way that other people I’ve traveled with who always sort of had an easier time and not encountered much along that way could still be very anxious about travel. And again, I go back to my kid because I’m just trying to train him as he comes up and we travel a lot and he’s been fortunate enough to only have very nice, very comfortable travel. I keep thinking I need to engineer some way that things go wrong and he learns this lesson of, oh, it’s going to be fine.

Ian Schumann (26:29):

Yeah. How can we engineer an opportunity for him to show off his own resilience or discover resilience.

Mike Haney (26:32):

Yeah.

Ian Schumann (26:34):

I did give a caveat at the beginning of that, when you said applying that lesson today. When I travel today, I still get anxious. It’s a little bit of a problem on the other end of the spectrum. It’s not because I’m afraid that something is going to go wrong that will be unrecoverable. I mostly get anxious because I want to maximize the enjoyment on a trip. And so this is a problem in other areas of my life. I want things to be the best that they can within the frame of the boundaries that they’re given. And it’s a cycle I get stuck in where I drive myself crazy. I’m researching stuff and making advanced arrangements so that I will save myself a little bit of effort while I’m out on the trip or whatever. I think this is a disease of civilization and of affluence. This conversation is a reminder to maybe ease off the gas pedal a little bit in that area.

Mike Haney (27:25):

It’s so funny you mentioned that. This came up in an episode we just recorded a part one of, and we’re going to do a part two, so it won’t be out for a while. But we did an episode with some of our digital nomads on the team with Casey, Sam and Steph. And this topic came up, this idea of trying to maximize your enjoyment when you’re in a place.

Ian Schumann (27:44):

Sam has told me about this, but keep going.

Mike Haney (27:46):

Yeah. Basically making sure that you kind of see everything. And Sam was communicating, I think our question was to Sam, as somebody who travels constantly, but is also working as he’s in these places, how do you balance those two? I think Steph had asked him that question and he was like, “Well, I just don’t really worry about seeing everything.” If I’m in China and I don’t see the Great Wall, I’ll see it next time I go to China.

Ian Schumann (28:08):

Right.

Mike Haney (28:08):

And if I want to go to China in two months, I’ll go back to China.

Ian Schumann (28:11):

Yeah. The problem is the scarcity for the regular folks among us, right?

Mike Haney (28:14):

Right.

Ian Schumann (28:14):

Like Sam doesn’t have the scarcity problem. Right?

Mike Haney (28:17):

Yeah. But I think that lesson in there was that within certain bounds to remember that some of that scarcity is sort of self imposed. Obviously, some of it is very real in terms of material availability. Not everybody can afford a trip to China all the time or whatever it might be. But just to remember that it doesn’t have to be the one time that you go.

Mike Haney (28:38):

And also, the thing I found because I have the same sort of attitude, I’m a real planner when it comes to travel is, it’s an unwinnable game. You’ll never everything.

Ian Schumann (28:48):

Yes.

Mike Haney (28:48):

And seeing the extra thing usually doesn’t really, it’s a very incremental improvement in the memory of the overall trip. And it’s cliche to say, but the things that end up sticking with you are the accidents, the unintentional things, the whatever. It’s rarely seeing that chapel that you had to make sure you got to, or doing that hike that you had to make sure you did. Those are great, but they’re not the only thing. But I completely understand the point of you have to keep reminding yourself of that.

Ian Schumann (29:15):

Yeah. I’m going to take us further into this tangent because I was recently reading, have you heard of the book Four Thousand Weeks?

Mike Haney (29:23):

Yeah. My wife is reading it now, so it’s next on my list.

Ian Schumann (29:26):

Oh, good. Okay. Well I found it very refreshing, especially for a maximizer and a planner because one of his core points is humans are finite beings and the internet, especially, we don’t need the internet, but the internet certainly makes this worse. The internet makes it seem like we are unlimited and the possibilities are unlimited. And so, one way to phrase this is there is an unlimited supply of worthwhile things to see on your vacation. Unlimited. Right? You’ll never run out of them, as you said. Even if you pick just the highlights from each place, it would be more than you could fit into a life to time because the world is a big place. And so I think he’s trying to coax the reader to declaring a existential bankruptcy.

Ian Schumann (30:11):

I don’t need to see all the best things or all the important things because I can’t do it anyway. That’s sort of where he’s aiming. And I find that to be a refreshing message.

Mike Haney (30:20):

Yeah, for sure. I always try to frame it as my goal is not to see a place, my goal is to be in a place. It’s why I like, actually, the idea of traveling and still working. I love what we’re able to do here because I like the idea of I’m going about my day, I’m doing the stuff I do. I’m looking at the websites I look at, I’m doing the work that I do. I’m eating the kinds of foods I eat. I’m just doing it in a different environment. And that, in and of itself, is the interesting thing. And if I happen to see stuff or meet somebody along the way that is beautiful or interesting or whatever, awesome.

Mike Haney (30:51):

But also trying to keep my eyes open to seeing things that are awesome can also happen in my day to day life. I live in San Diego and I walk my dogs every night. And when I walk out to the end of my block, I look one way and I have mountains of in the background and I look the other way and there’s a sunset with palm trees. I’ve been here three years and it still kills me. I’m still like, this is amazing. This is as nice as anything I will travel to see. So just trying to separate that experience of being versus seeing has for me, been a helpful heuristic in keeping in mind what you’re talking about.

Ian Schumann (31:22):

That connects real easily with one of other thing I wanted to pull out from the previous question of insights from that world I had abroad. Also, I thought of this again when I was listening to your talk with Steph and the whole existence of a digital nomad. I remember distinctly learning, on that year abroad, that you can get bored anywhere, doing anything. That, to some degree, comes down to humans’ adaptability. We can get used to even something that’s very turbulent and full of novelty. We’ll just get inured to it.

Ian Schumann (31:57):

And to some degree, I think it’s also that no matter where you are, if you’re not engaged in that practice, like what you just said, of soaking up what’s right in front of you, you can become bored and want to move on to the next place. So I had this distinct experience of noticing when I was halfway through the year, I think I was in India at this point or maybe East Africa, of feeling bored and then being like, “What on earth? What is wrong with me? I’m moving countries once a month. I’m having the adventure of a lifetime and I’m bored. Something is wrong here.”

Ian Schumann (32:36):

I think it’s also a pointer to the idea which I find probably crucial for a digital nomad to take on board, which is that whatever emotional baggage you have is just going to follow you. Right? You’re not going to solve your problems with satisfaction or meaning or connection by moving to a new place.

Mike Haney (32:54):

Yeah. We talked about that. We moved, we went from New York City, upstate and we ended up moving out here and I think the move from New York City, upstate, we were very much trying to solve some of those bigger problems. And we learned in a very hard way that exactly what you said, it doesn’t. And so when we moved out here, people would say, “Why are you moving to San Diego?”And I would say the weather and they would laugh and I’d be like, “No, no, I’m serious. That’s literally the only thing that I’m putting on this move.” Everything else is like, it’ll be whatever it is. the only thing I know I can count on is that the weather will be better.

Ian Schumann (33:27):

Yeah.

Mike Haney (33:27):

It was interesting when you talk about that idea of being bored and the idea of a digital nomad. Given your travel background, have you thought about nomading? As somebody who’s traveled a lot and spent years or months on the road, what’s your relationship with home? And as somebody who’s come back to the place that you grew up, do you like to have a stable base or do you feel any pull to just go back out and be placeless for a while?

Ian Schumann (33:51):

Yeah. I think that I am one who can probably oscillate between those different modes. Since I got married, gosh, eight, nine years ago, mostly life has been about situating in a place, having a solid home where we’re connected and stable and then using that as a launching point to occasionally have an adventure somewhere else. I find that works pretty well for us right now. I think probably every few months, my wife and I just whimsically ask each other, you want to move to Spain? And we’re like, “Yeah.” But we don’t do it, I think mostly because our community is here. And the prospect of starting over with our social connections is daunting. I think that whenever we do decide to take that plunge, if we ever do, I think we will probably have to be in a state where we’re like, yeah, we have space on our plates, we are in a season of life where we’re going to be out and mingling and meeting a bunch of new people. And so we can rebuild that community wherever we go.

Ian Schumann (35:00):

I do think the way that digital nomading is talked about in the popular imagination, it’s mostly about the Instagrammable vistas and the things that you can do and see. And what’s missing from behind the lens of the camera is how connected and how much of a sense of belonging does that photographer, that nomad have, in the place that they are. And I know some people managed to establish a nomadic network. I remember talking to Sam about this and he seems to have a number of really strong connections in a bunch of different places. And because he really is in the habit of traveling, those people that he feels close to are not that far from him at any given point. He can go meet them and hang out with them and reconnect with them.

Ian Schumann (35:47):

And I think that’s crucial. I imagine that a lot of people embrace the permanent nomadism or the long term nomadism, maybe without thinking so deeply about the need for social ties like that.

Mike Haney (36:00):

Yeah. One of the things he mentioned in that episode, I asked the question of how do you decide where to go, the being paralyzed by choice, if you can go anywhere, how do you figure out what next plane to get on? And he said it’s largely driven by that. It’s driven by the relationships that he thinks about who does he want to go see. And he’s like I think less about place than I think more about people, which I think is exactly your point. I want to make sure we have time that could continue on this vein, I think for a while, but I do want to talk about Levels and sort of how you ended up here and what your experience has been. So I guess we’ll sort of skip ahead in the chronology of your journey.

Ian Schumann (36:32):

Yeah.

Mike Haney (36:32):

How did Levels come onto your radar and what was interesting about it?

Ian Schumann (36:36):

Well, it’s probably worth just getting a couple of the milestones that led up here previous. So I mentioned a little while after getting back from that world travel, I got a foothold in the software industry. I moved up through the customer facing side of the industry for several years, ended up doing consulting and implementation and project management and that sort of stuff. And I knew in the background that I had a lot of aptitude with computer things, or as we say it internal to Levels, I knew I was good at a computer. But I shied away from that for a while because of the fear of what I mentioned earlier about video editing, which is that I was pretty sure that doing heads down work on a computer full time would be crushing to me.

Ian Schumann (37:22):

So I stayed on the people facing side of the industry and by about 2017, which is about seven years into my career, I felt like I was hitting a ceiling in terms of what I was being asked to do versus what I could actually do. I was pushing up against the boundaries of what that role or that world required for me. And I wanted something to more technical or more challenging. And so that was when I decided to jump the fence into engineering. By that point, I had discovered that you could do engineering and still be people oriented. You didn’t have to be a neck beard, I think is how I put it in my spotlight article.

Ian Schumann (37:58):

And so early 2018, I switched into engineering and that went great. I ended up feeling like, I maybe shouldn’t have waited so long to do this. The material took hold very easily. And this ties into Levels because when I made that switch, one of my great hopes was that I would get to use these technical skills that I was in the process of acquiring to somehow build this future at some cool company, a few years down the road. Or another way that I’ve put it to myself is build something that the world needed, as opposed to just building something that represented a market opportunity. I figured it would take a little while to be competitive enough as an engineer to join, what I imagine, would be a very competitive company, a very cutting edge company, doing something cool, attracting lots of candidates. But the first few years of my engineering career went very well. And I learned about Levels, I guess it would’ve been early last year, spring of 2021.

Ian Schumann (39:03):

What year is it? Yeah, that’s right. And that’s mostly because I’m just like a part-time, low key, sort of biohacker and sometimes athlete. I do a lot of back packing, I’ve played a lot of racket sports. I like gadgets. I’ve worn a lot of things on my wrist. And I think because YouTube saw that I had looked up reviews for the Garmin Instinct or the Fitbit Versa or whatever it was like, you might also care about this cool thing from Ali Spagnola, if I’m saying her name right. That’s how I found out about Levels. Initially I was a beta customer. I thought the product was really cool. Then I started to listen to the podcast, this very one that I’m on now. And I think that was where I really started to feel a connection with the personalities and the culture here.

Ian Schumann (39:58):

And that was much more important to me than just product on its own. The mission of this place, the reason that the founders and the leaders and the senior people, and really everyone, the reason people are on board really resonates with me. I think the values of transparency and humility and low bullshit and all these things that contribute to the vibe here. Those all just felt like such a bullseye to me. And so the more I listen to the podcast, the more I started to read the excellent content in this content effort that you’ve been helping out with.

Mike Haney (40:31):

Thank you. Thank you for getting that plugin. Your payment is on the way.

Ian Schumann (40:34):

Yeah, yeah, affiliate links and everything. The more exposure I had to that, the more I was like, maybe I just need to work here. I keep talking my wife’s and my friends’ ears off about this. Maybe I should just see if they’re hiring. And of course, we were hiring for people with my skillset. And so here I am.

Mike Haney (40:52):

I want to get deeper into that, they were hiring and now here I am. Did you feel like, at that point, you had the skillset and the experience given your time in the industry to apply. Was there any sort of intimidation about it? And what was the interviewing process like? Was it what you expected?

Ian Schumann (41:11):

Yes and no, in that order. I found that for the most part, I felt like I was prepared based on the qualifications that were stated for engineers. I think there’s sort of a sheen of prestige and sophistication around a company that has made such a splash in the media landscape as we have. And so my initial feeling was like, “Oh, I can’t be experienced enough or good enough, or what they must be looking for.” And then I looked at the qualifications and I listened to some of the episodes with some of the engineers and I was like, “No, I can do this. I fit in here. Yeah, this will be fine.” So by the time I applied, I was like, “Yeah, I think I can. I think this is a good fit.”

Ian Schumann (41:53):

The latter question was, was the interview like what I expected? No, it was not. But I will say the interview process was lovely. I think that’s the right word for it. It was very informal, it was very relational. As I know now, it was very much designed to sus out culture fit and subtle personality quirks and to see if I could function well in a async, fully distributed team to see how much of an ego maniac I was. Hopefully I’m below that threshold, just skating in there under whatever boundary that is of ego mania. It was a lot of talking to different people and just getting to know them. It was a lot less of some inane technical challenge, like whiteboarding. I thought it was a very positive interview experience, in short.

Mike Haney (42:46):

How long have you been here now?

Ian Schumann (42:49):

So actually today would be two months on the dot.

Mike Haney (42:53):

Okay. It’s so interesting that you came in having listened to the podcast, a lot of content sort of already out there. So really getting, I think, a picture of the organization. As you say, our interview process is pretty involved, you talk to a lot of folks. So my sense is that people come in here, I think with a much better view than you usually have starting a job of what that job is going to be like. That said, what has surprised you in the two months that you’ve been here?

Ian Schumann (43:20):

Yeah, that’s a good question. I would say that my expectations were high coming in based on the available information, like you alluded to. And the expectations I think were exceeded for the most part. I really like the people here, and that is just one of the most important things. As you said at the start, everyone has said such an interesting story. Lots of people have come here by indirect or nonlinear paths. Everyone is thoughtful and funny. In varying degrees, obviously. We’re not uniformly funny or thoughtful.

Ian Schumann (43:54):

But I just have enjoyed getting to know everyone here. And that matters a lot to me. I think I’ve and surprised to find again, I’m going to call back to this sheen of prestige and sophistication. I think the media production, the level of polish on the podcast and in blog posts and so on. And when we get featured on external publications, it makes Levels feel from the outside, like it’s a place for fancy people, and we do fancy things here. And I would say on the inside, it is a lot of humility and approachability. There’s the cultural norm of short toes, which is an illusion to stepping on people’s toes. I have written a lot of things in threads and proposed a lot of changes to culture and I’ve contributed to things here along the way, and I’ve found it very difficult to step on people’s toes.

Ian Schumann (44:56):

It’s almost like I keep trying and I can’t find any toes to step on. And that is not really what I expected. I expected to find maybe people who were more easily offended or had stronger opinions that were also strongly held. And I hope that’s coming across the right way. I just have found people to be easy to negotiate with, and I’ve found it easy to form consensus with people and to move forward because ultimately, I think we’re in a phase where velocity matters as much or more than anything else.

Mike Haney (45:30):

Yeah. I think that’s right. Yeah, I’ve had the same experience of the lack of territorialness, especially in a small company, where content is me essentially. There’s a lot of departments have one or two, right? Like partnerships is Tom or Tom and Jackie now, and growth is Ben and the expanding team there. But you could imagine a world in which that meant that people much more closely guarded their spaces. Right? Because there is no separating of editorial in me. Right? There’s a world in which if you’re criticizing editorial, I can take that personally because it’s like, well, I can’t blame anybody else if something went wrong. That’s purely me.

Ian Schumann (46:14):

An assault on the king’s body is an assault on the king himself.

Mike Haney (46:17):

Well put yes. But I found it to be the opposite, and I think it is just that cultural norm that’s instilled all the way from the top down. And it just becomes the water that we swim in that you observe other people having a humility and exhibiting the short toes. And even if you have, as I certainly have, a sort of natural body reaction to want to get defensive or want to take something personally or have a reaction that in most other companies, would be completely normal, you’re so conscious here that is not the environment that we live in and it would be culturally abnormal to have that kind of reaction.

Mike Haney (46:56):

And therefore, you just don’t see a lot of it. People really live the short toes thing. I’m curious also, when we talk about the… I’m glad you sort of centered on the people aspect of it, because one of the things I’ve been trying to explain, and I haven’t figured out a good way to explain it, so I’m curious your take on this. When you describe to people being async and remote, I say to people I’m surprised at how can connected I feel to my colleagues here, for people that I rarely talk to, right? I think we don’t do a lot of this. There’s not a lot of one on one sync chat. There might be more in engineering because you guys are more of a team, but particularly from my seat, there’s just not a lot of that.

Mike Haney (47:34):

And yet, somehow I guess through threads, I guess through the forum, I don’t know what it is, but somehow I feel pretty connected to people. I feel like I sort of get them. I feel like I appreciate them and what they bring in their interesting backgrounds. How have you found the social connection? Have you found that you have a social connection to folks? And if so, where do you think that stems from when we are so async?

Ian Schumann (47:57):

Yeah, I really like that question. That was another thing, another aspect here that exceeded my expectations. I’ve mentioned earlier on this podcast that I’m people oriented and relational. That actually kept me away from remote work for a long time. I’m not sure I ever imagined earlier in my career that I could join a company like this. And then of course, for most of us in tech, the pandemic made remote workers of us all.

Ian Schumann (48:25):

And so it didn’t matter if I liked it or not, I just got used to it over the course of 2020 and most of 2021. And I think that adaptation period was crucial for me because here’s, I think, a precondition for functioning and thriving in a company like this. If you are sociable by nature, you have to learn to locate most of those social needs outside of work. And before the pandemic, I think it was the default that a lot of those social needs were located inside of work. Right? You agree with that proposition?

Mike Haney (48:57):

Yeah, I think that’s the default. It probably varies by industry, but I could certainly say within publishing, that is the default. In my 20s, the people I ran around with were the people I also made magazines with all day long.

Ian Schumann (49:09):

Yeah. And I think most people want to feel a sense of a crowd that they are within. And the easiest place to get that in today’s Western world, adult working world, is your job. Right? So that shift of, I found a crowd outside of work during the first year of the pandemic, which was very helpful for me. And then when I came in here, I think I was braced for a work day that would feel pretty transactional with people, and that probably gets to what you’re talking about. I was braced for, yeah, I’m going to have to assume best intent on the part of these people, because I will not really understand their tone because I will not really know them.

Ian Schumann (49:49):

And to your point, I found I was braced for a bad outcome that never came. I found it really easy to feel connected to people here. I think one of the other key ingredients, which I think we screen for effectively, is you need to be able to feel that connection receiving and sending social vibes from people in text and in asynchronous formats. If you can only feel close to someone from synchronous conversation, I think a place like Levels will be tough. But if you’re okay with putting some tone into your writing and laughing at some joke that somebody made in the same way that you would on, I don’t know, Reddit or whatever, well, this place feels like that.

Ian Schumann (50:39):

I’m not really a Redditor, but I know that a lot of people get a lot out of Reddit. They laugh a lot, they learn a lot, they feel connected to subreddits. This place, I think, feels a lot like bad if I understand right, with the addition that when people come in, we do these thorough introductions, right? There’s this concept of a spotlight article, not to mention this podcast that we’re recording, which creates opportunities for us to get to know each other in a more intentional, and I’d say, substantial way than really was ever offered to me in any conventional job that I had before Levels. Just in the course of reading my spotlight article, you know more about me than a lot of my former coworkers in the pre pandemic world ever knew about me.

Ian Schumann (51:20):

And that took you what, four minutes to read that? So yeah, I think those touches go a long way. I think that the little bits of synchronous video calls like this one go a long way. To your point, like in engineering, before this I was paired with Jeremy for about 45 minutes. And that was probably the only synchronous interaction that I will have with any team member in engineering this week. And it’s fine. I don’t feel starved for connection. I feel in step with the people on my team and I’m really enjoying them.

Mike Haney (51:53):

Well, I think we’ve come up with a title for this one. It’s going to be Our Levels: A Place For Fancy People.

Ian Schumann (52:05):

There you go. I like that. Yeah.

Mike Haney (52:08):

Well, thanks so much, man. This has been great. I think we could definitely go on, but I see we’re at time. So yeah, I appreciate you sharing all this. It’s been fun.

Ian Schumann (52:16):

Yeah. Thanks for asking good questions. It’s great to finally chat with the deep sagely voice of Levels content.