Brendan Gregg's Blog

I've moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Sydney, Australia, where I will continue the best job so far of my career: Performance engineering at Netflix. I'm grateful for the support of Netflix engineering management, Netflix HRBPs, and others for helping to make this happen. While my move is among the first from the Linux cloud teams, Netflix has had staff in Australia for years (for content, marketing, and the FreeBSD OCA).

It's been a privilege and an adventure to work in Silicon Valley with so many amazing people. But I'm now excited about my new adventure: Doing an advanced tech role remotely from Australia.

I know others who have also left the Bay Area or are planning to. Back in 2015 we'd have BPF (iovisor) meetups in Santa Clara and most contributors would be there in person, with some having travelled. Now we're more scattered, either to other US cities or worldwide. As another indicator of tech moving elsewhere, last year brought the headline: "Bay Area's share of VC deals predicted to fall below 20% for first time in 2021."

Day to day things won't be much different. I'm still online, doing the same work, answering the same emails. And many of us expect (when travel is possible) to make regular visits to the US for company-wide meetings and events. I think some coworkers will still see me occasionally in the US office and won't even realize I've moved.

Why Australia?

When I told people I was moving to Australia they'd guess why: "Is it because of X? Or Y? ... or Z?" Well, the answer is yes, all of the above. I began discussing Australian tech roles with different companies in Jan 2020. The pandemic then added another reason to move.

Both the US and Australia have their pros and cons, and I have many favorite places and people in both (sorry I didn't come say goodbye: We'll meet again). But in the end I'm a proud Australian and I do prefer Australia for various reasons, many of which Deirdré wrote about in Why move to Australia?. Additional reasons for me included visa uncertainty (and the abuse it leads to), voting rights, and complex international taxation. (Disclaimer: Netflix is an exception, as they have been great with visa workers including myself.)

Another reason is that the tech market became stronger in Australia. I moved to the US in 2006 as there were many more opportunities there, especially in kernel engineering and performance. Now, in 2021, Australia has a thriving tech market. Sydney has AWS and Google offices and even a small Netflix office, just to name a few. There is also a wider variety of roles available. If you want to do kernel engineering work you no longer need to move to California to work for Sun Microsystems in the MPK17 building. You can work on Linux anywhere.

Linux is Already Remote

Linux has been described as the world's most successful open source project, and it's all engineers working remotely. There's no Linux kernel headquarters where all the engineers sit in an open office layout, typing furiously then dashing for the break room coffee during kernel builds, and where maintainers can yell across the room at someone for their bad patch (when it's Linus yelling, everyone takes off their headphones to listen). That doesn't happen. Engineers are remote, and may only meet once or twice a year at Linux kernel conferences. And it's worked very well for years.

Another example of remote work I've already done is book writing. Last year I published Systems Performance 2nd Edition, which I wrote from my home office with help from remote contributors. The entire project was run via emails, a Google drive, and Google docs, and was delivered to the publisher on time.

Making it Work

While tech workers are well suited for remote work (savvy with communications technologies) there are benefits with office work, and I don't think remote work is for everyone. (One benefit I'll miss is playing in the Netflix cricket team.) In the future I'd expect hybrid teams, where the remote workers visit the office on a regular cadence (e.g., once a quarter) for meetings. This is a model that's already been successfully used by some teams, including at Netflix.

As for work hours, I set my own schedule where I start around 7am, giving between 3 and 5 hours overlap with California time (depending on daylight savings). About once a month I'll have an early morning meeting (e.g., 4am). Back when I did SRE oncall for Netflix I'd have more wakeups at unpredictable times, so this feels easier to manage. (I also had prior jobs in the Bay Area where I'd be in the office most days past midnight, so compared to that this is like a health retreat!) As more people move to other timezones I think this will improve further. Some meetings may move to an asynchronous format, and others may be run twice for world coverage, at 9am and 4pm California time.

To work remote I think you have to really want it and be willing to put in extra effort, including doing the occasional early meeting. Personally, I use a stopwatch to help me stay productive: I pause it whenever I have an interruption, and measure how many hours of uninterrupted work I get done each day, log it, and then plot it on graphs to see the trends. Yes, I'm performance analyzing myself. It's been a slow process, but I've been figuring out how to become more productive each day. It's really satisfying to finish a full day's work and then realize I'm no longer in the Bay Area, but instead have a two minute walk to the beach. It's just one of many reasons to put in that extra effort.