Before working at Ubermind, Vera did a fair bit of moving around. In high school, he was transplanted to California where he live with his father for a couple of years. During his stay, he was able to attend an educational facility that provided coding classes. Coding came second nature to him, finding beauty in distilling complicated code down to simplified lines of text. In the middle of his senior year he moved back to Washington where he attended Kent Meridian High, but dropped out a month before graduation to avoid having to complete his Culminating Project, which at the time was a state requirement. Instead, making up the rest of his education in a program at Green River Community College. At the time, he had surpassed the level of coding that classes available to him provided and shifted to self teaching. Shortly after, he moved to Seattle, attending a year at University of Washington, only to abandon it for an independent job venture, working remotely overseas.
For six months Vera partnered with an entrepreneur in London, telecommuting across the pond. Most of the work involved creating applications to be sold via Apple's App Store. Josh favors working remotely. "I feel like I can choose my own environment, and that allows me to sort of temper my workplace to my habits." he says. Unfortunately, his employer couldn't create enough revenue and the little startup tanked. This is when he found the offices of Ubermind, where he currently works and further increases his knowledge of coding. He still prefers working off-site, but says, "I loose out on being able to just walk over to someone and ask them a question." This, of course, leads one to believe that there are also positives to working offline and in person, "It's easy to collaborate and the environment is tempered for getting things done and it always feels busy. You always feel like you need to be doing something."
When separated by digital means, Joshua will often communicate with his coworkers through chat rooms, instant messaging, email and voice conversations. He feels, "it does free you up to work at different places and at different times." Social media also plays a large part in the way he communicates within his workplace:
"We use twitter to chat back and forth sometimes outside of work, about industry stuff. Inside of work, we sort of have this social network called Yammer. It's sort of like a Facebook for businesses. There's a feed and people post to it and it can be just staff spam stuff, that is just interesting links and funny videos that people saw or stuff that's important to the news. It always gets people communicating, and you can check it on your own time. It gets people who wouldn't normally interact with each other to interact more because they wouldn't be on the same projects or something like that."
From the book Taken Out of Context, Danah Boyd claims that, "Mediated environments like networked publics formalize and alter the identity processes of self-presentation and impression management." That, when people are put into a position where they have to promote themselves within a profile of a social network, more often then not, they will present themselves as how they ideally see themselves or how they want to be perceived by others. Josh says he also notices this same sort of thing among coworkers in business centric social networks, "You can go on LinkedIn and you can say you know 10 or 20 different (coding) languages you may have barley touched." This can especially be true if someone is trying to use it as leverage for acquiring a job.
Despite being able to work outside of the office, Josh still needs to attend meetings regularly. In general he thinks they're horrible. In most cases they waist time and money, particularly in ones involving more then five people. Though he says, "Every once in a while, you have to because it's hard to coordinate a group of people to do a certain thing if everybody is working 8 hours a day on different things." He believes meetings are largely unnecessary and can break the creative work flow. In PBS's documentary Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier, Philip Rosedale asserts that technology, which has socially alienated us in the past, is bring us back together. the documentary also displayed how IBM's tried using Second Life to shift meetings to the virtual world. Josh believes there are still many difficulties and draw backs with such methods:
"Maybe one day we could have real life representations of ourselves interacting as if in a meeting. I don't think, the way we can do that now, that those benefits outweighs the cost. I feel that at the moment, it's a little bit of a gimmick compared to what you can do with collaborative Google docks or video conferencing."
Ubermind has recently expanded with a satellite office in Denver due to the shear amount of people telecommuting from that location. Josh thinks it's going to be interesting communicating with roughly 150 people over different time zones and how they'll be juggled. Currently, he's working with a telecommuter from London and has experienced how differing time zones can work to their advantage. They often find that they'll have new work finish for each other by the time they wake up. "It's like were working 24 hours a day, except him and me trade off."
As well as making apps for their customers, Ubermind will also set up small projects the benefit the company itself. In one such project, Josh built a time tracking system of sorts "to smooth out billing and who's working on what." Originally, people would have to fill out hardcopy timesheet by hand. Making the whole process digital made the process more accessible and easier to manage. "It's supper beneficial," he says, " whoever wants to know gets better data, people aren't nagged about it, and it improves the workflow for everyone." In this way the company can continuously improve and streamline itself over time.
With this career path, Josh has contently found himself sitting at his computer for long periods of time. Tired of being attached to his computer and devoting most of his time to coding, Josh has recently taken up long boarding in his free time.
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