Working at home has its advantages, but office collaboration is important, too. Here's what engineers seem to like best.

TechRepublic's Karen Roby spoke with Mark Kinsella, VP of engineering for Opendoor, a real estate software company, about engineers. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Karen Roby: This is interesting I think because the role of the engineer has changed some through the years, of course, and we've been living through a pandemic. So many of us are working remotely now , which has really changed things too. How have things really changed for engineers through the last couple of years, do you think?

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Mark Kinsella: Well, especially with a trend toward working remotely and working from home, a key thing that we need to focus on is keeping collaboration strong. Especially on the engineering side, it's important to focus both on the technical collaboration, but also on the people collaboration piece. And so there's been a huge focus on tools to enable collaboration over the internet, even though you're not physically together. We at Opendoor rely a lot on GitHub, JIRA, Slack, Confluence, and there was a multitude of other things that we used to ensure that we're building the best product together, even though we're physically apart.