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How To Utilize Core Company Values

HackerRank needed to improve their company communication and hired a value-fit panel to come up with core values. After several iterations, the panel agreed on four values: customer delight, data over opinion, giver, and ambition. After interviewing candidates, they realized extreme ownership was a better fit. By using these values to inform their hiring process, they have ensured everyone in the company resonates with their core values. The lesson learned is that if you don't ensure cultural and value-based fit, you'll have no control over what the culture of your company is going to be.

Hiring Engineers When You Don’t Have An Engineering Team

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a US-based engineering team for HackerRank. The author suggests focusing on people applying for roles, setting up a pipeline with predefined guidelines, and networking to find the right candidates. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of having job guidelines and an efficient recruitment pipeline. Lastly, the author suggests focusing on candidates who are already engaged with the company's mission.

Guiding Engineers With Their Career Path

A software engineer was not performing at his usual level and was considering quitting. His manager held a meeting to understand the situation and provide advice. The manager suggested that the engineer should stick it out and deliver concrete results for the team over the next few months, and if he still wanted to leave after that, he could do so feeling good about himself. The lesson learned was to understand what employees are going through and be upfront about the reality that everyone can leave, but provide context about similar experiences.

Ensuring Engineering Teams Feel Heard

TaskEasy had a team of 25 engineers and two senior managers, but due to poor planning and communication, morale and productivity were low and four employees left in two months. The CEO stepped in and the CTO was moved to another role, while the senior manager was promoted to Director of Engineering. The Director of Engineering implemented team verticals, with engineering managers and four to five team members, and addressed the issues engineers were facing. Through listening to team members and brainstorming, a two-step plan was created to improve morale and productivity. The lesson learned was that change could have been enacted sooner if the Director of Engineering had presented proposals to more parties and taken responsibility for the issues. Additionally, team members have good ideas and the role of the engineering manager is to support and enable them.

Lessons From Working As A New Remote Team Lead

This article is about a software engineer who was offered a team lead position while also transitioning to working remotely. The engineer had to figure out how to manage a team spread across different time zones. To improve communication, the engineer moved the stand-up meeting to an asynchronous Slack channel and introduced a half-hourly daily meeting to allow team members to check in and get to know each other. The article emphasizes the importance of preparation for managers, as they may face new management problems that they have never had to deal with before.

Agreeing on Plans for Delivery

This article discusses the problem of reconciling top-down planning from the CEO with the engineers' goals. The solution was to have the engineers present their goals to the whole company, and then present them to the leadership team. This resulted in an organization that was aligned from head to toe and very motivated. The lesson learned is that it is important to ensure that the people doing the work understand why the work is important, so they can remain motivated.

Shaping An Engineering Organization

When an organization grows, it must decide how to shape its engineering teams. Two options are assigning Dev Leads to groups of four to five, or building teams of four to seven engineers that are self-reliant and can touch any area of the stack. The latter option was chosen, resulting in faster velocity, cleaner code, and well-regarded features. However, it requires hiring generalist engineers, which some may not enjoy. It is important to think about this issue early on and adjust the interview process accordingly.

Hiring For An Unfamiliar Skillset

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a hardware startup. It outlines the steps taken to source and interview candidates, such as talking to mentors and leveraging external recruiters. It also highlights the importance of designing a process that simulates real work and assessing a candidate's technical strengths to guard against unconscious bias.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

How To Utilize Core Company Values

HackerRank needed to improve their company communication and hired a value-fit panel to come up with core values. After several iterations, the panel agreed on four values: customer delight, data over opinion, giver, and ambition. After interviewing candidates, they realized extreme ownership was a better fit. By using these values to inform their hiring process, they have ensured everyone in the company resonates with their core values. The lesson learned is that if you don't ensure cultural and value-based fit, you'll have no control over what the culture of your company is going to be.

Hiring Engineers When You Don’t Have An Engineering Team

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a US-based engineering team for HackerRank. The author suggests focusing on people applying for roles, setting up a pipeline with predefined guidelines, and networking to find the right candidates. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of having job guidelines and an efficient recruitment pipeline. Lastly, the author suggests focusing on candidates who are already engaged with the company's mission.

Guiding Engineers With Their Career Path

A software engineer was not performing at his usual level and was considering quitting. His manager held a meeting to understand the situation and provide advice. The manager suggested that the engineer should stick it out and deliver concrete results for the team over the next few months, and if he still wanted to leave after that, he could do so feeling good about himself. The lesson learned was to understand what employees are going through and be upfront about the reality that everyone can leave, but provide context about similar experiences.

Ensuring Engineering Teams Feel Heard

TaskEasy had a team of 25 engineers and two senior managers, but due to poor planning and communication, morale and productivity were low and four employees left in two months. The CEO stepped in and the CTO was moved to another role, while the senior manager was promoted to Director of Engineering. The Director of Engineering implemented team verticals, with engineering managers and four to five team members, and addressed the issues engineers were facing. Through listening to team members and brainstorming, a two-step plan was created to improve morale and productivity. The lesson learned was that change could have been enacted sooner if the Director of Engineering had presented proposals to more parties and taken responsibility for the issues. Additionally, team members have good ideas and the role of the engineering manager is to support and enable them.

Lessons From Working As A New Remote Team Lead

This article is about a software engineer who was offered a team lead position while also transitioning to working remotely. The engineer had to figure out how to manage a team spread across different time zones. To improve communication, the engineer moved the stand-up meeting to an asynchronous Slack channel and introduced a half-hourly daily meeting to allow team members to check in and get to know each other. The article emphasizes the importance of preparation for managers, as they may face new management problems that they have never had to deal with before.

Agreeing on Plans for Delivery

This article discusses the problem of reconciling top-down planning from the CEO with the engineers' goals. The solution was to have the engineers present their goals to the whole company, and then present them to the leadership team. This resulted in an organization that was aligned from head to toe and very motivated. The lesson learned is that it is important to ensure that the people doing the work understand why the work is important, so they can remain motivated.

Shaping An Engineering Organization

When an organization grows, it must decide how to shape its engineering teams. Two options are assigning Dev Leads to groups of four to five, or building teams of four to seven engineers that are self-reliant and can touch any area of the stack. The latter option was chosen, resulting in faster velocity, cleaner code, and well-regarded features. However, it requires hiring generalist engineers, which some may not enjoy. It is important to think about this issue early on and adjust the interview process accordingly.

Hiring For An Unfamiliar Skillset

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a hardware startup. It outlines the steps taken to source and interview candidates, such as talking to mentors and leveraging external recruiters. It also highlights the importance of designing a process that simulates real work and assessing a candidate's technical strengths to guard against unconscious bias.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

How To Utilize Core Company Values

HackerRank needed to improve their company communication and hired a value-fit panel to come up with core values. After several iterations, the panel agreed on four values: customer delight, data over opinion, giver, and ambition. After interviewing candidates, they realized extreme ownership was a better fit. By using these values to inform their hiring process, they have ensured everyone in the company resonates with their core values. The lesson learned is that if you don't ensure cultural and value-based fit, you'll have no control over what the culture of your company is going to be.

Hiring Engineers When You Don’t Have An Engineering Team

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a US-based engineering team for HackerRank. The author suggests focusing on people applying for roles, setting up a pipeline with predefined guidelines, and networking to find the right candidates. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of having job guidelines and an efficient recruitment pipeline. Lastly, the author suggests focusing on candidates who are already engaged with the company's mission.

Guiding Engineers With Their Career Path

A software engineer was not performing at his usual level and was considering quitting. His manager held a meeting to understand the situation and provide advice. The manager suggested that the engineer should stick it out and deliver concrete results for the team over the next few months, and if he still wanted to leave after that, he could do so feeling good about himself. The lesson learned was to understand what employees are going through and be upfront about the reality that everyone can leave, but provide context about similar experiences.

Ensuring Engineering Teams Feel Heard

TaskEasy had a team of 25 engineers and two senior managers, but due to poor planning and communication, morale and productivity were low and four employees left in two months. The CEO stepped in and the CTO was moved to another role, while the senior manager was promoted to Director of Engineering. The Director of Engineering implemented team verticals, with engineering managers and four to five team members, and addressed the issues engineers were facing. Through listening to team members and brainstorming, a two-step plan was created to improve morale and productivity. The lesson learned was that change could have been enacted sooner if the Director of Engineering had presented proposals to more parties and taken responsibility for the issues. Additionally, team members have good ideas and the role of the engineering manager is to support and enable them.

Lessons From Working As A New Remote Team Lead

This article is about a software engineer who was offered a team lead position while also transitioning to working remotely. The engineer had to figure out how to manage a team spread across different time zones. To improve communication, the engineer moved the stand-up meeting to an asynchronous Slack channel and introduced a half-hourly daily meeting to allow team members to check in and get to know each other. The article emphasizes the importance of preparation for managers, as they may face new management problems that they have never had to deal with before.

Agreeing on Plans for Delivery

This article discusses the problem of reconciling top-down planning from the CEO with the engineers' goals. The solution was to have the engineers present their goals to the whole company, and then present them to the leadership team. This resulted in an organization that was aligned from head to toe and very motivated. The lesson learned is that it is important to ensure that the people doing the work understand why the work is important, so they can remain motivated.

Shaping An Engineering Organization

When an organization grows, it must decide how to shape its engineering teams. Two options are assigning Dev Leads to groups of four to five, or building teams of four to seven engineers that are self-reliant and can touch any area of the stack. The latter option was chosen, resulting in faster velocity, cleaner code, and well-regarded features. However, it requires hiring generalist engineers, which some may not enjoy. It is important to think about this issue early on and adjust the interview process accordingly.

Hiring For An Unfamiliar Skillset

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a hardware startup. It outlines the steps taken to source and interview candidates, such as talking to mentors and leveraging external recruiters. It also highlights the importance of designing a process that simulates real work and assessing a candidate's technical strengths to guard against unconscious bias.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

How To Utilize Core Company Values

HackerRank needed to improve their company communication and hired a value-fit panel to come up with core values. After several iterations, the panel agreed on four values: customer delight, data over opinion, giver, and ambition. After interviewing candidates, they realized extreme ownership was a better fit. By using these values to inform their hiring process, they have ensured everyone in the company resonates with their core values. The lesson learned is that if you don't ensure cultural and value-based fit, you'll have no control over what the culture of your company is going to be.

Hiring Engineers When You Don’t Have An Engineering Team

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a US-based engineering team for HackerRank. The author suggests focusing on people applying for roles, setting up a pipeline with predefined guidelines, and networking to find the right candidates. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of having job guidelines and an efficient recruitment pipeline. Lastly, the author suggests focusing on candidates who are already engaged with the company's mission.

Guiding Engineers With Their Career Path

A software engineer was not performing at his usual level and was considering quitting. His manager held a meeting to understand the situation and provide advice. The manager suggested that the engineer should stick it out and deliver concrete results for the team over the next few months, and if he still wanted to leave after that, he could do so feeling good about himself. The lesson learned was to understand what employees are going through and be upfront about the reality that everyone can leave, but provide context about similar experiences.

Ensuring Engineering Teams Feel Heard

TaskEasy had a team of 25 engineers and two senior managers, but due to poor planning and communication, morale and productivity were low and four employees left in two months. The CEO stepped in and the CTO was moved to another role, while the senior manager was promoted to Director of Engineering. The Director of Engineering implemented team verticals, with engineering managers and four to five team members, and addressed the issues engineers were facing. Through listening to team members and brainstorming, a two-step plan was created to improve morale and productivity. The lesson learned was that change could have been enacted sooner if the Director of Engineering had presented proposals to more parties and taken responsibility for the issues. Additionally, team members have good ideas and the role of the engineering manager is to support and enable them.

Lessons From Working As A New Remote Team Lead

This article is about a software engineer who was offered a team lead position while also transitioning to working remotely. The engineer had to figure out how to manage a team spread across different time zones. To improve communication, the engineer moved the stand-up meeting to an asynchronous Slack channel and introduced a half-hourly daily meeting to allow team members to check in and get to know each other. The article emphasizes the importance of preparation for managers, as they may face new management problems that they have never had to deal with before.

Agreeing on Plans for Delivery

This article discusses the problem of reconciling top-down planning from the CEO with the engineers' goals. The solution was to have the engineers present their goals to the whole company, and then present them to the leadership team. This resulted in an organization that was aligned from head to toe and very motivated. The lesson learned is that it is important to ensure that the people doing the work understand why the work is important, so they can remain motivated.

Shaping An Engineering Organization

When an organization grows, it must decide how to shape its engineering teams. Two options are assigning Dev Leads to groups of four to five, or building teams of four to seven engineers that are self-reliant and can touch any area of the stack. The latter option was chosen, resulting in faster velocity, cleaner code, and well-regarded features. However, it requires hiring generalist engineers, which some may not enjoy. It is important to think about this issue early on and adjust the interview process accordingly.

Hiring For An Unfamiliar Skillset

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a hardware startup. It outlines the steps taken to source and interview candidates, such as talking to mentors and leveraging external recruiters. It also highlights the importance of designing a process that simulates real work and assessing a candidate's technical strengths to guard against unconscious bias.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

How To Utilize Core Company Values

HackerRank needed to improve their company communication and hired a value-fit panel to come up with core values. After several iterations, the panel agreed on four values: customer delight, data over opinion, giver, and ambition. After interviewing candidates, they realized extreme ownership was a better fit. By using these values to inform their hiring process, they have ensured everyone in the company resonates with their core values. The lesson learned is that if you don't ensure cultural and value-based fit, you'll have no control over what the culture of your company is going to be.

Hiring Engineers When You Don’t Have An Engineering Team

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a US-based engineering team for HackerRank. The author suggests focusing on people applying for roles, setting up a pipeline with predefined guidelines, and networking to find the right candidates. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of having job guidelines and an efficient recruitment pipeline. Lastly, the author suggests focusing on candidates who are already engaged with the company's mission.

Guiding Engineers With Their Career Path

A software engineer was not performing at his usual level and was considering quitting. His manager held a meeting to understand the situation and provide advice. The manager suggested that the engineer should stick it out and deliver concrete results for the team over the next few months, and if he still wanted to leave after that, he could do so feeling good about himself. The lesson learned was to understand what employees are going through and be upfront about the reality that everyone can leave, but provide context about similar experiences.

Ensuring Engineering Teams Feel Heard

TaskEasy had a team of 25 engineers and two senior managers, but due to poor planning and communication, morale and productivity were low and four employees left in two months. The CEO stepped in and the CTO was moved to another role, while the senior manager was promoted to Director of Engineering. The Director of Engineering implemented team verticals, with engineering managers and four to five team members, and addressed the issues engineers were facing. Through listening to team members and brainstorming, a two-step plan was created to improve morale and productivity. The lesson learned was that change could have been enacted sooner if the Director of Engineering had presented proposals to more parties and taken responsibility for the issues. Additionally, team members have good ideas and the role of the engineering manager is to support and enable them.

Lessons From Working As A New Remote Team Lead

This article is about a software engineer who was offered a team lead position while also transitioning to working remotely. The engineer had to figure out how to manage a team spread across different time zones. To improve communication, the engineer moved the stand-up meeting to an asynchronous Slack channel and introduced a half-hourly daily meeting to allow team members to check in and get to know each other. The article emphasizes the importance of preparation for managers, as they may face new management problems that they have never had to deal with before.

Agreeing on Plans for Delivery

This article discusses the problem of reconciling top-down planning from the CEO with the engineers' goals. The solution was to have the engineers present their goals to the whole company, and then present them to the leadership team. This resulted in an organization that was aligned from head to toe and very motivated. The lesson learned is that it is important to ensure that the people doing the work understand why the work is important, so they can remain motivated.

Shaping An Engineering Organization

When an organization grows, it must decide how to shape its engineering teams. Two options are assigning Dev Leads to groups of four to five, or building teams of four to seven engineers that are self-reliant and can touch any area of the stack. The latter option was chosen, resulting in faster velocity, cleaner code, and well-regarded features. However, it requires hiring generalist engineers, which some may not enjoy. It is important to think about this issue early on and adjust the interview process accordingly.

Hiring For An Unfamiliar Skillset

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a hardware startup. It outlines the steps taken to source and interview candidates, such as talking to mentors and leveraging external recruiters. It also highlights the importance of designing a process that simulates real work and assessing a candidate's technical strengths to guard against unconscious bias.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.

How To Utilize Core Company Values

HackerRank needed to improve their company communication and hired a value-fit panel to come up with core values. After several iterations, the panel agreed on four values: customer delight, data over opinion, giver, and ambition. After interviewing candidates, they realized extreme ownership was a better fit. By using these values to inform their hiring process, they have ensured everyone in the company resonates with their core values. The lesson learned is that if you don't ensure cultural and value-based fit, you'll have no control over what the culture of your company is going to be.

Hiring Engineers When You Don’t Have An Engineering Team

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a US-based engineering team for HackerRank. The author suggests focusing on people applying for roles, setting up a pipeline with predefined guidelines, and networking to find the right candidates. Additionally, the author emphasizes the importance of having job guidelines and an efficient recruitment pipeline. Lastly, the author suggests focusing on candidates who are already engaged with the company's mission.

Guiding Engineers With Their Career Path

A software engineer was not performing at his usual level and was considering quitting. His manager held a meeting to understand the situation and provide advice. The manager suggested that the engineer should stick it out and deliver concrete results for the team over the next few months, and if he still wanted to leave after that, he could do so feeling good about himself. The lesson learned was to understand what employees are going through and be upfront about the reality that everyone can leave, but provide context about similar experiences.

Ensuring Engineering Teams Feel Heard

TaskEasy had a team of 25 engineers and two senior managers, but due to poor planning and communication, morale and productivity were low and four employees left in two months. The CEO stepped in and the CTO was moved to another role, while the senior manager was promoted to Director of Engineering. The Director of Engineering implemented team verticals, with engineering managers and four to five team members, and addressed the issues engineers were facing. Through listening to team members and brainstorming, a two-step plan was created to improve morale and productivity. The lesson learned was that change could have been enacted sooner if the Director of Engineering had presented proposals to more parties and taken responsibility for the issues. Additionally, team members have good ideas and the role of the engineering manager is to support and enable them.

Lessons From Working As A New Remote Team Lead

This article is about a software engineer who was offered a team lead position while also transitioning to working remotely. The engineer had to figure out how to manage a team spread across different time zones. To improve communication, the engineer moved the stand-up meeting to an asynchronous Slack channel and introduced a half-hourly daily meeting to allow team members to check in and get to know each other. The article emphasizes the importance of preparation for managers, as they may face new management problems that they have never had to deal with before.

Agreeing on Plans for Delivery

This article discusses the problem of reconciling top-down planning from the CEO with the engineers' goals. The solution was to have the engineers present their goals to the whole company, and then present them to the leadership team. This resulted in an organization that was aligned from head to toe and very motivated. The lesson learned is that it is important to ensure that the people doing the work understand why the work is important, so they can remain motivated.

Shaping An Engineering Organization

When an organization grows, it must decide how to shape its engineering teams. Two options are assigning Dev Leads to groups of four to five, or building teams of four to seven engineers that are self-reliant and can touch any area of the stack. The latter option was chosen, resulting in faster velocity, cleaner code, and well-regarded features. However, it requires hiring generalist engineers, which some may not enjoy. It is important to think about this issue early on and adjust the interview process accordingly.

Hiring For An Unfamiliar Skillset

This article discusses the challenges of hiring engineers for a hardware startup. It outlines the steps taken to source and interview candidates, such as talking to mentors and leveraging external recruiters. It also highlights the importance of designing a process that simulates real work and assessing a candidate's technical strengths to guard against unconscious bias.

Setting Up Engineering Team Values to Aid in Recruiting

When the company VTS was ramping up their recruitment process, the team got together to come up with engineering values to use when evaluating candidates. They broke into small groups, wrote the commonalities on a whiteboard, and published the values online. This helped them make decisions about candidates, and also helped candidates who fit the values reach out to them. The lesson learned was to do this sooner, when the team was smaller, to ensure everyone was on the same page when recruiting.

Mentoring Through Rotating Senior Engineers

In order to leverage the knowledge and skills of senior engineers, a mentorship program was created in which six senior engineers rotated from team to team. The senior engineers paired with junior engineers on tickets and features, allowing the junior engineers to level up their skills. The program was successful in introducing pairing as a common practice and helping junior engineers level up their skills.

Reduce Recruiting Stress By Rotating Responsibility

As CTO of VTS, the author needed to rapidly grow their engineering team without an in-house engineering recruiter. To do this, they set up a weekly rotation where one engineer was responsible for collecting candidates from various sources and assigning them to another engineer on the team to take them through the recruitment process. This allowed the responsibility of recruiting to be distributed across the team and for engineers to work on their recruitment skills. However, some engineers had little experience evaluating other engineers, so they had to be paired with senior ones in interviews. This approach was successful, but it also meant that engineers had less time to do engineering.

Using a Business Mindset for Engineering Teams

The author joined Oracle early on and noticed that Sales was always prioritized over Engineering. To gain a better understanding of Sales, the author asked to be a pre-sales person for a year, and learned how hard Sales worked. This experience changed the author's entire career and approach to managing engineers, and they now train their engineers to think from the customer's perspective and to understand the business. Managers are also trained in budgeting and finance, and the author values people with an MBA. This has resulted in the company understanding and respecting engineering teams more.

Removing the Need for a Formal Tech Lead

A team of mid-level engineers wanted to lead design discussions without waiting for a tech lead's approval. To solve this, the tech lead role was dissolved and two engineers were self-nominated to lead separate projects. The tech leads were concerned about their growth, but were given more time to do hands-on development and work on projects. This approach works well with mid- to senior-level engineers, but more junior teams may need a role model. If making this change, be respectful and ensure the former tech leads understand it is not a reflection on their work.

Focussing On Skills Rather Than Only Titles

The manager invests time in understanding their team members and works with them in a mentor-mentee relationship to help them understand their strengths and values. They focus on building their personal brand and skills, rather than titles, to help them reach the next level. This investment of time and energy creates motivated and happy employees.

Engineers As Scrum Masters

This article describes the experience of an Engineering Manager who wanted to become more informed about Scrum and Agile, and to improve the functioning of their team. They sent various members of their team to Scrum Master training, and had the engineers work as part-time Scrum Masters. It was important to set clear expectations in terms of how much time they should spend on Scrum, and to choose extroverted, more forceful engineers to lead the Scrums. The article concludes that having a full, self-organizing Scrum team changes the job of the Engineering Manager, and provides them with more time to focus on coaching, hiring and mentoring.

Hiring and Managing Successful Remote Teams

When tasked with hiring an entirely new team at Walmart, the author had to convince their manager to search nationwide for remote developers due to the competitive marketplace in the San Francisco Bay area. After six months, they had recruited a team of fourteen people, with eight of them working remotely. The author learned that when managing a team with remote workers, it's important to ensure they have a clear direction and to trust them, and when hiring remote developers, it's best to focus on more experienced, senior developers.

Building A Passionate Team

My company used a personality assessment test to determine the strengths of each applicant and build teams based on those strengths. This allowed us to create a more diverse team and ensure that everyone was in a role that fit their strengths and passions. We also redo the test every two years to make sure everyone is in the right role. This has resulted in people being happier and more passionate in their jobs.

Becoming Location Independent

Our company wanted to become location independent to have a better work-life balance. We had to embed our beliefs into the day-to-day running of our company, and faced obstacles such as communication difficulties. We implemented clear values, habits, areas of responsibilities and processes to ensure everyone understood their roles. Becoming location independent has been beneficial, allowing us to stay out of autopilot mode, manage our health better and have one central source of truth for tasks and progress.

How to manage off-site and on-site teams together

The speaker had to manage remote and local teams at both NetApp and Cisco. There was a lack of communication and platform for sharing ideas, projects, and resources between the teams. To bridge the gap, the speaker set up monthly all-hands meetings, quarterly HQ visits, and lunches and informal get-togethers. Through these actions, the speaker learned that product ownership and accountability are key to keeping up motivation, and that messaging needs to come from the top with clear and transparent rules.

Onboarding and mentoring new employees

In 2005, Monica Bajaj, a manager, realized that her company had no process for onboarding new employees. She took several years to develop an onboarding packet that included a buddy or mentor, information about peers and the leadership team, and training material links and resources. This approach has been well-received by new hires and Monica has shared a link to the onboarding package as a reference.