Just a quilt of ideas, musings, and observations from the world of software development from our team.
Radoslav Stankov is the Head of Engineering at Product Hunt. He actually took over the post from our last guest, Andreas Klinger, and Andreas wanted us to follow up with Rado to learn about some of the changes he’s made.
In this episode, we dive into the impact that “single-player mode” has on remote work and how Rado uses checklists and clear expectations to ensure his team gets onboarded effectively.
Read MoreHiring software developers is really, really hard. That's why we sit down with hiring managers every day to understand what’s working, and not working, when screening for technical talent.
Our surprising finding? There is one thing that the best hiring managers do differently that causes them to fill engineering roles 30% faster than their counterparts.
Read MoreAndreas is the Head of Remote at AngelList, the largest remote hiring job board in the world. After building multiple remote teams at companies like CoinList and Product Hunt, Andreas has become one of the preeminent voices in the remote work movement.
In this episode, we discuss how Andreas uses metrics for de-risking instead of politics and how he builds an onboarding process that makes it easy to scale remote engineering teams.
Read MoreMelissa Leffler is the VP of Engineering at Drift, a chat software and conversational marketing platform based out of Boston that has grown a ton over the past few years. In the past 5 years, they’ve raised $107M in funding. They have 75 developer on staff and are showing no signs of slowing down in the next few years.
In this episode, we discuss how Drift changed Melissa’s mind on the power of small teams, how she uses incident response to guide her team, and the one question she asks to unlock the biggest problems in her department.
Read MoreWill Larson is the author of my new favorite engineering management book, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Will has been an engineering leader and software engineer at technology companies of many shapes and sizes including Digg, Uber, and Stripe. He currently leads foundation engineering at Stripe, where he is responsible for the infrastructure and platform organization. If you haven’t heard of Stripe, they’re a huge player in the online payment space, building the economic infrastructure for the internet. They’ve raised over $700M to date and show no signs of slowing their growth any time soon.
Read MoreWill Larson is the author of my new favorite engineering management book, An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management. Will has been an engineering leader and software engineer at technology companies of many shapes and sizes including Digg, Uber, and Stripe. He currently leads foundation engineering at Stripe, where he is responsible for the infrastructure and platform organization. If you haven’t heard of Stripe, they’re a huge player in the online payment space, building the economic infrastructure for the internet. They’ve raised over $700M to date and show no signs of slowing their growth any time soon.
Read MorePeter Cullen is the Product Architect at Dispatch, a software company that enables businesses to order a courier directly from the driver. Based out of Bloomington, Minnesota, they’re fresh off of a nearly $8M Series A and are looking to grow their engineering team substantially in the next year.
In this episode, we talk about why it’s important to keep the wheels greased for remote communication, even if your team is all local. We also talk about why Peter hired someone else to manage the people side of the engineering department, and how to decide whether that decision is right for your team.
Skyler Nasheim is the VP of Engineering at Dwolla, a fast-growth FinTech scale-up. They’ve raised over $50M in venture dollars to connect enterprises to the US banking system. The Dwolla team has built one of the most disruptive products in the enterprise FinTech space, all from Des Moines, Iowa.
In this episode, we talk about how to build a microservice architecture as we scale, how to incorporate customer feedback into our product vision, and why we’re not Google… and that’s a good thing.
Read MoreFor many software engineers this year, Independence Day will bring them closer to liberating them from their current employer. In fact, 43.9% of the work simulations submitted last July through Woven happened during the 4th of July week and weekend. An additional 29.3% occurred in the week immediately following. This means that, while most hiring managers were barbecuing and enjoying fireworks, talented engineers were actively applying for roles on their team.
Read MoreHiring talented software engineers is hard, and it’s getting harder. Our data shows that it takes an average of 86 candidates and 15 onsite interviews to get one accepted offer for a mid-level software engineering role.
That’s incredibly tough, but the best engineering managers in the country are getting smarter about their hiring process so they can save time, hire faster, and win the talent war in their market.
Every hiring market in the United States is different, but there’s one commonality we’ve seen from San Francisco to Des Moines. The outliers in the market are able to perform multiple orders of magnitude better than the average firm.
Read MoreJake Miller is the CTO and Co-Founder of MetaCX, an Indianapolis-based startup that raised a $14 Million dollar initial round to revolutionize the Customer Success industry. Before starting MetaCX, he was an engineering leader at ExactTarget and Salesforce.
In this episode, we talk about why we should never say no to PTO, how algorithms make diversity worse, and how he focuses on building a balanced team instead of a senior team.
Read MoreEvery startup, given enough time, will at some point face this question… When should I consider hiring remote employees? There are tons of benefits to hiring remote, including increased candidate volume. With remote hires, however, comes a learning curve and some key things to consider. So I sat down with some engineers who have made this decision, and they presented me with two options. Read about them in this post…
Read MoreRecently, I was talking to a Head of Recruiting at a high-growth SaaS company who was facing a problem: his team was looking to make their first mobile engineering hire and they didn’t have anyone on staff who had the skillset to assess mobile engineering talent…
Read MoreJason Wong is an engineering leadership consultant who focuses on Diversity and Inclusion. His past lives include engineering roles with Yahoo! Sports, Etsy, and Blink Health.
In this episode, we talk about the difference between diversity and inclusion, and why that difference is important. We also touch on some of Jason’s favorite management and hiring practices.
Read MoreKyle Gunderson is the President and CTO at Revel Health, a Minneapolis-based software company that uses advanced analytics and AI to create health action programs that improve the health of people on an individual-basis. He’s a tech veteran, with over 20 years of leadership experience and multiple high-growth teams under his belt.
Read MoreThis week, we’re diving into part two of our conversation with Charity Majors. Charity is the CTO at Honeycomb, a company that builds observability for distributed systems. Charity’s team is on a mission to make monitoring less cumbersome so that being on-call can suck less.
In this episode, we talk about how to hire the right seniority mix for your team and ensure you see everyone at their best, both when they’re interviewing for a job and once they’ve started.
Read MoreCharity Majors is the CTO at Honeycomb, a startup that builds observability for distributed systems. Charity’s team is on a mission to make monitoring less cumbersome so that being on-call can suck less.
In this episode, we talk about when pain and discomfort is okay in your professional life (and when it’s not). We also talk about hiring practices and why more people should quit their job.
Read MoreLambda School has been in the news a ton for the way they’re revolutionizing the financial model of education. Today, we get to talk with one of the architects of this revolution. Bob is the VP of Engineering at Lambda School. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Lambda School is a coding academy that aims to help anyone, from any background, get a high-paying job in software development.
In this episode, we talk about the importance of speed at an early-stage startup, why deliberate communication is essential for remote teams, and how we can be more productive by removing distractions.
Read MoreJohn Harden is the Principal Software Engineer at Kerauno. Kerauno is a workflow and communication software company that just raised a $25M Series A. When he’s not leading a high-growth development team, he’s mentoring for two coding academies, Eleven Fifty and Kenzie Academy.
In this episode, we talk about his experience both hiring and mentoring coding bootcamp alumni, finding mentorship early in your career, and the importance of “tech jams” when scoping a project.
Read MoreMax Yoder is the founder and CEO of Lessonly, a team learning and training software company that raised a $8M Series B in late 2017. Max’s team is dedicated to helping people “Do Better Work,” which is where he got the title of his new book, Do Better Work: Finding Clarity, Camaraderie, and Progress in Work and Life.
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