Stripe’s remote engineering hub shows how distributed workforces can thrive

Above: Remote working: Man on sofa… working.

Image Credit: Getty

More than two-thirds of the global workforce operate remotely at least one day a week, according to a study carried out last year by Switzerland-based serviced office provider IWG, while around half of the U.S. workforce specifically could be remote by 2020 — up from 39% in 2012.

There are a number of benefits to operating a so-called “distributed workforce.” It gives the worker more flexibility over where they work, improves work-life balance, reduces the carbon footprint (less travel), and saves money — less overhead for the business, and fewer dollars spent on transport and Starbucks for the employee.

Climate change: ‘Invest $1.8 trillion to adapt’

Ollivier Girard/CIFOR

Investments – like the purchase of a water pump for irrigation – can provide a sustainable farming income for farmers like Sanfo Karim in Burkina Faso

Investing $1.8 trillion over the next decade – in measures to adapt to climate change – could produce net benefits worth more than $7 trillion.

This is according to a global cost-benefit analysis setting out five adaptation strategies.

17 Reasons NOT To Be A Manager

Yesterday we had a super fun meetup here at Intercom in Dublin. We split up into small discussion groups and talked about things related to managing teams and being a senior individual contributor (IC), and going back and forth throughout your career.

One interesting question that came up repeatedly was: “what are some reasons that someone might not want to be a manager?”

Scaling In Lower Cost Locations – AVC

This is a topic I’ve written about a bunch over the years. I feel like it is becoming more urgent every day.

Last week I heard some shocking numbers about salary levels for certain kinds of engineers in the bay area. I checked them out with a few of our bay area portfolio companies and they were more or less corroborated.

The tight technical labor markets in the bay area, NYC, and a number of other regions in the US are making it hard to scale software businesses without burning massive amounts of cash.

Every manager needs the magic of a work BFF

One of the few pieces of advice I feel good about giving to everyone is this: When your job gets harder, the best thing you can do is make a friend.

This is also backed by the data. Gallup research has consistently shown that having a best friend at work leads to better performance—perhaps related to the findings that people who have a best friend at work are more likely to be engaged in their job, more likely to take risks that spark innovation, and less likely to be actively looking for job opportunities elsewhere.

What I Learned After Becoming an Engineering Manager

This post will help engineers get the best results out of their work with managers, and achieve career goals in a predictable way.

After many years of being an individual contributor and Tech Lead, I decided to transition to the Engineering Manager role. My main expertise is in mobile app development, but notes below are relevant for any software engineering team.

Own your success

Please don’t wait for your manager to tell you exactly what to do and how to do it. If you’re part of the big team in the big org — your manager is not expected to have all context on all the details of your projects. Please come up with your own roadmap to ship the next feature, and ask feedback. Drive the development of your project.

Product Team FAQ | Silicon Valley Product Group

Every so often one of my articles seems to strike a chord, and this latest one on the difference between Product Teams and Feature Teams certainly seemed to do that. I am grateful for the very positive response. This morning I woke up to well over a hundred people who took the time to e-mail me a personal note of thanks, and often with follow-up questions.

Product vs. Feature Teams

This article is certain to upset many people.

I’m sorry for that, but the degree of ongoing noise and confusion surrounding the role of product at tech companies is only getting worse. Moreover, I see the issues and problematic behaviors getting institutionalized in conference talks, training programs and so-called certification programs for product people.

I have talked about this issue several times in the past, most specifically in the article and keynote on Empowered Product Teams . However, so many people hear only what they want to in that, and it has become clear to me that I need to be more explicit.

Small Wins

It’s easy to put up a facade of success.

Social media has trained us to only show the best parts of our lives.

The pressure is on to announce and celebrate the big wins.

To curate the narrative in the biggest and most glorious manner possible.

The bigger the better.

And it’s really easy to keep silent when you’re unknown,

when you’re only making small progress,

and when everyone else seems to be doing much better.

Modern applications at AWS – All Things Distributed

Innovation has always been part of the Amazon DNA, but about 20 years ago, we went through a radical transformation with the goal of making our iterative process—”invent, launch, reinvent, relaunch, start over, rinse, repeat, again and again “—even faster. The changes we made affected both how we built applications and how we organized our company.

Back then, we had only a small fraction of the number of customers that Amazon serves today. Still, we knew that if we wanted to expand the products and services we offered, we had to change the way we approached application architecture.

How to Discover Your Unknown Knowns

Known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns

It’s been almost twenty years since Donald Rumsfeld, the then US Secretary of State of Defense, said:

“There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know. “

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You Might Not Be Checking In on Foursquare, But Foursquare Is Checking In on You

Foursquare check-ins in New York City.

Photo: Courtesy of Foursquare

Way back in 2009, when Barack Obama was president and Little Nas X was 10 years old, one of the most talked-about start-ups in the tech industry was an app called Foursquare. The digital compass that pointed your Uncle Tony to the mayorship of your local Boston Market was the most prominent check-in app at a moment when everyone in Silicon Valley was betting on location-based social networks like Foursquare’s biggest competitor, Gowalla. Foursquare was also the best-known of a generation of cutesy local start-ups — think Tumblr and Gilt — poised to transform New York City into the next Silicon Valley.

How to build social connection in a remote team – Know Your Team | Blog

Virtual team building is tough. Here are 7 ways you can build social connection in a remote team, even from afar.

I’ll be shocked if you’re shocked: Building social connection in a remote team is the hardest part of managing a remote team. According to a survey we ran this past fall with 297 remote managers and employees, “fostering a sense of connection without a shared location” was seen as the #1 most difficult part of being a remote manager – and the #1 most difficult part of working remotely, in general.

The 10x Engineer – making a whole team 10x better

Lately there was a lot of talk on twitter about the 10x engineer which started a big debate about what makes a good engineer. Some really stupid things were mentioned such as “10x engineers hate meetings” and “10x engineers come late to the office” and “10x engineers laptop background is usually black”. In general, it seems that some people think that if you are smart enough, it is okay to be an asshole.

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.

Disasterpiece Theater: Slack’s process for approachable Chaos Engineering

Richard Crowley Aug 1 · 8 min read

Slack is a large and complex piece of software that’s been added to and changed many times over the last five years. We added features, grew to 10,000,000 DAUs, and made major architectural changes. We made assumptions and tested them with processes that often resembled science.

Whenever we launch features or make changes, we test the fault tolerance of that new code. Unfortunately, we seldom get to repeat these tests as the environment continues to change around that no-longer-new code. As the sands shift, those initial test results lose value. We remain confident in the resilience and robustness of our most critical systems but that confidence is less well-founded as time progresses. And luck is not an availability strategy, so something must be done.

The workplace is a lonely place, but it doesn’t have to be

In early 2017, Shelly Schneider accepted a new job at a large insurance company. With a desk surrounded by hundreds of coworkers, she expected to have a robust social experience at work.

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But after two years, Schneider found herself isolated, unhappy, and unproductive.

Schneider excelled in her role as an underwriter, working across all of the company’s service lines and receiving consistently positive feedback from her director. But her role required very little contact with her colleagues, and she found herself falling out of touch with her office neighbors and team members.

The Bullseye Framework for Getting Traction

With nineteen traction channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s why we’ve created a simple framework called Bullseye that will help you find the channel that will get you traction. As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it:

[You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral marketing — everything but the kitchen sink.

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All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people

Marianne Bellotti Aug 5 · 13 min read

Vector created by rawpixel

As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my abilities at that same stage. More often than not the best advice, the things that stuck with me, came from people who had no background at all in software.

The Complete Guide to Deep Work

Illustration by @margaridamouta

Let’s get right to the point: bouncing between your inbox, pointless meetings, and group chat notifications is no way to get ahead in today’s information economy.

These are markers of busyness not productivity. They won’t help you to deepen your writing practice, master a programming language, or grow your business. In fact, these activities won’t aid you in any number of the ambitious goals you’ve set for yourself.

AARRR Framework- Metrics That Let Your StartUp Sound Like A Pirate Ship

Nov 25, 2017 · 11 min read

AARRR Metric Framework- Pirate Metrics for Startups

​Today, September 19th, is International Talk Like A Pirate Day, and thus, the perfect excuse to chat about one of the most important metric frameworks to live by as a startup marketer or Growth Hacker: The AARRR framework.

10 years ago… wow, that’s a long time ago.

Getting Real About Managing Up

From QCon NYC, 2019

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Hi!

Most engineers, as hyper rationale beings above the fray of emotional persuasion are kind of “Ugh, do we have to” when the topic of managing up comes up, so thank you for coming!

My name is Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Cards on the table. I’m the person you manage up to. (experience: Etsy, Flickr, various startups)
But I also advise and coach. (30+ companies)
This talk is drawn from all of that experience.
When Jean asked me…

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog

The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you’ll finish more stuff per unit time. But there’s more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.

The converse is true, too. If every time you write a blog post it takes you six months, and you’re sitting around your apartment on a Sunday afternoon thinking of stuff to do, you’re probably not going to think of starting a blog post, because it’ll feel too expensive.

Book Summary – The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter

The first 90 days of any career transition—be it a promotion, a new job or a lateral transfer—are critical and can determine if you succeed or fail in the new role. In this book, Michael Watkins presents critical success strategies for new leaders at all levels. In this summary, we’ll give an overview of the proven strategies to shorten your learning curve and build momentum within the first 90 days of any new management role. The impact is multiplied when the approach is applied organization-wide. For the full details, examples and tips, do or get a detailed overview with our complete book summary bundle .

Google’s HEART Framework for Measuring UX

If you’ve been struggling to adopt useful metrics in your user experience team – you might want to consider the HEART framework designed by Kerry Rodden, Hilary Hutchinson and Xin Fu, from Google’s research team.

The idea is a simple one; to deliver a series of user-centred metrics that allow you to measure the user experience on a large scale. These metrics can then be used for decision making in the product development process.

Developing a management philosophy

Developing a management philosophy

June 21 2019

A management philosophy is not something I thought I needed, but once I finally landed on it, it felt like a puzzle had been completed. My philosophy—Take care of your people—is the truth for me. I meditate on it and tell the story to anyone who will listen.

Developing my management philosophy was a long process and was sparked by my management coach, Lara Hogan. 1 She said this philosophy was going to become my North Star, so I felt a lot of pressure to get it right. Two months and 11 versions later ​“Take care of your people” came into focus and for the last 18 months it has guided everything I do.

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RAPID Decision Making Model

The RAPID Decision Making Model is a framework that can help organizations make better decisions. Making high-quality decisions is critical to organizational success.

Every success an organization achieves. Every failure. Every missed opportunity. They can all be traced back to a decision or series of decisions made by the organization.

When an organization’s decision-making process is poor or nonexistent it can lead to wasted time, confusion and frustration. Let’s take a look two examples of a poor decision process:

Career narratives.

A peculiar challenge of management is trying to invest in someone’s career development when they themselves are uncertain about their goals. As a manager, you may have more experience and more access to opportunities within the company, but that represents a small slice of someone’s career possibilities. Our schooling often rewards us for being methodical, linear thinkers, but that approach is less effective outside the intentionally constrained possibility spaces.

An introduction to Wardley ‘Value Chain’ Mapping

This is about my journey, from a newly-minted yet confused CEO caught like a rabbit staring helpless into the oncoming headlights of change – to being voted one of the most influential people in IT within the UK. It took me a decade to first develop the techniques that I’m going to describe and a further 10 years to gain confidence with them through practice.

A Tale Of Two WordPress Hosts

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The WordPress hosting space may just simultaneously be one of the most lucrative, yet underfunded, industries out there.

There’s no question that the use of WordPress, the open source content management system (CMS) that enables the publishing of blogs and e-books (among other things), is growing exponentially. The WordPress CMS has grown to 30 percent of the Internet, up from 13 percent in 2010, according to W3Techs.

How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg

Say your startup has an on-call rotation that follows the sun. Someone’s always on. One day, a member of your team gets an alert that disk space will run out on the primary PostgreSQL server in two hours. An hour later, he gets another page. Then thirty minutes later, disk space runs out and your entire site goes down. For 18 hours. The silver lining is that your two-tier architecture can keep your site and app online, but the backend of your business has come to a halt. Your CTO is furious. He says you must fire the engineer who was on call to make a point.

Going Indie. Step 2: Reclaiming Content · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

We have lost control over our content. To change this, we need to reconsider the way we create and consume content online. We need to create a new set of tools that enable an independent, open web for everyone.

This is the second article of a two-part series on digital citizenship. Part one was all about online privacy and how to protect it, this second part focuses on how we can build and promote tools that enable an open, independent, and resilient web.