A primer on managing remotely

#12 – November 23, 2020

this week's favorite

If the events of 2020 mean you’re a newly remote engineering manager and you’re still trying to get things right, start here.

A successful framework distills the complex, and in that synthesis, gets to a timeless insight. That’s always my aspiration, to varying degrees of success.

From my own personal experience, I am convinced that the large majority of companies building software products are wasting an enormous amount of the creative energy that lies dormant within their disempowered teams.

First, let’s take the question. You want to change the engineering values that your company is expressing. You don’t just want to create a heavyweight process (your checkin fails if you don’t reach X code coverage, for example), you want engineers to start to value these things enough that they don’t need a process to enforce them.

That said, I think rather than advice on how to select vendor tools, for most engineers an even more helpful topic is renegotiating an expiring contracts their organization already has.

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