I keep reminding my self almost daily that the only reason we write software is to create business value. We don’t write software because it serves some higher purpose. It’s very simple. Business aims to solve customer’s problem or reduce friction in its operations. Software solves those problems and business captures created value.
Hiring, hiring, hiring. I’ve been hiring for the last 6 months non-stop. Before leaving my job I had to hire new CTO and a team of 6 in India as part of my handover.
At my new startup, I am setting up a team and I started hiring even before I started. I talked to freelancers from Upwork, super contractors in London, AWS solution architects, many outsourcing agencies from 20 to 200 staff in Serbia, Ukraine, Belarus, Holland, South Africa., LinkedIn contacts, Twitter followers, CTOs from London, Israel and Belgrade… and many recruitment consultants.
I posted jobs on job boards from LinkedIn to local job sites in Eastern Europe. I interviewed many candidiates in the first to final rounds, reviewed not as many CVs (engineers don’t know how to write CVs), built submitted code, performed many coding tests, talked to many managers. The key to success is to forget your ego and find value in candidates for the particular role you are hiring for. Forget your ego.
When manging remote teams I find useful to agree for engineers to perform regular code submissions. I should also note, from my experience on both ends, that when someone — myself included — isn’t making regular pushes or pull requests., they’ve usually “checked out.” That is, they’re not actually working. And more importantly, they’ve stopped caring.
So, as long as you’re actually doing work, and as long as writing code is a daily responsibility of yours, you shouldn’t be afraid to push code every day. If you find that difficult, you might be in the wrong job! And, that’s something both your manager and you should want to see the early signs of!