The Power of Productivity workshop will help developers resolve remote work challenges, acquire new soft skills, and build a solid communication network while..
Remote work is no longer the future of employment; it is the present. Several studies have shown that employees who work from home are more productive and engaged, have a better work-life balance, and help employers save infrastructure costs.
But while remote work sounds empowering, it comes with certain challenges. And so, remote workers need to find ways to stay productive and stoke motivation.
Keeping in mind these challenges, the Turing Community is organizing an exclusive workshop under its Soft Skills Program for Senior Developers. This workshop will cover the best productivity tips and tools for aiding remote work.
What will the workshop include?
Writing good code is the cornerstone of every developer’s technical acumen. However, engaging in meaningful interactions and building solid professional ties with coworkers are also equally important.
And so, the Power of Productivity workshop will help developers acquire new soft skills, boost their remote work performance, and build a solid communication network while working remotely.
The workshop will give you answers to the following questions:
How to face the main remote work challenges?
How to identify and eliminate action faking?
How to plan your day to get more things done?
How to use modern tools to boost your productivity and the quality of your deliverables?
Who will host the workshop?
Mudit Yadav will lead the Power of Productivity workshop. Mudit is a Chartered Accountant, CFA Charterholder, and ex-strategy consultant.
Mudit Yadav is a globally recognized success coach, awarded the title of ‘Millennial Coach of the year’ at the World HRD Congress 2019. He has spoken to more than 415,000 people from over 48 countries and at multiple TEDx events.
In addition, Mudit has authored a book: Be Invincible – The mindset, skills, and habits for sustainable growth and success.
The workshop will take place on the following date and time:
Thursday, May 19
07:00 AM (PDT)
Here’s how you can join the session:
Visit the Turing Community page and register for the event.
Attend the event on May 19, 2022.
That’s it!
The registration process is entirely free and open to developers.
To sum up
The Turing Community offers software developers and engineers the opportunity to learn new skills and grow in their careers.
The upcoming productivity workshop will motivate and enable software developers and engineers to improve their remote work performance. So if you’re a software developer looking to supercharge your career, register for the workshop today!
Join a network of the world's best developers and get long-term remote software jobs with better compensation and career growth.
Heather McKelvey, LinkedIn’s VP of Engineering, discussed the secrets behind high-performance remote teams at Turing’s Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic Event.
Heather McKelvey, Vice President of Engineering for LinkedIn, discussed the secrets to developing high-performance in distributed teams with Emma Giles, Co-Founder & COO of Sophya, at Turing Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic conference, that took place on May 13, 2021.
Highlights of the session included:
Strong sponsorship develops high performance
Emma began the session by asking Heather to define the key characteristics of high-performing teams, to which she answered:
Strong leadership
Execution (fulfilling your goal and simultaneously learning something)
Craftsmanship (building something that can be easily maintained or scaled)
To achieve high performance, Heather advised leaders to assemble and consult a board of mentors, not just one mentor. A board can combine its strengths and offer greater insights to the mentee, she explained.
Heather also recommended, “Look past mentorship and towards sponsorship.” A mentor helps you identify your strengths and opportunities, she said. A sponsor promotes you within exclusive circles. “Teaching people what a sponsor relationship is, is key,” she explained.
Don’t raise the bar prematurely
Heather cautioned leaders against constantly raising the bar for their teams. She suggested, “Raise the bar. Stop and celebrate. Then, when the team is ready, raise the bar again.”
Agreeing, Emma offered an example: When leadership raised the bar for the Sophya team, the group seemed to internalize it quickly. Rather than raise the bar again right away, the management group decided to wait. That turned out to be the right decision as they found the overall team needed more time to operate at that higher level, she explained.
Following up on Heather’s comment about celebration, Emma asked how managers could bring teams together to celebrate achievements—before raising the bar again. Heather recommended arranging events that unite employees with common interests.
She also suggested organizing activities that involve employees’ families—and offered magic shows as an example. Emma pointed out that the digital world blurs the line between personal and professional. “Moments of celebration can now have a more personal element,” she added.
Set your boundaries
Heather shared insights from her experience transitioning to an all-remote work environment.
One important lesson, she explained, is to set boundaries. “If you’re going to maintain high performance, you should also maintain the ability to relax and turn off,” she said. “Remote work can cause burnout when team members don’t identify their limits and make them known,” she added. Heather further recommended that managers purposefully enquire about their team’s boundaries and respect them. Moreover, she said she asks team leaders to identify their limits and communicate them to their team.
Emma said from her own experience that “performance wanes if we continue to stay on all the time.”
Heather shared her method for setting boundaries: two 30 minute slots of going off-grid each day. Other colleagues, she said, put defined limits on their workdays. “Working six hours as a high-performer is better than working ten hours while feeling 50%,” she explained.
Emma and Heather also discussed proactive communication, team bonding, and other critical strategies for managing high-performance teams. Catch the whole conversation here.
Watch the rest of the conference, featuring additional discussions between top Silicon Valley engineering leaders, here.
PS: Turing’s readers can get two months of free access to a private Sophya digital office for teams of any size by contacting emma@sophya.ai.
Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic is sponsored by Turing.com. With Turing, hiring and managing exceptionally talented, pre-vetted remote software developers is automated, speedy, and affordable. Companies have access to a global talent pool of top 1% of 700K+ Turing developers across 140+ countries. 200+ companies, including those backed by Google Ventures, Andreessen, Founders Fund, Kleiner, and Bloomberg, have hired Turing remote software engineers.
Tell us the skills you need and we'll find the best developer for you in days, not weeks.
Leaders from Amazon, LinkedIn, and Postmates discuss strategies for managing remote teams post-pandemic at the Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic Conference.
Helping employees avoid meeting fatigue, the importance of onboarding, and the need for diversity were among the recommendations shared by engineering leaders from Amazon, LinkedIn, and Postmates/Uber at Turing’s Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic conference, which took place on May 13, 2021.
“What Does Remote Look Like for the Enterprise Post-Pandemic?” was the second session of the thought-provoking conference that Turing sponsors and holds quarterly to help engineering leaders from fast-scaling startups and enterprises meet the challenges of managing remote software development teams.
Key points discussed during the enterprise session:
Avoid “meeting fatigue”
Sumir Chadha, Co-Founder & Managing Director, WestBridge Capital Partners, began the session by asking his fellow panelists to share lessons learned from going remote. Aditya Modi, Senior Engineering Manager, LinkedIn, discussed a typical problem remote teams face: “meeting fatigue” caused by overcommunication.
He recommended managers be mindful of the number of meetings they schedule. He suggested consolidating meetings and inviting only those team members who would find the discussion relevant. He also cautioned against back-to-back meetings and instead recommended having frequent breaks between them.
Agreeing, Aabhas Sharma, Director of Engineering, Postmates/Uber, revealed that his team has a similar approach: it sets meeting hours that work for all time zones, allowing employees to have flexible schedules outside of those hours to avoid fatigue.
Kintan Brahmbhatt, GM, Amazon, said his team follows a practice of “no-meeting days or times,” wherein teams avoid get-togethers altogether on particular days of the week or month.
Self-onboarding is a critical investment
Sumir sought the panel’s advice on managing remote teams for the first time. In response, the experts stressed the importance of smooth onboarding for newly remote teams.
Aabhas introduced the concept of self-onboarding. He pointed out that synchronous onboarding sessions can be difficult for teammates located in different time zones. Instead, managers should equip new hires with the resources to onboard themselves, he added. “Self-onboarding resources were a critical investment for the Postmates team,” he mentioned.
Kintan, too, said he preferred thorough document-sharing to one-on-one onboarding meetings and shadowing. “Increased documentation makes it easier for new employees to understand the rhythm of the organization,” he explained. “The right support and mentorship structure can also be crucial,” he added.
Diversity is a crucial feature of remote teams
Sumir asked leaders about the importance of diversity in remote teams.Aditya said, “Remote work helps companies access a bigger pool of talent, which organically creates diversity.” This has worked well in LinkedIn’s interest, he added.
Kintan commented that remote work is inclusive of different races and ethnicities and different personality types. “Hiring remotely instead of locally has helped bring forth newer perspectives and diversity of thought,” he explained.
Aabhas called remote work a significant “bias remover” during the hiring process. “Biases that would apply during in-person interviews disappear in remote hiring,” he said. In-person interviews draw attention to dressing styles, features, and overall appearance, while remote hiring doesn’t, he added.
Eric Nguyen, Head of Engineering, Getaround, revealed that affinity groups—groups of people from similar backgrounds and their allies—have become an important social space for employees at his company. Himself a member of affinity groups like Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Eric added that such groups have helped support many meaningful conversations.
The group of leaders also discussed everything from hiring strategies for the hybrid world to the importance of proactive communication. Watch the entire conversation here.
Head here to watch a recording of the Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic Conference.
Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic is sponsored by Turing.com. With Turing, hiring and managing exceptionally talented, pre-vetted remote software developers is automated, speedy, and affordable. Companies have access to a global talent pool of top 1% of 700K+ Turing developers across 140+ countries. 200+ companies, including those backed by Google Ventures, Andreessen, Founders Fund, Kleiner, and Bloomberg, have hired Turing remote software engineers.
Tell us the skills you need and we'll find the best developer for you in days, not weeks.
Silicon Valley tech leaders shared insights on retaining top talent, engaging distributed teams, and succeeding in the post-pandemic new normal at Turing’s Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic conference, held on May 13, 2021.
Silicon Valley tech leaders shared insights on retaining top talent, engaging distributed teams, and succeeding in the post-pandemic new normal at Turing’s Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic conference, held on May 13, 2021.
“Prepping for the New Normal: To Office or Not To Office,” the first panel of the conference, featured experts from Postmates/Uber, Cushman & Wakefield, and VergeSense. The panel discussed creating positive outcomes for companies navigating the post-pandemic world and overcoming the challenges of managing various engineering teams, from all-remote to hybrid.
Key highlights of the conversation:
Workers will lead the way
Moderator Akshay Thakor, SVP of Operations, Turing, kicked off the discussion by asking the panel of leaders to share their vision of the post-pandemic workplace.
Gabe Burke, Managing Director, Cushman & Wakefield, said that workers—not employers—will decide how the new normal will look. “There’s nothing more important than recruiting top talent. If the talent insists on hybrid or remote work, most companies will follow,” he explained.
Agreeing, Hetal Shah, VP of Engineering, Postmates/Uber, said, “Companies that don’t provide flexibility will see an increase in attrition. This will drive change.”
Nellie Hayat, Head of Workplace Transformation, VergeSense, explained that leadership teams are out of touch with employees. This lost connection has led to a disconnect between what management teams want and what employees need, she added.
To prove this disconnect, Gabe shared a powerful statistic: Only 4% of employers believe that remote workers prefer full-time, in-person work. Yet, 28% of them plan to ask employees to return to in-person, full-time. He cautioned against this, saying, “Talent will get hybrid or remote work if they demand it.”
— Turing.com – The Future of Work is Remote (@turingcom) May 13, 2021
Teams that engage with each other stay together
Akshay further asked the panel about the challenges and opportunities of retaining global talent pools.
In response, Gabe highlighted one such challenge: helping employees connect with the company’s goals. He said that physical work environments make it easier for employees to understand a company’s vision. Remotely, it’s difficult to show workers how each individual contribution brings value to the company, he added.
“Employees can feel disengaged in remote settings,” agreed Nellie. She continued, “Such settings often lack frameworks of support for employee engagement.” Nellie suggested using tools specifically to identify and measure engagement.
Agreeing, Hetal stressed the importance of occasional in-person interactions to engage remote teams. He recounted his experience at eBay as an example: His globally distributed team conducted offsites at the start of every quarter. This brought the team together to discuss essential strategies and exchange crucial feedback.
Trust is a critical factor in the employer-employee relationship
Akshay asked the group to share tips to help employers and workers succeed in the new normal.
“It is vital for employers to trust their workers,” Hetal commented. “Give employees the ownership and responsibility to be successful,” he added.
This trusting relationship should be mutual. Hetal asked employees to feel comfortable asking for help from leadership teams. He encouraged them to be transparent about their work schedule to find the right work-life balance.
The group further discussed everything from strategies for supporting remote and hybrid teams to nurturing employees’ talents. Catch the entire conversation here.
Head here to watch the rest of the Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic Conference and hear leaders from LinkedIn, Amazon, Postmates/Uber, and more top companies share valuable insights.
Tell us the skills you need and we'll find the best developer for you in days, not weeks.
Engineering Leaders from Amazon, LinkedIn, Postmates/Uber Share Insights for Building Successful Remote Teams Post-Pandemic.
Engineering Leaders from Amazon, LinkedIn, Postmates/Uber Share Insights for Building Successful Remote Teams Post Pandemic
Creating opportunities for rapport building among team members, understanding employee needs post-pandemic, and supporting downtime for remote workers were three of the key insights engineering leaders and remote work experts shared at Turing’s Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic conference. Turing leaders also discussed exciting new product updates to Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud.
The virtual conference, held May 13, 2021, to discuss sourcing, vetting, onboarding, and managing remote software teams in a post-pandemic world, featured speakers from Amazon, LinkedIn, Cushman & Wakefield, Postmates, and WestBridge Capital Partners, as well as several fast-scaling startups. #ScalingPostPandemic was the latest in Turing’s series of quarterly virtual conferences.
Top takeaways from the event:
Talent will rule the day
Moderator Akshay Thakor (Turing) kicked off the first panel discussion, “Prepping for the New Normal,” by asking leaders about their vision of the post-pandemic world.
Gabe Burke (Cushman & Wakefield) and Hetal Shah (Uber/Postmates) both declared that talent will drive workplace transformation in the new normal. “If the talent insists on hybrid or remote working models, then most companies will eventually give in to their needs,” said Gabe.
Hetal agreed, saying, “Companies that can provide flexibility to their employees—whether it’s a hybrid approach or something similar—are going to be winners.”
Nellie Hayat (VergeSense) pointed out that, currently, leadership teams are out of touch with employees’ needs for flexibility. “There’s a gap between what employers want and the reality of what employees need,” she explained.
Gabe cited a survey by Littler to show this disconnect. 71% of employers surveyed believe that most employees would prefer a hybrid model; only 4% believe that most employees who work remotely would like to return to full-time, in-person work. Despite this, 28% of employers plan on having most employees return full-time and in person.
The group further discussed strategies for retaining talent pools, questions for remote leaders to reflect on, and advice for remote workers. Watch the full discussion here.
Boundaryless teams need boundaries too
Emma Giles (Sophya) kicked off the fireside chat, “How Does LinkedIn Approach Remote Work?”, by asking LinkedIn VP of Engineering Heather McKelvey to share her own experience and learnings from going all-remote.
— Turing.com – The Future of Work is Remote (@turingcom) May 13, 2021
Heather emphasized the need for setting boundaries. Working from home can cause high-performance teams to lose track of the number of hours they work, causing burnout, she explained.
“If you’re going to maintain high performance, you should also maintain the ability to relax and turn off,” she said.
Emma agreed, sharing her experience with her own team. “Performance wanes if we continue to stay on all the time.”
Heather explained a solution to potential burnout that LinkedIn has developed. LinkedIn shuts down twice a year for one week. This year, the company realized employees weren’t taking time off due to the pandemic and the shift to remote. To help workers cope, the firm closed for an extra week in April, Heather said.
Heather said her own method of setting boundaries includes going completely offline for at least two 30 minute slots per day. Other colleagues, she mentioned, cope by working six hours a day. “Working six hours as a high-performer is better than working ten hours while feeling 50%.”
Emma and Heather also discussed tactics for mentoring remote teams, celebrating team wins, and connecting with each other. Catch the full conversation here.
PS: Turing’s readers can get two months of free access to a private Sophya digital office for teams of any size by contacting emma@sophya.ai.
The key to remote success: deliberate personal communication
Two panels—“What Does Remote Look Like for the Enterprise?” and “How Should Startups Think About Remote Work and Distributed Teams Today?”—found common ground at #ScalingPostPandemic around the importance of communication.
Leaders from both the enterprise and startup panels said proactive, intentional personal communication between remote team members is critical to success.
— Turing.com – The Future of Work is Remote (@turingcom) May 13, 2021
In the enterprise panel, Aditya Modi (LinkedIn) explained the reasoning behind this to moderator Sumir Chadha (WestBridge Capital Partners): relationships get built organically within on-premise teams. Remote teams, however, require more effort. “When everyone is remote, you must carry out team bonding deliberately,” Aditya said.
Kintan Brahmbhatt (Amazon) said frequent one-on-one calls, catch-ups with colleagues, and personal chats are important strategies for ensuring teams bond as a unit.
In the startup panel, Greg Moulton (PocketBuildings) also cited a lack of personal communication as a potential problem. He stressed strengthening relationships in remote teams with in-person meetings.
“We want to bring the company to our employees,” Greg explained. He said he plans to move his team around to different members’ localities, enable them to experience different cultures, and get to know each other on a deeper level.
Similarly, Tray Lewin (AIKON) mentioned the significance of continuous engagement in onboarding and mentoring new employees. “You need to be proactive and regularly ask people if they’re getting what they need,” he said.
The startup panel also touched upon hiring best practices, remote work surprises, and transitioning to boundaryless work. Head here for the full conversation.
Meanwhile, the enterprise panel also discussed diversity in engineering teams, onboarding new employees, and effective distributed meetings. Watch the complete session here.
Turing’s Co-Founder & CTO Vijay Krishnan, along with Chul Kwon, Senior Growth Product Manager, and Rivers Evans, Director of Sales, showcased the latest updates to Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud. Designed to help companies better source, vet, and manage remote developers, the updates included:
A unique self-serve system that allows customers to instantly find pre-vetted software developers based upon their exact needs, easily set up interviews, and hire developers they choose within days vs. weeks or months required for traditional approaches to hiring software engineers.
Enhanced deep developer profiles, that provide rich representations of a developer’s strengths, experience, and expertise across a wide range of capabilities, all, validated by Turing’s intelligent vetting platform.
Significant advancements to Turing’s ML-powered vetting system, including the ability to accurately predict an individual developer’s likelihood of being a good fit for a customer’s specific role or needs.
The event concluded with an urgent call-to-action from Turing’s CEO and Co-Founder Jonathan and Ashu Garg, Turing investor and co-founder at WestBridge Capital Partners. Jonathan and Ashu spotlighted the ongoing COVID-19 surge in India and shared how event attendees could help through support of One More Breath, which aims to provide beds with oxygen support in the hardest-hit Indian regions. To donate, visit onemorebreath.org. You can also help by spreading the word through their Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
Tell us the skills you need and we'll find the best developer for you in days, not weeks.
Hear from Silicon Valley engineering managers and remote work experts at Turing’s Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic Conference, on May 13th from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT.
The pandemic drove a rapid — and in many cases unplanned — shift to remote work across Silicon Valley and the US. Now as we move into the post-pandemic world, engineering leaders at fast-scaling startups and global enterprises are asking themself how the new “normal” will yet again change the way they source, vet, hire and manage software development teams.
Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic, Turing’s next event in a series of quarterly virtual conferences, is designed to provide insights and answers that will help engineering managers lead their teams into the post-pandemic future. Attendees will hear from Silicon Valley senior engineering leaders and remote work experts from companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Postmates, among many others.
Agenda Highlights
Register today to hear from Silicon Valley engineering managers and remote work experts at Turing’s Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic Conference, on May 13th from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT.
Prepping for the New Normal: A detailed discussion with engineering leaders on how to prepare for the new normal, from all-remote to hybrid teams.
How to Scale Up in a Post Pandemic World: An insightful chat among CEOs and founders of fast-scaling startups on how the pandemic has changed the conventional approach to scaling and managing software teams and what new strategies they are employing to drive continued success.
Post-Pandemic Management of Enterprise Software Dev Teams: A conversation with senior leaders of enterprise-scale engineering teams on the best strategies for leading such teams in the post-pandemic new “normal.”
Leading High-Performance Remote-First Teams: A fireside chat between experts on building meaningful connections in our virtual world.
Evolution to the Intelligent Talent Cloud: A deep dive into how the Intelligent Talent Cloud will change the way companies find, vet, hire, and manage engineers.
Hiring Pain Points and How to Fix Them: A sneak peek into how Turing’s boundaryless software can solve common hiring challenges.
Key Speakers
Kintan Brahmbhatt, GM, Amazon, where he leads global product teams responsible for the Amazon Music experience
Heather McKelvey, Vice President of Engineering at LinkedIn, and former engineering leader at MyVest, Basho, and Netscape/AOL
Hetal Shah, ex-VP of Product & Operations at Postmates, which Uber recently acquired in a $2.65B deal
Gabe Burke, Managing Director at Cushman & Wakefield, one of the largest real estate services firms in the world
Aabhas Sharma, Director of Engineering at Uber — by way of its Postmates acquisition — and former Tech Lead/Manager at Sosh
Eric Nguyen, Head of Engineering at Getaround, a car-sharing platform with 5 million users and a presence in 300 cities and 7 countries
Nellie Hayat, Head of Workplace Transformation at VergeSense, a Y-Combinator backed workplace analytics platform
Sumir Chadha, Co-founder & Managing Director at WestBridge Capital Partners, a $3.3B fund previously known as Sequoia Capital India
Aditya Modi, Sr. Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, where he leads two teams in creating product architecture to serve 700M+ LinkedIn members
Palash Soni, Co-Founder at Goldcast, which counts Underscore, Afore, and AngelList’s Access Fund among its backers
Tray Lewin, Co-Founder, CTO at AIKON, and former CTO at Abaka Inc, Connect, and Stream Productivity
Greg Moulton, Senior Vice President at Pocket Buildings and former Director at HELIX RE. Inc
Mark Derbecker, Vice President of Engineering at Seeq, an analytics platform that has raised a total of $115.2M in funding
Christopher Bunting, Former Engineering Manager, Abstract, a design intelligence platform with customers like Cisco, Microsoft, and Zendesk
Jonathan Siddharth, CEO & Founder at Turing.com
Akshay Thakor, SVP of Operations at Turing and former VP Ops at Postmates
To learn how these engineering leaders and remote work experts are adapting their management styles to the new normal, register today.
In the post-pandemic world, leading high-performance remote-first teams will be the top priority for engineering leaders. To enhance productivity and streamline the scaling process, Turing can help companies hire remote development teams.
With a talent pool of more than 3 million developers, experienced team leaders, managers, and developer success specialists, Turing is well equipped to handle remote developer teams on your behalf. Visit the Hire page for more information.
The future is Boundaryless! What about you?
Boundaryless: #ScalingPostPandemic is sponsored by Turing.com. With Turing, hiring and managing exceptionally talented, pre-vetted remote software developers is automated, speedy, and affordable. Companies have access to a global talent pool of the top 1% of 3M+ Turing developers across 150+ countries. 900+ companies, including those backed by Google Ventures, Andreessen, Founders Fund, Kleiner, and Bloomberg, have hired Turing remote software engineers.
Tell us the skills you need and we'll find the best developer for you in days, not weeks.
Turing’s Vijay Krishnan, Zan Doan, Chul Kwon, and Alex Sung explain the science behind the world’s most-advanced vetting and matching system
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The fourth and final session of the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere conference saw an all-Turing exec team explaining how they built the world’s most-advanced vetting and matching system to match developers from across the globe with top Silicon Valley opportunities.
The speakers for this session included Turing.com co-founder and CTO Vijay Krishnan, VP of engineering Zan Doan, senior growth product manager Chul Kwon, and senior product manager Alex Sung.
Describing the reason behind the consistent increase in the number of customers demanding Turing developers, Vijay said: “The reasons are threefold—intelligent vetting, speed of hiring, and scalable quality control.”
The panelists also shed light on several other innovative Turing products generating significant value for both companies and developers.
Zan told the audience how Turing uses the lessons from Facebook, Google, Uber, and other top engineering organizations to produce an intelligent vetting engine.
He said: “At Turing, we cover all important vetting areas that help us to vet great engineers.”
“We created more than 100 automated assessments that not only cover the vetting standards followed in the Bay Area but also assess other critical aspects of an engineer,” Zan added.
Zan also explained how Turing’s intelligent management system addresses the three main concerns relating to remote work—communication, performance, and management.
He said: “For communication, we have daily standups, bi-weekly 1-on-1s and time zone overlap; for performance and productivity tracker, we have performance reviews, Turing virtual machines; and for ease of management, we have payments, contracts, and billing security.”
During his demo, Chul helped the audience understand how Turing’s automated seniority assessment test, algorithm coding interview, and automated vetting flows help companies hire top engineers in days rather than weeks.
“By leveraging data science, we have reduced vetting time to just six hours. Radically reduced vetting time means you can have the world’s best engineers, not in sixty days but less than a week. The purpose of Turing is to help you get your dream engineers on-demand,” Chul said.
Next, Alex decoded Turing’s deep developer profile with a crisp and clear presentation. “Turing developer profiles are detailed, comprehensive, continuously updating, representations of our developers. They only show validated skills, and on-the-job performance data enrich them,” he said.
Alex also spoke about the Turing Workspace and the Turing Virtual Machine’s importance in managing remote talent efficiently and keeping firms’ code safe, respectively.
In the end, Vijay explained the data science and machine learning efforts at Turing and how they helped the company in building deep developer profiles, powering its vetting process, and sourcing from a wider developer pool.
The session helped the audience understand Turing’s ‘deep jobs’ platform better and how it helps companies find the best remote developers across skills with the push of a button.
The guest list for the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere conference included Darren Murph, Head of Remote, GitLab; Pravin Desale, SVP of SDS and Appliances, Veritas; Suneela Joshi, Sr. Director of Engineering, Abbott Laboratories; Chris Herd, CEO, Firstbase; Anna Chukaeva, Co-Founder / COO, Carta Healthcare; Job van der Voort, CEO, Remote.com; Henrik Hussfelt, Director of Engineering, Proxy; Andy O’Dower, Veteran Product Engineering Leader, Former Head of Product, Carlease.com and Alex Bouaziz, CEO, Deel among others.
All the sessions of the event are now streaming on YouTube. Head over toTuring’s YouTube channeland let us know what you liked the most about each session in the comment section.
Join a network of the world's best developers and get long-term remote software jobs with better compensation and career growth.
Firstbase’s Chris Herd, Remote.com’s Job van der Voort, and Deel’s Alex Bouaziz join Jonathan Siddharth to discuss remote work at Turing Boundaryless event
An all-CEO panel joined Turing.com co-founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth on 18 Feb 2021 for the third session of the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere conference to talk about the unique challenges and opportunities that a remote workforce brings for organizations.
Chris Herd, CEO, Firstbase; Job van der Voort, CEO, Remote.com and Alex Bouaziz, CEO, Deel, were at their absolute best as they shared their ideas on how to create seamless remote work culture.
Chris kick-started the conversation by sharing his view on how remote work can benefit a company’s culture and its employees. “What many companies are doing right now is replicating the office environment remotely, and that’s causing them to miss many of the benefits,” Chris said.
He urged organizations to look at remote work as a ‘new thing’ and take advantage of the things that are different about distributed teams.
Describing how he sees remote work, Job said: “Remote work allows you to live your life, and work is just a facet of that. I can live wherever I want. I can earn money wherever I want.”
Talking about how remote-first companies could help their employees forge strong interpersonal relationships, both Alex and Job agreed that organizations should try to understand people’s hobbies and express themselves via virtual games, hangouts, etc.
Responding to Jonathan’s question on what CEOs building boundaryless companies can achieve with a remote workforce, Chris said: “Rather than hiring the best person in a 30-mile radius of an office, you can hire the best person anywhere that you can afford for every single role. So there’s this massive talent arbitrage that companies can now fish in a global talent pool, which is incredibly important.”
“The second part is efficiency,” Chris added. “Not only are our employees more productive and efficient as they’re not distracted in the same way that they are in an open plan environment, but we’re also far more cost-efficient because we’re not spending $15,000 to $50,000 per worker per year on office space,” he added.
Answering the same question, Alex said: “Many companies don’t understand that being distributed means establishing trust. It means that you will not be able to check if all your teammates have their greenlight on Slack every day. That’s just not going to work.”
“From a trust angle, as long as you understand the mechanism that is right for your team, then you’re setting up the right culture,” Alex added.
Along with the above issues, the panelists also shed light on a host of other problems like hybrid work, disadvantages of being globally distributed, setting up a good home office, time zone management, communication tools, processes, workflows, etc.
There was one more thing apart from the quality of the discussion that grabbed the public’s attention during the session — Job’s webcam and workspace set-up.
And to the delight of the live audience, Job shared the list of equipment he uses, including his Sony webcam. He also took the opportunity to highlight the importance of ergonomic chairs and desks and how companies should consider providing a budget to employees for it. He also advocated for having a monitor and not just the laptop while working.
“These are simple things that don’t have to be expensive. They make a huge difference in long-term health,” Job said.
The session gave the audience an excellent opportunity to listen to three of the best remote work experts and understand how they handle highly-productive distributed teams.
Apart from these three, a long list of Silicon Valley engineering leaders shared their ideas at the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event. The speaker list included some of the best thought leaders like Darren Murph, Head of Remote, GitLab; Pravin Desale, SVP of SDS and Appliances, Veritas; Suneela Joshi, Sr Director of Engineering, Abbott Laboratories; Anna Chukaeva, Co-Founder / COO, Carta Healthcare; Henrik Hussfelt, Director of Engineering, Proxy; Andy O’Dower, Veteran Product Engineering Leader, Former Head of Product, Carlease.com, among others.
You can watch all the Turing Boundaryless sessions: #BuildFromAnywhere conference on our YouTube channel here and let us know in the comment section which speaker gave you the best insight about remote work.
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Pravin Desale, Suneela Joshi, Anna Chukaeva, Henrik Hussfelt, Andy O’Dower explain how to manage remote developers in Turing’s #BuildFromAnywhere conference.
A panel of high-profile engineering leaders joined Turing.com CRO Prakash Gupta for the second session of the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event on 18 February 2021 to share their experiences managing remote developers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The guest list for the second session included Pravin Desale, SVP of SDS and Appliances, Veritas; Suneela Joshi, Sr. Director of Engineering, Abbott Laboratories; Anna Chukaeva, Co-Founder / COO, Carta Healthcare; Henrik Hussfelt, Director of Engineering, Proxy, and Andy O’Dower, Veteran Product Engineering Leader, Former Head of Product at Carlease.com.
From challenges to solutions, the panelists touched upon various issues regarding remote teams. They also revealed their first preference when it comes to fully-remote or hybrid. Here are the key takeaways from the session in case you missed it.
Describing the hurdles that his team faced during the early months of the pandemic, Pravin said. However, his organization had to deal with many challenges starting from product development processes to customers’ data safety. They learned a lot out of those problems.
“I think it has made our company better for the future. There’s no question about it,” Pravin said.
Expressing similar thoughts, Suneela said: “We were forced to take on remote, but it has worked out well.”
She also explained how her company tried a mix of remote and office-going employees to mitigate the challenges.
Henrik, who was one of Proxy’s first remote engineers, while sharing his experience, said: “When Covid hit, the whole company had to do what we did every day. But getting the organization to get to the same state took quite a while.”
Andy, who is now with live streaming platform Wowza, told the audience that they had to make some changes and break some old tools and some old habits as part of the leadership team.
“I think we were able to grow the business certainly and help customers in a time of need, but it did require both company changes and a roadmap change in our product,” he said.
During her turn, Anna said that the challenges for her organization were all about the people. “We need to build trust. And trust is hard to build, especially if somebody is remote and in a different time zone. How are we going to do that?” she said. The answer she explained was in listening to your team members and implementing their feedback.
Moving ahead, the speakers also spoke about the many steps that they took to overcome the initial challenges of remote work.
According to Henrik, he and his team took some ideas from GitLab’s guidebook and implemented them in their organization. He suggested anyone who needs to understand how to run a remote organization should look at that guidebook. You can find the link to the guidebook here.
Talking about distributed teams, Andy said that companies needed a mindset shift when it comes to remote first. He added that previously organizations used to hire candidates keeping the physical office model in mind, but now they must recruit people keeping remote work at the forefront.
While Pravin spoke about the importance of a sense of belonging and purpose at the individual engineer level, Suneela shed light on factors such as flexibility and empathy for remote employees.
Adding to these two speakers’ views, Anna talked about the significance of feedback in a distributed team and how she implemented a program to collect the proper feedback to solve many of the problems related to remote teams.
The session ended with a small poll where most of the panelists barring Henrik, said they expect their organizations to go for a hybrid remote set-up in a post-Covid world. Henrik voted in favor of a fully-remote setup.
You can watch the entire session on Turing’s YouTube channel and let us know in the comment section what you liked the most about the conversation.
This post concludes our recap of the second of the four sessions of the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event. Keep checking this space for highlights from the rest of the sessions.
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Top engineering leaders who have built large, remote developer teams for tech unicorns, pre-IPO companies, and enterprises came together at the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event on 18 February 2021 to discuss the strategies, tactics, and tools for creating and managing high-productivity remote teams. Turing.com co-founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth kicked off the event with opening… View Article
Top engineering leaders who have built large, remote developer teams for tech unicorns, pre-IPO companies, and enterprises came together at the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event on 18 February 2021 to discuss the strategies, tactics, and tools for creating and managing high-productivity remote teams.
Turing.com co-founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth kicked off the event with opening remarks where he elaborated about the massive advantages of being a remote-first company and why Silicon Valley tech giants are going for distributed teams.
“The new way is to look for the best people in the world who could contribute to your company’s success, not the best people who happen to be living near your office,” Jonathan said.
The guest list for the conference included Darren Murph, Head of Remote, GitLab; Pravin Desale, SVP of SDS and Appliances, Veritas; Suneela Joshi, Sr. Director of Engineering, Abbott Laboratories; Chris Herd, CEO, Firstbase; Anna Chukaeva, Co-Founder / COO, Carta Healthcare; Job van der Voort, CEO, Remote.com; Henrik Hussfelt, Director of Engineering, Proxy; Andy O’Dower, Veteran Product Engineering Leader, Former Head of Product, Carlease.com and Alex Bouaziz, CEO, Deel among others.
The much-awaited event delivered what it promised and much more as all the sessions were full of solid nuggets of wisdom. Here are the key takeaways from each session of the event in case you missed it.
1st Session: Secrets of Running High-Performance Remote Teams
GitLab’s Head of Remote, Darren Murph, joined Jonathan for the first session and discussed the do’s and don’ts behind successful remote-first companies. The conversation was full of new ideas as the duo touched upon various issues ranging from the importance of culture in remote work to asynchronous communication to time zone management.
Answering Jonathan’s questions, Darren explained some of the key concepts of remote work like ‘transparency and belonging,’ ‘psychological safety,’ ‘values fit,’ ‘documentation,’ etc., in detail.
“Many companies haven’t drawn the parallel between transparency in your work and belonging in your culture. But what we believe is that the more transparency and visibility that the entire team has to each other’s work, the easier it is for people to feel like they belong.” Darren said.
“Belonging is crucial to culture, especially in a remote environment,” he added.
During the session, Darren also shared his views about remote-first and hybrid-remote companies.
2nd Session: Managing Remote Engineers – Lessons from the Field
Turing.com CRO Prakash Gupta moderated the second session featuring renowned engineering leaders including Pravin Desale, Suneela Joshi, Anna Chukaeva, Andy O’Dower, and Henrik Hussfelt.
The high-profile panelists, who had gone through the challenges of managing remote teams during the initial months of the Covid-19 pandemic, gave the audience a unique opportunity to understand the key lessons that they had learned from the field.
“Remote-first is a mindset that you must apply to every aspect of your management,” Andy said.
Anna Chukeva, Co-Founder at @carta_health, joined us last week at the Boundaryless #BuildFromAnywhere event to discuss how she understands remote engineers’ needs. ?????
— Turing.com – Remote Work is The Future of Work (@turingcom) February 26, 2021
The engineering leaders also discussed the formulae that they implemented during the pandemic to continue to hire, onboard, and define success for a remote software engineer.
The session ended with a small poll where most of the panelists, barring Henrik, said they expect their organizations to go for a hybrid-cum-remote set-up in a post-Covid world.
3rd Session: Avoiding the Pitfalls of Managing a Global Remote Workforce
A new ‘remote-work mafia’ joined Jonathan for the penultimate session to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities to create a seamless, remote work culture. Firstbase’s Chris Herd, Remote.com’s Job van der Voort, and Deel’s Alex Bouaziz were at their absolute best during the conversation to give the audience an enthralling panel discussion.
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Darren Murph, GitLab’s head of remote, shares the do’s and don’ts of high-performance remote teams at Turing’s Boundaryless #BuildFromAnywhere Conference
If you ever had a question regarding the successful management of remote teams, then you need to listen to GitLab’s Head of Remote, Darren Murph. Darren leads people, culture, operations, inclusivity, marketing, employer, branding, and communications at GitLab, one of the world’s most successful remote startups with more than 1,300 employees distributed across 67 countries.
Murph recently sat down with Turing.com CEO Jonathan Siddharth for a conversation at the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere Conference and revealed his secrets for hiring and running high-performance remote teams.
He touched upon various issues ranging from the importance of culture in remote work to asynchronous communication to time zone management. He also shared a few interesting suggestions for remote-first as well as hybrid-remote companies. Here are the key takeaways from the session in case you missed it.
Transparency and Belonging
Keeping everyone working together as one unit when they’re all remote is a challenge for any company. So, when Murph was asked by Siddharth how GitLab handles such an issue, he credited Gitlab’s tooling and culture for successfully addressing the problem. He also pointed out the significance of ‘transparency’ and ‘belonging’ for healthy relationships.
“Many companies haven’t drawn the parallel between transparency in your work and belonging in your culture. But what we believe is that the more transparency and visibility that the entire team has to each other’s work, the easier it is for people to feel like they belong,” Murph said.
“Belonging is crucial to culture, especially in a remote environment.”
Asynchronous Communication
In remote work, different people work at different times of the day. And this is where, according to Murph, asynchronous communication becomes crucial.
“Asynchronous is what I call the superpower of remote teams. That is the sign that you’ve evolved past the skeuomorphic ‘shift and lift type of approach,’ where you try to copy the office environment and paste it into a virtual environment, into one where you’re much more thoughtful about how work can take shape and take place,” Murph said.
During the conversation with Siddharth, he also stressed that it is not just a matter of efficiency and productivity; it is also about respecting the other person’s time.
“We think it’s a matter of respect. If you can move a project forward without demanding that someone be online at the same time as you, you’re fundamentally more respectful for [Sic] their time.”
Signaling is Important
Murph also touched upon the subject of a post-Covid-19 world. Siddharth asked what possible mistakes firms should avoid after the pandemic. Darren said companies should not let their exec teams rush back to offices as it has a negative signaling effect.
“If you have a long-term lease on a building, and you will have people back into that building, make sure that the executives stay out to help force your workflows. We call these forcing functions to be more inclusive and remote first.”
And for those who are considering a hybrid-remote structure, Murph urged them to be very careful. “It’s fundamentally more difficult to manage and make equitable two different playing fields compared to one or the other.”
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Where You Work or How You Work?
One of the key things that Murph told Siddharth during the conversation was that a lot of the proven principles on all-remote and remote-first are equally applicable to hybrid-remote or even co-located organizations.
“Remote first isn’t about where you work. It’s about how you work. So if someone chooses to go to the office, they shouldn’t work fundamentally differently than if they’re at their home. So when you’re thinking about what are the considerations to make sure hybrid goes well, convert all of your work processes so that they’re equally seamless away from the office as they are in the office,” he said.
Talking about some of the well-known tools that GitLab uses, Murph explained why they just use existing tools in innovative ways.
Answering Siddharth’s question about using the popular app Slack at GitLab, Murph said that Slack messages expire after 90 days at his organization.
And the reason behind this is that Gitlab wants its staff to work in their internal platform as it is “far more transparent and less siloed than working in Slack.”
Now, like many, you might be wondering how and why GitLab uses Slack then?
According to Murph, people at GitLab don’t use Slack for work; instead, they use it to communicate with their colleagues about other things like parenting and hiking and cooking, etc. “It’s a lot easier to use that as a bit of a virtual water cooler and have human-to-human conversations when you are also expected to do work in the same medium.”
Culture of Documenting Everything
The Head of Remote also explained the vital role that documentation plays for a company.
“It makes your day more efficient when you don’t have to answer things over and over and over. If you answered it once, you’re able to share the link around,” he said.
“If it’s not in the handbook, it doesn’t exist. And we’re serious about that. We try very hard to make sure that we ask others what we would expect from ourselves, which is document, document, document. So the people around the world and whatever [Sic] timezone they’re in have more access to that information.”
Psychological Safety
When asked by Siddharth to give a piece of advice that CEOs of remote-first companies can follow to bring people together, Murph said, “Create psychological safety so that people can be who they are.”
He believes that people in the leadership should encourage employees to bring their individualized stories back to the workplace.
“Those are the real stories that give you insight into who your colleagues are. And those stories are much more valuable than small talk about the weather. But it requires leadership to say, we trust that you can build culture outside of work, and we’re going to create a psychologically safe atmosphere for you to bring that back into work.”
Values Fit
Shedding light on one of the secrets behind GitLab’s success, Murph told the audience they take candidates through GitLab’s values during the interview to see if people align from a value standpoint.
“We don’t even hire for culture fit. We hire for values fit,” Darren said.
“As long as we’re assured that we’re both working in accordance to the same values, then we want all of that individual brought to work.”
In the end, Murph also shared the link to GitLab’s handbook on running remote-first teams while answering a couple of questions from the audience. You can watch the full session on Turing’s YouTube channel and let us know in the comment section what you liked the most about the conversation.
Apart from Murph, a long list of Silicon Valley engineering leaders shared their ideas at the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildfromAnywhere event. The speaker list included some of the best thought leaders like Pravin Desale, SVP of SDS and Appliances, Veritas; Suneela Joshi, Sr Director of Engineering, Abbott Laboratories; Chris Herd, CEO, Firstbase; Anna Chukaeva, Co-Founder / COO, Carta Healthcare; Job van der Voort, CEO, Remote.com; Henrik Hussfelt, Director of Engineering, Proxy; Andy O’Dower, Veteran Product Engineering Leader, Former Head of Product, Carlease.com; Alex Bouaziz, CEO, Deel among others.
This was the recap of the first of the four sessions of the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildfromAnywhere event. Keep checking this space for highlights from the rest of the sessions.
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Register Today to Hear from Silicon Valley Engineering Leaders and Remote Work Experts at Turing’s Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere Conference, on February 18th from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT Have you ever wondered how successful remote-first companies source, vet, and hire their offshore developers? Or how they manage remote teams at scale to solve for speed… View Article
Register Today to Hear from Silicon Valley Engineering Leaders and Remote Work Experts at Turing’s Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere Conference, on February 18th from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT
Have you ever wondered how successful remote-first companies source, vet, and hire their offshore developers? Or how they manage remote teams at scale to solve for speed and quality?
If you have, then here’s your chance to listen to the top minds in the business at the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event and find answers to the above questions.
Silicon Valley engineering leaders from fast-scaling startups and global brands will discuss the strategies behind successful remote software development teams. Register now to get an opportunity to learn how engineering leaders from Facebook, Google, Uber, and Stanford successfully solve the various problems that come with distributed teams.
These experts, who have built large, remote engineering teams for tech unicorns, pre-IPO companies, and global enterprises, will also present the latest strategies, tactics, and tools for creating and managing high-productivity remote teams.
The guest list for the much-awaited event includes some of the best thought leaders who will share their ideas with you live. Pravin Desale, SVP of SDS and Appliances, Veritas; Darren Murph, Head of Remote, GitLab; Suneela Joshi, Sr. Director of Engineering, Abbott Laboratories; Chris Herd, CEO, Firstbase; Anna Chukaeva, Co-Founder / COO, Carta Healthcare; Job van der Voort, CEO, Remote.com; Henrik Hussfelt, Director of Engineering, Proxy; Andy O’Dower, Veteran Product Engineering Leader, Former Head of Product, Carlease.com; Alex Bouaziz, CEO, Deel among others will be joining the event.
For more information, including the agenda, please visit the Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere event page.
Check back regularly to stay updated as we add additional speakers to the agenda.
The Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere will take place on February 18th, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. PT.
Turing Boundaryless: #BuildFromAnywhere is sponsored by Turing.com, an automated platform that lets companies hire Silicon Valley-caliber remote developers at the touch of a button from a global talent pool of more than 200,000 software engineers.
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