9 ms·

Interview with CTO and Co-founder of Zapier on Working with Remote Engineers

248 points by Riphyak 8y ago

woolvalley 8y ago
When I was onboarding with a remote company, we had an open hangouts video call and I was able ask the other guy questions whenever I needed. It was like being the same room together and it was pretty amazing. It's not something I see done that often, but if your 'remote in similar timezones' it does remove a friction point. We only did it for a day or two as part of getting set up with the new codebase, but I found it fairly effective.
crsv 8y ago
Solid marketing content.
- ryanwaggoner 8y ago
  Yeah, from the outside, it seems like they take remote seriously and do it very effectively: https://zapier.com/jobs/ https://zapier.com/jobs/ Glassdoor seems to agree: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Zapier-Reviews-E1196705.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Zapier-Reviews-E1196705.ht... Note: I have zero affiliation with Zapier, other than being a satisfied customer. Just happened to run across their hiring page today and was impressed.
bnchrch 8y ago
Anecdotally I'm finding this shift to remote work in some area's fascinating and powerful. My career started only about 5 years ago but over that time each position I've had has either been fully remote or had a remote aspect to it. The company I now work for had a similar start to zapier but with one key difference: the co-founders were opposed to remote work. However the market forces of hiring the right people pushed this venture to become remote and our team is now scattered across North America and Asia. I think we're going to continue to see companies moving in this direction and more "remote native" workers like myself come to expect it. Especially after visiting Canggu I don't think the trend is going to reverse itself.
- bryanh 8y ago
  We definitely believe the future of work is remote in nature. Physical locality is a vestige from days where manual work dominated -- knowledge work has no such constraint. People want autonomy, and not just in work -- but life too!
ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Remote is a management skill and an effective hiring advantage. 43% of American employees reported in 2017 working remote at least part of the time, and 31% of those are 80-100% remote, up from 24% in 2012. The world has changed and I don't think we're going back.
- bproven 8y ago
  Exactly - its nothing to fear if you are good manager. If the person is screwing around you will find out quickly when projects slip over and over.
  - crispinb 8y ago
    Resistance to remote work is very entrenched in my country (Australia). I suspect it's because competent management is very scarce here.
  - jcims 8y ago
    It's not just ensuring they are productive, it's also ensuring that they feel included and their voice isn't drowned out by the proximity and presence of the local team. So yes, nothing to fear, but it takes a little more tending to if you have a blended local/remote team.
  - matwood 8y ago
    Yep. Years ago when I was pushing us remote one of the owners asked “how will we know when people are working?”, to which I responded, “how do we know now?”
- otakucode 8y ago
  I have been waiting for a quite significant change in management culture for a few years now. It seems to me that a watershed moment is coming. So much thinking on the management level is drawn directly from the old manufacturing world and is such a tremendously poor fit for any form of mental work that something is going to have to give. In manufacturing, pushing for worker disposability makes sense. In mental work, it's suicide. In manufacturing, open floor plans and interruptions are fine. In mental work, it's death. In mental work, the best idea needs to win. And that's the case especially when the situation is nuanced. In-person communication generally hands every discussion to the person who is most outgoing, confident, or tallest. That generally results in the wrong idea winning and large amounts of time and resources being wasted. One of the big challenges I see is for management to avoid over-reliance on metrics. There's a famous quote whose attribution I don't recall that says "what you measure, you optimize" which is a warning. It is exceedingly easy to create perverse incentives and direct efforts toward optimizing a metric that actually hurts your progress toward the actual goal you want to accomplish. These are the places where a real leader can be instrumental. There are also many organizations that seek to reduce almost every task an employee does to a checklist or standard procedure. That made sense in the manufacturing world. But in mental work of any kind, most problems are going to be novel and, by necessity, so will be the solutions, which requires greater flexibility (and more trust extended to the worker). None of this even touches on the fact that human beings have very different fundamental capacities for mental work than they do for repetitive physical labor. If you attempt to do remote work and start by planning a system to monitor every keystroke and mouse movement to ensure that every action is productive, you'll burn out the most valuable people and those that remain will be working with a severe handicap. So many aspects of work seem ripe for change... maybe those thousands of studies done and ignored for the past few decades will come in handy.
bryanh 8y ago
Disclaimer: said CTO. Happy to answer any questions — though we definitely don’t presume we have all the answers, we’re constantly learning! We are also hiring remote engineers — https://zapier.com/jobs/ https://zapier.com/jobs/. Would lov to talk to anyone in the JS, k8s, and Python community!
- hitekker 8y ago
  I recently heard from friends of friends that Zapier conducts reference checks on its candidates without the candidates' permission. By that I mean: finding previous coworkers on LinkedIn, contacting them out-of-the-blue and asking for an appraisal of the person they may-or-may-not have once worked with. Is there any truth to this rumor?
  - clay_the_ripper 8y ago
    Is there something wrong with doing this?
    - trevelyan 8y ago
      Yes. They may not want people to know they are considering leaving their current job. And they may not keep their job if people find out they aren't fully committed.
    - godzillabrennus 8y ago
      It’s immoral behavior on the employers part to not ask for permission. IMHO it shows how they will be to work for if you take a job.
      - eloff 8y ago
        I don't get why people downvoted you. It is definitely expected that potential employers ask permission. People may apply while having a current job, and not wanting their boss to find out.
amanzi 8y ago
Anyone considered remote working as a part time job in addition to a traditional full time role?
- programmarchy 8y ago
  Moonlighting? I did that for awhile to build up my client base until I transitioned to full time consulting. Hard to do long term.
bluedino 8y ago
Hope you weren’t working with any Russian teams this last two weeks... internet shutdown has ruined protectivity
- rwmj 8y ago
  Can you expand on this? I work with some Russian open source developers. I heard the news about Russia blocking Telegram (we use IRC). Has it affected git hosting services and the like?
  - dijit 8y ago
    Telegram moved to the public cloud providers Google Cloud Platform and Amazon, meaning Russia was blocking a significant proportion of those providers IP Address space as Telegram moved servers around.
- LeonidBugaev 8y ago
  Anyone who works in IT knows how to setup and use VPN. Which I'm currently had to do as well (Russia).
lordnacho 8y ago
I work fully remote now too. Thoughts: - It helps that everyone is a senior dev on my current project. There's nobody on the team who needs to be handheld through anything. I've pretty much said "Welcome, I see you were able to build the project. Let's automate a Valgrind step in the CI pipeline". And like magic the new guy does a merge request with a Valgrind step soon after. - Being remote also means you are effectively only looking for senior staff, because you get so many CVs, why would you go for an unproven junior guy? You also tend to think young people are slackers, or someone on your team will. The only time I worked with someone fresh from a bootcamp was because she was inexpensive. Good worker though. - Tools: Slack, GitLab. They seem so intuitive, never met a dev who needed to be shown how they work. Slack for discussions. GitLab issues for specific issues. - Culture: wrong personalities are magnified. When you aren't talking to someone in person there's no facial feedback. If someone says something people don't like in person, they often get the feedback from the listeners quickly and are able to change tone. Online, this is not so easy. We had one guy who was being very aggressive in technical discussions, and it annoyed people. - Tools/Culture: some people are resistant to organising their work through issue tracking and version control. This was a huge problem at an onsite job I had years ago. If it had been remote, it would have been even more of a disaster. Part of the issue is when you write a bug report, you are implying someone has done something wrong. This is a terrible attitude. Along similar lines, if you create a goal like a milestone, you are again setting yourself up for failure if you don't reach it. What kind of people are prone think this way? Strategy quants whose job it is to deliver the magic that can't be found in any published work, and whose work is greatly affected by randomness. Now I'm sure they're not all like that, but the ones I worked with did seem to have rather fragile egos. - Culture: Not everyone wants to work remote. One guy left because he missed the camaraderie of the office, the on/off of being in or not. Of the people who love remote, a lot have families. Then there's the ones who use it to globetrot. Those two tend to not have an on/off. They're always kinda there, kinda not. - Culture: Meetings are drop-in, drop-out. In real life some people like being able to call a bunch of people into a room and have them stay there for questioning. I don't think I've ever met anyone who liked that. Online meetings are asynchronous. I might say something, then go to the bathroom without telling anyone, then come right back and catch up. People leave to get their kids, and you don't expect them to be right there. But coding work tends to accommodate that.
lishuaichao 8y ago
Solid marketing content.
danmaz74 8y ago
During the last 5 years I've been managing two fully remote small teams, across different time zones (one team CET+Philippines, the other one CET+India+Philippines). Some of my takeaways: * Doing a 15 minutes "daily standup" (we use hangouts, audio-only) is really, really useful. Of course, for some people the meeting won't be at the beginning of their day, but it can work all the same. It's the one thing that I would recommend the most: creating cohesion in a remote team is much more challenging than in person, and this helps a lot. Insist on everybody being on time: my teams are very, very flexible, except for this one rule. When somebody has a bad connection, they still participate in a group chat. * For task management we use Trello (with a kanban-like approach). It's great for asynchronous communication - in one of the two teams, we even use it to communicate with the customer; this only worked after we were able to "educate" the customer about a scrum-like approach. Only try it if you have a very collaborative relationship with the customer. * When there is the need to share longer specs than those that can fit on trello, we use google docs - the ability to collaborate both with real-time shared editing and with comments and suggestions is very valuable. * For brainstorming, drawing architectural diagrams, discussing design etc. I find murally a godsent: https://mural.co/ https://mural.co/ * For quick real-time communication we use chat (again, hangouts). But whenever I see that it takes more than just a few lines to finish talking, I suggest increasing the bandwidth and upgrading to an audio call with screen-sharing. Some people don't like that very much, but we saved hundreds of hours - and a lot of frustration - by doing this. * If the person you need isn't online right when you need them, we resort to comments on trello or just plain old email. * Not everybody can work well remotely - it requires A LOT of self-discipline and self-motivation. At the beginning, I hired some people even if I had some doubts about those traits, or I started having those doubts in the first weeks, and tried many different ways to motivate them and get better results. I never succeeded - this could have been my limitation, but grooming devs remotely is objectively much more difficult than doing that in person. So, my suggestion is: when in doubt, don't hire. If you have doubts early on, fire (I don't like doing that, but paid a very heavy toll in terms of stress when I didn't do it). Shameless plug: I'm currently looking for a career change. If interested, take a look at my profile :)
- keegancsmith 8y ago
  I can understand the "daily standup" being very useful to you as the manager. I'm interested if the engineers find it useful though. Personally, in both remote and local contexts I haven't found much value in them.
pcarolan 8y ago
What AV equipment do you use that you find indespensible?
- walshemj 8y ago
  From experience doing a bit of podcasting. 1 A proper professional external sound card 2 Pro / Semi Pro microphones no need for condensers etc a Sure SM58 is good enough. 3 for skype its often better to have dedicated skype drone machine and feed your audio into that. 4 a good video camera.
courtz 8y ago
I first heard about Zapier when I started my side project, https://parserr.com https://parserr.com. We have now actually been listed as an integration with them and Id still do anything to work there. Currently working as an engineering manager, id kill for an opening there as I so believe in their product and their remote first culture.

248 points by Riphyak 8y ago

When I was onboarding with a remote company, we had an open hangouts video call and I was able ask the other guy questions whenever I needed. It was like being the same room together and it was pretty amazing. It's not something I see done that often, but if your 'remote in similar timezones' it does remove a friction point. We only did it for a day or two as part of getting set up with the new codebase, but I found it fairly effective.

crsv 8y ago

Solid marketing content.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago
Yeah, from the outside, it seems like they take remote seriously and do it very effectively: https://zapier.com/jobs/ https://zapier.com/jobs/ Glassdoor seems to agree: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Zapier-Reviews-E1196705.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Zapier-Reviews-E1196705.ht... Note: I have zero affiliation with Zapier, other than being a satisfied customer. Just happened to run across their hiring page today and was impressed.

bnchrch 8y ago

Anecdotally I'm finding this shift to remote work in some area's fascinating and powerful. My career started only about 5 years ago but over that time each position I've had has either been fully remote or had a remote aspect to it. The company I now work for had a similar start to zapier but with one key difference: the co-founders were opposed to remote work. However the market forces of hiring the right people pushed this venture to become remote and our team is now scattered across North America and Asia. I think we're going to continue to see companies moving in this direction and more "remote native" workers like myself come to expect it. Especially after visiting Canggu I don't think the trend is going to reverse itself.

bryanh 8y ago
We definitely believe the future of work is remote in nature. Physical locality is a vestige from days where manual work dominated -- knowledge work has no such constraint. People want autonomy, and not just in work -- but life too!

ryanwaggoner 8y ago

Remote is a management skill and an effective hiring advantage. 43% of American employees reported in 2017 working remote at least part of the time, and 31% of those are 80-100% remote, up from 24% in 2012. The world has changed and I don't think we're going back.

bproven 8y ago
Exactly - its nothing to fear if you are good manager. If the person is screwing around you will find out quickly when projects slip over and over.
- crispinb 8y ago
  Resistance to remote work is very entrenched in my country (Australia). I suspect it's because competent management is very scarce here.
- jcims 8y ago
  It's not just ensuring they are productive, it's also ensuring that they feel included and their voice isn't drowned out by the proximity and presence of the local team. So yes, nothing to fear, but it takes a little more tending to if you have a blended local/remote team.
- matwood 8y ago
  Yep. Years ago when I was pushing us remote one of the owners asked “how will we know when people are working?”, to which I responded, “how do we know now?”
otakucode 8y ago
I have been waiting for a quite significant change in management culture for a few years now. It seems to me that a watershed moment is coming. So much thinking on the management level is drawn directly from the old manufacturing world and is such a tremendously poor fit for any form of mental work that something is going to have to give. In manufacturing, pushing for worker disposability makes sense. In mental work, it's suicide. In manufacturing, open floor plans and interruptions are fine. In mental work, it's death. In mental work, the best idea needs to win. And that's the case especially when the situation is nuanced. In-person communication generally hands every discussion to the person who is most outgoing, confident, or tallest. That generally results in the wrong idea winning and large amounts of time and resources being wasted. One of the big challenges I see is for management to avoid over-reliance on metrics. There's a famous quote whose attribution I don't recall that says "what you measure, you optimize" which is a warning. It is exceedingly easy to create perverse incentives and direct efforts toward optimizing a metric that actually hurts your progress toward the actual goal you want to accomplish. These are the places where a real leader can be instrumental. There are also many organizations that seek to reduce almost every task an employee does to a checklist or standard procedure. That made sense in the manufacturing world. But in mental work of any kind, most problems are going to be novel and, by necessity, so will be the solutions, which requires greater flexibility (and more trust extended to the worker). None of this even touches on the fact that human beings have very different fundamental capacities for mental work than they do for repetitive physical labor. If you attempt to do remote work and start by planning a system to monitor every keystroke and mouse movement to ensure that every action is productive, you'll burn out the most valuable people and those that remain will be working with a severe handicap. So many aspects of work seem ripe for change... maybe those thousands of studies done and ignored for the past few decades will come in handy.

bryanh 8y ago

Disclaimer: said CTO. Happy to answer any questions — though we definitely don’t presume we have all the answers, we’re constantly learning! We are also hiring remote engineers — https://zapier.com/jobs/ https://zapier.com/jobs/. Would lov to talk to anyone in the JS, k8s, and Python community!

hitekker 8y ago
I recently heard from friends of friends that Zapier conducts reference checks on its candidates without the candidates' permission. By that I mean: finding previous coworkers on LinkedIn, contacting them out-of-the-blue and asking for an appraisal of the person they may-or-may-not have once worked with. Is there any truth to this rumor?
- clay_the_ripper 8y ago
  Is there something wrong with doing this?
  - trevelyan 8y ago
    Yes. They may not want people to know they are considering leaving their current job. And they may not keep their job if people find out they aren't fully committed.
  - godzillabrennus 8y ago
    It’s immoral behavior on the employers part to not ask for permission. IMHO it shows how they will be to work for if you take a job.
    - eloff 8y ago
      I don't get why people downvoted you. It is definitely expected that potential employers ask permission. People may apply while having a current job, and not wanting their boss to find out.

amanzi 8y ago

Anyone considered remote working as a part time job in addition to a traditional full time role?

programmarchy 8y ago
Moonlighting? I did that for awhile to build up my client base until I transitioned to full time consulting. Hard to do long term.

bluedino 8y ago

Hope you weren’t working with any Russian teams this last two weeks... internet shutdown has ruined protectivity

rwmj 8y ago
Can you expand on this? I work with some Russian open source developers. I heard the news about Russia blocking Telegram (we use IRC). Has it affected git hosting services and the like?
- dijit 8y ago
  Telegram moved to the public cloud providers Google Cloud Platform and Amazon, meaning Russia was blocking a significant proportion of those providers IP Address space as Telegram moved servers around.
LeonidBugaev 8y ago
Anyone who works in IT knows how to setup and use VPN. Which I'm currently had to do as well (Russia).

lordnacho 8y ago

I work fully remote now too. Thoughts: - It helps that everyone is a senior dev on my current project. There's nobody on the team who needs to be handheld through anything. I've pretty much said "Welcome, I see you were able to build the project. Let's automate a Valgrind step in the CI pipeline". And like magic the new guy does a merge request with a Valgrind step soon after. - Being remote also means you are effectively only looking for senior staff, because you get so many CVs, why would you go for an unproven junior guy? You also tend to think young people are slackers, or someone on your team will. The only time I worked with someone fresh from a bootcamp was because she was inexpensive. Good worker though. - Tools: Slack, GitLab. They seem so intuitive, never met a dev who needed to be shown how they work. Slack for discussions. GitLab issues for specific issues. - Culture: wrong personalities are magnified. When you aren't talking to someone in person there's no facial feedback. If someone says something people don't like in person, they often get the feedback from the listeners quickly and are able to change tone. Online, this is not so easy. We had one guy who was being very aggressive in technical discussions, and it annoyed people. - Tools/Culture: some people are resistant to organising their work through issue tracking and version control. This was a huge problem at an onsite job I had years ago. If it had been remote, it would have been even more of a disaster. Part of the issue is when you write a bug report, you are implying someone has done something wrong. This is a terrible attitude. Along similar lines, if you create a goal like a milestone, you are again setting yourself up for failure if you don't reach it. What kind of people are prone think this way? Strategy quants whose job it is to deliver the magic that can't be found in any published work, and whose work is greatly affected by randomness. Now I'm sure they're not all like that, but the ones I worked with did seem to have rather fragile egos. - Culture: Not everyone wants to work remote. One guy left because he missed the camaraderie of the office, the on/off of being in or not. Of the people who love remote, a lot have families. Then there's the ones who use it to globetrot. Those two tend to not have an on/off. They're always kinda there, kinda not. - Culture: Meetings are drop-in, drop-out. In real life some people like being able to call a bunch of people into a room and have them stay there for questioning. I don't think I've ever met anyone who liked that. Online meetings are asynchronous. I might say something, then go to the bathroom without telling anyone, then come right back and catch up. People leave to get their kids, and you don't expect them to be right there. But coding work tends to accommodate that.

lishuaichao 8y ago

Solid marketing content.

danmaz74 8y ago

During the last 5 years I've been managing two fully remote small teams, across different time zones (one team CET+Philippines, the other one CET+India+Philippines). Some of my takeaways: * Doing a 15 minutes "daily standup" (we use hangouts, audio-only) is really, really useful. Of course, for some people the meeting won't be at the beginning of their day, but it can work all the same. It's the one thing that I would recommend the most: creating cohesion in a remote team is much more challenging than in person, and this helps a lot. Insist on everybody being on time: my teams are very, very flexible, except for this one rule. When somebody has a bad connection, they still participate in a group chat. * For task management we use Trello (with a kanban-like approach). It's great for asynchronous communication - in one of the two teams, we even use it to communicate with the customer; this only worked after we were able to "educate" the customer about a scrum-like approach. Only try it if you have a very collaborative relationship with the customer. * When there is the need to share longer specs than those that can fit on trello, we use google docs - the ability to collaborate both with real-time shared editing and with comments and suggestions is very valuable. * For brainstorming, drawing architectural diagrams, discussing design etc. I find murally a godsent: https://mural.co/ https://mural.co/ * For quick real-time communication we use chat (again, hangouts). But whenever I see that it takes more than just a few lines to finish talking, I suggest increasing the bandwidth and upgrading to an audio call with screen-sharing. Some people don't like that very much, but we saved hundreds of hours - and a lot of frustration - by doing this. * If the person you need isn't online right when you need them, we resort to comments on trello or just plain old email. * Not everybody can work well remotely - it requires A LOT of self-discipline and self-motivation. At the beginning, I hired some people even if I had some doubts about those traits, or I started having those doubts in the first weeks, and tried many different ways to motivate them and get better results. I never succeeded - this could have been my limitation, but grooming devs remotely is objectively much more difficult than doing that in person. So, my suggestion is: when in doubt, don't hire. If you have doubts early on, fire (I don't like doing that, but paid a very heavy toll in terms of stress when I didn't do it). Shameless plug: I'm currently looking for a career change. If interested, take a look at my profile :)

keegancsmith 8y ago
I can understand the "daily standup" being very useful to you as the manager. I'm interested if the engineers find it useful though. Personally, in both remote and local contexts I haven't found much value in them.

pcarolan 8y ago

What AV equipment do you use that you find indespensible?

walshemj 8y ago
From experience doing a bit of podcasting. 1 A proper professional external sound card 2 Pro / Semi Pro microphones no need for condensers etc a Sure SM58 is good enough. 3 for skype its often better to have dedicated skype drone machine and feed your audio into that. 4 a good video camera.

courtz 8y ago

I first heard about Zapier when I started my side project, https://parserr.com https://parserr.com. We have now actually been listed as an integration with them and Id still do anything to work there. Currently working as an engineering manager, id kill for an opening there as I so believe in their product and their remote first culture.