Thread by @JeffHandley

I’ve been in that boat as a hiring manager. I’ll share my story from SAP Concur to help shed some (positive) light on the situation, @daveaglick.

#remotework #culture

1/13

https://twitter.com/daveaglick/status/1208515621618671618

When our group was beginning to grow, we knew we needed to foster a remote culture to succeed over time. But the group was young and most of us were new to the company. Only a few folks had experience with distributed teams, and none of us had felt truly successful with it.

2/13

We wanted a sustainable approach for our remote culture, and that meant we needed to be confident that we could help remote folks succeed. I didn’t want our group’s shortcomings to reflect poorly on a remote engineer or lead them to be unhappy or isolated (and leave).

3/13

We needed to build a local culture that was ready to be good hosts, and hire the “right” remote folks to seed the group and patiently teach us how to be good hosts.

4/13

For a long time, we wouldn’t be someone’s first remote employer. With that rule of thumb to quickly identify the “right” candidates, we hired several remote folks while hiring lots of local junior engineers. We began learning the remote culture through a growth mindset.

5/13

We gave ourselves a couple years to get good at it. Remote folks were succeeding just as much as local folks. We were off to a good start.

Then we started breaking our “never be the first remote employer” rule “for the right candidates.”

6/13

After a while like that, we really felt confident in our group’s ability to host just about any remote team member. That’s when I wrote this post:

jeffhandley.com/2018-10-21/fos…

7/13

Then we started hiring some junior engineers as remote. And we started promoting remote engineers into management, and recruiting more aggressively remote than local. We had built a full team in Europe. And we hired in Canada.

8/13

And then through a reorg, our group expanded into Vancouver and Palo Alto and it was no big deal. The folks joining us were afraid of being isolated, but by then we were taking the distributed culture for granted because we no longer even thought about it.

9/13

I believe @SAPConcur’s UI Engineering group became a model for distributed teams that I’ll forever be proud of. But if we had hired the “wrong” remote candidates when we were starting, we would have stunted our growth and lost great talent along the way.

10/13

Like software, a distributed team culture requires a good foundational architecture. It doesn’t succeed by accident, and it won’t happen easily by just hiring folks remotely. You must grow the skill into the culture intentionally, and it won’t happen overnight.

11/13

Poor results from or attrition of remote engineers could likely lead to executive distrust of the remote culture, so the stakes are high. Many groups will only get one chance at becoming remote-friendly.

12/13

So if you see “remote for the right candidate,” I hope you’ll see that as a sign of awareness and growth. They have to start somewhere, and hopefully that’s with the right candidates to help them learn and grow and build a sustainable remote culture.

13/13