Chris Hart

Product Engineer

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

0100

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@sifrious Nice

[Alex Atallah @alexatallah]

A good security reputation will become even more of a moat

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@alexatallah smug https://t.co/qHvPCRnRh4

[Camilla Parisotto @camski]

People who adress themselves in third person are not to be trusted

[dax @thdxr]

forcing you to upgrade to enterprise for sso seems exceptionally bad now

this just needs to be on for everyone

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@ChromiumDev Great stuff

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@WalshyDev @Cloudflare https://t.co/qZv8LGAApi likely to receive any more updates?

[Bryan Cantrill @bcantrill]

Are we ready to acknowledge that the RTO mandates ca. 2024 were performative bullshit?

[KATE WANG @KATEWWANG]

A small MVP doesn’t need to answer every question.

It needs to make one important question easier to test.

[Sean Hickey @headzoo]

Experts often look slower at first because they spend more time deciding what the problem actually is. Then they move very quickly.

Beginners usually reverse that order.

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@headzoo how https://t.co/ugQMJQHaYz does usernames too

[Paul Graham @paulg]

Someone asked what was the best way to get hired by a startup. I told him it was to start one and then hire himself.

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@tamurphy2112

[Evan Boyle @_Evan_Boyle]

I've managed fully remote engineering teams for ~7 years, from small teams to rapidly growing orgs spanning 10+ countries.

I've developed some pretty strong opinions about what makes remote work actually work:

<rant>

1. YOU MUST GET "THE TEAM" TOGETHER ONCE A QUARTER, NO EXCEPTIONS. The faster the team/company is growing, the more critical this is. If you follow no other piece of advice follow this one. Remote work is built on a foundation of trust which for most humans can only be built in person. Think about a person you know well who has extremely dry humor. Would you be able to detect that characteristic if you met them for the first time over SMS or slack? Bonds are built over dinner, a beer, an in person hackathon. And those bonds carry forward to the rest of the time spent remote. **for some definition of "the team" - can be a mix of immediate team, org, company-wide, all are useful at different cadences.

2. Managers must be pros and must be highly technical. Many non-technical managers rely on lazy half-ass signals like "who left the office last". As a remote manager you literally have no option other than to inspect the concrete outputs to understand what is going on. This tip is also very useful to non-remote teams 🙂

3. No juniors except for exception cases. Exceptional cases are obviously exceptional. Gotta build the muscle before you play on hard mode - for mere mortals at least. Don't expect someone to learn "how to remote" and "how to engineer" simultaneously. It is too much.

4. Establish a physical center of gravity, ideally 20-30% of staff. Company can still be fully remote and have "an office" where company events are held, some fraction of local employees cowork once a week even if on different teams.

5. Regardless of critical mass, all meetings must be remote first. None of this conference room with 10 people dialing into a zoom meeting with 3 other people nonsense. 100ms latency of conversation is real and you are at a disadvantage if you are trying to interject remotely into a room of in person attendees.

6. Hire managers into the critical mass (or who are willing to travel a lot). There will be lots of good reasons for the manager to make their way in on occasion (once a week, twice a month) to the home of critical mass for one reason or another

7. Onboard senior hires and leaders in person. I have seen new leaders, ICs, managers, design/pm/marketing leaders crash and burn over lack of building good relationships in the first 3 months. If you're bringing on a new leader for god's sake make sure they spend a few days in person with the other leaders they have to collaborate with.

8. Hire within a deliberate, manageable timezone range!!! This becomes more important the more varied the experience level is within your team. Is it possible with absolute engineering pros and remote veterans? Yes! But you need to ask yourself if your team is ready to coordinate work across Australia, UK, NYC, SF, Japan, and India timezones. Think hard about this one. My team is US west coast through Czech Republic. Teammates spanning every part of the US, Brazil, UK, Portugal, Denmark, and more.

8.a. Have a clearly established schedule for "time the whole team must be online". For us this is 8:30 - 10:00am Pacific, but many Europeans choose to work shifted schedules to have more overlap with their peers. I advertise this upfront in every hiring manager screen. Make expectations clear and let people decide. We're all adults and we're more likely to commit and make things work when we make a decision with complete information.

9. Onsite time is precious. Don't waste it on ordinary meetings. Use it for strategic conversations, solving hard problems together, hackathons, and high-bandwidth planning. This is where you build the relationships that make the next three months of remote work successful. For fuck's sake please do not fill a week making people stare at a projector while you read powerpoints!!!

Take the advice or don't.

</rant>

[Jason Cohen @asmartbear]

With AI, "be so good they can’t ignore you" becomes "Be so good they can’t replicate you."

"So good" will not mean "features" anymore. It will mean design, delight, customer service, opinionation, attitude, brand, community, and more.

[Rob Walling @robwalling]

99.3% of the people telling you that “distribution is the only moat remaining” have never distributed anything except that opinion.

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@paulg There are dozens of us

[Jason Fried @jasonfried]

Since we started offering employee profit sharing in 2020, we've paid out over $24,000,000 to employees.

We've never offered stock options. Not a fan of future maybe money. We pay real cash to real people so they can spend it on real things right now.

When you choose to be our customer, you're making this possible. You're supporting an independent, fully customer-funded business that shares its success with the people who make it happen.

You don't need investors, stock options, or complicated cap tables to share your success. You can just share the profits. It really can be that simple.

If you're curious, this is how the profit sharing plan works:
https://t.co/bVoHb28gQZ

[Chris Hart @chrishartdev]

@GergelyOrosz TP phone home