What else?

• Studies in Chemistry (MRI, Quantum Mechanics)
• IT Freelancer
• Collector of (unfashionable) programming languages
• Multipotentialite
• "Fashion Nerd"

Team management is no cat herding

The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.

You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership.

"I'll be a reproach once I'm grown up", said the expectation.

Explanation

• Everyone has expectations
• There are (at least) two variants:
  • Explicit expectations
    Contracts, Company Handbook
  • Implicit expectations
    What is 'standard practice'
• Consequences when not fulfilling

Consequences when not fulfilling

• Friction
• Open aggressivity
• High employee turnover & cancellations

How to avoid

• Implicit to explicit:
  • Codification: Handbook, wiki, videos
  • With new hires: Onboarding!
• Communication
  • Regular communication
    One-on-One's, team meetings
  • Fast Feedback
  • Workshops about expectations

Software is the invisible writing that whispers the stories of possibility to our hardware.

Soft? Hard?

• Separation between soft and hard skills is arbitrary
• Communication is the foundation of nearly every skill (→ remember: expecting information)
• In remote teams communication is a more valuable skill than domain knowledge
• Lack of communication abilities: sarcasm e.g. is used when someone doesn't know how to apply negative feedback in a productive way

Work environment

• Move fast intelligently, fail fast intelligently
• Emotional safety
  
  • Errors are always possible
  • Reduce stress: Stress leads to errors
  • Competition in a team is harmful
  • Don't work in 'survival mode' (more on that later)

Emotional safety

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.

Stress and pressure

• "Work hard, play hard" Bullshit!
   
• Historical roots: calvinistic work ethics
  (read Max Weber, "The Protestant Ethic
  and the Spirit of Capitalism")

Respect the flow

• Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
• Try to avoid interruptions in the middle
  of longer working periods
• Try to do meetings on the boundaries of work times or around lunch break!

Organisation

• Processes simplify work, unless they impede thinking
• In software teams 'process' is the sum of all the work and progress related communication
• When the official processes don't work for you, don't try to hide or scaffold your working processes

Picard management tip

When a policy is doing more harm than good, you must examine and revise that policy. It may require simplification, or it may require greater sophistication. Either way, you must change it.

Team culture

• All successful teams in larger organizations have their own culture that differs from that of the organization
• The organization can not adopt this culture since it eventually doesn't want that
• All you can copy are the less important things like processes

Picard management tip

Encourage extracurricular activities with your crew, especially if it involves wearing costumes.

Empathy

• Task: find and remove pain points
• Important: values! You don't make money despite your values but because of them
• Glorification or reframing of psychological or social tensions as 'war wounds' is dangerous
  → Software developers are no Klingons!
• In 'survival mode' you are blind for other people's pain points

Engineers aren't Klingons

Hard skills as empathy

• Good or readable code is empathy with your future self and your team
• Teams only optimized for velocity will not respect this
• Empathy with old code: even code you feel now being badly written has been written like this for some reason

Radical acceptance!

All that happens does so for a reason, even if we don't see it (yet).
Accepting this leaves room for curiosity!
Curiosity leads to understanding.

Change management

• If you're part of the system you can't change processes without changing yourself.
• Self organized / agile teams only can be successful, if they cause changes in their environment
• If you can't create change:
  You have two choices: change the team or change the team

Work doesn't happen at work

• Instead many people work on weekends or do overtime
• Offices, particularly open spaces, are factories for interruptions
• Important tasks need a longer uninterrupted period of working time

No commuting!

• a loss of life time
• bad for your health
• bad for business

Why now?

• The technology is mature
• Let go of nostalgic ideas like good results only emerge between 9 and 5
• Remote teams and organizations are more resilient (see COVID-19)

Cities aren't talent hubs anymore

• Every resource is available everywhere anytime (compare V. Bush, "As we may think")
• Most perks (Arcade Games, free meals, massage) will be offered to keep you in the office for longer time
• Good talents can be found anywhere
• Too much competition in walking distance in the city

Save resources

• You need less office space
• Save fuel
• Environment protection

Organisation

• Have overlapping work times
  Team members should have around 4h of overlap
• Synchronize your flow
  "What have I done this week?" thread
• Document all meetings and communication
  What's not documented didn't happen!
• Equal pay for equal work!

Technical resources

• Use conferencing tools & screen sharing
  Skype, Zoom, WebEx, Slack
• Have everything available
  Have every resource available to anyone every time
• Use an email server that archives every mail and makes them available in a database
  This is what Stripe does
• Use online team tools like retrotool.io
• Details in the Gitlab Handbook (section CEO)

People Ops 1

• Manage work, not chairs
  (avoid software line TimeDoctor)
• Have an understanding of what your team is working on!
• Organize regular meetings
• Don't let remote team members feel second class
  "John and I already decided that this morning in the office"
• Experience working remote to see what it feels like

People Ops 2

• Do regular One-on-One's
  At least every two weeks (but also be available in between)
• Remove impediments, empower people do make their own decisions
  37Signals hands out creditcards to every coworker and there are no applications for leave
• Look out for people doing overtime, not those who slack off

People Ops 3 - Onboarding

• Create a checklist of goals for the first week
• Introduce them to your team
  Write a mail or a slack message, setup a separate video call
• Set up one-on-one's as soon as possible
• Set them up with a buddy
• Help out with their home office setup
• Ask them about their onboarding experience

Trust

• "How do I know they are working if I don't see them?"
  Be a manager, not a baby sitter!
• "People's homes are full of distractions!"
  89 min/day at the office lost with non work stuff
• "Our data is only secure within the office space!"
  Ever heard of VPN's?
• "Who will answer the phone?"
  Virtual VoIP phone system anyone?

Myths

• "True magic only happens at the office between 9 and 5!"
• "None of the big ones does it."
• "Your colleagues will be jealous, when you are working remote!"
• "But we invested so much money in this new office!"
  see: Fallacy of sunken cost

Bad habits

• Standard questions → Mail
• Somehow important or more urgent → Chat
• The roof is on fire → Phone call

• Will Larson, "An Elegant Puzzle - Systems of Engineering Management"
• Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, "Remote: Office Not required"
• Vanevar Bush, "As we may think", The Atlantic, July 1945
• GitLab Handbook
• Remotive.io
• Michael Lopp, Rands in Repose

• Michael Lopp, "Managing Humans"
• J. Hank Rainwater, "Herding Cats: A Primer for Programmers Who Lead Programmers"
• Camille Fournier, "The Manager's Path"
• Julia Evans, "Help! I have a manager!"
• Patrick Kua, "Talking with Tech Leads"

• Tom deMarco, "Slack - Getting past burnout, Busyworks and the myth of total efficiency"
• Tom deMarco, "Peopleware - Productive projects and teams"
• Johanna Rothman, Ester Derby, "Behind Closed Doors - Secrets of Great Management"
• Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman, "Team Geek - A Software Developers Guide to Working with Others"
• Scott Dawson, "The Art of Working Remotely"

• Chad Fowler, "The Passionate Programmer"
• John Z. Sonmez, "Soft Skills - The Software Developer's Life Manual"
• Sandy Mamoli, David Mole, "Creating Great Teams - How Self-Selection Lets People Excel"
• Danyel Fisher on AngelList Blog: "What I Learned from Being Distributed at Honeycomb"

• Post on Payscale.com: "What It’s Really Like to Be a Full-Time Remote Worker"
• Charity Majors on AngelList Blog: "On Messing Up Your Remote Team—And Then Getting It Right"
• Ambition & Balance blog by doist: "Building a Remote Career : Advice from Six People Who've Done It"
• Post on Payscale.com: "10 Communication Tips Remote Workers Need to Know"

• Celine Mechain on Medium: "How to build a successful distributed team"
• Justin Bariso on inc.com: "Google Spent 2 Years Researching What Makes a Great Remote Team. It Came Up With These 3 Things"
• Jess Lee on dev.to: "The DEV Team is now 100% Distributed"
• Post on twist.com: "The Future of Work: The Guide to Remote Work"

• Post on jottohq.com: "Managing Remote Teams"
• The People Ops team at GitLab: "The Remote Manifesto"
• GitLab's' Resources for companies embracing remote work
• GitLab's Guide to All-Remote
• The Work From Home Guide for Leaders

Podcasts

• > Code
• Programming Leadership with Marcus Blankenship
• Führung auf den Punkt gebracht (german)
• Mein Scrum ist kaputt (german)

Videos 1

• Camille Fournier - Rebooting Culture
• Camille Fournier - Cloning yourself is not an option
• Coraline Ada Ehmke - Diversity in OSS
• Patrick Kua - What I wish I knew as a first time Tech Lead

Videos 2

• Patrick Kua - The Constant Life of a Tech Lead
• Patrick Kua - Geek's Guide to Leading Teams
• Laura Paterson & Patrick Kua - Technical Leadership
• Camille Fournier - Building and Motivating Engineering Teams

Videos 3

• Dave Thomas - Agile is Dead
• Patrick Kua - Why Technical Leadership Matters
• Lisette Sutherland - Working Remotely … Successful