Remote Teams

I Love Cowboy Coding, But I Don’t Run Wild West Teams

March 2, 2010 Management

I love being a cowboy coder. It feels great. Just the thought of dreaming up a new feature, coding late into the night, and unveiling it to the astonishment of the rest of my team makes my heart beat a little faster. I love it so much that I once joined a company made up [...]

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Make Your Goals Measurable

December 22, 2009 Remote Teams

Defining your goals in ways that are easy to measure and demonstrate will make it easier for your team and your boss to see your benefit to the team. This is important because telecommuting means nobody can see how hard you are working. There is no A for effort. You need to show real results. [...]

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3 Hours of Real-Time Communication Is Magic

December 8, 2009 Management

If you’re interested in Firefox you might want to tune in to air.mozilla.com on a Monday at 10:00 AM Pacific time. You can watch Mozilla’s weekly all company staff meeting. Mozilla employees and volunteers work from all over the world. When it’s 10:00 AM in California, what time is it for other Mozilla engineers? Mountain [...]

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How to Hire Effective Workshifters: 7 Signs and How to Evaluate Them

October 27, 2009 Guest Post

Hiring teleworkers is a stressful experience. Work shifting takes a specific set of skills that are difficult to evaluate in an interview. Even worse, it takes a lot of time and money to find out that you hired the wrong person. That’s why I created a system for evaluating which candidates make good teleworkers. It [...]

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Telecommuter Team Building

October 8, 2009 Remote Teams

Team building is on the wain in the high-tech industry and I’ve missed most of it. My wife, an engineer a few years older than me, tells stories of blindfolded bowling, mall scavenger hunts, and a dozen other team building activities ranging from somewhat useful to downright painful. Never wear open-toed shows to blindfolded bowling. [...]

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