Many developers say that growth opportunities are one of the most important things for them when it comes to staying in a job. However, for a tech lead figuring out how to cater for everyone’s career goals can be hard. That’s why Julian Springer, Technical and Career Manager at Singular Systems, has set up ‘contribution sessions’ with his developers every month to track progress and solve any niggles before they become bigger problems. Here’s how he does this.

Watch the video, and read the blog post here! (http://bit.ly/3aPgiHM)

When scaling one’s responsibilities as a tech leader, it can be hard to not feel anxious about whether or not you have the leadership experience you need to thrive — be it moving from startup to enterprise, or vice versa. Calvin Hawkes, former Product Lead at Trivago, says that even though he moved from a startup to an enterprise, his experience as a product lead at a startup actually made him a better product lead at an enterprise. In this conversation, he shares the lessons he applied from his startup experience to his enterprise leadership role, and how it gave him a unique strength.

Watch the video here! (https://bit.ly/3aLNorQ)

Being a remote leader is hard enough, but being a remote leader in a different time zone is even harder. Ashley Sanders is Signific’s Director of Tech, and sits roughly eight hours behind his tech team, in another country. In this conversation, he shares the operating system he’s developed for himself, and his team, to ensure that he is not a blocker to his team’s productivity, that his team can still ask him for support, and that he can still provide his team with what they need to thrive.

Watch the video here! (https://youtu.be/5ZkPGJw4dRs)

As tech teams around the world embrace remote work to varying degrees, tech leaders need to adapt their leadership to suit the new environment. Understanding what that means in practice, however, is hard. Mike Scott, CEO and co-founder at NONA, learned an important lesson in his time as a remote leader, namely that: Remote leadership is not the same as remote work, and strategies for the latter won’t necessarily work for the former. Being a remote leader requires a new approach, and in this conversation Mike shares what he’s found effective for getting this right.

Watch the video here! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IJuYS974I&feature=youtu.be) 

When communication structures and organisation design happen by accident — ie. they are not set up in parallel to each other — it tends to result in greater cognitive loads on developers, slower development speeds, and suboptimal workflows and productivity. This is why Richard Bailey, Executive VP of Engineering at Entersekt, used intentional organisation design to construct a new team structure around Entersekt’s product architecture so that his teams’ communication could mirror their architecture’s communication structures, and reduce cognitive load on developers. Here's how he did that.

Watch the video, and read the blog post here! (http://bit.ly/2ORq4AC)

Overhauling a development team's existing architecture can be a massive undertaking for any CTO. Maryn Conen, CTO at Cardano, led their move from C# to Python and said that — for him — it was critical to make sure that the people in his team would benefit from the change as much as the business would. In this article, he shows how he did that by asking his team three specific questions, in order to understand whether the change was worth it or not.

Watch the video, and read the blog post here! (http://bit.ly/3dmD0Zo)

Being a leader can make it hard to take time off, and feel confident that your team will continue to thrive without you there. Chiedza Muguti, Head of Product at Penta, experienced this first hand when she had to take 10 weeks of medical leave, and saw how her team's systems failed when she wasn't around. Since then, she has set up a competency framework and a succession — or handover — plan that she uses to help her team succeed with or without her there. Here, she shares what this framework looks like and how it’s helped her team become more independent.

Watch the video and read the blog post here! (http://bit.ly/3olrwY1)

Many technical recruiters acknowledge that hiring developers is particularly hard. They often don’t have a background in tech, and traditional approaches to recruiting often don't work because of how a developer thinks and what they're looking for in their careers. That's why Mark Deubel, Senior Tech Recruiter at Elastic, has found it useful to collaborate with his hiring manager and their team to learn more about the candidates that he's reaching out to. Here's how he approaches this.

Watch the video and read the blog post here! (http://bit.ly/3pLklts)

Technical interviews are part of most companies' hiring process, and are one of the most important stages. But Ed O’Reilly and David O’Reilly, COO/Co-founder and CTO at NONA respectively, have found that they’re often limited in focus, and treated as a screening procedure more so than an engagement opportunity. In their experience, this reduces their efficacy and negatively impacts candidate experience. Here are three ways they make their tech interviews more interactive, get a better understanding of a candidate, and still leave them with an engaging experience.

Watch the video and read the blog post here! (http://bit.ly/3r1nSEx)

While your talent pool for high quality developers increases when you open up your hiring remotely, so does the competition. Now, companies across the world — from small startups, to ‘big tech’ — are trying to attract the same developers. In this audio documentary, we get advice from the best in tech hiring at Codility, Recruitee, and co., and unpack what companies getting remote hiring right are doing. Here is what it takes to hire top tech talent in a remote world.

To read OfferZen’s full ‘Developer Remote Work’ report, download it here! (http://bit.ly/3iGqFA5)

And check out the blog post here! (https://bit.ly/3sRumHM)