Nothing strikes more fear into a tech professional than the prospect of a technical interview. Being challenged by the blank slate of a whiteboard while an interviewer waits for you to prove you’re a 10x-er is enough to make any developer consider switching careers to an artisan cheesemaker. In this article, we will explore how...
Interview Tips, Technical InterviewsIn a rapidly growing freelance industry, job descriptions are still the best way to find the right remote candidate. It’s how you write them that has changed. The first step to writing a good job description (or JD for short) is understanding your target audience. Job boards have become relics of the past. The best freelancers...
Job Description, Recruitment, TalentStaff onboarding programs have become common practice; both in large corporations and time-starved startups. The reason for this is pretty straightforward: they have a positive effect on job satisfaction, performance, stress and retention. In other words: they work. Yet, onboarding practices for remote teams are often close to non-existent. This results in many remote developers being...
Onboarding, Orientation, ProductivityThe remote workforce revolution is redefining the relationship between businesses and their employees. According to Gallup’s State of the American Workplace report, the number of people working remotely more than four days a week rose from 24 percent to 31 percent between 2012 and 2016. It is now estimated that within the next 3 years, over...
Distributed Teams, Remote WorkforceScrum is perfect for small, remote teams working on complex software products. But its rapid rise in popularity has meant that Agile Project Management with Scrum it is often not fully understood, even by those who have been exposed to it. In this series, I hope to clear up some of the confusion around terminology,...
Agile, Product Owner, Scrum, Scrum Master, Sprints, User StoriesJira, Asana and Basecamp have become popular task managers because of their versatility. But when your business belongs to a specific industry with specific needs, a catch-all solution is rarely optimal. Here are 4 vital questions that will help you find the best fit project management tool for your software development team – whether you...
Agile, Basecamp, Githib, Jira, Pivotal Tracker, Project Management, Self Hosting, Sprint planning, Time Tracking, Trello, Version Control, WaterfallAny aspiring Product Owner looking to build a great software product could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed. A quick Google search turns up a lot of conflicting, dated examples for a product requirements document. People used to follow the Waterfall Model and define everything their software would do at the outset (think bloated Use Cases...
Agile, Product Owner, Product Requirements Document, Sitemaps, Software, User Personas, User Stories, Waterfall, WireframesWorking remotely has many perks, but it comes with one glaring disadvantage. Coffee shops, hotel rooms and co-work spaces, the preferred haunts of the remote worker, rarely provide an ergonomic work environment. This has lead to an increase in injuries among the nomadic workforce. I should know, I’ve been part of this workforce for about...
Ergonomic, Freelancers, Remote WorkThe Information Revolution is subjecting today’s workforce to a structural change as significant as its 18th-century Industrialization counterpart. While that change was characterized by the organization of labor into factories, the 21st century is seeing the workforce decouple itself geographically from its employers. This change is already upon us. 1 out of 4 Americans already...
Asana, Basecamp, Collaboration, Communication, Jira, Podio, Trello“The best programmers are up to 28 times better than the worst programmers” – Robert. L. Glass Great developers are rare. Their productivity is 3 times that of an average developer and 10 times that of a bad developer*. The top 1% developers in the world don’t just write solid code but have important intangible...
Communication, Self Learning, Skills Testing, Talent