“I’d have nightmares about showing up with my co-founder at a VC event and all the technical questions were directed to her instead of me. I didn’t realize how much of my identity was bound up in being seen as a highly competent technical person.”

“You can’t innovate on everything, or you’ll spend all your time on bullshit, constantly ironing out tiny little details. You have to use the tried and true as much as possible so the things you build yourself can become real core differentiators.”

“No smart, ambitious engineer wants to be told exactly what to do. They want agency and decision making.”

“There are a lot of different ways people learn. Some like to read a book, others like to be taught by somebody else. I like to learn by doing.”

“I find it helps me be less stressed about interpersonal conflict to become more curious about why certain behaviours make sense to people.”

“I find that asking yourself ‘what is this person optimizing for’ is quite a useful thing, because people are almost always doing things that make sense to them at the time. You want to help them understand why the incorrect behaviour might have made sense at the time. If you don’t, they’ll do it again.”

“Sometimes with primarily technical roles, there’s a lot of pressure to be heads down and coding literally all the time. But if that’s the case, when are you supposed to contribute to the important discussions the rest of the team is having?”

With the rise of remote working, many businesses are navigating entirely new opportunities and challenges. Commit’s Sarah Marion sat down with Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Buffer (both organizations are remote-first) to talk about how to have hard conversations, build resilient teams, and promote positivity as a remote-first organization.

With the rise of remote working, many businesses are navigating entirely new opportunities and challenges. Commit’s Sarah Marion sat down with Katie Wilde, VP of Engineering at Buffer (both organizations are remote-first) to talk about how to have hard conversations, build resilient teams, and promote positivity as a remote-first organization.

“Silicon Valley is moving to the Cloud” – In a recent interview by Bloomberg, Andreessen said remote work and distributed companies in the post-covid world are moving Silicon Valley to the cloud.