“Deciding whether to use off the shelf software or investing time and energy into building your own tools from scratch can be one of the most difficult choices a startup makes in its early days. That goes double for technical founders who like to build and want to come to market with something special.”

True or false: You’ve failed at something in your career before. If you answered false, well that’s a bit hard to believe, but it just means there is still plenty of time to fail. And that’s a good thing.

“In my experience, over half the time you ship something with five things wrong with it, people complain about one or two of those things, but they almost never complain about all of them. And then they complain about something that you would have never expected.

You could have fixed those five things and you would have made two of those complaints go away, but you would have never solved the thing that you hadn’t seen. You can then use the time you saved fixing the things that they do actually care about.”

“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.

Commit is experimenting with making many aspects of our interviewing process asynchronous. It’s not because we’re anti-social; we believe it makes for a meaningfully better interviewing experience and helps us attract the best candidates.

Commit co-founder, Beier Cai, sat down with Gokul to hear his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities for startups today, and the importance of creating a robust community for Software Engineers.