
Interview with CTO and Co-founder of Zapier on Working with Remote Engineers - Riphyak
https://youteam.io/blog/interview-with-bryan-cto-and-co-founder-of-zapier-on-working-with-remote-engineers/
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bryanh
Disclaimer: said CTO.

Happy to answer any questions — though we definitely don’t presume we have all
the answers, we’re constantly learning!

We are also hiring remote engineers —
[https://zapier.com/jobs/](https://zapier.com/jobs/). Would lov to talk to
anyone in the JS, k8s, and Python community!

~~~
cookiecaper
Experienced remote engineer here with a good deal of experience in k8s,
Python, Linux, application architecture and design, the works. Applied to
Zapier Infrastructure Engineer position a little over a year ago, if memory
serves. Twice, actually; one time my application was closed out almost
immediately. Waited several months and the same gig had been reposted and/or
reactivated, so I applied again. This time I got a message once a week for
about six weeks that said they were reviewing my application, and then I got a
message that said they weren't interested. My only contact was an internal
recruiter, and I never spoke to or received any information from anyone
technical.

It was a disappointment because I expected better from a YC company's process.
Of course, I can't really blame Zapier for passing, as I'm sure there are a
great deal of applicants and, since I never talked to anyone, I can't know
whether we'd be a good match, technically or culturally. For example, many
remote companies, especially those that are primarily staffed with offshore
employees, are just trying to pinch pennies and paper over it by talking about
the hipness and uniqueness of their remote workforce.

Zapier is a custom Q&A intake application [or, at least the applications I
filled out were], so it's irksome to write real answers to those Qs and get
nothing back. I'd much rather write an HN post where I can wear my rightly-
deserved downvotes and critiques with pride -- then I at least get something
for the effort! ;)

So, note well, potential applicants: "would love to talk" seems to mean "would
love to have you languish in our HR system after you've taken the time to fill
out our bespoke long-form questionnaire". Like I said above, usually it's hard
to fault companies too heavily for this, but when the CTO is making a personal
appeal on HN, I feel like a counterpoint is warranted.

Hiring in general seems to go very slowly these days. I don't know if everyone
is flooded with fake resumes from "bootcamp grads" or what now, but 5 years
ago or so, you could normally expect to hear back within a few days if someone
was interested. It's a different ball game now. In the last couple weeks I've
gotten two replies to applications I sent in around Christmas time -- one "an
invitation to interview" from a well-known company (which I ignored), and one
a message from another company that they'd closed out my application in their
HR platform.

Disclaimer: my experience from memory. Intervals and dates may be fuzzy. Not
going to dig up the correspondence.

~~~
cerebrum
Cookiecaper, I understand where you are coming from but complaining only makes
you look like a sore loser. You are not helping your position by this post.
Consider taking constructive action.

~~~
barry-cotter
He’s telling people about his experience of applying to Zapier in the comments
to a post about Zapier. It’s relevant and no more gives the impression of
being sour grapes than the people who don’t interview at Google after two
rounds of apply again next year when Google recruiters email them.

------
bnchrch
Anecdotally I'm finding this shift to remote work in some area's fascinating
and powerful.

My career started only about 5 years ago but over that time each position I've
had has either been fully remote or had a remote aspect to it.

The company I now work for had a similar start to zapier but with one key
difference: the co-founders were opposed to remote work. However the market
forces of hiring the right people pushed this venture to become remote and our
team is now scattered across North America and Asia.

I think we're going to continue to see companies moving in this direction and
more "remote native" workers like myself come to expect it. Especially after
visiting Canggu I don't think the trend is going to reverse itself.

~~~
bryanh
We definitely believe the future of work is remote in nature. Physical
locality is a vestige from days where manual work dominated -- knowledge work
has no such constraint. People want autonomy, and not just in work -- but life
too!

------
ryanwaggoner
Remote is a management skill and an effective hiring advantage. 43% of
American employees reported in 2017 working remote at least part of the time,
and 31% of those are 80-100% remote, up from 24% in 2012.

The world has changed and I don't think we're going back.

~~~
bproven
Exactly - its nothing to fear if you are good manager. If the person is
screwing around you will find out quickly when projects slip over and over.

~~~
jcims
It's not just ensuring they are productive, it's also ensuring that they feel
included and their voice isn't drowned out by the proximity and presence of
the local team. So yes, nothing to fear, but it takes a little more tending to
if you have a blended local/remote team.

------
danmaz74
During the last 5 years I've been managing two fully remote small teams,
across different time zones (one team CET+Philippines, the other one
CET+India+Philippines).

Some of my takeaways:

* Doing a 15 minutes "daily standup" (we use hangouts, audio-only) is really, really useful. Of course, for some people the meeting won't be at the beginning of their day, but it can work all the same. It's the one thing that I would recommend the most: creating cohesion in a remote team is much more challenging than in person, and this helps a lot. Insist on everybody being on time: my teams are very, very flexible, except for this one rule. When somebody has a bad connection, they still participate in a group chat.

* For task management we use Trello (with a kanban-like approach). It's great for asynchronous communication - in one of the two teams, we even use it to communicate with the customer; this only worked after we were able to "educate" the customer about a scrum-like approach. Only try it if you have a very collaborative relationship with the customer.

* When there is the need to share longer specs than those that can fit on trello, we use google docs - the ability to collaborate both with real-time shared editing and with comments and suggestions is very valuable.

* For brainstorming, drawing architectural diagrams, discussing design etc. I find murally a godsent: [https://mural.co/](https://mural.co/)

* For quick real-time communication we use chat (again, hangouts). But whenever I see that it takes more than just a few lines to finish talking, I suggest increasing the bandwidth and upgrading to an audio call with screen-sharing. Some people don't like that very much, but we saved hundreds of hours - and a lot of frustration - by doing this.

* If the person you need isn't online right when you need them, we resort to comments on trello or just plain old email.

* Not everybody can work well remotely - it requires A LOT of self-discipline and self-motivation. At the beginning, I hired some people even if I had some doubts about those traits, or I started having those doubts in the first weeks, and tried many different ways to motivate them and get better results. I never succeeded - this could have been my limitation, but grooming devs remotely is objectively much more difficult than doing that in person. So, my suggestion is: when in doubt, don't hire. If you have doubts early on, fire (I don't like doing that, but paid a very heavy toll in terms of stress when I didn't do it).

Shameless plug: I'm currently looking for a career change. If interested, take
a look at my profile :)

~~~
matwood
I know this can be a polarizing opinion, but I have found when fully remote to
force video whenever possible. Seeing everyone, their location, facial
expressions, etc... really helps build a team and empathy when stressful
moments arise.

~~~
rendaw
To complete the polarity, I would hate this.

Being able to dress down comfortably is one of the benefits of remote work. I
work 90% on slack and not knowing what facial expression someone is making has
never hindered dealing with a crunch - my teammates are on point and engaged
as it is.

For me the dead air in a crunch time call, the need to split my attention,
etc. would just increase the stress.

I think communicating effectively via text as well as comprehending meta cues
in received messages may be a learned skill.

~~~
matwood
> Being able to dress down comfortably is one of the benefits of remote work.

How comfortable are we talking? Like shirtless? I don't know of anyone
expecting people to be office dressed when working at home. If that's the
case, then yeah I fully agree with your point.

> For me the dead air in a crunch time call, the need to split my attention,
> etc. would just increase the stress.

I think there was some confusion about my original statement. I was not
talking about being on a video call during crunch time, but that seeing your
co-workers on a regular basis helps you know them better and thus have more
empathy and understanding when a problem time arises. The point is to build a
bond with co-workers similar to when working in a office so that the same work
product can be created.

> I think communicating effectively via text as well as comprehending meta
> cues in received messages may be a learned skill.

I agree, which is why most of my teams communication is over chat and email.
My original point was _if_ a meeting is required then it should be video
whenever possible. This includes daily stand ups. I have found anecdotally
that having regular video chats improves chat and email communication.

------
amanzi
Anyone considered remote working as a part time job in addition to a
traditional full time role?

~~~
programmarchy
Moonlighting? I did that for awhile to build up my client base until I
transitioned to full time consulting. Hard to do long term.

------
woolvalley
When I was onboarding with a remote company, we had an open hangouts video
call and I was able ask the other guy questions whenever I needed. It was like
being the same room together and it was pretty amazing.

It's not something I see done that often, but if your 'remote in similar
timezones' it does remove a friction point. We only did it for a day or two as
part of getting set up with the new codebase, but I found it fairly effective.

------
lordnacho
I work fully remote now too. Thoughts:

\- It helps that everyone is a senior dev on my current project. There's
nobody on the team who needs to be handheld through anything. I've pretty much
said "Welcome, I see you were able to build the project. Let's automate a
Valgrind step in the CI pipeline". And like magic the new guy does a merge
request with a Valgrind step soon after.

\- Being remote also means you are effectively only looking for senior staff,
because you get so many CVs, why would you go for an unproven junior guy? You
also tend to think young people are slackers, or someone on your team will.
The only time I worked with someone fresh from a bootcamp was because she was
inexpensive. Good worker though.

\- Tools: Slack, GitLab. They seem so intuitive, never met a dev who needed to
be shown how they work. Slack for discussions. GitLab issues for specific
issues.

\- Culture: wrong personalities are magnified. When you aren't talking to
someone in person there's no facial feedback. If someone says something people
don't like in person, they often get the feedback from the listeners quickly
and are able to change tone. Online, this is not so easy. We had one guy who
was being very aggressive in technical discussions, and it annoyed people.

\- Tools/Culture: some people are resistant to organising their work through
issue tracking and version control. This was a huge problem at an onsite job I
had years ago. If it had been remote, it would have been even more of a
disaster. Part of the issue is when you write a bug report, you are implying
someone has done something wrong. This is a terrible attitude. Along similar
lines, if you create a goal like a milestone, you are again setting yourself
up for failure if you don't reach it. What kind of people are prone think this
way? Strategy quants whose job it is to deliver the magic that can't be found
in any published work, and whose work is greatly affected by randomness. Now
I'm sure they're not all like that, but the ones I worked with did seem to
have rather fragile egos.

\- Culture: Not everyone wants to work remote. One guy left because he missed
the camaraderie of the office, the on/off of being in or not. Of the people
who love remote, a lot have families. Then there's the ones who use it to
globetrot. Those two tend to not have an on/off. They're always kinda there,
kinda not.

\- Culture: Meetings are drop-in, drop-out. In real life some people like
being able to call a bunch of people into a room and have them stay there for
questioning. I don't think I've ever met anyone who liked that. Online
meetings are asynchronous. I might say something, then go to the bathroom
without telling anyone, then come right back and catch up. People leave to get
their kids, and you don't expect them to be right there. But coding work tends
to accommodate that.

~~~
Roritharr
To your last point: are the meetings solely text chat based?

~~~
lordnacho
Occasionally people will do a video meeting, but it's rare. Of course there's
also the socials for those who happen to live near London.

------
bluedino
Hope you weren’t working with any Russian teams this last two weeks...
internet shutdown has ruined protectivity

~~~
rwmj
Can you expand on this? I work with some Russian open source developers. I
heard the news about Russia blocking Telegram (we use IRC). Has it affected
git hosting services and the like?

~~~
dijit
Telegram moved to the public cloud providers Google Cloud Platform and Amazon,
meaning Russia was blocking a significant proportion of those providers IP
Address space as Telegram moved servers around.

------
pcarolan
What AV equipment do you use that you find indespensible?

~~~
walshemj
From experience doing a bit of podcasting.

1 A proper professional external sound card

2 Pro / Semi Pro microphones no need for condensers etc a Sure SM58 is good
enough.

3 for skype its often better to have dedicated skype drone machine and feed
your audio into that.

4 a good video camera.

------
crsv
Solid marketing content.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Yeah, from the outside, it seems like they take remote seriously and do it
very effectively: [https://zapier.com/jobs/](https://zapier.com/jobs/)

Glassdoor seems to agree: [https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Zapier-
Reviews-E1196705.ht...](https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Zapier-
Reviews-E1196705.htm)

Note: I have zero affiliation with Zapier, other than being a satisfied
customer. Just happened to run across their hiring page today and was
impressed.

------
courtz
I first heard about Zapier when I started my side project,
[https://parserr.com](https://parserr.com). We have now actually been listed
as an integration with them and Id still do anything to work there. Currently
working as an engineering manager, id kill for an opening there as I so
believe in their product and their remote first culture.

