Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Hear the inside stories of the "geeks who lead at scale" - Directors, VPs and CTOs running software engineering orgs at larger companies with 100+ engineers, and interviews with domain experts who can help those leaders to manage their engineering orgs more effectively.
I'm your host - Peter Bell, I've been helping senior engineering leaders to connect with and learn from their peers since 2010!
This podcast is designed for engineering leaders who want to learn the latest good practices from their peers who are way too busy operating to write an article or publish a book!
Running a software engineering org at scale is hard! You need to manage stakeholder expectations, attract and retain top talent, align and structure your org effectively and keep up with the latest processes and tooling. And that's before we even try to make sense of the potential impact of LLMs and GenAI on managing technical teams.
Our podcast and weekly newsletter provide you with access to hard-won wisdom from top engineering leaders and relevant domain experts. Learn more at https://geekswholead.com/
Geeks Who Lead Podcast
Engineering Team Cohesion at Scale with Han Yuan, SVP of Engineering @ Upwork
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This week, Peter Bell is joined by SVP of Engineering at Upwork, Han Yuan. Han and Peter dive into what it’s like to run an engineering team that spans countries, building a good engineering culture for a remote team and how he brings on new engineers to the team.
[00:21] - Differences in thinking about distributed teams across multiple companies[02:59] - Communication best practices across time zones & countries[05:22] - Interviewing for long term fit[08:15] - Development environment workflow with an evolving team[09:46] - Code quality & remote collaboration[11:58] - Providing new opportunities for engineers while retaining knowledge[13:42] - Autonomy, consistency and self-organization across teams and services[21:13] - Balancing support and product development teams[24:39] - Onboarding new engineers[28:24] - Building social and cultural cohesion [31:05] - Fostering a sense of connection and community within a big company with a remote team
Han Yuan is currently the Sr. VP of Engineering at Upwork. Prior to Upwork, he’s held Sr. leadership roles at eBay and Netflix. You can find more information about Han Yuan at LinkedIn.
CTO Connection is where you can learn from the experiences of successful engineering leaders at fast growth tech startups. Whether you want to learn more about hiring, motivating or managing an engineering team, if you're technical and manage engineers, the CTO Connection podcast is a great resource for learning from your peers!
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Podcast episode production by Dante32.