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“What Do You Mean They Quit?!” Don’t Give Your Engineers a Reason to Leave with Notion’s Head of Engineering: Michael Manapat, Change.org’s CTO: Elaine Zhou, and Plato’s CEO: Quang Hoang (Video)

SaaStr

The competition for engineers is fiercer than ever — and that means that companies need to work harder than ever to attract and retain them. Each company approaches this challenge uniquely, but there are a few features consistent in every workplace that are hard to leave. Focus on retaining your engineers from day one.

CTO Coach 230
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When The Team Revolts

SaaStr

They’ll revolt when you make a senior or mid-level hire that as a group, they simply cannot suffer one day longer. It’s happened to me, and I think for whatever my faults, I have a pretty high EQ and am a half-decent manager. The three times it happened to me: A very senior engineer that we just HAD to have.

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Reddit’s Nick Caldwell on engineering leadership

Intercom, Inc.

On day one as Reddit’s new VP of Engineering, Nick Caldwell faced a dilemma. He had just spent 13 years at Microsoft, most recently as the head of 300 engineers. At Reddit, he led a team of 35 – none of whom knew how to manage other engineers. Building trust can be tough when you’re a new hire in a leadership position.

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Transparent Optimism

Casey Accidental

I wanted my team to have very clear goals, remove any roadblocks they would face to being successful, and make a big impact on the success of the company. I was able to hire a strong team, and we got to work, 100xing the size of our customer base over four years. This is a style of communication that will not work with all cultures.

CTO Hire 125
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Intercom’s Rich Archbold on how to run less software

Intercom, Inc.

In engineering, you want to move fast, ship often and solve real customer problems. It means reducing choices amongst engineering teams and standardizing technology, so our team can spend as much time as possible delivering value to customers. Rich: Today I’m the Senior Director for Foundations Engineering at Intercom.

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5 Secrets to Moving Upmarket – How the Right Sales Tax Technology Can Support SaaS Growth

SaaStr

hiring in-house talent). Scaling companies that need insight can get it easily with the help of a specialized platform that guides them through all the necessary and applicable sales tax obligations and processes. . On a more day-to-day level, problems with your sales tax calculation engine can also stall your checkout.

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Building a sales team that can go from $0-$50M (Video + Transcript)

SaaStr

So you were the first sales hire. Talk to me about the sales hires that you made back in the early days and talk to me about how it changed through the different stages. So my first sales hire was beginning of 2015. The very first few sales hire are I would say not your typical reps. Laura Bilazarian : Awesome.

Scale 136