Welcome to Codespaces – High Performance Workplaces: A blog around how to run a best-performing workplace. This blog is the successor to the popular blog “High Output Management” and was originally entitled “Codespaces: High Output Management”.
It is maintained by Bill Coughran, a partner at Sequoia Capital, and former SVP of Engineering at Google, who has had the privilege of working with many great managers and product teams over the last twenty years. I have always been interested in understanding what makes a team successful and am grateful that many people have shared their insights and experiences with me. I hope this blog can give back in some small way by sharing some of what I have learned.
Codespaces – High Performance Workplaces: A blog around how to run a best-performing workplace.
By: Lukas Grossar
On: April 17, 2020
When I started working with remote teams, I had no idea what I was doing. We were a distributed team of full-time employees in Edtech and worked at small offices around the globe. Everyone had their own schedule and as long as they got their work done, there was no need for rigid rules or processes. In fact, we didn’t even have a shared calendar for organizing our meetings. People would just send out a scheduling link and meet when it worked for all involved parties. Looking back, I’m pretty impressed that this worked at all!
But then things changed. We had more employees and we grew faster and suddenly we all met in one place – Vienna HQ. As you can imagine, these sudden changes in our work environment led to some unexpected consequences. Some were positive, some were negative but all of them were new to me and my colleagues at the time!
In this article I want to share some of my learnings from the last years about remote work with you. Some are obvious for seasoned remote workers but others might be new to you! Let’s dive right
High Performance Workplaces: A blog around how to run a best-performing workplace.
“Codespaces” is a general business blog with examples from the high-technology industry, written by Erik Schoen and Chad Bell. Erik has worked in financial services and information technology for 25 years. Currently he is a managing director at Barclays Capital, leading their global IT team in Newark, NJ. Chad has worked in the software industry for 20 years, most recently as CTO of an online consumer company. They are based in Maplewood, NJ (a suburb of NYC).
The blog’s name comes from the term “codespace” – a term Erik coined to describe an office environment where people work primarily on software development projects. Codespaces are different than traditional offices because they have very little space dedicated to meetings or collaboration. Instead they are designed primarily to support individual concentration and focus.
The blog will cover:
– codespaces (of course)
– effective leadership and management techniques
– dealing with difficult people
– hiring and firing
– motivating people
Our mission is to help companies create the most productive and innovative workplaces on the planet. We do this by bringing together the brightest minds in the world for a conference that results in actionable insights for attendees.
The Codespaces Foundation is a nonprofit organization and our work is made possible by generous supporters like you.
The blog is a collection of high-performance workplaces (designs) in different domains. The blog focuses on hardware and software designs that are used to run an efficient workplace. The idea of the blog is to create a database of such workplaces with their designs, so that people can learn from each other and help improve their own workspace.
Hi, my name is Christian Maioli and I am a software engineer.
I have been working in the tech industry for more than 10 years, moving from Italy to Germany (for a time) and then to the USA.
I worked for companies such as Google, Microsoft, RedHat, IBM and many others on projects around web performance, web security, cloud services and related fields.
My technical skills are mostly focused on the software development area with a special attention on the web technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I also work with Java and other languages frequently.
I love to travel around the world both for work and pleasure.
Two years ago we started Gitpod, a company building hosted development environments based on the open source project Eclipse Theia.
We were convinced that, in the future, all software will be developed in the browser, and we wanted to build this future. Along the way we built a great team of 17 people (and counting) located across Europe and the U.S.A., raised our first investment round and worked on some of the hardest technical problems we could find.
As we just closed our Series A funding round with Accel, I want to share with you how we did it: what worked well for us, what did not work so well, and what I would do differently if I could start from scratch again.
But before I go into details about fundraising, I want to share with you a few general thoughts on building a remote team and running a remote company.