Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis)

Culture

Diffusing religious arguments

I called arguments between assemble-your-own vs. kitchen-sink framework approaches a religious one akin to tabs vs. spaces in my previous post. All of my leadership positions have been on brownfield products, usually turnarounds, so I’ve walked into minefields of religion that I’ve had to diffuse in order to focus...

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Comparing assemble-your-own vs. kitchen-sink frameworks

In my previous post, I wrote about some of the “performance” tradeoffs in build-yourself vs. off-the-shelf approaches as an analogue for remote vs. collocated teams. I’d like to wade deeper into the build-yourself vs. off-the-shelf approaches, in this case going with an “assemble-your-own” framework (Sinatra with Sequel, Flask with...

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Performance of remote vs. collocated teams

I saw a tweet the other week about remote teams having lower performance than colocated teams: It's not possible to not take a significant performance hit if you're not collocated. Remote if you must, but don't imagine that it's not costing both money and time to do that. —...

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How to turn a team around in one easy step

My last four roles have all been “turn-around” scenarios. At CCP Games I had three: as Technical Art Director, I turned around a group that was struggling on executing basic tooling; as Technical Director I had to turn an entire engineering department that was writing an order of magnitude...

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The most important piece of advice I’ve ever gotten

In May 2010, I had been at BioWare for about 2 years, and was ready to quit. Actually, I had quit. My Art Director at the time set up a meeting between myself and Gordon Walton, a the General Manager for BioWare Austin. Despite of being at BioWare for...

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Working around process bandwidth bottlenecks

For most of my first year at Cozy, the engineering team was rebuilding the application. The UX and code we had was, hmmm, not good. It wasn’t serving our customers and wasn’t maintainable in any way. We were working as fast as we could to add enough functionality to...

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You’re probably not affirming your employees enough

I thought I was a good manager. I listened. I gave feedback. I mentored. I found solutions. I motivated and supported. People trusted me. The first time one of my reports told me that I needed to give more praise and affirmation, I thought perhaps they were being fragile....

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My Framework for Compensation

As CTO at Cozy, I came up with a framework for compensation that I was able to mostly apply to the engineering/ops/fraud teams, and tried to impart onto other groups though not always successfully. There are a few parts to this framework, but nothing about it is complicated. Some...

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Hiring in a time of scarcity

I’ve never understood the hypergrowth mindset that’s guided the tech industry for the last few years, and part of me is happy that the investment bubble has popped. I’m not interested in throwing around money to solve problems; my experience is this creates more problems than it solves, and...

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Questions to ask before you make that hire

When I was at CCP, I blogged a lot. I was able to try out many new ideas, and my disagreement with certain decisions sparked a lot of good writing. I’ll get to why that matters in a minute. At one point, one of the American executives hired by...

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