By: Bita Djaghouri
The engineering team at Unite Us has grown rapidly in the last year and includes team members with incredible expertise and experience. In order to recruit top talent and hire from the communities we serve, Unite Us hires engineers from all across the country. As our team continues to grow, we have collectively focused on how to work together effectively as a fully remote team. Over time, we have become veterans at working remotely and developed a number of effective strategies and tools to maintain a strong structure and culture for our fully remote team.
Collaboration Tools
Our team uses many tools to collaborate efficiently and effectively. Here are a few of our top tools:
Slack — You’re unlikely to find a tech team these days that’s not using Slack. At Unite Us, we utilize Slack channels to categorize by topic (#dev-front, #dev-backend) where tech team members can share documents, information, provide topical inquiries, input, snark, and make enthusiastic use of the /gifs plugin. Naturally, custom Slack emojis are the crux of any successful Slack communication.
Github — In addition to managing repos in Github, we utilize the Pull Approve plugin to randomly assign two engineers to each pull request, ensuring that all team members have a chance to review a proportionate number of pull requests and manage workload across the team.
VS Code — While not as commonly used, we have begun to explore the VS Code Live Share feature. It’s a great tool that allows live collaboration on a codebase (similar to the way two or more people can collaborate on Google Docs at the same time) while sharing a context without having to set up a whole environment.
Zoom — Really a remote team staple. We have a Zoom call for everything from company-wide all-hands meetings, to agile planning meetings, to daily stand up calls to individual one-on-one calls.
Calls
While there’s no replacing face-to-face interactions, video calls help support a collaborative team environment. As much time as engineers will spend producing code, it is equally essential that we spend time collaborating, ideating, or casually socializing. Before we went fully remote, you could set your watch by the small army of engineers leaving the New York office on their way to Starbucks every afternoon. These walks have resulted in many unblocked issues as well as advice sought and offered. (The benefits of coffee to an engineering team could be its own post altogether.) This ritual does not have to be lost on a remote team. Although our status as a fully remote team is temporary, I continue to enjoy afternoon coffee chats on video calls a few times each week to connect with teammates.
Pairing
Software engineering is a profession that lends itself well to remote work. The vast majority of engineers are individual contributors, but producing code is only one part of our job. It is equally important for engineers to help teammates work through problems in the form of code reviews and pairing. A vast majority of engineering problems are solved collaboratively. The days of the lone basement programmer have long since fallen out of fashion.
Pairing at Unite Us is seen as part of the job description for any engineer. No matter how busy we are, everyone on the team always finds time to pair when someone else needs it (though, if you’re not quite ready to get on a call to pair, there’s always the rubber duck method). As a team, we have collectively saved ourselves hundreds of hours by working together on tough problems, instead of allowing one another to spin our wheels. Although pairing has changed since the team became fully remote, the value and frequency has only increased.
The Unite Us engineering team was relatively small when I started in July 2017. We were a team of ten engineers, all working out of the NYC headquarters. Since then, Unite Us has grown rapidly and the engineering team now has dozens of members spread all over the country — including California, Arizona, South Carolina, Kentucky, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. While that growth ushered in some amazing changes, it rapidly transformed our team from one that could fit in a single conference room to one that has more remote members than local members. Although working remotely has its challenges, the Unite Us engineering team has demonstrated that with the right tools and culture, working remotely does not have to impair the productivity or cohesion of a strong engineering team.
To learn more about engineering roles at Unite Us, check out our website.
