Mike Baglio Jr.

Ditch the Commute! 15 SaaS Companies Crushing Remote Work in 2024: The future of work is flexible, and these top SaaS companies are leading the charge with awesome remote-first cultures: 1.) Zapier (automation platform) 2.) GitLab (version control) 3.) Cloudbees (software delivery management) 4.) Automattic 5.) Doist (task management) 6.) HubSpot (CRM platform) 7.) SurveyMonkey (online survey tool) 8.) Slack (communication platform) 9.) Zoom (video conferencing platform) 10.) Dropbox (cloud storage) 11.) Mailchimp (email marketing platform) 12.) Stripe (payment processing platform) 13.) Canva (graphic design platform) 14.) Airtable (collaborative work management platform) 15.) ClickUp (project management platform) Considering a remote role? Research the company culture and benefits to ensure it aligns with your needs. Look for strong communication practices and support systems for remote teams. **Do you work for a remote-first SaaS company you love? Share it in the comments! #remotework #saas #careerdevelopment #hiring #recruiting #flexibility

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Anyone in my network (or knows someone) that’s looking to start out their software career or already has some experience, gimme a shout. Have a client looking to hire. Please note, this is more of an entry level/less experienced position. Not looking for loads of experience. Only drawback is it’s mostly an on-prem gig here in Jax. Upsides include getting to work with modern tech, a plethora of legitimately interesting problems, and you get to work with us too. 😎 That last one might include some mentoring, pairing, and teaming. #payITforward

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OK, let's talk about Platform Engineering. Good grief. Platforming is a topic that has grown into a life of its own in tech, and not in a good way. I'm going to row against the current. Platform teams are an anti-pattern. If your developers don't know how to properly provision and maintain infrastructure that is both supportable and minimizes cost and emissions, then you need better developers. Maintaining infrastructure in a consistent, supportable, optimized fashion does not require a team of people. A platform is not infrastructure nor is it the automation to maintain said infrastructure. A platform is a collection of APIs and messages that bind applications together. Again, this does not require a dedicated team of people. Platform teams are waste. Platform engineering is cover for justifying that waste. #platformengineering #platforms

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Imo, conferences, meetups, events have been some of the best things to happen in the industry. They’ve opened the door for so many more tech professionals to speak at all levels and created more C-level opportunities—which I absolutely love, as I speak their native language. I know a huge number of engineers who now hold some of the most senior roles, with many others either having made or considering moves toward CIO (not traditional or expected CTO) and similar positions (CPTO, CDO etc). In these senior roles, communication is paramount. Being able to converse effectively across all levels is a skill not everyone possesses. #conferences #meetups #events #communication #leadership #CIO #CTO #CPTO #CDO

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Is your team looking to bring on a Backend Engineer? Take a look at Michael's profile below! Michael – Backend – CA Headhunter Prescreen Notes: I really enjoyed this conversation. He is an expert at integrating API with 3rd party vendors. He has worked with some major 3rd parties like Amazon, Albertsons, Samsung, and Zocdoc on integrations. He is passively looking and is currently at $160K and is looking for a bump. Resume Notes: 💠 Extensive Integration Expertise: Successfully led integration projects with major partners such as Amazon, Samsung, and Zocdoc, showcasing adeptness in designing and implementing APIs, microservices, and backend services, directly applicable to building backend API integrations with diverse systems in the electric power industry. 💠 Authentication Architecture Overhaul: Redesigned and enhanced authentication architecture, developing a versatile magic link and verification system extendable for third-party integration, aligning with the need to own all aspects of meter data processing and implement new features for virtual power plants. 💠 Workflow Component Design: Designed and implemented a flexible workflow component for handling complex notifications, directly transferable to implementing API monitoring tools and proactively monitoring API service performance in the electric power industry. 💠 Advocacy for Best Engineering Practices: Advocated for and implemented better engineering practices and resilient infrastructure, including principles of DDD, OOP/SOLID, and microservice architecture, which align with the need for strong software engineering background and attention to detail. 💠 Tooling and Infrastructure Optimization: Created developer efficiency tools and optimized infrastructure and service pipelines, reducing service build times by up to 40%, showcasing proficiency in optimizing cloud services and infrastructure, a crucial aspect in the electric power industry. FlanStaff #BackendEngineer #TechTalent #Hiring #EngineeringJobs #APIDevelopment #TechRecruitment #JobOpportunity #SoftwareEngineering #CareerGrowth #RenewableEnergy #imhiring #hiring

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What's slowing down your ability to iterate? Some common culprits in game dev: - Slow feedback loop on what is and is not working - Poor dev tooling (unreliable, slow, incomplete) - Poor build pipelines and release processes - Culture / Leadership doesn't value iteration - Teams not prioritizing reviewing each other's work - Plan that provides no time to iterate Done well, iteration creates learning, and learning lets you create a better game. Without it, you're stuck making tons of assumptions and hoping they work out. It's a lot better to be learning. What could you change to help yourself OR someone else iterate quicker and better? #gameproduction #gamedevelopment #gameindustry #iteration

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Senior Devs / Hiring Managers—during our live webinar yesterday, we polled a few hundred recent Comp Sci grads. 60% didn’t feel that they had enough experience in Java to qualify for an enterprise coding job. Instead they’d been pointed towards Python. 80% had no experience with Unit Testing. I know Comp Sci isn’t just about software engineering; but it’s by far the largest number of available jobs for grads. If jobs are the metric that Higher Ed is judged on, this seems like a huge failure. Does this line up with your experience? How are you dealing with this skills gap when you look to onboard junior talent?

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It's not always about the money for tech folks. Startups sometimes can't pay what more established orgs can. And that's OK so long as they make up in other areas. Candidates care deeply about: -time off -remote vs hybrid vs on-site flexibility -work/life balance -equity -great product/service -strong mission and vision -strong culture One example, candidates are often willing to take lower salaries for the flex of remote work. I’ve had countless convos where people tell me their "on-site" salary range and their "remote" range. I had candidate once reject a $20k salary bump to stay remote. But it's not only remote flexibility. I speak with startup talent all the time... And the 3 universal things brought up in every conversation are: -the product/service -mission/vision -equity To be blunt, some people are built for startups. They LOVE the risk. But for the risk to make sense, they need to love the product/service, align with the mission/vision, and have a piece of the pie. So to attract top folks, you don’t need to beat out your competitors through high salaries (although it can and does help). You can beat them out in other areas. And it may vary person to person. This also doesn't mean underpay potential employees just because you offer what's above. If you have the budget to pay people their worth/what's aligned with market rate AND can offer some of the aforementioned things, do it. People are the thing that take business to the next level. And startups have a special opportunity here to get creative.

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I'm excited for our next release - "From Observation To Automation In One Afternoon..." Problem: Your team already gets lots of alerts Problem about to get worse: Your org is migrating/re-platforming a key app, and your team is about to get far more alerts Problem about to get EVEN worse: Your team is getting ZERO new headcount. Oh... and your execs expect ZERO downtime during the process. :) We are about to release a major new capability we've been working for months. It is another case we're building on top the same underlying AI engine and expert automation library. More to come!

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Fellow engineering leaders, how do you and your teams handle product and technical bets that fall outside of annual planning? At Cedar, we've developed a framework to mitigate risk and provide clarity in such scenarios, helping us avoid pitfalls like the sunk-cost fallacy. Our approach is structured around three key steps: 1. Pitch, 2. Manage, 3. Pivot or persevere. By following this process, I’ve found we have a much better understanding of the success, or failure, of our bets. I recently shared our framework in detail in a post created in collaboration with Coda after receiving interest in this framework from my recent talk on this topic - https://lnkd.in/g5zGQX3V. You can explore it here: https://lnkd.in/gdEvsMKw. The post not only outlines the framework but also offers templates for immediate use. I welcome your feedback and insights on how you approach this challenge. Is it similar to Cedar's method, or have you discovered a different approach? Share your thoughts! I also want to thank those who helped refine my thoughts on this blog: Jonathan Collette Aaron Zollman Justin Hales Latham Arneson Annie Lux Craig Beveridge

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🛠️ Okay y'all, looking for advice: I'm running a handful of small apps for Build Carolina's Development Studio initiative. These are low-utilization apps for relatively small audiences. I'm leaning heavily on Rails at the moment but expect to bring on some JS-stack projects in the near future (likely Next, but I'm always open to the flavor of the week in JavaScript 😅) Here's what I'm finding for hosting: - I still know Heroku best, but I just don't trust them to not enshittify further. 🫠 Every new app here is a liability when Marc decides he needs another island or whatever. 💰 - I'm using a lot of Render and like their devex philosophy, but their pricing is weird (per-service + premium tiers? Pick one!), the big feature gaps in their platform have gone long-unaddressed, and their support has been poor. 🤖 - I'm experimenting with Fly.io: great pricing, but a weird mix of UI-vs-CLI workflows and segmenting project resources is unintuitive. I feel like I'm going to wake up to a huge bill because I accidentally over-provisioned something here. 💸 I'm curious what other folks are doing for small-scale artisanal app hosting in 2024+. Are we all running our own EC2 clusters? Is everyone just writing Next apps for Vercel? Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy looking for a backend host in a static SPA world. 👴 ❓ Tips/tricks/tales welcome. Where are you hosting your lil' bytes right now?

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If you’re lucky, Agile today is very much like... Been there. Done that. Works. The agile community has had a massive impact on how work gets done today. Many younger people have no idea how broken IT organizations were 15 years ago. Does anyone still remember how project managers and requirements engineers spent months predicting a future that never materialized? Meanwhile, dev teams built things no one needed because they had no chance to talk to users. This created insane costs of failure, delays, and frustration. The agile community created the "operating system" for future-proof organizations. That was before the Big 5 consultancies swooped in and started selling their hallucinations, turning agile into "lots of useless roles and meetings for micromanagers." Many important questions have been left unanswered:  - Does creative entrepreneurial spirit have a place in our organizations?  - Are we attracting the talent that might otherwise disrupt our business elsewhere?  - Is it safe to fail, or will I get roasted when our assumptions prove wrong?  - Are we running experiments with real users effectively and in a structured way?  - Will I get funding for my bold ideas, or will the HIPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinions) always win?  - Is it a viable career path to become an innovator/intrapreneur, or will I end up in an "innovation department" playing innovation theater until retirement? I’ll leave it to Schrödinger’s crowd to decide if the agile cat is dead or alive. But it’s definitely time for some to move forward. If you're an agile transformation coach and haven’t figured out the path forward, feeding the cat is going to get tough — and it won’t be long before it’s very much dead. Innovation theater never works for long. The real treasure for most organizations today is knowing what *not* to do and executing the right things at full speed. Stop the innovation theater. Getting stuff done in sprints and testing the waters with real users still works best.

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There is 1 piece of the puzzle that 90%+ of SaaS companies do poorly during an interview process. If you can't do this well, you have no shot at landing top talent. I am talking about the DEMO It's your chance to show off the product to a potential employee. The opportunity to build a picture of how awesome it would be to sell/Market/Design etc. It usually happens towards the end of the process and should be an awesome opportunity to close. But sadly, most demos do not go so well. Candidates come out with more questions than when they went in. A super positive process can turn on its head. Lots of reasons for this but one of the easiest fixes is make sure that you have the right person doing the demo use a sales guy/gal who demos the product day in, day out. Too often because it is an interview, 'Users' of the product get pulled in to demo. People who use the product, know all of its flaws and have never sold it. Have you ever had a bad demo experience? #recruitingforSaaS #SaaS #demo

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Day 2 Problem 🚧 Transitioning from Day 1 to Day 2 in software development can present unique challenges, often leaving teams struggling to maintain and scale their applications effectively.  But the Day 2 problem doesn’t have to hold you back. In this article, we explore how teams are using Roadie to overcome Day 2 hurdles, streamline operations, and boost team productivity. How are you handling your Day 2 challenges? #Roadie #Backstage #DevOps #SoftwareDevelopment #TechBlog

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Your Offers Are Getting REJECTED – And It’s YOUR Fault! 90% of you are losing top software talent because you CAN'T keep up with the game. Developers today? They’re getting counteroffers that are DOUBLE, sometimes TRIPLE what you’re putting on the table. 💸 And guess what? They know it. They're in demand and they know their worth better than most companies do. 🔊 So why are your offers STILL getting rejected? Here’s why: 1️⃣ You’re not doing your homework – While you’re stuck in yesterday’s salary brackets, competitors are shelling out 20-30% more. Wake up! Salary expectations have skyrocketed. 2️⃣ You’re desperate, not prepared – Offering a salary that tanks your business just to keep up with the big boys? 🏢 You can’t out-bid them, but you can out-maneuver them. 3️⃣ You’re ignoring the REAL value – Devs don't just care about money. Career growth. Development opportunities. Learning culture. These matter more than you think. If you’re not ready to offer them, good luck holding onto top talent. 😏 💡If you’re not offering more than just a fat paycheck, you’re toast. 🔍 Your competition is fierce, your budget is tight, and your strategy? Honestly, it's trash. ❗ So, what are you going to do about it? Let your offers get thrown back in your face? Or will you take a hard look at what your company is offering in terms of culture, growth, and long-term development? 🧠 💣 Stop throwing money at a problem you don’t understand. It's not just about numbers; it's about the full package. 🛑 Quit losing talent because your offer isn’t good enough. Step up or get left behind. 👇 Agree? Disagree? #Recruiting #TechTalent #SalaryNegotiations #CounterOffers #SoftwareDevelopment #HiringGame #CareerGrowth

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Friday Findings: CTO Hiring Insights I've spoken with several startup CTOs this week who feel like they're hitting a brick wall when hiring software engineers Some have found some success with job ads but had to lower standards to cut costs. Others are frustrated by the time wasted interviewing unqualified candidates and the struggle to attract top talent. I asked James Pepplinkhouse for his take, and he shared an interesting shift in approach: "We've been facing challenges with finding the right talent, so we are shifting to tech pairing interviews to gauge a quicker and clearer assessment of their skills and performance." James emphasized looking for qualities like: 👉Using shortcut keys 👉Efficient app and tab management 👉Ability to start projects from scratch using preferred tools 👉Effective use of Google & AI tools He summed it up well: "It's a sports team, we have limited places, you gotta be a great player and a team player to be on the winning team." What's been working for you in hiring and assessing candidates? Any tips or tricks to share?

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New Developer Experience report: Only 44% of developers believe leaders are aware of developer experience issues. I spoke to quite a few tech leaders. Most of them told me they prioritize developer productivity and asked for advice on measuring it. Do you see the disconnect? Leaders want to start measuring the problems but don't speak to and listen to their developers, who already know the areas of improvement. Instead of prioritizing measuring productivity, leaders should help developers be productive by prioritizing improving the developer experience. We surveyed 2,100 devs and tech leaders on the current state of DevEx. You can download the full report here: https://lnkd.in/eAq6RZPJ.

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Buckle up, folks! It's time to dive into the wild world of curb appeal! Picture this: your house is throwing a party, and the first guests to show up are potential buyers. What's the first thing they see? That's right, the outside! It's like the trailer for a movie - you want it to be epic and leave them dying to see more! Sadly, many homeowners skip this crucial step in prepping their homes for sale. Let's break it down - what exactly is curb appeal and why should you care? Curb appeal is like your home's outer charm - the flashy outfit that catches eyes and whispers, "Come on in!" So, why should you bother jazzing up your home's exterior? Well, for starters, it sets the mood for the whole property. Imagine buyers pulling up to a dreary exterior - not a great start, right? You want your home to scream, "Pick me!" from the get-go. Plus, a fab exterior hints at a well-kept interior, boosting your home's value and drawing in top-notch buyers. Let's not forget the competition! With killer curb appeal, your home won't just blend in - it'll shine like a diamond in a sea of rocks. And guess what? Even before buyers set foot on your property, your online listing pics can work their magic, thanks to that snazzy curb appeal. Oh, and here's a fun fact: a well-groomed exterior can bump up your home's perceived value. Buyers assume a pretty outside means a stunning inside, giving you a sweet return on your investment. But hey, if your curb appeal game is weak, buyers might just speed away, eyeing up prettier houses down the block. So, there you have it - the power of curb appeal! It's not just about looking pretty; it's a full-on strategy to reel in those dream buyers and send your home sale soaring to the stars! It's simple, remember dating!!! #helpfulrealtor #realtortips #curbappeal #curbappealmatters #askarealtor #utahrealtor #usearealtor #exitrealtyadvantage

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🤔 "Why hire juniors when you could just hire seniors?" I hear this question a lot. After 20+ years leading software teams, I'll tell you exactly why this thinking is dead wrong. Watch this 90-second video to learn: • Why blended teams outperform senior-only teams • The surprising way junior devs make seniors better • How "naive" questions lead to breakthrough innovations 👉 Your company's next big innovation might come from your newest hire. #SoftwareDevelopment #Leadership #Engineering #TeamBuilding #Innovation #JuniorDevelopers

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