Interview with Ravi Bhim, CEO & Founder of BeautifulCode

Vidal: Good afternoon. I have with me today Ravi Bhim. Hi, Ravi, welcome to the show. RAVI: Thank you, Vidal. Nice to be here. Tell us about Yourself Vidal: Ravi, maybe you could tell people a little about your role and what Beautiful Code does. And by the way, I love the name, cool name. RAVI: Thank you. Yeah, so I am the founder of Beautiful Code. I set up Beautiful Code in 2013. And the company basically sets up and fully manages remote engineering teams for our clients. Vidal: Ravi, a lot of companies struggle with remote teams. At some companies I’ve even worked at, they don’t allow it. They have this term, “face-to-face culture,” which basically is a nice way of saying we don’t want any remote teams, we can’t deal with remote teams. So do you have any quick advice for engineering managers on the remote team? RAVI: Right, great opening question. I think it’s natural that people want to interact in person. Definitely, that has the highest quality quotient in terms of communication and coordination. Remote teams, I believe, is more of an evolution, in general, of how people want to work and how, in general, technology is transforming and making people capable to work remote. So it’s a trend, I believe. Let me take that back, it’s not really a trend any more. It started off as a trend, but it’s going to be inevitable for companies to be remote-smart and even distributed-smart. There are few companies that have gone a hundred percent distributed. We are not even talking about remote. If people are skeptical of what remote can do for them they probably could learn a different perspective. Not to say this is going to work for everyone. They could learn a different perspective by just observing fully distributed engineering teams. Coming back to the advice – you don’t have to buy into the remote or the distributed set-ups. But if you spend time to understand, then you can kind of get another perspective of how some of these new-age leaders are basically taking up remote and distributed teams and making it work. Vidal: Interesting. So you said they can observe to understand… How would be a way if someone’s at a company where they don’t have remote, that they could observe this? I’m just curious what would be your advice on that. RAVI: Yeah. Some of the companies have been pretty vocal about this. Buffer is a great example.  I interviewed Katie Womersley, who is the VP of Engineering at Buffer a few weeks back and I’ve learned a new perspective on distributed team management. Thought leaders such as Katie are actively helping evolve this new style of workforce management.  And there are other companies who are in general gone 100% distributed or 100% remote. Stripe notably has made a big kind of commitment to go remote in recent times. Talking and preparing ourselves for Remote is fantastic because this is not an area which has been formally researched, unlike for example software development processes. We have the agile methodology, right, which was fairly researched and studied. There’s not a lot of formal study that went into Remote. But I think that’s just due. It’s a matter of time before people are going to share their best practices ...