Discovering Engineering Talent in a Distributed World by Han Yuan, Laura Thomson, Daniel Dargham
Just a year ago, the future of work was often described as one that existed beyond office walls where anyone could work from anywhere. Unknown to all of us then, a pandemic would strike the globe quickly accelerating the future of work to the present-day realities that we see today. The world isn’t going to go backwards in time now that we’ve seen the future. How do leaders adapt to the challenges of building distributed teams in this new reality?
In this panel, we discuss the challenges leaders face in building distributed teams and explore solutions.
Han Yuan
Han Yuan is the founder of Post-PC Labs, LLC. Post-PC Labs is wholly-owned and funded by Han, powered by a global team of freelancers. The group's focus is building cash-flow breakeven projects with product-market fit. Early investment themes include wellness and corporate productivity. Before Post-PC Labs, Han was SVP of Engineering at Upwork, where he led one of the world's most distributed engineering teams: 350+ engineers in 40 countries around the world. In this role, Han was responsible for any function that had anything to do with a computer, including Information Security, IT, QA, Application Engineering, Cloud Engineering, Data Science, Infrastructure Engineering, and Program Management. During his tenure at Upwork, Upwork's revenue doubled, and the company went public in 2018. In a previous life, Han was an influential mobile engineering leader, having incubated world-class teams for eBay and Netflix. Han's early work in mobile proved that it was possible to sell billions of dollars of goods and entertain hundreds of millions of people globally using just a mobile phone. Together with his teams, Han helped launch and scale the eBay and Netflix programs from small incubation teams. At eBay, he was the first engineer on his team. When Apple announced its one billionth download in the app store and celebrated the top 25 apps in the store of all time, eBay and Netflix were both on the list. Han started his career in enterprise software specializing in the finance and human resources domains and was a co-founder of Buddystumbler.com. Han has a B.S and M.S in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research from U.C. Berkeley with a minor degree in Computer Science and a Management of Technology Certificate from the Haas School of Business.
Laura Thomson
Laura Thomson is Vice President of Engineering at Fastly, where she leads the Platform Engineering team. She is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society. Previously, she spent more than a decade at Mozilla, leading engineering and operations teams, and was on the board of Let's Encrypt. Laura has spoken at many conferences world wide over the last twenty years and is the author of best-selling software development books.
Daniel Dargham
Daniel Dargham is President & CEO of Lohika. He brings over 25 years of international experience in a diversified range of software engineering, marketing, sales and general management experience, from both established and high-growth companies at the cutting edge of software development. Prior to Lohika, he held several engineering and management roles at KLA-Tencor and IBM. Daniel holds an MBA from Stanford University and an M.S in Electrical Engineering from INSA Lyon in France
