Culture, Hiring & Leadership

Looking to increase gender diversity in your company? Check out these best practices for recruiting and retaining female employees.

There’s no doubt I love New York and I love being a Software Engineer. There’s infinite things to do and cool neighborhoods/restaurants/museums/random fun stuff to checkout all the time in NYC.

Tech teams are getting smarter. Efficiency in software engineering is becoming a critical piece of a company’s competitive advantage. Stay ahead of the curve by knowing the top software engineering trends of 2018

Founders often become CEOs but it's not always the best path for your startup.

Learn the three steps I've followed as CEO to create a welcoming environment that results in a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

Learn how Debbie Madden, founder of Stride and advisor at Docker, thinks about onboarding remote employees in hybrid and remote environments.

For the past 7 years, I face the challenge that all working moms that I know face - balance. Here are 3 things I've learned to achieve work/life balance.

How does one hire for “motivation”? Here are 3 tips to consider when hiring.

If you go into each interview prepared to interview for integrity, you can land yourself a top candidate that is both honest and extremely technically talented.

Learn about the four steps Stride Consulting's Chief People Officer, Rebecca Braitling, recommends to help build a values aligned culture.

Harassment has been all over the news the past couple of years. That means we all know what not to do and can stop making a big deal out of it in our workplaces, right?

I've seen tons of articles, speeches and emails on proper interviewing etiquette, do X, Y and Z and you magically land the job of your dreams. In my experience, which has unbelievably been 16 years of being involved in technical recruiting, a candidate can do all the right things, but do one thing wrong and not be able to overcome it. Reason being, interviewers are on the prowl for this, and feel when they see you do or say something negative they are seeing your true colors and this is often the tip of the iceberg to your true self. However true or false this may be, it's best to keep these 5 things in mind when interviewing.

6 tips for hiring the right developers for your startup

Follow these experience-driven tips to help your organization adjust effectively to remote software development.

Selecting the right tech stack for your project is a key decision that you need to make. Check out this guide to help you make the right choice.

Learn more about how you can utilize best practices for stakeholder and user interviews to ensure your team's success.

How do you solve a problem when our hypothetical heroine has a knack for computer science and radiates all of the key qualities of a technology leader?

Learn how breast cancer made Stride's Founder & Chairwoman, Debbie Madden, a better CEO!

Learn how a small group of engineers worked to build a learning culture at Stride.

Having the entire team in one space provides a significant advantage. Learn how a co-located team is the single most effective way to get work done.

No matter what type of business you are involved in, there is one element that clearly must be present in order for you to succeed.

The difference between core values that are useful and ones that sit on a shelf gathering dust are subtle yet powerful.

Effective communication between team members is the backbone of an efficient organization. See how you can improve communication in your own team.

Hiring the right people to join your team is likely something that keeps you awake at night. If it's not, you're likely not thinking about it enough. Unconscious bias exists. Learn how to identify and remove it from your hiring process.

It's time to close the wage gap in the workplace, and start demanding equal pay for equal work. Learn how we ensure our team is paid fairly.

Learn tips and techniques for facilitating meetings from AFB, a seasoned consultant leading teams at Stride.

Outsourcing development, at it’s root, is similar to outsourcing many other things in your life. You are trusting a team of individuals who are experts at a craft because you believe they will produce better and/or faster results than if you did it yourself

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned when starting a company is that it’s vital to know how and when to scale. Want to learn how to do it well? Read on.

Need to hire a CTO? Finding good talent can be challenging, but these seven steps increase your chances of finding your ideal candidate.

Learn how Stride increased employee engagement and content creation with lightning talks hosted by an employee-led group called the Learning Initiative.

Learn how Stride has iteratively built an interview process with the goal of making a more equitable and inclusive experience for candidates.

Learn how Stride Consulting makes it easy for you, the candidate, to interview with us.

Stride Consulting’s culture club has been working to foster fun and togetherness. Learn about Stride’s culture club and their impact on company culture.

Maybe you’ve made the decision to leave your job and are on an active search for your next gig. Or maybe you’re passively looking to see what’s out there. Either way, it’s very likely that your first interaction with your next potential company is going to be with a non-technical person. For smaller companies, you might talk directly with the CEO or founder. For bigger companies it’ll likely be a head of talent or technical recruiter.

Phone interviews are the first step in the hiring process for Stride Consulting. Learn how to pass your next phone interview with advice from an expert.

Getting your team to align on priorities is hard work. Learn how Stride uses the OMV framework to facilitate prioritization and alignment.

Stride lead software consultant Ian McNally shares his tips for researching new technologies and how to apply them to your business and tech team.

Learn how to find a technical co-founder for your startup and the questions you should answer before making the decision to hire.

Learn how to get the most out of your software outsourcing partner in order to achieve the best possible outcomes.

If you want to increase the efficiency of your software team, use this easy technique.

Do you want to learn how to leverage positive feedback for continued personal growth? Here are three strategies to teach you how.

Let’s just all agree right now that it’s disrespectful of others’ time when you show up to meetings late. It’s kind of like saying your time is more important than theirs. I know we’re all busy.

It’s clear that women and men start off in equal numbers at birth and stay at equal numbers in college. Yet, somewhere between college and leadership we lose the majority of women.

Learn how to build your culture and how it impacts business

A volunteer task force is a small group of employees who volunteer themselves to own a high priority company initiative.

Learn about the interview process at Stride from the perspective of a Software Engineer.

It’s not clear if Snap’s culture is as sexist and toxic as Uber’s, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is how Snap resolves the issue. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel said to the Los Angeles Times “With a younger workforce people are going to make mistakes.”

One of the biggest mistakes I see adults make is not asking for or giving help. For some reason, many people believe that suffering through a thing on your own is somehow more noble than getting help from others.

Debbie Madden talks about how how a many tech companies have gotten it right in regards to harassment of women in the workplace.

Learn how to maximize outcomes with your outsourced software development teams through the lens of Stride Founder, Debbie Madden.

Grow your business by nailing the most important meeting of the week: the leadership team scrum.

Management and mentorship may seem like similar roles, but they are actually very different. Discover the main differences between the two leadership roles.

Every negotiation is different. Yet, they should all start with one simple act: meeting in person.

Learn why Obi-Wan wasn't just a great Jedi, but also a great consultant. Here are 5 impactful consulting tips from Obi-Wan!

Read about how to optimize you hiring process for today, in order to prevent future layoffs.

David A. Black is by any measure an accomplished Rubyist. He is the author of The Well-Grounded Rubyist and an internationally-known software developer, speaker, and event organizer. He is a Ruby standard library contributor and one of the founders of Ruby Central, Inc.

On April 5, U.K. companies with 250 employees or more were required by law to reveal their pay data. The goal: Narrow the gender wage gap.

Last week, we were honored to learn that Stride was identified as one of the 50 fastest growing women-owned or led organization in the country (we were #6). Furthermore, Stride was recognized as the fastest growing in all of New York.

Trust is a critical component of effective teams. I personally believe that trust is the number one, most important criteria of effective teams. Yet the path to building trust among co-workers is misunderstood. According to Bruce Tuckman, all teams evolve through four distinct phases:

To land the best developers in town, make a job offer the same day you bring the candidate on site. Here's why.

Read how Stride's founder, Debbie Madden, decides whether or not to build, borrow or buy when it comes to goals around outsourcing software development.

It’s 4p.m. on Thursday. I’m halfway through giving a job offer to Stacey when I bring up the handshake deal. After I finish explaining what the handshake deal,

Productivity drops by a full 66 percent by the time you reach 60 hours of work in a given week. Work smarter not harder with these tips.

Learning how to give feedback effectively is something many people fail to take the time to learn. But, with 4 easy steps, I believe we can all get better as this vital part of communication.

Ever wonder what all high-performing teams have in common? See how great teams operate and learn the secrets to their success.

Learn about Stride's People Team and the lessons they learned from Axe Throwing!

Ever wondered what made Darth Vader such a bad team leader? Learn how to avoid 3 leadership mistakes that Darth Vader made and May the Fourth be with you.

Stride CEO Debbie Madden shares the 4 mistakes for enterprises to avoid when outsourcing a technology team for application development.

When you started your company, everyone knew everyone. You shared the inside jokes, brainstorming sessions included the whole company, and there was a sense of belonging and family.

Learn how you can give useful feedback for career and personal growth.

there are some common traits that the successful companies I worked for all had in common. For one, everyone involved with these great companies

Read about how Stride has worked to build a talent review that is designed to help our employees grow at their pace

Whether discussing it with our friends, seeing it as a topic on our favorite TV show, or just imagining it for ourselves, we are all familiar with the question “What would you do if you had one month to live?” And even though we’ve heard it a bunch of times before, this is not just some fantasy, throwaway question. If taken seriously, the “one month to live” question will challenge you to focus on the things that are truly important in your life, whether that be family, friends, career, or hobbies. It can also help you learn how to live life to the fullest in order to minimize and eliminate the regrets that many people have as they grow older.

One unhappy employee can drag down the morale of an entire team. Instead of firing them, here's an alternative approach.

Read about what Ken Judy, CEO of Stride Consulting, believes is the connection between work and joy.

Learn about why and how you should keep a work journal!

I was recently getting a coffee with a fellow Strider; let’s call him Bobby. Bobby was offering me some feedback on a project we had worked on for some time. He had been a senior developer on my team and was always ready to answer my GraphQL and Django questions.

The days of tech teams hiring ‘ninja’, ‘rockstar’ or ‘unicorn’ developers is done. If you are still seeking these people, stop what you are doing immediately.

Debbie Madden explains how being a female entrepreneur is hard, but that’s what we signed up for. Women entrepreneurs should never be viewed as victims.

Learn if you're ready for a CTO and the questions to ask yourself when starting your company.

Networking is a craft. Yet, if you follow this one rule, you'll be on your way to effective networking in no time.

Whether you’re a startup looking for your first employee, or an established firm looking to scale, keeping on top of the best hiring practices is a key competitive advantage. Here are three recruiting tactics that are underutilized.

To learn how you can make high quality decisions quickly, and to get key insights into 7 habits of highly successful CTOs, read on.

Consider these 7 things to do today if you've been laid off

Programming can be one of the worst things for your physical and mental health. But it doesn't have to be. Here are seven ways to be a healthy programmer.

Learn about ESG and how sustainability models are evolving with service companies, large and small.

For over 17 years, my business life has revolved around building and growing tech companies from startup through success. Doing this is a job, no doubt. But if that’s all that it was, there’s no way I would have been able to achieve the things I have throughout my career. Nor would I have enjoyed the past 17 years of my life nearly as much. No, tech entrepreneurship is more than just a job for me. It is a passion!

Or, how do I know if the developer I am interviewing for my team is good enough or if I should hold out for the perfect match?

Read about our CEO's experience as a middle manager and the lessons he learned that have helped him grow into the leader he is today.

Think about your team. Think about each person on your team. Do you trust them?

The best company cultures are created purposefully. Learn some key tips on creating a strong culture for your company that fits your needs.

Missing deadlines should never happen on your tech team. This practical advice will help you avoid missing last minute deadlines.

Read four steps to consider when choosing the right technology partner for your team's software development needs.

Learn how Stride's founder and chairwoman, Debbie Madden, creates her talks and presentations. This was originally a Stride Lightning Talk.

Learn how Stride Consulting works with tech organizations to integrate culture post m&a in this blog post written by two culture integration experts.

Does your company really trust each other? See why trust is so vital to the success of an organization, and how to spot signs that signal lack of trust.

As a mission-based and purpose-driven company, Stride Consulting built a lead qualification template to ensure that values are vetted in the sales process.

Follow these steps for the key to achieving effective innovation at scale.

Amazon has 600,000 employees, is 24 years old, and is worth $1 trillion. Yet, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos believes every day is day one.

I had the pleasure of attending an Inc Business Owner’s Council (IBOC) event in New York City. Jim McCann, the founder and CEO of1-800-Flowers.comspoke with an intimate gathering of 30 entrepreneurs for about an hour.

I recently sat down with some of NYC’s leading CTOs and heads of engineering to discuss OKR and KPI best practices. The truth is, despite the fact that 2018 is underway, many tech teams are still scrambling to finish 2018 annual planning.

I want to share several learnings from my experience over the past three months of serving as a project lead for the first time. It was both an exciting and, at times, a stressful period, but overall a wonderful opportunity to deliver software not just from an engineer’s perspective but also as a project manager.

See why a fixed bid project is not only a bad idea, but is nearly non-existent when it comes to accurately estimating a realistic budget for your project.

Stride addresses three common questions for startups that are looking to scale their business.

The Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is every product manager’s favorite punching bag these days — most writing on the subject these days is a feverish attempt to come up with a new acronym with less baggage. Much of that dissatisfaction boils down to the fact that the concept of MVP has been co-opted by non-Agile types to define a Phase 1 of a larger project.

The human brain physically cannot read and listen at the same time. In fact, the brain is terrible at multitasking. We have to choose one activity to focus on. For those who think we are multitasking, what we are actually doing is rapidly switching from one thing to the next.

Stress can be an essential ingredient for success both in work and in life. The key is knowing how to unlock its positive powers.

Global venture capital funding reached a high of $155 billion in 2017, according to auditing firm KPMG, and only .62 percent of startups raise VC funding.

Recently, an ex-Google employee detailed his experience working at the tech giant via Twitter- using 149 tweets to be exact.

The number one hiring mistake I see people make is prioritizing skill and experience over integrity and the ability to learn. As counterintuitive as it may seem, skill should be the least important thing you vet for when hiring. Instead, follow the lead of one of the most successful companies in the world: Visa.

At my first programming job, writing video games in San Francisco in the 90s, I was thrown into the deep end of some C and C++ hoopla and I turned to the well known and venerable book “The C Programming Language,” by Kernighan and Ritchie, for salvation.

Have you seen Marie Kondo’s new Netflix show, Tidying Up? I have, and I love it. I work as a software developer consultant at Stride. My job is to go into companies, join their engineering teams, and help them build better software and processes. So what could Marie Kondo have to teach me?

There are two types of truths: comfortable and uncomfortable ones. A comfortable truth, like “The sky is blue,” is easy to share with others. An uncomfortable truth, like “You are doing a bad job,” is hard to share with others.

At 21, I had just graduated college and started my first job. Today, I'm 43 and my career is in full swing. I've started five companies and been CEO of three of them. I've landed two consecutive companies on the Inc 500 list. I have experienced many successes and have weathered many failures.