Agnès is a software engineer and expert in GPU programming.
She holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and a Civil engineering degree from Universidade de Minas Gerais (Brazil).
She realized during her studies that programming computers to perform complex calculations was what interested her most. She started out as a researcher in Computational Fluid Dynamics, where she worked on a particle-based simulation method facing performance issues. She is the author of 10+ publications in this field, and won three awards in the course of her PhD. After a few years contributing to various open source software projects as a researcher at EDF (Electricity of France), Agnès decided to focus more exclusively on software development. She then worked at RTE (France’s Transmission System Operator) as a software developer to develop power grid simulation software.
Agnès is now manager of the GPU acceleration team at Zama, tasked with pushing the performance of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to the limits by leveraging the computational power of GPUs.
Many leaders & managers today face these questions: should I let my teams work remotely? Partially, or fully? Is it a good or a bad thing for the company?
Some companies answered this question, even prior to Covid, with a resounding yes: Canonical for example has been fully remote since 2004. On the other hand, some companies have tried remote work but are now heading back, like Amazon recently announced. My current company champions a flexible policy in the sense that employees can be fully remote or work from the office at the frequency they choose to.
However, focusing on an opposition between remote work and on-site work is somehow off the mark. Recruiting in tech can be very complicated, and companies often hire contributors in other countries, who can’t possibly come to the office every week. Remote and hybrid working are widely common in deep tech, but whether your team is remote or not is not what determines its success. The capacity to solve problems is the key; the capacity to embrace difference, to remain motivated in the face of difficulties, to find reward even if only seeing each other in person a few times a year. As a manager, instead of having doubts about whether or not remote work is an issue, you should instead keep asking these simple questions: what does my team need to succeed? What can I change in the way we work to make things better? How can I connect with people, how can I encourage them to connect?
I’ve worked in fully remote teams, partially remote teams and fully on-site teams, and surprisingly my best experience has been with fully remote teams. So I’ve been asking myself: what was or is working so well in those teams? There are some basic requirements to keep in mind of course: having clear objectives that make sense with regards to the company’s success, neat project management so everyone knows what to work on at any time, some time together for socializing in a more casual context. It’s up to the manager to make sure that these conditions are met: if you don’t have positive feedback on any of those points, you need to act. So what do you do? Here are three examples of things I’ve experienced that worked well for me.
Remote work is not an issue, but you need to meet each other in real life sometimes
One of the best things I’ve experienced in a fully remote team was to organize hackathons, once or twice a year. At the time when I was working at Electricité de France, one of the projects I worked on daily involved people working from the US, Italy and Germany. Every 6 months we would gather for a week in Italy, France or the US, and work together on the software we were developing together. It was a great way to realign on the priorities for the project, get help, share best practices, and know each other better. I learnt a lot during those hackathons, and they are part of my best work-related memories. It was a great time to socialize as well, and get to know each other better. This is something I try to reproduce in my current team at Zama, which is spread across three different time zones. Meeting people in real life on a regular basis is very important for a team I believe, but it doesn’t have to happen every week. Something I have experienced though, is that having at least part of the team based at the headquarters is key to the success of the team, if possible the manager, to nurture the link & interactions with the rest of the company.
You are not alone
In my current team, everyone has specific tasks assigned to them, which they are responsible for carrying through. I believe this is a very common way to organize daily work, and it’s important to have this kind of basis so that each contributor “owns” part of the project. But when someone gets blocked on something complicated for too long, it’s important to redirect other team members to that task to support them. Some tasks are particularly adapted to team work: if a big rework of documentation or tests is needed, I try to block 4 days or a week for all team members to do it together. I think this is very important to keep motivation up in the team, to make sure everyone feels like they’re not alone facing a huge amount of work. I’ve been in teams where this kind of dynamic did not exist, and people tended to feel lonely, even though the whole team came to the office every day. They would stop helping each other out, because they felt like nobody would help them anyway.
Make small things better, let time do the rest
I think it is very important for a team to regularly take time to gather, share insights about the ongoing work and get help – or even just get someone else’s point of view. When team members are spread across different time zones, it can be challenging to set this up. Some team members might have to adapt their personal agenda to attend such meetings, and reaching a consensus within the team as to when is the best time for those meetings might be complicated. Solving this kind of small problem together is the basis of a successful collaboration I believe. In my current team we changed the frequency and size of those meetings many times already, and we’ll continue adapting to our needs as many times as required, so that each of us feels comfortable. It’s very important to listen to each other in this process: as a manager, if a contributor proposes a change or feels uncomfortable about something, it’s very important to understand what’s at the root of it and act to make things better. With time, people will trust you, and they will trust each other within the team: this is what builds up team spirit.
In my experience , the team managers should have a technical background strong enough to assess the difficulties of the tasks their team has to handle. The point is not necessarily being able to help team members from a technical point of view, but rather to be able to assess employee’s engagement and technical skills accurately. Without this, team members might tend to not feel listened to, and lose faith in their manager.
As an employer, focusing on an opposition between remote work and on-site work is not really what matters. The question is: what does my team need to be successful? Having an inclusive culture, setting clear, ambitious but realistic goals, and having managers who listen to their team members and support them is key. Being part of a team where people feel like they belong, where everyone seeks to help each other, where everyone works together towards the same goal, is something every developer out there should be experiencing. It is the essence of success. When in a team like that, anything is possible.
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Tips to manage a fully remote team in Deep Tech
ARTICLE SUMMARY
Agnès is a software engineer and expert in GPU programming.
She holds a Mechanical Engineering degree from Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and a Civil engineering degree from Universidade de Minas Gerais (Brazil).
She realized during her studies that programming computers to perform complex calculations was what interested her most. She started out as a researcher in Computational Fluid Dynamics, where she worked on a particle-based simulation method facing performance issues. She is the author of 10+ publications in this field, and won three awards in the course of her PhD. After a few years contributing to various open source software projects as a researcher at EDF (Electricity of France), Agnès decided to focus more exclusively on software development. She then worked at RTE (France’s Transmission System Operator) as a software developer to develop power grid simulation software.
Agnès is now manager of the GPU acceleration team at Zama, tasked with pushing the performance of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to the limits by leveraging the computational power of GPUs.
Many leaders & managers today face these questions: should I let my teams work remotely? Partially, or fully? Is it a good or a bad thing for the company?
Some companies answered this question, even prior to Covid, with a resounding yes: Canonical for example has been fully remote since 2004. On the other hand, some companies have tried remote work but are now heading back, like Amazon recently announced. My current company champions a flexible policy in the sense that employees can be fully remote or work from the office at the frequency they choose to.
However, focusing on an opposition between remote work and on-site work is somehow off the mark. Recruiting in tech can be very complicated, and companies often hire contributors in other countries, who can’t possibly come to the office every week. Remote and hybrid working are widely common in deep tech, but whether your team is remote or not is not what determines its success. The capacity to solve problems is the key; the capacity to embrace difference, to remain motivated in the face of difficulties, to find reward even if only seeing each other in person a few times a year. As a manager, instead of having doubts about whether or not remote work is an issue, you should instead keep asking these simple questions: what does my team need to succeed? What can I change in the way we work to make things better? How can I connect with people, how can I encourage them to connect?
I’ve worked in fully remote teams, partially remote teams and fully on-site teams, and surprisingly my best experience has been with fully remote teams. So I’ve been asking myself: what was or is working so well in those teams? There are some basic requirements to keep in mind of course: having clear objectives that make sense with regards to the company’s success, neat project management so everyone knows what to work on at any time, some time together for socializing in a more casual context. It’s up to the manager to make sure that these conditions are met: if you don’t have positive feedback on any of those points, you need to act. So what do you do? Here are three examples of things I’ve experienced that worked well for me.
Remote work is not an issue, but you need to meet each other in real life sometimes
One of the best things I’ve experienced in a fully remote team was to organize hackathons, once or twice a year. At the time when I was working at Electricité de France, one of the projects I worked on daily involved people working from the US, Italy and Germany. Every 6 months we would gather for a week in Italy, France or the US, and work together on the software we were developing together. It was a great way to realign on the priorities for the project, get help, share best practices, and know each other better. I learnt a lot during those hackathons, and they are part of my best work-related memories. It was a great time to socialize as well, and get to know each other better. This is something I try to reproduce in my current team at Zama, which is spread across three different time zones. Meeting people in real life on a regular basis is very important for a team I believe, but it doesn’t have to happen every week. Something I have experienced though, is that having at least part of the team based at the headquarters is key to the success of the team, if possible the manager, to nurture the link & interactions with the rest of the company.
You are not alone
In my current team, everyone has specific tasks assigned to them, which they are responsible for carrying through. I believe this is a very common way to organize daily work, and it’s important to have this kind of basis so that each contributor “owns” part of the project. But when someone gets blocked on something complicated for too long, it’s important to redirect other team members to that task to support them. Some tasks are particularly adapted to team work: if a big rework of documentation or tests is needed, I try to block 4 days or a week for all team members to do it together. I think this is very important to keep motivation up in the team, to make sure everyone feels like they’re not alone facing a huge amount of work. I’ve been in teams where this kind of dynamic did not exist, and people tended to feel lonely, even though the whole team came to the office every day. They would stop helping each other out, because they felt like nobody would help them anyway.
Make small things better, let time do the rest
I think it is very important for a team to regularly take time to gather, share insights about the ongoing work and get help – or even just get someone else’s point of view. When team members are spread across different time zones, it can be challenging to set this up. Some team members might have to adapt their personal agenda to attend such meetings, and reaching a consensus within the team as to when is the best time for those meetings might be complicated. Solving this kind of small problem together is the basis of a successful collaboration I believe. In my current team we changed the frequency and size of those meetings many times already, and we’ll continue adapting to our needs as many times as required, so that each of us feels comfortable. It’s very important to listen to each other in this process: as a manager, if a contributor proposes a change or feels uncomfortable about something, it’s very important to understand what’s at the root of it and act to make things better. With time, people will trust you, and they will trust each other within the team: this is what builds up team spirit.
In my experience , the team managers should have a technical background strong enough to assess the difficulties of the tasks their team has to handle. The point is not necessarily being able to help team members from a technical point of view, but rather to be able to assess employee’s engagement and technical skills accurately. Without this, team members might tend to not feel listened to, and lose faith in their manager.
As an employer, focusing on an opposition between remote work and on-site work is not really what matters. The question is: what does my team need to be successful? Having an inclusive culture, setting clear, ambitious but realistic goals, and having managers who listen to their team members and support them is key. Being part of a team where people feel like they belong, where everyone seeks to help each other, where everyone works together towards the same goal, is something every developer out there should be experiencing. It is the essence of success. When in a team like that, anything is possible.
Software
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