Felipe Rueda

The quietest people on your team are usually the closest to leaving. Not the complainers. Not the ones asking for raises. The ones who deliver. Never escalate. Ask for nothing. And one day — just stop showing up. At Deel, we made a few things non-negotiable: weekly 1:1s with your manager, a leadership team that's genuinely reachable, and a culture where asking for help is never a weakness. It doesn't eliminate the problem. But it raises the floor. Here's where most managers get it wrong, and what the best ones do instead: 1️⃣ Compensation is a baseline, not a message — Paying someone well tells them you won't underpay them — It says nothing about whether their work matters — Specific praise, tied to specific impact, says the thing a salary never can 2️⃣ No complaints = high risk, not high morale — Strong performers rarely escalate — They absorb, adapt, and eventually exit quietly — If you've heard nothing lately, that's the signal 3️⃣ In distributed teams, visibility doesn't travel on its own — Great work disappears unless you surface it — Audit who gets credit in your all-hands — If it's always the same 3 people, something is broken 4️⃣ "How are things going?" is not recognition — Replace status updates with impact conversations — Try: "What's something you worked on this week that you're proud of?" — That one question changes everything 5️⃣ Your best people are the hardest to retain — They have options. They also have patience. — But resilience isn't fulfillment. — Check in on your strongest performers first — not last 6️⃣ Generic praise teaches nothing — "Great work this week" is forgotten by Monday — "The way you handled that escalation on Thursday saved the deal" — that sticks — Specific recognition reinforces exactly what you want more of 7️⃣ Culture is what you consistently celebrate — Teams watch what leaders reward publicly — If you only praise speed, that's what you get — at the cost of everything else — What you notice is what your culture actually is Feeling valued isn't soft. It's the delta between a team that fights for you when things get hard — and one quietly updating their LinkedIn on a Tuesday. The leaders who get this right don't have retention problems. They have waiting lists. What's something a manager did — or didn't do — that changed how you felt about your work?

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Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify: https://lnkd.in/d6rzXn9V We don’t hold on to a decision just because it was successful at the time. When a core assumption changes, we’re willing to go back and ask whether it’s still the right call. LLMs changed one of the core assumptions behind our 2020 decision, so we reevaluated our mobile stack from first principles. What we found led us back to native. The Shop app has already been migrated. How we did it: https://lnkd.in/d97WjFJW

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Read the post before you pick a side. This is not React Native vs Swift, and Shopify never said it was. They did not call React Native slow. They said the opposite, in the post itself: "React Native apps can be fast. Ours are." They called it an excellent framework that delivered exactly what they hired it for since 2020. So what changed? The price of building twice. In 2020, two platforms meant two teams, two backlogs, and permanently chasing feature parity. That cost was real, and React Native was the right answer to it. In 2026, agents handle enough of the implementation, translation and review that one team can carry both platforms. The thing that made the decision has stopped being the thing that makes the decision. The part I find more interesting is what comes next. New hardware always lands in first-party frameworks first. Apple shipped a foldable two days ago. Adaptive layouts for a folding screen will work in SwiftUI long before any abstraction layer above it catches up. When the hardware moves this fast, sitting one layer up starts costing you time instead of saving it. Credit to Mustafa A. and the Shopify team for publishing the actual reasoning instead of a headline, and for committing to hand over Skia and FlashList cleanly rather than walking away from them. That part matters to a lot of teams. My read for anyone building cross-platform: this is not React Native dying. It is platform depth becoming worth learning again, and LLMs making it cheaper to learn than it has ever been. Writing a longer piece on this. Would you migrate an app you already shipped, or only start native on the next one?

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Two things about Shopify’s hiring process really stuck with me. 1️⃣ Even VPs have to code. Every engineering director and VP candidate does a coding interview. Not strategy. Not leadership philosophy. A coding interview. Apparently, many VP candidates are shocked. Shopify CTO Farhan Thawar explains it simply: “We believe they are still deeply in love with technology.” The point isn’t that leaders should code every day. It’s that the best engineering cultures are led by people who are still running toward the craft. When leaders step back into coding interviews, something interesting happens: The muscle memory comes back. And whether it does tells you a lot. 2️⃣ AI tools are allowed in interviews. Candidates can use anything. Cursor. Copilot. Claude. Whatever they’d use on the job. But Farhan isn’t just watching for speed. He’s watching how candidates think when AI fails. He described a candidate who ran into a single-character bug in AI-generated code. Trivial to fix manually. Instead of fixing it, the candidate kept re-prompting the model — hoping it would catch the mistake. Farhan stopped them and asked: “Are you really an engineer?” What Shopify is looking for: Engineers who are 90–95% AI-assisted. Not 100% AI-dependent. That last 5–10% matters. The judgment to: • step in • fix the line • understand what broke Speed is table stakes now. The real signal is whether someone can still think clearly in the moments where AI isn’t enough. 🔗

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When you’re choosing where to hire engineers, every location comes with tradeoffs. Let’s talk about hiring engineers from Brazil for team augmentation. Pros and cons. Huge talent pool. One of the largest you’ll find. Strong front-end and full-stack engineers. The ecosystem is growing fast, and hiring is relatively easy because of the volume. Now the cons. Quality is inconsistent. You’ll find great people, but you’ll also spend more time filtering. English is not as strong across the board, so communication can become a bottleneck if you’re not careful. It’s also a Portuguese-speaking country. If the rest of your team is Spanish-speaking, that could create friction quickly. And then there’s bureaucracy. It’s not simple, and it will affect how you operate. Brazil gives you scale. But you don’t get scale without complexity. #Hiring #RemoteWork #EngineeringTeams #Startups #Leadership #TechHiring #Brazil

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