Open and Async

Working from home ? working remotely. Your company shipped everyone a laptop, bolted Zoom onto the same approval chains, and called it remote work. It wasn't. It was office work in sweatpants — same meetings, same status theater, same hallway politics, just piped through a webcam. Most "remote work" books are written for knowledge workers in the abstract. Open and Async is written for the teams that have been doing this longest — software engineers, the people who turned pull requests, issue trackers, and code review into a global async operating system before the rest of the world had a name for it. Drawn from more than a decade at GitHub — remote-first since before it was fashionable — this is the opinionated, practical playbook for the two practices that make distributed work actually work: working in the open and communicating asynchronously. Async is the operating system. Remote is the hardware. Inside, you'll learn: — Why "hours worked ? value created," and how to manage (or be managed) on outcomes instead of optics. — How to treat meetings as escalation, not default — when to write, when to call, and how to stop drowning in "quick syncs." — Why every decision should have a URL, so context survives reorgs, departures, and Slack purges. — How to "work loudly" — make your impact visible without performing busyness. — How to run 1:1s, weekly reports, and career conversations that aren't a tax on everyone's time. — How to hire, onboard, and transition teams to remote-first without losing what made them work. — How to lead from any seat — whether or not you have direct reports. For engineering managers, directors, and VPs: Build teams that ship without constant synchronous coordination. Retain your best people by respecting their time, focus, and intelligence. Advance your career on what your team delivers — not how busy it looks. For senior ICs, staff+ engineers, and tech leads: Become visible, effective, and promotable on the strength of your work — not the luck of your seating chart. Interviewing at a remote-first company? This is the playbook they wish you'd already read. Why this book is different: unlike generic remote-work books, Open and Async is engineering-rooted, strongly opinionated, and built for both people-managers and the individual contributors they work with. It pulls from GitHub's actual playbook — the practices, not the marketing — and translates them for any team that doesn't share an office. Stop digitizing the office. Start building something better.