231–240 of 258 posts
Ordering of stuff from central IT. I waited 3 months for my RSA token (which I need for working remotely). My boss waited 4 months for a dev server he desperately needs for a customer project. The request for the server was only processed when my boss talked to some other guy who knows someone from the central IT department. And the requested server wasn't even physical hardware but a virtual server!
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That's a perceptual bias. There's a tendency for humans to resist changes just because they don't feel normal. Humans might have spent at least hundreds of thousands of years talking to each other in person, but only a fraction of that commuting by cars, or even having the notion of jobs, or even the notion of "productivity". Further, the same arguments you made are the same arguments made in any given era. I do thin…
I would try purely emailing / chatting with someone and compare that against the relationship you build with someone who is right there. You probably are not going to be available on video, so there is a lot of transcoding happening between you and your email / IM etc. and that loses a bunch of info. Not to mention the lack of impromptu hallway conversations and general social bonding. It is the same problem we face…
1. Zoom (or Hangouts, or etc., in other words, video)
2. Slack
3. Sometimes email
4. Sometimes phone
We use video and Slack quite a bit.
Both my current full-time job and in my last full-time job with a distributed team, every so often, people are flown in together to meet up, hang out, and build relationships.
So as I mentioned in one of my responses above, remote work is not intended to 100% replace in-person relationships. Video and Slack did not build the same kind of experience I had when I flew into San Francisco and spent some time strolling towards the Golden Gate Bridge park with two of the other team members while talking about life, rather than work. Not everything about building relationships with other people has to do with being productive.
I've found the idea "impromptu hallway conversations" come up so often, I suspect it is a kind of echo-chamber narrative that hasn't really been examined for what it is. Having said that, when I visited my team, the office was hosted in a co-living space. I had a lot of impromptu hallway conversations ... outside of the team with all sorts of people, perspectives, philosophies. But that is not the normal experience people have when working onsite, either.
"General social bonding" isn't always what it is cracked up to be. Most people do not allow themselves sufficient honesty or vulnerability to have real conversations. It's more the case, social interactions often has more to do with people's masks and social selves interacting.
By the same token, I have found that effective use of Slack following the Kanban principle of "Make Work Visible" allows me to communicate in a way that I can't easily do with an on-site presence.
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How about a script that does sentiment analysis on the twitter stream for the company and then automatically fires the CEO? If it works we could apply it to the US presidency ;).
Glassdoor has a rating on the CEO. Could use that.
Lawyers. The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of your local lawyer. The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're building. After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some En…
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If your blog provides an RSS feed then there are many options to choose from to achieve autoposting to Twitter, first two that come to my mind: https://dlvrit.com/ https://ifttt.com/connect/feed/twitter
Yep. I'm more inclined to roll my own right now though, since I have some very specific ideas I want to implement and some other use cases to incorporate. The biggest problem lately has been time. I started down this path sometime last year, but have been letting it sit on the back-burner for a while, in favor of focusing on higher priority tasks. sigh
Security. 90 day passwords, with multiple internal sites & servers each needing unique ones? I don't understand why we don't have automated client certificates and auto-generated ssh keys.
Rotation is a really interesting subject which has true security benefits. Unfortunately manual rotation is a PITA. What works better is to have an automated system rotating the credentials, and then you fetch the credentials as-needed by authenticating with an identity and access management system. For example, in Conjur there is a suite of rotators ( https://developer.conjur.net/reference/services/rotation ) for ro…
Sure, you can't capture everything everyone does, but most of the "timesheets" I've had to fill out in the past could have at least started with this information and allowed me to modify it. I hate filling out timesheets and keeping track of what I do. I'm doing work, something should keep track of that for me.
Our company pumps out tons of long-document PDFs that are fairly complex in terms of text, charts, tables and whatnot. We then take the docs, excel files, and charts into InDesign to create a nicely designed PDF to upload online. I need to find a way to automate this workflow. Anyone out there experience this in their organization and want to work together on something?
Lawyers. The problem is, that it's really time-consuming and expensive to get decent terms of service/privacy policy/other common legal document squeezed out of your local lawyer. The initial version is basically a copy-paste of some template that just has your own company's name put in and does not anyhow describe the service you're building. After a week or two with back-and-forward you'll get to settle for some En…
You can't really automate lawyers, unfortunately, anymore than you can automate accountants. Someone has to assume the liability for giving you legal advice / accounting advice. Computers can't yet assume such liability.
I see two ways around this:
1. The company behind the computer takes full responsibility and charges for the risk. Stripe has made online payments a breeze, because they are the one taking responsibility for the legal things (securing payments, proofing physical access to servers holding the credit card data etc).
2. The tool is so understandable that I'm willing to take the legal risk. There are a few tools that make accounting so easy for a small business owner that I'm willing to take the legal risk myself about the accounting.
I would like a tool that looks at what people are doing and fills out timesheets automatically. Stop asking your developers what they are working on directly and start looking at their artifacts. For example, if Dev A. just checked in a bunch of code for Project Alpha, there is a good chance they have been working on Project Alpha for the past X hours. If QA person Q just ran a bunch of tests for Project B and update…
Mac: https://qotoqot.com/qbserve/ (our app, the site lacks info but it has export now)
Linux: https://github.com/gurgeh/selfspy
Windows: http://www.manictime.com/