I get the idea that remote.com is trying to trademark the term "remote". F that. The best way to stop that is to prevent remote.com from getting a lot of brand recognition. I don't care how much they want to contribute to the remote worker community - there's no way it will make up for stealing the identity that we have for ourselves.
Working asynchronously
31–40 of 110 posts
Re: Working asynchronously
#32I get the idea that remote.com is trying to trademark the term "remote". F that. The best way to stop that is to prevent remote.com from getting a lot of brand recognition. I don't care how much they want to contribute to the remote worker community - there's no way it will make up for stealing the identity that we have for ourselves.
I dunno, it's just clever company naming, like Meetup. I don't think it's stealing an identity. It's also a risk for the company, because the trademark isn't defensible. Google's legal team doesn't like the fact that people use to google as a verb. The extreme form of that would be Microsoft being able to say, "Now you can google better with Bing!"
Re: Working asynchronously
#33I've managed multiple remote, asynchronous teams across multiple countries. When people work in opposite time zones, asynchronous communication is mandatory. When it works, it's a great experience. However, async communication isn't appropriate for every situation, as the article admits. Some times, the most efficient way forward is to schedule a call where all parties can work out the solution in 15 minutes of real-…
I think that there is a tragedy-of-the-commons issue here that some teams or organizations just aren't very good at tackling. Everyone's time is a valuable resource. It's quick and easy to demand synced communication, but that depletes the time people can dedicate to longer tasks that should not be interrupted. Now take the team's collective time. That's the commons, and poor work discipline drains that shared resour…
This is exactly where writing docs epitomises Larry Wall's "laziness" virtue.
Re: Working asynchronously
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
If only job interviews could be async!
Companies have actually done that, and it's worse: They're the "homework" interviews.
I don't mind "homework" interviews, they let me collect my thoughts and put together something representative of my work. It's easy to ship a complete (toy) product for a trivial problem, show unit tests, documentation, written communication skills, etc.
Much better than a timed coding challenge in my book. It's only bad when the problem isn't you know, a toy. Sometimes you have to reply with your consulting rate.
Re: Working asynchronously
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that there is a tragedy-of-the-commons issue here that some teams or organizations just aren't very good at tackling. Everyone's time is a valuable resource. It's quick and easy to demand synced communication, but that depletes the time people can dedicate to longer tasks that should not be interrupted. Now take the team's collective time. That's the commons, and poor work discipline drains that shared resour…
This is exactly where writing docs epitomises Larry Wall's "laziness" virtue. http://threevirtues.com/
A lot of my "formative years" in IT were spent in several Perl environments, but it's been a while since I heard those 3 virtues so succinctly put. Thank you :)
Re: Working asynchronously
#36I get the idea that remote.com is trying to trademark the term "remote". F that. The best way to stop that is to prevent remote.com from getting a lot of brand recognition. I don't care how much they want to contribute to the remote worker community - there's no way it will make up for stealing the identity that we have for ourselves.
I dunno, it's just clever company naming, like Meetup. I don't think it's stealing an identity. It's also a risk for the company, because the trademark isn't defensible. Google's legal team doesn't like the fact that people use to google as a verb. The extreme form of that would be Microsoft being able to say, "Now you can google better with Bing!"
Being remote is a lifestyle, where as a meetup is an event, so I think it's worse than Meetup. The brand Meetup is problematic though. It makes it harder to talk about events without accidentally dropping the name of a company. Meetup may have gotten a pass because they've done pretty good, but they are now driving away their customer base (https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/15/20893343/meetup-users-fu...). There are also other companies like https://remote.co/ that are already using the name remote, but remote.co is respectfully calling themselves remote.co instead of just remote. Having a .com shouldn't be a ticket to appropriate a common word and turn it into a brand.
Re: Working asynchronously
#37I get the idea that remote.com is trying to trademark the term "remote". F that. The best way to stop that is to prevent remote.com from getting a lot of brand recognition. I don't care how much they want to contribute to the remote worker community - there's no way it will make up for stealing the identity that we have for ourselves.
Love that you feel so passionate about it! We are part of that community, and we're doing this so that more people can enjoy working remotely as well. It changed my life in many positive ways and there's nothing we want to take away from it, quite the opposite. We own the domain, we don't own something that is a way of life for which we have tremendous respect.
Re: Working asynchronously
#38I've managed multiple remote, asynchronous teams across multiple countries. When people work in opposite time zones, asynchronous communication is mandatory. When it works, it's a great experience. However, async communication isn't appropriate for every situation, as the article admits. Some times, the most efficient way forward is to schedule a call where all parties can work out the solution in 15 minutes of real-…
>When it works, it's a great experience. However, async communication isn't appropriate for every situation, as the article admits. Some times, the most efficient way forward is to schedule a call where all parties can work out the solution in 15 minutes of real-time conversation rather than 3 days of back-and-forth e-mails.
I always hated "15 minutes of real-time conversation", not because of being an introvert or anything, but because it's fuzzy, nobody remembers what it was exactly said, and usually ends up with people wasting each others time (like Diltert-style meetings).
I'd much rather people knew how to communicate effectively on chat.
But people don't, so you get messages like:
"The service is broken!"
"[panicked] What do you mean? Is it down?"
"It doesn't show anything"
[still panicked] Really? Let me see... Hmm, I see it working properly, loaded the first page and everything. What do you see?"
"I don't see anything"
"[???] On the first page? On some specific panel? Have you entered something?"
"Entered? I clicked and got nothing"
... and after 20 more minutes you realize they are on the third tab of a particular page, which nobody ever uses, have entered some search term people seldom enter, and got no results there, and everything else is working fine...
Re: Working asynchronously
#39Great now how do I convince my team this is a good idea, overcoming super ingrained and traditional working concepts?
Re: Working asynchronously
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Companies have actually done that, and it's worse: They're the "homework" interviews.
I don't mind "homework" interviews, they let me collect my thoughts and put together something representative of my work. It's easy to ship a complete (toy) product for a trivial problem, show unit tests, documentation, written communication skills, etc. Much better than a timed coding challenge in my book. It's only bad when the problem isn't you know, a toy. Sometimes you have to reply with your consulting rate.
I wouldn't mind the homework interviews if they paid me to take them. In fact, on-sites should be paid also.