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Quora goes permanently remote-first

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Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#221

Post by matz1 »

Leszek wrote: post #154

One interesting aspect of this is that they still explicitly expect "synchronous" work, timezones be damned: > We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located. This maps to 6am to 12pm in Hawaii, 12pm to 6pm Eastern Time, 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12…

>I know that I wouldn't work for them from Europe if those were the conditions.

There is no system that would satisfy everyone. You wouldn't work for them but pretty sure many other people wouldn't find it a burden.

In this modern day the concept of working only during the daylight is slowly disappear. In most big city, night time can still pretty lively.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#222

Post by toyg »

balfirevic wrote: post #212
toyg wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I guess Quora will become (even more of) a singles-fest in Europe. My point is that as a general model, it fails hard here.

The current general model for US companies is to not hire people in Europe at all. That fails even harder.

Meh, plenty of companies open European subsidiaries every day. Google, Twitter and Facebook are massive in Ireland.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#223

Post by LMYahooTFY »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #197
toyg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t work for families. 6pm - 9pm is primetime for kids. But who cares about them oldies, right? /s

When I managed teams with flex hours, several parents explicitly preferred to work 4PM to midnight because they could spend the morning with their kids while their spouse worked their day job. If the working hours are presented up front and agreed upon by all, I don’t see why this is any more problematic than any other shift work. There are a lot of programmers out there who are naturally night owls and would prefer…

> When I managed teams with flex hours, several parents explicitly preferred to work 4PM to midnight because they could spend the morning with their kids while their spouse worked their day job.

This seems like it would be good for the younger children and then invert once they started attending school.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#224

Post by sailfast »

toyg wrote: post #200
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I managed teams with flex hours, several parents explicitly preferred to work 4PM to midnight because they could spend the morning with their kids while their spouse worked their day job. If the working hours are presented up front and agreed upon by all, I don’t see why this is any more problematic than any other shift work. There are a lot of programmers out there who are naturally night owls and would prefer…

> Don’t shame companies who don’t fit your own personal ideals of working hours. It's not "my" ideal - I don't set school hours. In fact, unsociable hours are defined in law, for many, many reasons. Quora's approach is shortsighted and, in my opinion, fundamentally ageist towards their European workers - and I say that as someone who definitely prefers to work afternoons.

It seems like a fair compromise to say “you have to work our hours because we believe it’s important to have this overlap” rather than “sorry we’re only hiring in North and South America”

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#225

Post by jfengel »

edw wrote: post #85
akajakaj wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's most accurately described as a yahoo answers with generally higher quality answers and SEO.

“Higher quality than Yahoo answers” is an extremely low bar.

There is a lot of genuinely good content on Quora. They went out of their way early to attract some high-level Silicon Valley talent, and that brought in a fair number of good writers. It was really cool, for example, to have physics professors explaining the Higgs Boson at the time of the CERN announcement.

It degrades over time, partly from simple reversion to the mean, partly because a number of topics have simply been talked to death. That's why they started paying people to ask questions. There's still good new content in a lot of areas, such as history and language, that are very broad and deep. But topics like physics and mathematics are largely moribund, because there's only so much that can be talked about at the roughly high-school level that most people can follow.

So it does look increasingly like Yahoo Answers, but there's still good content if you know where to look. It earned a very good reputation early and that high rep still has some carryover.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#226

Post by im3w1l »

Leszek wrote: post #154

One interesting aspect of this is that they still explicitly expect "synchronous" work, timezones be damned: > We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located. This maps to 6am to 12pm in Hawaii, 12pm to 6pm Eastern Time, 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12…

If remote-first with American timezone becomes a trend, I could see Indians and Chinese moving to South America.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#227

Post by tptacek »

dang wrote: post #124
ardit33 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It adds 0 to the conversation. It is very weird, almost borderline autistic behaviour... 90% of links, have some kind of: "doesn't work on my mobile... format sucks, i don't like the colors, etc... etc.." comment. It is pure infantile/juvenile bikesheding and distracting from the point of the conversation/link that has nothing to do with formatting.

We could consider adding a guideline asking people not to post such things. The problem is that sometimes such comments are helpful for the owner of a site, who either shared their own work or happened to be on here when someone else did.

My guess is that's pretty unusual, and that if you looked at a sample of, like, 20 of them, in at least 19 cases whatever was being complained about would remain the case on the website in question, indicating that the site owner did not get value from them. Meanwhile: those comments really are a pox on the threads; it'd be better if users were in the habit of downvoting them to keep the top of the thread clear, which a guideline would accomplish.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#228

Post by marcinzm »

bambax wrote: post #203
Leszek wrote: post #154

One interesting aspect of this is that they still explicitly expect "synchronous" work, timezones be damned: > We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located. This maps to 6am to 12pm in Hawaii, 12pm to 6pm Eastern Time, 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12…

> 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12am across most of Europe This is completely ridiculous and means abandoning any kind of family or social life. It also means they probably only hire young, single people with no kids. Based on this, they sound like a seriously insensitive and diversity-hostile company.

The parents I know who could do flex-time liked to spend the morning/afternoon with their kids and then work in the evenings. For younger kids that allows you to split-shift with your partner while for older kids you get to be there when they get ready/get home from school.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#229

Post by marcinzm »

dtech wrote: post #169
Havoc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a pretty insane expectation given that their physical office presumably don’t require working at midnight. (Good luck getting that one past European regulators)

In my European country you're required to pay 125-200% for night and sunday shifts, I wonder if they will do that.

They'll just do the usual thing when regulations pose a problem: work around them or not hire in that region. That's the tradeoff with regulations, you lose some potentials business.

Re: Quora goes permanently remote-first

#230

Post by marcinzm »

Leszek wrote: post #154

One interesting aspect of this is that they still explicitly expect "synchronous" work, timezones be damned: > We have initially designated 9am to 3pm Pacific Time as “coordination hours” where most employees will be expected to be available for meetings and impromptu communication, regardless of where they are located. This maps to 6am to 12pm in Hawaii, 12pm to 6pm Eastern Time, 5pm to 11pm in the UK, and 6pm to 12…

Seems senior management wants the same amount of synchronous meetings rather than investing in more asynchronous communication. If they're just mimicking in-person approaches then that bodes ill for the whole initiative in my view. I say senior management because they're usually the only ones who have 6+ hours of meetings per day.
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