261–268 of 268 posts
(Ex-Quora here) This is great to see. I left Quora over a year and a half ago, and at the time, the company believed pretty strongly in an in-person culture (in particular, having one office)—even though a bunch of employees and managers were pushing for more flexible work/location policies. I know the company had started experimenting with a little remote work pre-Covid, but it really took a forcing function to demo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wonder if it ever happens the other way around? Does the office team ever turn into second class citizens?
I would say it depends on where the decision makers are.
If you are not invited to the VIP zoom meeting you are also second class no matter where you are
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to calibrate: would you say "this site breaks the back button fuck I fucking hate that" should be under this umbrella?
Extremely yes. Sites that break the back button aren't going to stop doing that because HN complains about it, right?
I worded it more concretely: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances [etc]" I find that giving concrete examples and inviting the mind to generalize them works better than giving an abstract rule and inviting the mind to instantiate it. I learned this trick from spreadsheet development.
I was about to complain bitterly that the guidelines are now too long and there isn't a single one that can be taken out...but then I saw one that could be taken out, and I took it out. That was "Please submit the canonical URL. Avoid link shorteners." It's covered by "Please submit the original source." We added it a few years ago to try to convey that link shorteners are banned on HN, but it can be pushed out of the constitution and down into case law. It's the ones that aren't derivable from other guidelines that are hard to remove.
The list still feels too long to me. The longer it gets, the less people will take in, and I really want to avoid the mistake of accruing a big list of rules over time. They've grown like tree rings (and about as slowly) as we've learned about what feedback helps regulate the system. But the longer the list becomes, the more it starts to feel like a bureaucratic artifact rather than, let's say, a philosophical one, and that is out of sync with the intended spirit. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
There's an insightful series of comments from Sid, CEO of Gitlab about why this is not likely to work over the long term: https://twitter.com/sytses/status/1264341436138270720 It might be different for Quora given that their CEO and SLT will be remote. But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely…
Personally, I don't see this as a big problem. I never considered being promoted the way up in the (admittedly, just a few) companies I worked in. Mostly because I don't feel like working at the same place for a long time and because switching jobs will most likely give you a better pay too.
Obviously, this is coming from someone in his mid twenties that has only worked in 2 places and then went freelance and mostly remote for businesses in The Netherlands. So maybe people do disagree at other places.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because you attract talent by high salaries, so try to save elsewhere (especially when office rental prices are astronomical). You yourself are yet another proof of this - you changed whatever rural environment you had to go into cramped office with very high salary. Clearly, the money was more important to you than vast open plains and remoteness. Most folks work this way. You ask for private space near colleagues -…
Aye, this. I need to fit 250 people in a single floor in a big city. One floor is already expensive as hell, and I'm not going to pick up 2-3 more. Hell, even my managers don't get offices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But I still believe that whenever you have an office you are creating a community of employees who will have a different relationship to those who are working remotely. Fully concur. Senior leadership needs to lead by example, whether it be remote work, taking paternity leave, or using a healthy amount of vacation. As some have pointed out, remote work as some companies has the potential to become the new "Unlimite…
I don't know, I don't really personally need "leading by example". That would mean a leading position getting into the details of the code and that's not going to happen. I need clearly defined goals though and freedom to choose technology to achieve them. That is possible remotely the same as in an office, only that in an office costs me time unnecessarily, which is frustrating.
My first question after someone mentions unlimited vacation is "how much vacation did the boss use last year?". If it's less than 4 weeks, I would view that company as being dishonest about their vacation policy.
The same thing applies to the number of hours worked. I value work-life balance and so if my boss is working 60 hours a week, I will know that company is not for me, because the boss would view me and my insistence on working 40 hours or less as uncommitted to company goals.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You ever try living in SF? You seem to have described it in a sense. Also see this great South Park clip for an analogy: https://youtu.be/a3ezyTXFgYM
I don't follow. What part of my post described SF, and what is the analogy with that South park clip? What I said was that if small communities spring up around places where remote workers converge, that is a good thing. It doesn't defeat the purpose of remote work.
The fact that people want to go remote and distributed and then maybe start up these things called ‘offices’ is analogous to quasi anarchist hippies at festivals that want to move off the grid and let a new society flourish organically. Ultimately we end up in the same place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sid explicitly says he expects we (Quora) avoided the pitfalls of hybrid companies in this comment: https://www.quora.com/q/quora/Remote-First-at-Quora/comment/...
Thanks for linking. I missed the 6 hour 'coordination time' when I made that comment. I think that async as the default is very important to be remote first https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...