11–20 of 332 posts
In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote work is not that different.
This isn't my experience, I find that people who are quick to initiate communication do really well. Doesn't matter too much about the writing (maybe some people are much worse than us at writing) as we simply voice chat if things weren't clear
Having Zoom on stand-by is key for us. Anytime things get complicated, we just hop on a Zoom call.
All of us can communicated well in writing, but I don't know of anyone on my team who prefers it. For me, in particular, I'm an incredibly slow writer, so it's just painful to write too much.
I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating. In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote…
It's a lot easier to casually interrupt someone with half a thought than to write a poorly thought out email.
To be honest, this fetishization of writing is very Anglo-centric. I don't think that people say this for example in Germany.
>this fetishization
What part of Mr Tien's post implies that he fetishizes writing? I read it twice, the logic behind prioritizing writing skills in a remote-first world is reasonable. Why is it suddenly a fetish?
>I don't think that people say this for example in Germany.
What experience are you drawing this statement from? Are you saying people in Germany don't prioritize good writing skills wrt remote candidates?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a junior candidate, which do you think is easier to train? The engineering skills, or the writing skills? At first glance, I think writing... But as I think more I personally think the writing / communication skills are more challenging to teach, especially to engineers because it is more of an "art" than a fixed talent.
Also been a hiring manager but not OP. I would honestly say they are more related than you think. If you can't fit a narrative to your architecture or what you're doing, it will be hard to understand. It's important to know the "story" of what you are building: where is the data going? Who is the user? If you come up with an architecture that is complicated, just keep working on it and editing, like writing, to make…
Those hires I made from far away were much more carefully thought out and turned out to be much stronger. Equivalent to the ones the senior guy was hiring, if not stronger. I think it's because I couldn't delude myself into thinking "They're fine, I don't need to waste time interviewing. I can just groom them, get them to where they need to be." I had to, absolutely, consider these people as full time remote workers, several time zones away. They had to be crack engineers and crack communicators. And I had to enforce those standards from the get go.
Watching everyone else go through the shift to remote work was fascinating. The pandemic caused us to change nothing.
I strongly agree! Looks like many other commenters agree too.
how do I find companies that are hiring and agree with this statement?
I've had a hard time finding those companies. I've had a slew of interviews recently, and none of them asked about my extensive online writing. None of them seemed to have clicked through to my website.
Are any of you on teams that really celebrate good writing, and would weigh my blog [0] at least as much as a technical challenge?
I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating. In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote…
The other thing working remote forces me to do is to actually think before I assign a task to someone or ask a question. It's a lot easier to casually interrupt someone with half a thought than to write a poorly thought out email.