I hope that after corona epidemic is over, remote work will blosom.
To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
91–100 of 332 posts
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#92Agree, but this does skew in favor of people who's first language is English, which shouldn't really be an indicator of engineering quality.
I don’t think it skews towards English speakers in particular: it actually skews towards strong communicators in the preferred communication language of the team. A great engineer who can’t communicate effectively with the team due to a language barrier isn’t a very useful team member. It’s tempting to think that technical ability should be the sole measure of someone’s worth as a engineer but that simply not true ou…
> A great engineer who can’t communicate effectively with the team due to a language barrier isn’t a very useful team member.
This is a much lesser bar than "strong English writing skills" that the article say you should require. "strong English writing skills" will force you to overlook most immigrants, but most of the great engineers in USA are immigrants so you'd handicap yourself by doing that.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#93I believe I am a good writer. On my first job as a developer I kept getting very positive feedback on my writing. I ended up even starting a newsletter with writing advice for software developers[0]. So 4 months ago I started looking for a remote job. I applied to 250+ positions. All very suited to my skills (e.g. I wouldn’t apply to any job asking for “senior” or “fullstack”). I got about only ~15 interviews, 1 offe…
> I applied to 250+ positions
That sounds wrong. It's common, but it still sounds wrong to me.
When I look for new jobs, I find a couple of companies (3-4) that match with what I'm looking for exactly, read up on the companies, tell them explicitly how I fit into what they need and write them personally. I have a 100% success rate when it comes to interviews, and most of the time I get a offer, but drop out when my counter-offer is too high.
On the other side of the fence (as someone who does hiring), if the application looks like something that can be easily copy-pasted and the applicant has no idea about the company itself or tried the product when I follow up, then the candidate very quickly goes to the bottom of the list.
Instead of focusing on useless parameters like "CS degree, top-branded college" and so on, try to focus on writing high quality applications for a few selected companies you know you can help. I'm sure your success rate will improve then.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#94Eng manager at a team that was remote pre-pandemic and I will 100% confirm this is critical to getting things done. I'll add on that it is tough to find someone who is a great writer and a great engineer early on in their careers. You just haven't had a lot of time to practice both. When you're looking for junior candidates, they will often fall into two camps: they'll write too much, or they'll write too little. If…
The longer I work in tech, the less silly it seems to have "English minor" on my resume.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a manager, you can probably get away with this. As an IC, people rarely read my emails if it doesn't fit in their screen (so 3 paragraphs is the max). The only thing I've found that works is to send details, and then probe the recipient on each important item in there to make sure they understood what I wrote. If I'm too detailed, they will get lost. If I'm very concise (but still complete ), they'll misinterpret.…
> As an IC, people rarely read my emails if it doesn't fit in their screen (so 3 paragraphs is the max). You need to learn how to restructure your writing. Most logical people naturally write in a way where it’s premise, premise, premise, conclusion. Instead, you need to write conclusion, premise, premise, premise. One way I’ve found to help my team learn to write this way is to institute a rule that any writing long…
This echoes OPs point about culture. One absolutely should not do what you've mentioned in my location. Here we lay out the arguments, and the conclusion at the end. The reverse is seen as jumping the gun, and not being well reasoned. It is looked down upon, and frequently discounted immediately.
Cultural bias is very much a thing.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#96I believe I am a good writer. On my first job as a developer I kept getting very positive feedback on my writing. I ended up even starting a newsletter with writing advice for software developers[0]. So 4 months ago I started looking for a remote job. I applied to 250+ positions. All very suited to my skills (e.g. I wouldn’t apply to any job asking for “senior” or “fullstack”). I got about only ~15 interviews, 1 offe…
I think you missed one thing -- in my opinion the most crucial: cover letter. I wrote about it on https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/who-doesnt-want-to-be-hired...
I am on the fence on cover letters. I am pretty sure they are not the most crucial part though. I did write cover letters for most of my applications, a relevant part of them following all the good advice for cover letters, some just copy and paste.
I couldn’t see correlation in my application of well-thought cover letters and interviews. My copy-paste one was very well written and representative of my skills. Good enough for most companies I think.
In the end I got a job from a copy-paste one.
The most a good customized cover letter did to me were customized rejections praising my cover letter/email.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#97> To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
This makes some sense.
"Strong writing skills" is not a skill IT people are good at.
Pre C19 I argued to stop putting this in job ads since no one could come up with examples where it mattered. For our best workers they didn't have it, we were just cargo culting the job ads.
Is this post-coronavirus remote working excitement just the dopamine hit of thinking what skipping a commute is like or a well thought out plan around long term job prospects and long term mental health?
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#98I'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…
In a properly collaborative environment, work is performative. When the work is not face to face, this is doubly true.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#99I'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…
As a manager, you can probably get away with this. As an IC, people rarely read my emails if it doesn't fit in their screen (so 3 paragraphs is the max). The only thing I've found that works is to send details, and then probe the recipient on each important item in there to make sure they understood what I wrote. If I'm too detailed, they will get lost. If I'm very concise (but still complete ), they'll misinterpret.…
>people rarely read my emails if it doesn't fit in their screen
I think this is the case unless the problem is very relevant to what you are working on at the moment. Normally what I would do, if I were writing an email to explain a problem, is create that explanation in depth on a wiki or other knowledge repository somewhere. Write the email referencing the url of this wiki, and explain the main points in the email.
This is as a general rule if I am explaining something important for tech team to know, if I am explaining something that is important for product owner to know I write it in as verbose an email as is required to explain everything. That's up to the product owner to follow. Generally after receiving an email like this they will want a meeting where I can explain in person and draw stuff on the whiteboard.
Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you missed one thing -- in my opinion the most crucial: cover letter. I wrote about it on https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/who-doesnt-want-to-be-hired...
I am on the fence on cover letters. I am pretty sure they are not the most crucial part though. I did write cover letters for most of my applications, a relevant part of them following all the good advice for cover letters, some just copy and paste. I couldn’t see correlation in my application of well-thought cover letters and interviews. My copy-paste one was very well written and representative of my skills. Good e…
How do you deploy the cover letter? I always package it in with the resume to force it to be read rather than just in the dedicated cover letter spot.