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To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

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Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#191

Post by misja111 »

jakuboboza wrote: post #125
hodgesrm wrote: post #11

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…

Exactly this. Assume nobody knows anything and explain everything 500 times. Also quick 5 minute call on Slack can save 4 hours to 4 days of sending emails. So prioritize fast issue solving rather than "process". Imho key things are: * Communication. * Biz + Technical PoV from devs. * Ownership / ability to make decisions. Full remote is not for control freaks. It is for people who wants to get shit done. If you can'…

TL;DR ;)

One tip for communicating at work: keep your message brief and concise. Add too many details and your mail won't be read or just half of it.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#192

Post by capableweb »

Fnoord wrote: post #179
capableweb wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why it's "one's native tongue" and not "same language as the people you work with", as many of us hardly use our native language once we move away from the country we were born in, especially when talking about programming.

Because mastering the native tongue shows the programmer was able to learn a lot of important basics at a very young age. Whereas the inability to master the native tongue shows a lack of education.

> able to learn a lot of important basics at a very young age

Ok, and why is that important? Could be a ton of reasons why people are lagging behind when they are younger but be able to catch up when they are adults. Judging people based on how you think they might have been when they were younger feels... Not fair. Judge them based on their current knowledge and person instead.

> inability to master the native tongue shows a lack of education

I think you're reading too much into it. Education has nothing to do with native tongue. People forget language.

I myself speak my native tongue a lot worse now when I lived outside the country I was born in a couple of years. Does this mean I lack education? No! I do lack any education, but that's not the reason my native tongue is getting worse every passing year.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#193

Post by mod »

rmk wrote: post #110
envolt wrote: post #30

I joined a new company recently (during pandemic; July). The onboarding was not so smooth. I was constantly following up here and there to get things done (e.g access to tools with IT), more importantly to get to the part with whom do I need to follow up and how to follow up; figuring this out was another follow up. I created an onboarding guide last week (for my team) which was a very small thing for me (created a d…

Sadly this sort of thing rarely matters when performance review time comes. I have never received any significant benefit career wise or money wise from doing this, despite this kind of stuff making a huge difference for the new joinee.

That's okay, I think. Not like it's a harder job than you'd otherwise be spending your time on.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#194

Post by dustingetz »

BeetleB wrote: post #63
hodgesrm wrote: post #11

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…

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.…

pick up the phone

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#195

Post by Frost1x »

hodgesrm wrote: post #11

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 issue people fail to realize is that language is quite lossy in terms of information. The way you make up for that to clarify ambiguity is through verbosity.

If you can't read and write long emails (or voice/video chat), you're going to have miscommunication. Experience and knowledge can only be used so far to interpolate and extrapolate. No matter how skilled you are at this, clarification will be needed in some form or another.

In cases where whoever you're working with doesn't know exactly what they want and give you what is essentially artistic liberty to fill those voids, you can reduce communication some but be warned, you may create the wrong thing and have to double back or worse, you may find out much later when its not viable to fix something was off.

I'm a fan of long emails or conversations to be certain I understand what's needed.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#196

Post by [deleted] »

szszrk wrote: post #166
BeetleB wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.…

The One Palm Rule. I know a few people that promote this :) If it's larger then your palm, when you streach a hand towards screen, you are not obliged to read it. Suprisingly effective, especially if you are open about it. Of course it applies only for those with 1000 unread (after filters).

[deleted]

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#197

Post by AQXt »

jzer0cool wrote: post #174

In a remote setting, over communicating is key. Some signs that the candidate is good in communicating: 1. They number each point. This helps person replying to address each point separately. 2. When hiring, a candidate is asking a lot of questions. An email with a proactive communication is a win over another candidate that fails to communicate, is silent, or inability to communicate over writing. This should allow…

> Some signs that the candidate is good in communicating:

> 1. They number each point. This helps person replying to address each point separately.

I disagree.

For me the most important sign is that:

* They use bullets instead of numbers.

Other than that, I fully agree.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#198

Post by alach11 »

nottorp wrote: post #159
trhway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is also the main advantage of email over IM. Email kind of forces some effect of the remoteness you described even when everyone is in the same office.

You're using IM wrong :) You don't have to read the message when it arrives just because it instantly arrived.

Sometimes it’s my colleagues that are using IM wrong.

> Hey I have a question

People are too lazy to type the rest of their request until they see a response from me indicating I’m listening.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#199

Post by hanifc »

benhurmarcel wrote: post #172
Nevaeh wrote: post #81

How do you feel about acronyms? Do they improve or hurt communication? From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that's bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is…

So does he propose that people always spell out the full name of all components? To me it comes across as selfish, he only wants people to use acronyms that he personally knows, even when they're not talking to him. For instance I work on aircraft. Basically every component has its acronym. Yes, it's hard when you're new to the area. But nobody is going to take the time to write or say "Integrated Drive Generator", "…

> So does he propose that people always spell out the full name of all components? To me it comes across as selfish, he only wants people to use acronyms that he personally knows, even when they're not talking to him.

I'm curious what makes you attribute that selfish motivation to him? I thought he was pretty clear in saying that it's particularly tough for new employees:

"Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all these acronyms and people don't want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. This is particularly tough on new employees."

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#200

Post by roland35 »

Nevaeh wrote: post #81

How do you feel about acronyms? Do they improve or hurt communication? From time to time, Musk will send out an e-mail to the entire company to enforce a new policy or let them know about something that's bothering him. One of the more famous e-mails arrived in May 2010 with the subject line: Acronyms Seriously Suck: There is a creeping tendency to use made up acronyms at SpaceX. Excessive use of made up acronyms is…

TLAs (Three letter acronyms) are indeed the worst and I try to avoid using any custom ones as well. I worked with a company where the code base was all organized into folders like "MCM" and "PCM" for every module... Of course this list of acronyms was nowhere to be found. It was just one example of many of how big a mess their organization was.
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