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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

#251

Post by ryandrake »

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", "…

I agree that it's unclear from the E-mail whether he actually means that these things should be fully spelled out or something else. And this is the problem I have with the E-mail: It's unclear. The details really matter when the edict comes from the CEO, and there will be senior people in the company that make and enforce huge, sweeping changes to the business that hang on the exact wording coming from the CEO.

I've worked at a company where the CEO (and sometimes SVP leadership too) was basically treated as a God-King figure. I mean that in a literal sense: People would walk behind him, writing down every word he said in the hallways and every meeting with him had multiple note takers. Kind of like those guys with the notebooks following Kim Jong Un around writing every word down. If a senior exec said something that wasn't clear or didn't make sense YOU DID IT ANYWAY because it came from [Person's Name]. In E-mail forwards, the words of top leadership would be quoted in a different color, and then scrutinized and interpreted until everyone thought they understood every little nuance of what was said.

I don't know if SpaceX and Tesla are like that but I have my suspicions :). When an E-mail like that comes from Elon, I'm positive there are dozens of people who make it their full-time job for the next few weeks to carry out to the letter exactly what he said. So if it's unclear or incomplete, there's a big problem.

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

#252

Post by spirobel »

adamnemecek wrote: post #73
spirobel wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you speak German? I mean seriously, talk to any German boomer and he will tell you about correct orthography. Its his favorite topic.

Yeah I can. Orthography is different from writing.

Es ist Teil davon. Dein Kommentar ist einfach Unfug.

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

#253

Post by hodgesrm »

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.…

You are right, of course, though this may seem to conflict with my original comment. One way to reduce email size is to put context information into reference documentation. (Or other substitutes, like Github issues, JIRA, design docs, requirements, operational run books, etc.)

One thing that may not work very well is depending on Slack channels or other chat systems for context. It's fine for an on-going issue but does not work for general information. Important topics are just too hard to find later.

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

#254

Post by thesz »

capableweb wrote: post #192
Fnoord wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tongu…

One can master owns native language being an adult, why not?

I am Russian and I enjoy translating wonderfully sounding English concepts to Russian. As you can understand, it takes a little bit of mastery in both languages. The upside I get is that these wonderfully sounding language concepts often lose all their charm when translated into Russian. They turn into a pumpkin. This way I can better focus on what is essential.

As I am here on the matter of focusing on essential things, please look at "Being Popular" essay by Paul Graham: http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html

Let me quote: "They're perfectly justified: the majority of hot new whatevers do turn out to be a waste of time, and eventually go away. By delaying learning VRML, I avoided having to learn it at all."

Another upside of translating things is that you often cannot apply same questions to English and Russian terms. There are questions applicable only to English term and there are questions for Russian term which are not applicable to English one. You have to do analysis anew, finding new sides of the problem, which either show you the problem's true underwater size or help you solve it.

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

#255

Post by UncleMeat »

yodelshady wrote: post #173
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…

Judging by that, Elon Musk is a seriously smart man. I've worked at places with that tendency, and he's described the issue well. Used too generously, acronyms make it impossible to gauge the complexity of the thing they're describing. Say that my system compromises a CCP, a SBS, and a RCS. That could mean "an afternoon and $1000" to "we need to build an entire supply chain". How do I begin to budget that, financiall…

It isn't like he is the only person to identify this issue.

I think the fact that he wants to personally approve things is an indication that he might not be as smart, since it implies limited trust.

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

#256

Post by [deleted] »

abdusco wrote: post #130
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…

They are detrimental to understanding. I hate them with a passion. I see people using acronyms without explaining them in context, which makes it even more difficult to understand what's written. Some terms are jargon and are probably ubiquitous in the field, but unless I'm reading a text written for the professionals working in that field, I'd much rather see it explained.

[deleted]

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

#257

Post by crispyambulance »

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 key to success is overcommunicating.

No, "overcommunicating", by definition, means giving more information than what is needed.

There are times and places where overcommunicating works, but email is almost never one of them. You simply can't get away with more than a few sentences in an email unless the recipients are specifically expecting that from you.

When "an essay" lands in someone's inbox unexpectedly, at best, you can expect recipients to skim it for whatever concerns them directly. If you have critical points or conditions embedded in a paragraph in the middle, those are probably going fly past the recipients' attention completely unnoticed.

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

#258

Post by _greim_ »

crispyambulance wrote: post #257
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 key to success is overcommunicating. No, "overcommunicating", by definition, means giving more information than what is needed. There are times and places where overcommunicating works, but email is almost never one of them. You simply can't get away with more than a few sentences in an email unless the recipients are specifically expecting that from you. When "an essay" lands in someone's inbox unexpectedly, a…

As a corollary, if your org is dependent on email for communication, you likely have some inefficiency and room for improvement.

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

#259

Post by throwaway2245 »

capableweb wrote: post #216
throwaway2245 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering that Dijkstra didn't consistently work in his native tongue (this is quoted from EWD498 which was written in English), this seems to be very much intentional. I guess he meant: If you know how to formulate some concept efficiently in your native tongue, you can work out how to translate it into another [programming or human] language.

> If you know how to formulate some concept efficiently in your native tongue, you can work out how to translate it into another [programming or human] language Even with that it seems strange, as I don't think I'm alone with having a easier time formulating some concepts (especially programming) in my now main language, while sometimes I can barely make myself understood when speaking my mother tongue. The view yowl…

It's also possible that Dijkstra was wrong/didn't consider this case.

At this point in his career, he was still teaching in Dutch at a Dutch University, so likely had a different experience of being bilingual than you do.

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

#260

Post by noisy_boy »

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.

Sometimes its just about the mindshare. The HR person chatting with the VP: "You know that new girl, what's her name, yeah Julie, she setup a nice onboarding guide, yeah I liked it, very useful..."; casual stuff like that adds the layers of impressions that construct how everyone sees you. And I have observed those impressions to be more lasting and impactful than your last code review.
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