To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by andrewmcwatters » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

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…

If it's not an industry standard acronym or initialism, don't use it. Internal-specific acronyms and initialisms are a litmus test for smart stupid people: smart enough to build the systems, too stupid to realize no one will understand what they're talking about. See also: enterprise-level companies.

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

#282

Post by sqs » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

medium_burrito wrote: post #275

_greim_ wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In all seriousness, please enlighten me. Email isn't the best, but the other options are equally or more shit: Slack, which has nonfunctional search and is miserable to navigate? Github readmes? Atlassian's wiki, which has even more broken search, and follows management's whims? Google docs, which vary widely in format, is not easily searchable, and has no index? Team documentation, which follows managements whims, g…

Quote: "The problem is there is no global index or search- think Sourcegraph, and management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months."

Are you saying that Sourcegraph's management keeps changing products/documentation/comms strategy every 6 months? (Just not sure how to parse this sentence.)

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

#283

Post by ketzo » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

names_are_hard wrote: post #86

ketzo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s big where I work, too - I’m very into the little slack (there might be a teams one?) plug-in, where you can just message people “/zoom” and it instantly makes a meeting with whoever’s in the chat. It makes little 5-minute meetings for debugging or clarification super painless, which means we do more of them, which is huge for the team being on the same page.

I doubt there's an equivalent Teams plugin because the standard solution for that problem in Teams is to click the little telephone icon inside the chat and you're on a call. Add or subtract video and screen sharing as desired. Continue to paste things (documents, links, whatever) inside the call's chat and it's recorded along with the chat/call. I have a lot of complaints about Teams, but there's something to be sai…

Oh, interesting, that sounds pretty cool. I haven’t used Teams, but it does seem like the big sell is how insanely tied into everything else Microsoft it is.

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

#284

Post by bonestamp2 » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #102

capableweb wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

”I’m sure your success rate will improve then” I think you are wrong. I don’t have a CS degree, I don’t have top brand college or employer. You also assume wrong that I didn’t dedicated myself to apply to specific jobs where I was a very good fit. I did that. And it didn’t got me offers. If you tell me more about your profile, I am sure I can pinpoint why you get 100% success rate and I don’t. I am pretty sure it is…

The problem is you're "applying" for jobs. Those applications almost always get filtered out by terrible decision makers (AI, HR, etc). Instead of applying for jobs, you need to network for jobs.

Part of your research about the job is figuring out who in the company will be your manager and getting your resume directly to them. People are often willing to help each other make helpful introductions, so check linkedin to see who you know at that company or at least your closest contact and then contact that person and ask for help getting your resume to the right person.

This is what they're talking about when they say most people get jobs through people they know. It's more work than simply applying, and that's why you can only afford the time to do it with 4-5 jobs. Even still, it's far more effective than applying for hundreds of jobs.

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

#285

Post by reubenswartz » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

I agree, and I'd go so far as to say that it's important for most office workers, even if you're not planning to be remote.

Writing is a great proxy for thinking, and a lot of people have great thoughts, but aren't good at organizing those thoughts into a coherent story.

(Note that there are a lot of people who think they're "good at writing" because they know a lot of words and can commit them to the screen quickly, and a lot of people who think they are bad at writing because they get a mental block trying to commit words to the screen.)

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

#286

Post by ibeckermayer » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:54 PM UTC

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…

If you think that email is impressive, wait until you hear about the other shit this guy’s accomplished

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

#287

Post by commandlinefan » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #80

I 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…

> help you get hired ... a CS degree, a top-branded college, a top-branded former employer

Well, while it's true that people with all of that will have no problem finding jobs, you should remember that there aren't that many of them and employers eventually have to be flexible somewhere if they actually want to fill a position.

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

#288

Post by jfengel » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

nthj wrote: post #245

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.…

One of the hidden assumptions in "hire people that write well" is that people who write well would also likely have high reading comprehension skills. Or, the inverse—I find that the ones who want to jump on a quick call vs. writing out their request are the same people who seemingly don't read the documents I produce. Quickly reading and understanding almost everything I can find—code, plans, schedules, calendars, s…

Different people have different communications styles, and resolving that is always tough. But there are definitely those who communicate poorly in any medium -- and I find that often they're the ones who like media where they don't leave a trail that can be pinned on them.

There are are advantages to the "quick call", and some people definitely work better that way. But I much prefer written communication: not only do I get to refer back to it, but it's more asynchronous, freeing me up considerably.

"Let's talk" often seems like a barbarous imposition on my time, that I have to hear it right now and make any decisions while you're staring at me. I try to keep in mind that they just have a different communications style, but that's not always easy.

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

#289

Post by robotresearcher » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #255

yodelshady wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He does not trust the team on this issue, because they have acted contrary to his previous instructions.

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

#290

Post by mrits » Wed, Nov 18, 2020, 7:05 PM UTC

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 doesn't have much to do with communicating. Recognizing people respond to different behavior in different ways will be much more productive. I for example, rarely spend more than a few seconds reading an email so if you have a point to make it better be in a succinct mini paragraph.