7 years as a contractor is abuse. It is abuse of the crappy enforcement of labor laws and abuse of the contractor.
That you can have an integrated member of the team clearly be a second-class citizen, that’s just hard to fathom.
Mourning loss as a remote team
41–50 of 408 posts
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#42Quoted post unavailable.
Dude, the guy /died/. We memorialise the people we care about when they pass away.
I have conflicting feelings about this.
I've witnessed a company name a hall after a guy who took his life. We all knew that the main reason he did it was because the company wouldn't secure his position. He was an expert on a very specialized field and losing his job meant he would have to move to a different country. It still feels hypocritical when I think about it.
It is generally accepted that a company's mission is simply to make money for its shareholders. Management will fire good, well-performing, committed people without thinking twice about how it impacts their life. But then someone dies in a car accident or takes their life and ... it's memorial time? It feels off.
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like it's much easier to understand what someone is saying when you can see their face and mouth than if it's just audio.
Same here. Seeing their lips move often provides just enough additional information for me to correctly guess their words.
Nowadays, with high definition and close to no perceivable latency. Early video chat was so bad that having the video on was more distracting than helpful.
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#44Managers, one solution here is pretty easy. For instance, if your team has a daily status meeting, just tell them "every other Friday, cameras are encouraged". That's it. Don't make it mandatory, don't make jokes about "Joe never turns his camera on, what does his place look like?" In a world that is getting more and more lonely for a lot of people, this can be a life saver.
And to HR, I have a similar message. Do your job. Just because someone is a contractor, doesn't mean you can't put in a little effort when bad things happen. One of my co-workers died of covid early in the pandemic. The place I was contracting at basically disappeared him, it was disgusting. Part of the reason I was laid off may have been because I started contacting managers up the chain saying basically "do _something_ to acknowledge that a member of the team has died for Pete's sake!"
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like it's much easier to understand what someone is saying when you can see their face and mouth than if it's just audio.
Same here. Seeing their lips move often provides just enough additional information for me to correctly guess their words.
I can see this not being the case with international latency causing lag between audio and video
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#46is the tribute page sofuckingagile.com/Pete?
It's inside a b2b enterprise app with ~50k mau. However that would have been a fitting blog path. But his name wasn't actually Pete
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#47Why isn't there a video required policy?
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#48Sorry to hear for their loss. It's tough losing coworkers. Feels like we've lost more than our fair share over the past several years.
My old boss died suddenly in an accident a number of years ago. Well-liked guy, been there for years, most everybody in engineering knew him. For some reason our leadership decided that they needed to have an all-hands -- the entire company -- where they announced that (these exact words) he "had been found deceased". Completely blindsided.
Sudden all-hands meetings still make me nervous years later.
In the context of this thread, I suppose what I'm trying to say is -- fully remote can create too much distance and that's not good. But at the same, you need to let people handle mourning in their own way. And maybe break the news gently.
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#49This was heartbreaking to read. What disturbs me most is the lack of any face-to-face time for this distributed team. I understand that not everyone likes to use a webcam, but to have gone 7 years without ever seeing your colleague's face seems, in my opinion, a symptom of a big managerial problem. Software engineers are usually humans, and teams composed of humans should make some effort to interact in a human way -…
I'm probably a minority but I don't care about my company or coworkers or building relationships. I'm just here to do a job to make money. As soon as I find a better offer I will happily quit. So being forced to use a camera to attend unnecessary meetings is just annoying to me.
Re: Mourning loss as a remote team
#50> He was a contractor remember, so more hours means more money, and I could reconcile this without thinking twice.
In a very depressing topic, this caught my eye. It’s a shame that it’s normalised for so many that extra work doesn’t mean extra pay. Salaried work seems a bit evil like.