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Mourning loss as a remote team

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Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#51

Post by civilized »

BubbleRings wrote: post #44

Managers, 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 yo…

I would like to gently caution and remind everyone that seeing coworker faces once a week may not have been the make-or-break in why Pete took his own life. And for all we know it may have made him feel worse.

A relatively solitary and cognitively intense discipline like software engineering could be one place in society (one!) where genuine introverts are understood and appreciated.

(I certainly agree that we should acknowledge when a team member dies and give people space to be sad!)

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#52

Post by kayodelycaon »

knorker wrote: post #19

How people can feel connected as a team without even video I'll never understand. It's hard enough to get a social "fix' over video. Audio only? No way. And I say this as an introvert who just knows that sometimes I have to take my "social medicine", because it's good for me. Maybe you feel connected with only audio. I can pretty much guarantee there's someone on your team for whom you're just some voice with a label…

I’ve had online relationships that are just as close and just as real as the people I know in person.

Deaths of people whose faces I’ve never seen and voices I’ve never heard hit just as hard as any other. I’ve attended an online funeral with only text for interaction from a hotel room a thousand miles from home. It was just as real as ones in person.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#53

Post by burntoutfire »

jnwatson wrote: post #41

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.

Depends on the particulars. In some countries in Europe, contractors pay much less taxes than FTEs. Hence, a lot of people prefer contracting. The additional benefit of being outside of grasp of HR and their processes (I'm mostly a contractor and never once in my life had to formaly define "yearly goals" or write up evaluation of my peers) is also nice for a lot of people.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#54

Post by tgtweak »

This is a larger issue. And it's not just limited to remote contractors. Even in the cushiest of office jobs with full benefits, seasoned HR and regular check-ins these personal issues can and do impact employees - often times not resulting in death but universally in personal suffering.

It's easy and convenient to keep the workplace professional and file those concerns away as "not your business", but they're important.

A good friend of mine (after years of being a good colleague) had immigrated from Ukraine to Canada a year ago and was weeks away from his family joining him when the unfortunate recent events unfolded. His wife and newborn child forced to drive a car from Kharkiv to Poland for a full week before they were even remotely "in the clear". He offered to continue working during this time when told to take time off fully paid, and said it kept his mind off of the things he couldn't control and that he was eternally grateful that he had this job in the first place and that his family's relocation was already prepared, saving him weeks of striding through refugee paperwork.

The lesson was clear - had he been an affordable contractor there we left in Ukraine vs a valued team member who we cared about on a personal level it would have been a dire situation for his family and our company.

Take the time to genuinely ask your people how things are inside and outside of work.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#55

Post by paulcole »

mgkimsal wrote: post #30
busterarm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised how normal this is, historically, among remote-first companies (pre-pandemic). A decade or so ago, I worked at a remote-only company with 1600 employees and we never cammed up. We had a large number of employees with serious medical conditions or other personal issues that prevented them from holding down normal jobs and really appreciated not having to go on video.

I'm on a couple of remote teams, and set the expectation that I won't be 'camera on' all the time during meetings. My reasons are more practical than privacy oriented. I'm often pacing during meetings, and connected via phone and desktop. I can see and hear what's going on, and can talk back, but when my camera is 'on' it's just constant movement, which distracts folks. Every couple of weeks I'll start a meeting with…

> No one missed anything of value by not seeing my face during that time. :)

How do you know this for a fact? You think sharing your face isn’t valuable, why do you think this applies to everyone you work with, too?

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#56

Post by exitb »

jnwatson wrote: post #41

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.

Isn’t it difficult/impossible to employ a remote worker from a different country? I assume the company was American, while the contractor worked from Scotland.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#57

Post by peaknarcissism »

NotAWorkNick wrote: post #14

Disclaimer: I'm about to disclose some personal information so will probably burn this nick shortly. I am slowly going blind (long, boring story; only relevance to the topic is during a discussion with the eye-guy consultant he mentioned that he had had a close personal friend of his kill himself the day after a night out and that he (the consultant) wished that he had been able to somehow sense that his friend was s…

No post body was provided.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#58

Post by vlunkr »

dougmwne wrote: post #13

My partner sat in the same cube pod as someone who took their life. One day they were just gone and a crying family member came by to take away a box of things. There was no official acknowledgement of what happened, no service or memorializing, only hushed whispers. It was terrible. Thank you for your humane response to Pete's death, for creating room for the team to grieve and official acknowledgement that it was n…

Is this the norm? I don't see why they wouldn't at least announce it an email. It's a bit of a weird topic for a work email, but it's certainly better than doing absolutely nothing.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#59

Post by pdpi »

kilburn wrote: post #42
beaconstudios wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 missio…

What you're describing is a company naming a hall after an employee when that employee was just numbers on a spreadsheet to them. What this article is talking about is a specific team, who had a personal relationship with Pete, adding that memorial as part of their own coping process. The former is definitely cynical and offputting, while the latter is human and heartfelt.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#60

Post by robertlagrant »

supertofu wrote: post #2

This 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 -…

> but to have gone 7 years without ever seeing your colleague's face seems, in my opinion, a symptom of a big managerial problem.

Video calling is still a relatively recent thing. It will become more unusual not to have video calls, but the past is less likely to have had it, not more.

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