Mourning loss as a remote team • Hacker News Board

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#131

Post by supertofu » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #119

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 -…

If a company cares about their employees getting to know each other - and they should - and they are distributed, they should budget for travel for them to meet in a central place - not withstanding a worldwide pandemic. No, cameras and “virtual happy hours” don’t cut it. I was hired remotely 6/2020 and the rest of my division is remote. I didn’t meet any of my coworkers until 9/2022. I didn’t meet most of my teammat…

Absolutely. Remote companies need to invest in team get-togethers.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#132

Post by Angostura » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

jddil wrote: post #95

Angostura wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HR has 1 job. Protect the company I see this from time to time and it irritates me. I'm not in HR. I know some people who are and people who go into that line of work often do care about making people's lives better. Certainly if that conflicts somehow with a a requirement to protect the company, they may have to prioritise the latter. But that doesn't mean that they have 'one job'.

I think it does. At the end of the day they will (and should) choose to protect the company above all else. That's their only job. They can also want to help people, have a ton of empathy and be literal saints. But that's their personal motivation and not what the job actually is.

I'd be interested to see the logic applied to other jobs. What's your job using this kind of reductionist logic? Are there any jobs that aren't "protect the company" in some way?

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#133

Post by supertofu » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

hohoemi8 wrote: post #49

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 -…

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.

For a long time I was like this too -- until I arrived at my current job. My dev coworkers are good friends, and I care immensely about their well-being.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#134

Post by gkop » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:25 PM UTC

vertis wrote: post #20

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #7

> It’s easy to think that we could have prevented Pete’s death This sounds like guilt, one of the stages of grieving. I hope you get counseling.

Second this. This is the second time I've written this in the course of a week, over two different items. Seems it the time for it. Getting therapy is not a weakness. They're professionals there to help you get the best outcome.

How do you find a good therapist? It seems like a market for lemons.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#135

Post by Angostura » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #109

Angostura wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whereas I generally like people. You say: "The transactional work relationships do nothing for me on a human or social level" perhaps the mistake you are making is seeing any interaction with the people at work as purely transactional - or being absolutely determined to keep it that way. I have a family and kids and friends. But I absolutely have friends who I have made at work as well. I quite regularly go out for a…

Here's the problem. If I talk with my friends and misspeak or say something I don't mean, worst case is I lose the friendship. At work I lose my livelyhood. That means I have to have a constant cognitive overhead at all times at work, I am unable to explore ideas that don't fit into that narrow box. If your life fits entirely into the confines of polite society maybe you don't have this worry, but I can't bring my fu…

I suspect that there are probably literally an infinity of thoughts and concepts that it is acceptable to talk about at work.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#136

Post by thenerdhead » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

throwmeariver1 wrote: post #83

thenerdhead wrote: post #82

One thing I cannot understand in the traditional workplace is why certain leaves & sudden departures are never disclosed to a close team whether by the person or their manager. I've had many teammates come and go in the blink of an eye and I'm curious to this day of "what happened to X?". Were they PIPed? Are they fighting something? Did they win the lottery and decide to retire? It's as if the relationships between…

Sometimes there is just nothing to say not everything is nefarious it could also mean that even if you think you had a close relationship to your colleague it really wasn't so close at all because otherwise they would give you a heads-up afterwards.

Is it reasonable to say "X is no longer with us, we'll figure out their responsibilities with hiring a replacement, dividing areas of ownership, etc" shortly after they depart (for any reason)? Or should the team have to put two and two together after realizing they aren't coming back? I feel like the latter is too common.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#137

Post by kn0where » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:27 PM UTC

vlunkr wrote: post #58

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.

Yeah, I’ve worked at a couple places where someone died, and it was definitely acknowledged by management and I feel like it would be incredibly weird not to.

At one place, a guy who had left the company a few months prior died in a car crash. The guy had a wife and newborn baby. The CEO shared the news and the company made a contribution to a GoFundMe for the wife and baby. I think the company offered grief counseling.

At another, larger company, someone died shortly after I joined, so I never knew them. We were all notified, once again I think a grief counselor came, and the guy’s desk was left as a memorial until we moved offices a few months later.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#138

Post by haswell » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #108

evancoop wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During my doctoral years, two students in my department took their own lives (separate events, to be clear). The events themselves were horribly tragic, but the lack of even a clear acknowledgement of the causes of death left a surreal sense of denial. Mental health is an enormously under-discussed issue in an increasingly digital society that hides suffering in so many of us. Work becomes an increasingly integral el…

Mental health isn’t underdiscussed, it’s just not discussed seriously enough.

I would argue that it’s both.

It’s not seriously discussed because it’s under-discussed.

I think most people understand the seriousness of cancer, or a heart attack, or other life threatening ailments. They accept that those things are often outside of one’s control, and so there is never any hesitation to take it seriously. When someone in a work setting is diagnosed with something serious, everyone pays attention.

Mental health issues are hard for some people to understand if they haven’t experienced their own challenges. And because it’s not discussed frequently/seriously enough, it’s easy to downplay it or believe that the person struggling can change just by thinking hard enough.

And the people suffering from it don’t feel the same freedom to share those struggles because they’ve also been conditioned by the same collective mindset about mental health and worry what opening up about it will mean for them.

Someone with severe depression who struggles with suicidal ideation has to wonder if people will think less of them, or if they’ll be understand at all. Even though awareness has grown, those old stigmas and default behaviors remain just under the surface.

Someone with a terminal illness will receive an outpouring of support and encouragement.

I’m happy that awareness continues to grow, but there’s a long way to go.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#139

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:29 PM UTC

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.

[deleted]

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#140

Post by treis » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 4:33 PM UTC

noirbot wrote: post #100

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.

It's interesting that you think that they're "clearly" "second-class". I've never had a feeling that the contractors on the teams I worked on were treated any differently. Obviously I didn't know their pay/benefits, but that's even true of folks in different offices/countries that are FTEs. If anything our contractors seemed to have looser schedules and would often take planned extended vacations for a month or so si…

> Obviously I didn't know their pay/benefits, but that's even true of folks in different offices/countries that are FTEs.

Usually contractors make more than FTEs for various reasons. It's only in the context of H1B body shops that contractors really get abused. Otherwise, the trade is higher pay for less stability.