Mourning loss as a remote team • Hacker News Board

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#171

Post by mrtranscendence » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:25 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #151

maleldil wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think some of that is a lot harder to when remotely, though. You can't do team dinners, and the alternatives feel forced to me. It's also a lot harder to socialise with people that you only interact with a few times a day (if you're asynchronous) because they don't feel like a part of your life like in-personal colleagues would. So it ends up being a very I'm impersonal relationship.

I agree but have found turning on the camera and keeping it on for most meeting does help.

During the time of COVID I've had two jobs, one where the culture is (usually) to keep the cameras on at all times, and one where the culture was to keep the cameras off even when speaking.

There are benefits to the latter approach ... I could futz around on my phone in particularly boring or useless meetings. But keeping the cameras on does make connections feel more personal and overall I prefer it, particularly for small meetings.

Plus, everyone gets to see my dogs roughhousing in the background.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#172

Post by VariableStar » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

refurb wrote: post #102

VariableStar wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know if it is the norm but I have also worked at an organization where one employee committed suicide. Leadership said nothing and everything was toned down. Some people spoke up and complained though. My interpretation is that the response was a combination of culture (although suicide is not "taboo" here it is not a preferred topic) and not wanting to bring undue attention to the organization.

What do you mean “said nothing” as in they stopped showing up and management pretended nothing happened? Or the person died and they didn’t say it was a suicide. Because if it’s the 2nd, that seems pretty normal. My right to know doesnt trump the family’s right to privacy.

Colleagues knew it was suicide and wanted to talk about it. Leadership did not want to discuss the issue. Normal, as you write.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#173

Post by gkop » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

ENGNR wrote: post #6

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 don't know, would it be more awkward for management to force you to turn on your webcam? I think the lack of face to face and the free language of this post shows some empathy. Maybe they could/should have arranged an in person trip sooner than that or something

+1 to that would be awkward, and post shows some empathy

A strong manager of course would not mandate micro behaviors like webcam use. A strong manager perhaps might 1) give space for the team to develop their own norms, 2) subtly nudge those norms with intention to test a hypothesis, gauge the result, and iterate and 3) once healthy norms have developed, take steps to formalize them (while taking care to maintain space for healthy dissent).

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#174

Post by asyncscrum » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:28 PM UTC

flybrand wrote: post #5

We lost a valued team member in late ‘19 and two others through the past two years. I choked up talking about him on several calls. Your note is very thoughtful. All we can do is our best. Grieving is very personal - from a colleague / employer standpoint we just support each other as best we can, if we can.

Thanks for this. Sorry to hear about your losses. HN has been very kind today and it's been cathartic to read all of these stories.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#175

Post by misslibby » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

dvtrn wrote: post #88

Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of, or at least, treated and compensated vastly different than their "staff"/"full-time" peers who are often doing the exact same work . For fun, google the phrase "permatemp". E.g. I had a past job a…

Why is a contractor asking for more hours an example of them being taken advantage of?

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#176

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:30 PM UTC

rmk wrote: post #169

I think human connection and doing things as a community has fallen by the wayside in the modern world. It will be particularly bad with fully remote work: most people do better cognitively and emotionally when they have contact with a variety of people and have the changes of scene that are part of a normal day. It's also sad to see the complete disconnect at the workplace, where people are no longer building relati…

[deleted]

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#177

Post by gordaco » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

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…

> the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it).

While this might be generally true (and it's especially true in the sense you wrote the message, i.e., there's a good chance that no one could see it coming), I would add something. It's, as I said, mostly true, but far from being the case 100% of the time. Ok, that was probably obvious, but the thing is: sometimes we interpret it as the contraposition (which is, after all, equivalent to the original statement): the ones who broadcast their intentions are not serious about it. And that's a huge mistake to make, when it happens to not be true. Someone who broadcasts that kind of intentions might be overdoing that kind of millenial "everything sucks" gallows humor you see a lot in Twitter... or they might be serious.

So, pay attention to people talking about that suicidal ideation. Many times, it's more than a joke.

BTW I also agree that in many cases an intervention can only delay the decision but not prevent it completely. I know it can be a hard pill to swallow for many people (and for good reason), but I strongly believe this to be true.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#178

Post by bicx » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

GGfpc wrote: post #161

bckr wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don’t say we’re “a family” My favorite way of framing this discussion is use the term "village". A village is a close-knit group of people with aligned interests (economic and otherwise), activities, rituals, beliefs, and ties of friendship.

if I hear the expression "it takes a village" on more fucking time I will quit my job and become a baker

It takes a village to bake a cake! Farmers gotta harvest the wheat, millers grind it to flower, Aunt Mae's chickens gotta provide the eggs, etc....

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#179

Post by freedomben » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #147

kn0where wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 counseli…

Reactions from management and everyone else is typically different for suicides than for car crashes and other causes. In my experience, suicides are hushed and not discussed while car crashes and heart attacks are. It’s a terrible double-standard.

Same. I don't think it's with mal intent, I think it's the result of a (misguided) attempt to give the passed privacy or spare them the embarrassment/humiliation/stigma that some people (mainly those who have never struggled with depression/suicide) think is attached to it. A good friend of mine committed suicide several years ago, and it was like pulling teeth trying to get somebody to just tell me WTF was going on. The most I could get was "Douglas passed away." Nobody even wanted to say it was a suicide!

We really need to start talking more openly about these things. If your coworker dies in a car crash nobody feels like they can't talk about the car crash or even acknowledge the cause of death. Yet with suicide, nobody wants to say it. The result is even more pain mixed with frustration.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#180

Post by misslibby » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

brassattax wrote: post #65

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…

The moment you realize HR is there to serve the company's interests, not the employee's, your expectation of them changes.

Taking good care of employees and contractors can be in the company's interest, though. It's costly to lose them and having to hire new ones, and ex employees talking badly about a company also is not good.

(I'd think, I don't work in HR, so no idea what actual directives they have).