Mourning loss as a remote team • Hacker News Board

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#241

Post by gunapologist99 » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

anonporridge wrote: post #206

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the worst! I remember when a long-time team member died unexpectedly one weekend. We all learned about it at the Monday standup meeting and we luckily had the common sense to cancel the standup because no one wanted to talk. A number of us went to the funeral and his wife told me (I had met her once before) that she was so happy that his co-workers came to pay their respects. It made her feel that he had a la…

> I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly. Don't ever expect a corporation of a…

Corporations are like a computer program. Sometimes they act a bit sentient, but mostly they just do what they're told.

The only people who are people are people.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#242

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

gkop wrote: post #134

vertis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In my experience, you definitely have to shop. You have to find someone who is a fit for you personally. Don't settle until you find someone who truly helps you; someone you anticipate seeing each week. It takes time and is an investment in yourself. Have patience and expect to spend a lot.

A therapist will never say to you, "You know what? I don't think we're a good fit" or "I don't think I can help you as effectively as someone else." It's up to you to figure that out, unfortunately. Personally, I have found that the more decades a therapist has in the field, the more helpful they are to me.

A lot of the best therapists do not take insurance and are not part of a group practice. Why? Because they do not want the enormous paperwork hassle. And if they are good, they get enough referrals to fill their schedule with people who can afford to pay out of pocket.

Also: this is one of those fields where credentials aren't as important as raw experience. Masters-level social workers can sometimes be more helpful than PhD- or PsyD-level clinicians.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#243

Post by civilized » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:05 PM UTC

eric-hu wrote: post #240

civilized wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems inconsistent with what little I know of employment law, or at least the spirit of the law. The difference between an employee and a contractor is mostly about the degree of control the employer exerts. Employees are more heavily controlled and therefore get more protections and benefits. In a sane world, common practices like forbidding a "contractor" from working with any other company would be more legal…

I was a long term, full time contractor from about 2015 until 2019. It worked out better for me since I was working as a nomad abroad. Around 2019, my client wanted me on as an employee. I never found out the precise motivations, but I suspect it had to do with the contractor laws getting tightened down for rideshare drivers. I suspect that I could have remained a contractor by the letter of the law, but that still m…

For all we know, some attorney general was ginning up to collectively punish businesses that use contractors because recent press had made such businesses politically attractive targets. And your client was just trying to stay out of the crosshairs.

You can be compliant with the spirit of the law and still be targeted by some ideologue using the law as a cudgel.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#244

Post by gkop » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #242

gkop wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my experience, you definitely have to shop. You have to find someone who is a fit for you personally. Don't settle until you find someone who truly helps you; someone you anticipate seeing each week. It takes time and is an investment in yourself. Have patience and expect to spend a lot. A therapist will never say to you, "You know what? I don't think we're a good fit" or "I don't think I can help you as effective…

Thanks. I could benefit from therapy to address trauma I experienced with a previous (awful) therapist. And I get a sinking feeling considering the shopping I would need to do.

> A therapist will never say to you, "You know what? I don't think we're a good fit" or "I don't think I can help you as effectively as someone else."

Would you say more about this? If I were a self-respecting therapist and I read this I would feel defensive on behalf of my field. The therapist is the professional in this situation- it’s obvious they have an ethical responsibility to catch bad therapist/client fits. I honestly have so many questions here!

- Why should we not expect the therapist to catch scenarios of bad fit?

- Do therapist professional associations make any attempt to set an expectation in this regard?

- Tactically, could therapists be required to set an auto survey to go out, say every three months asking “Is our work helpful?”, to make it easy for the patient to speak up, and once the patient has spoken up, the therapist has some limited timeframe to remediate the relationship or it’s terminated by default?

- Is the reason that I perceive a market for lemons simply that therapists’ profit motive is a moral hazard? IE the worse the therapist, the less likely they will catch (admit to?) a bad fit, so due to probability, over time, we patients will converge on the bad therapists? How could we systematically mitigate this “externality”?

- If therapists could collectively improve the therapist shopping experience, could they grow the market for therapy? IE how many people like me are out there, that need therapy but don't seek it, because of distrust for the the industry. Is anybody working on this?

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#245

Post by styren » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:09 PM UTC

jddil wrote: post #203

Angostura wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If you're working for a for-profit company .... uhh no? And I'm a software engineer, I solve business problems with code. If I decide to to write some code that doesn't help the company I would probably be fired or at least put on a PIP

If there's one thing I've learned from mgmt it's that happy teams make for performant teams. The employees trust that I'll support them in creating a fulfilling work environment and look out for them. If I'd take all decisions with the companies profits in mind I'd break that trust which wouldn't lead anywhere good. When an issue arises I'll sometimes be on the side with sr mgmt, sometimes with the team, sometimes it will be more complex than choosing sides. Not all decisions can (or should) be boiled down to dollars and cents.

Perhaps you should ask someone in your HR department to tell you more about their mission as I doubt they'd share these views.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#246

Post by zdragnar » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #221

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the worst! I remember when a long-time team member died unexpectedly one weekend. We all learned about it at the Monday standup meeting and we luckily had the common sense to cancel the standup because no one wanted to talk. A number of us went to the funeral and his wife told me (I had met her once before) that she was so happy that his co-workers came to pay their respects. It made her feel that he had a la…

> I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! Remember that study that found psychopathic traits in upper management? https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...

Everyone is a bit of a psychopath.

https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#247

Post by 1270018080 » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:10 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.

In developed countries (so not the US) that have public healthcare, I've heard contracting roles are much more common, typically preferred by workers, and pay better.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#248

Post by paledot » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:12 PM UTC

icecap12 wrote: post #192

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…

Your comment REALLY resonates with me. When I was fresh out of school, I joined an enterprise software team as a junior engineer. The team was mostly FTEs, but there were 2 or 3 contractors as well - one of whom was extremely talented. It was the talented one that everybody ganged up on. He was ridiculed (it was supposed to be in good fun but I think it went too far), and he was abused and given all the hard problems…

This reads like a LinkedIn parable. I hope you're also providing them with avenues to become full-time contributors if they want to, and ensuring they're fairly compensated and have access to the resources as discussed in this thread.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#249

Post by trinsic2 » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:12 PM UTC

ajkjk wrote: post #227

anonporridge wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen! I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly. Don't ever expect a corporation of a…

The corporation may not be kind as an entity, but it would be nice if the individual people are.

That's the rub, at least for me. The poster above you is right, corporations are just corporations. If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body.

This is why I think that, more and more, people who have a heart, are moving away from big entities like this. I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm.

The biggest problem is not the people, its the amount of people that organize together to make something happen. When you live and work in a sea of people vying for attention, to be seen and heard, there is no possibility of humanity. Its the size that makes or breaks the organization, not the people in it. It breaks accountability and it breaks social connections.

I see smaller organizations all the time that act responsibility. These organizations usually consist of smaller teams. This is the future, a new way of living, small decentralized organizations providing the world with what it needs in a human way.

Re: Mourning loss as a remote team

#250

Post by brassattax » Sat, Mar 26, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

owl57 wrote: post #98

brassattax wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I could see the difference with "commodity" employees, and that sucks, but what's the big difference if we are talking about programmers? The company is obviously very interested to make us not want to leave, and also probably interested that we feel like caring about the product.

Possibly true when the programmers are building the company's product. I happen to work for a company where all of IT is a cost center.