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Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

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Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#141

Post by somsak2 »

Corrado wrote: post #136
somsak2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you see this just the same when screen-sharing over Zoom?

Yes, I think you could. However this type of interaction (screen sharing) is generally scheduled (stand up, all-staff, etc.) while most institutional learning is done off the cuff. For example, when I was a younger programmer I spent quite a bit of time outside with an older programmer. He would go outside to smoke and I would go outside to take a break. We talked a lot and I learned a ton of stuff on those smoke bre…

yeah zoom based hangouts are usually pretty cringe and I don't enjoy most myself. have felt similarly to you that on sites are really the only consistent way this kind of stuff happens, but it's been hard in my company to motivate management to pay for those

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#142

Post by ceddiexd »

Corrado wrote: post #136
somsak2 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you see this just the same when screen-sharing over Zoom?

Yes, I think you could. However this type of interaction (screen sharing) is generally scheduled (stand up, all-staff, etc.) while most institutional learning is done off the cuff. For example, when I was a younger programmer I spent quite a bit of time outside with an older programmer. He would go outside to smoke and I would go outside to take a break. We talked a lot and I learned a ton of stuff on those smoke bre…

Perspective from someone who entered the workforce during COVID, I found being onboarded remotely was just fine. My team lead is 27, and the rest of us are under 25. We bond and engage socially in our Slack channels just fine. We meet once a week, but banter less than over text.

I don’t mean this in a flippant way - for better or worse, social media has transformed the way this generation communicates. Online slang is an adaptation that evolved as a means to capture the full range of human expression in character limited unicode strings. Group chats are the atomic unit of social networks in the digital age.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a generational divide when it comes to how efficient remote work and learning is, and the success will vary from team to team depending on its composition. The latter is self evident enough, but still useful to keep in mind.

Personally, I find there’s an argument to be made that water cooler experiences are forced, since it’s synchronous communication that makes it less possible for a party to politely disengage midway through if that’s what they wish.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#143

Post by lnsru »

nojvek wrote: post #131

IMO the biggest shift with remote work is building a culture of writing and async communication. Like sitting down, thinking clearly, writing your thoughts and sharing. At Stripe, this was perhaps the biggest differentiator in their culture compared to anywhere else I’ve witnessed. Writing docs to clearly communicate where things are, where things are heading, where they should be heading was just as important as wri…

I spent many years in a company without documentation culture. There were project plans for managers, but no single technical document. All the requirements were gathered during meetings verbally. So the guys who were for decades in the company were hiding information from new hires and that way were controlling everything. It was super toxic since nobody could advance without kneeling before all mighty old dude. This company couldn’t exist without office.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#144

Post by omscs99 »

lnsru wrote: post #143
nojvek wrote: post #131

IMO the biggest shift with remote work is building a culture of writing and async communication. Like sitting down, thinking clearly, writing your thoughts and sharing. At Stripe, this was perhaps the biggest differentiator in their culture compared to anywhere else I’ve witnessed. Writing docs to clearly communicate where things are, where things are heading, where they should be heading was just as important as wri…

I spent many years in a company without documentation culture. There were project plans for managers, but no single technical document. All the requirements were gathered during meetings verbally. So the guys who were for decades in the company were hiding information from new hires and that way were controlling everything. It was super toxic since nobody could advance without kneeling before all mighty old dude. Thi…

Wow you just described my current gig, it’s like they have this inner circle of management/architects that just withholds information. No one documents anything. It’s a fucking mess

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#145

Post by freilanzer »

passion__desire wrote: post #113
credit_guy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company with a good product will thrive no matter the policy A different way to say it is "If you found a gold mine, you can afford to do things others can't". 99% of companies don't sit on gold mines like Nvidia.

Remember how Marissa Mayer in her bid to rescue Yahoo made everyone come to office. Even to relocate entire teams to US.

How did that go?

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#146

Post by datavirtue »

WanderPanda wrote: post #117
datavirtue wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then companies should lobby to make unions required.

If there was any entity that had enough power to enforce this worldwide I‘m sure companies would jump at and lobby like crazy. We are blessed that no such (Orwellian) entity exists (yet)

You can enforce it in the US. Which I think would be a good idea coupled with a humane immigration policy that focuses on lifting everyone up.

You can also enforce it through trade laws, requiring imports to come from union shops.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#147

Post by red-iron-pine »

Corrado wrote: post #134
haswell wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I experienced this when we brought on junior members and an intern right as COVID hit. The short answer is that you do it like anything else you do remotely. Zoom, chat, email, regular check-ins. They join the standups and team calls, learn who to reach out to for help, are assigned a buddy, etc. There can be benefits in terms of teambuilding and camaraderie in a collocated environment, but I don’t think there’s anyt…

> And if they can’t collaborate remotely, they may not be a good fit for a remote company. I work for a REMOTE first company and we had a junior developer that was struggling with not being in the office. The good news is that they were able to move to another company with a local office. The bad news is we didn't see that they were struggling until it was too late. Maybe if we were in the office we might have been a…

> I feel like employee happiness and job satisfaction is harder to manage remotely. Or it just might be that this employee wouldn't have worked out anyway. Who knows.

It is, but there are mitigations. The big one is that you have to ask. You can't bump into an employee and have a chat on the way to lunch or in an elevator and get a candid take on X or Y. You gotta ask directly, and often take the temperature a few times.

Experienced employees will vent or direct complaints -- squeaky wheels, grease, etc. -- but the noobs may not know how to complain, or if they should feel invalidated, dumb, etc. Hard to know what condition your condition is in.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#148

Post by red-iron-pine »

tintedfireglass wrote: post #59
hipparchus wrote: post #49

Ok, I'll bite the bullet: how do you train interns and/or junior employees in a fully remote environment? I only have two years of experience so I'm still super new, but it's something I'm confronted with this, and I just don't know how to train people in a fully remote environment. It's from little things to catching an intern who doesn't know a couple extremely handy shortcuts with tools that they are still learnin…

Thank god someone feels the same. No one cares when I put this argument forward against remote work especially for me as a junior/beginner dev

Sounds like a good argument for apprenticeship-style training. The trades do it fairly well, and I reckon you could probably skill up a number of IT folks and jr coders with a similar approach.

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#149

Post by red-iron-pine »

freilanzer wrote: post #145
passion__desire wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember how Marissa Mayer in her bid to rescue Yahoo made everyone come to office. Even to relocate entire teams to US.

How did that go?

she got her golden parachute. who cares about the suckers who had to move?

Re: Nvidia, one of tech's hottest companies, is fine with remote work

#150

Post by red-iron-pine »

smarmgoblin wrote: post #133
HDThoreaun wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leaders of hospitals almost always have MBA's, not MDs. Every medical department answers to the business analysts.

I was gonna make a comment saying “yeah but those MBAs aren’t dictating minutiae about how they complete their tasks (in the way software CEOs are assured we work better in an open-office shared desk hours from our homes)” But actually there’s a ton of micromanagement in medicine too. It’s equally insane there though and transparently driven by profit motives over patient wellbeing.

> It’s equally insane there though and transparently driven by profit motives over patient wellbeing.

only in the US, mon ami.

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