Rambling also makes you visible which is not a bad thing when you're remote.
If you're remote, ramble
431–440 of 479 posts
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are…
That's the remote equivalent of banning informal conversations in the hall and saying "save it for the daily team meeting". It feels good as a manager to formalize things, but the best collaboration and ideas happen organically at less formal times and places - and those times are worth at least as much, if not more to the company than anything formal. You might as well say "no thinking about work in the shower."
The worst manager I ever had literally told the team off for discussing things in a 1:1 setting, it was wild.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#433I’ve been working remotely for YC startups for the past 3.5+ years, and I completely agree. I went from being the quietest person in the room to someone who often ends up rambling on most calls. Remote work has not only given me the space to speak my mind - and sometimes even find answers to my own questions - but also the opportunity to learn so much from my colleagues.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
If someone you work with and you otherwise trust e.g. with your code, servers, and business, says they are feeling under the weather, why should you not assume they are not telling the truth?
Especially as it’s obviously not a lie. A lie would be like, their 7th grandma to die or something. Saying you just feel under the weather is… exactly what someone who was just feeling under the weather and didn’t want to lie about it would say.
It’s that kind of controlling and judgmental mentality of that makes corporate employment so toxic, you are constantly in an adversarial environment where someone believes they have some cause to judge others. He says “I’m suspicious of anyone who says I’m under the weather” as if he had any ethical or moral cause to be so, a right to be controlling over others’ lives.
It is that kind of mentality that unfortunately then gets promoted in corporations and creates a feedback loop to create every less trust, because how could you trust anything or anyone on a system that is like that? You can’t. Only the naive trust anyone at their job. All corporate employment structures are inherently hostile trust environments, you’re always swimming with beasts with toxic control issues above you and random features thrown together around you.
The very core nature of a corporation is inherently a structure of narcissistic control and exploration of people to one degree or another, that is its whole purpose.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#435Let me share a personal story. Back in 2014 when I was working at Cloudflare on DDoS mitigation I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run". I quickly realised that these conversations had value outside the two of us - pretty much everyone else…
> I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run". Hi, that's me! There were definitely a lot of fun conversations. I liked that a culture of internal blogs became a thing too. It was good to see people brain dumping their experiments and findings.…
Internal blog is another thing, but indeed related to chat. Once we figured some techical thing out, I often put it under "personal blog" on wiki under something like ~marek/date-slug. (I'm actually quite upset about jira removing slug from the url and replacing it with random number, this makes url completion much worse. I often titled the wikis funny/witty to make it easier to remember and find)
These were usually quite short notes. Like I did this and that. Or here are instructions I've run. Pretty much a "lab notebook".
Again, this was often useful to people. Folks new what I was working on at that time. Over time more people adapted this style of public note taking (within company), but I have the impression I was more consistent than others.
I did it for many reasons. I genuinely forget things. It was always nice to see comments (like James complaining that I shouldn't do `dpkg -i x.deb`, and instead finally install the package repo in apt-sources!). So again - searchability (a form of documentation), reach (getting feedback), and work log (for planning).
The format was also nice - short, without specific audience in mind. Zero drama, zero effort. Plentiful and low quality. Because it was "blog" and not "pages", this meant it was obvious when the note was written and nobody expected old blogs to be up to date. The lower the friction in note taking - the better.
Finally, I was working with an SRE team, which was tightly knit and communicated very often over daily checkins (which I wasn't invited to) and other informal channels. And I worked from home a bit. This meant I had to find an asynchronous way to communicate with the team. My personal blogs worked nicely. I highly recommend this style to anyone working remotely.
Although I must admit the personal "lab notebook" wiki thing is not scaleable. It's impossible to "follow" more than a handful of people.
I kept statistics. It's fairly obvious when I was most productive. Here it is, my internal blogs on the wiki per quarter:
2013-Q4 | 0 |
2014-Q1 | 0 |
2014-Q2 | 2 | ##
2014-Q3 | 3 | ###
2014-Q4 | 2 | ##
2015-Q1 | 14 | ##############
2015-Q2 | 15 | ###############
2015-Q3 | 57 | ###################################################
2015-Q4 | 60 | ######################################################
2016-Q1 | 70 | ######################################################################
2016-Q2 | 71 | #######################################################################
2016-Q3 | 17 | #################
2016-Q4 | 23 | #######################
2017-Q1 | 13 | #############
2017-Q2 | 22 | ######################
2017-Q3 | 16 | ################
2017-Q4 | 25 | #########################
2018-Q1 | 12 | ############
2018-Q2 | 9 | #########
2018-Q3 | 23 | #######################
2018-Q4 | 14 | ##############
2019-Q1 | 14 | ##############
2019-Q2 | 20 | ####################
2019-Q3 | 18 | ##################
2019-Q4 | 36 | ######################################
2020-Q1 | 19 | ###################
2020-Q2 | 13 | #############
2020-Q3 | 4 | ####
2020-Q4 | 3 | ###
2021-Q1 | 4 | ####
2021-Q2 | 8 | ########
2021-Q3 | 3 | ###
2021-Q4 | 21 | #####################
2022-Q1 | 4 | ####
2022-Q2 | 12 | ############
2022-Q3 | 4 | ####
2022-Q4 | 28 | ############################
2023-Q1 | 14 | ##############
2023-Q2 | 16 | ################
2023-Q3 | 10 | ##########
2023-Q4 | 6 | ######
2024-Q1 | 12 | ############
2024-Q2 | 22 | ######################
2024-Q3 | 0 |
2024-Q4 | 2 | ##
2025-Q1 | 20 | ####################
2025-Q2 | 3 | ###
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed, I, as a fully remote, probably overworked person, sometimes wonder if I'm a loser just because I never * pick up Becky from school * feel under the weather today so I'll be offline and "take it easy" (never hear about me anymore today) * sorry "traffic jam" (10:00am) * sorry "train canceled" * will leave a bit early (2pm) for [insert random reason] appointment While all these can be completely valid reasons,…
I do tend to be a bit suspicious of the one-day "under the weather" events. However I do think we need to make extra room for parents (I am not one, yet). I'm going to need a doctor who's younger than me when I'm 80+ Folks could always just disappear instead of announcing these things, but is that better? And as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok.
Countries with a (still capitalist) social support system manage this with parents' time off; the mother and father can request a significant amount of paid time off, which is separate to the government mandated 20 or so days per year of paid vacation, and it essentially can't be denied.
Before you say it'll be exploited; the largest economy in Europe does this and it works wonderfully, and so do many others.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#437Let me share a personal story. Back in 2014 when I was working at Cloudflare on DDoS mitigation I collaborated a lot with a collage - James (Jog). I asked him loads of questions, from "how to login to a server", via "what is anycast" to "tell me how you mitigated this one, give me precise instructions you've run". I quickly realised that these conversations had value outside the two of us - pretty much everyone else…
I understand the point you were making, but from a manager’s perspective this format is something we’ve tried to avoid. Having a place to have people ask questions is great and encouraged, but doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability, and risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are…
> doing anything that starts gravitating the knowledge toward a person instead of a topic creates problems for discoverability, searchability
Channels aren’t searchable. Messages are.
> risks creating the impression (for new employees) that certain specific people are at the center of projects they just happen to know a lot about.
Sorry to break it to you, but that’s not just an impression. It’s a fact.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#438At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use isnky own chat (where inam alone), where in post links that mostly interest me. Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
Too many typos isnky -> is my Inam -> I am In -> I? Funnily, the first two autocorrected when I typed then in and I genuinely didn't know what isnky was supposed to mean. On topic though, if no one else can read it it's like writing in your own local notes files.
Sorry for typos. The keyboard I am using (Helio on Android) hasn't corrected the typo and I was too fast with the submission.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#439At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use isnky own chat (where inam alone), where in post links that mostly interest me. Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
At work we use Teams and one interesting feature that I use is my own chat, with my own Name, where i post links that mostly can catch my interests and use for future reference.
Also Signal offers something similar, called "Personal Notes"
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#440Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a great comment. Thanks. In my case - indeed the name is a historical baggage, I'm not arguing for or against it. Indeed we had regularly situations that we had to pull in experts from other rooms, to discuss specific topics (like TCP), so we should have forwarded the conversation at the start. But I don't think this should be categorical. There is value in non-experts responding faster (the channel had good…
OTOH I hugely appreciate my manager who makes a conscious effort to direct people to ask questions in public channels and not just ping “hey” in my DMs all day. And it saves them time too, because my response is going to be “you should ask in channel xyz”. (And yes, in that public channel I am likely to be the one who answers it, but not always, and it’s now visible for other people who also need to know - the exact…
The best Slack culture I ever saw also had a strict “No DMs” policy. All discussions had to take place in public or semi-public channels. DMs were reserved for “hey you’re missing standup” or similarly trivial stuff.