Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

youteam.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 332 posts

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#311

Post by wonder_er »

ayewo wrote: post #309
wonder_er wrote: post #17

> To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills I strongly agree! Looks like many other commenters agree too. how do I find companies that are hiring and agree with this statement? I've had a hard time finding those companies. I've had a slew of interviews recently, and none of them asked about my extensive online writing. None of them seemed to have clicked through to my website. A…

Off-topic: I like the look of your blog. Is your theme a heavily customized instance of Jekyll?

Thanks ayewo!

It is indeed Jekyll. The Poole theme. I've written a little about how to set up something similar here: https://josh.works/build-a-personal-site-with-jekyll

It's not super customized, but I've done a lot of work over the years to just make it work well for me.

Jekyll is a super cool tool.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#312

Post by ilaksh »

mrits wrote: post #290
hodgesrm wrote: post #11

I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating. In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote…

The key to success doesn't have much to do with communicating. Recognizing people respond to different behavior in different ways will be much more productive. I for example, rarely spend more than a few seconds reading an email so if you have a point to make it better be in a succinct mini paragraph.

I believe that you should be fired for that.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#313

Post by tekknik »

3pt14159 wrote: post #76
rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put your ask at the top, don't be afraid to use bullet points, keep things short and sweet. Most things can be effectively communicated in 2 or 3 paragraphs - if you need to communicate more than this, send it in a follow-up email after they respond. If you need to communicate more than this, you should really set up a quick call to communicate the thing and ensure they understand, then send the long email afterward.

Using checkboxes in GitHub issues is my secret weapon. There is no way to mark an issue as done or glaze over the details that way. Checklists in general are a great thing. I wish there was a startup that made community sourced checklists for common tasks like opening up a PR or writing an email asking for a raise.

on the flip side of this, there’s those of us who hate the superfluous (opinion) processes that seem only to slow down, not speed up.

PRs don’t need checklists IMO. If they do maybe your team is too large.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#314

Post by tekknik »

quicklyfrozen wrote: post #279
BeetleB wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager, you can probably get away with this. As an IC, people rarely read my emails if it doesn't fit in their screen (so 3 paragraphs is the max). The only thing I've found that works is to send details, and then probe the recipient on each important item in there to make sure they understood what I wrote. If I'm too detailed, they will get lost. If I'm very concise (but still complete ), they'll misinterpret.…

As an IC you probably have more time to fully read emails, esp. those from your management chain. I like to lay out the decisions I'm going to make if I don't get feedback, if possible. That seems to prompt feedback when feedback is required -- it seems the human desire to fix mistakes is stronger then it is to answer open ended questions. It likely gives the reader some context as to why you need the information as…

> As an IC you probably have more time to fully read emails, esp. those from your management chain.

I’m sorry, an IC having time?

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#315

Post by tekknik »

macksd wrote: post #241
fn1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried putting each important sentence on it's own paragraph? Just the important ones. That makes a difference in focus/readability. Try it.

Many of the suggestions I'm seeing are the polar opposite of how this thread started. When you're remote you miss a lot of context. Overcommunicating in writing helps address that. Eliminating information or not expecting people to fully read and engage with what they read is going in the wrong direction of the fundamental problem.

If an email is too long, then some will just ignore it. So overcommunicating can lead to people ignoring your essays for a simple point. Then there’s the time aspect. With everybody overcommunicating how will work get done with everybody overcommunicating to discuss a bug? Some of the most productive teams I’ve been around and on barely needed any communication outside of quick alignment meetings. Seems this is very opinionated, rather than fact.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#316

Post by hodgesrm »

irrational wrote: post #59
hodgesrm wrote: post #11

I've been working on remote teams for almost 20 years. The key to success is overcommunicating. In other words--don't assume people have full context or share assumptions. Write emails that lay out assumptions explicitly and detail problems completely. As a manager I sometimes feel like a Habsburg bureaucrat buried in the Chancery offices sending painstaking messages to a far flung empire. Come to think of it, remote…

But, when it's that long, do people read it? It seems like a great CYB tactic, but maybe a poor communication tactic. I'm a voracious reader, but when it comes to most corporate communication I won't really read anything over a paragraph long. I might skim it if it is from my manager. Maybe.

I work on distributed teams that are spread across 10 to 12 time zones. We depend on people making local decisions that are approximately right, because confirming a decision may mean a 24 to 48 hour cycle of back and forth communications.

In these situations it's more important to share "what is the problem" than how to solve it.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#317

Post by ako »

tayo42 wrote: post #273
ako wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This approach depends very much on culture. For example, US culture is very much, get to the point, start with the conclusion. German culture requires you to outline how you got to the conclusion. Interesting book on this topic: The culture map, by Erin Meyer. ( https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Map-INTL-ED-Decoding/dp/16103... ) It has a whole chapter on this topic: 3 - Why versus How, the art of persuasion in the mult…

German culture requires no introduction in any writing? Am I talking about the same thing as everyone else commenting? Anything you write will always have a first sentence or paragraph. Your saying it's offensive to use that to give an overview of what's to come and to set the tone of the writing?

Looks like i wasn't very clear.

The difference according to the book is that if you want to convice an audience of something, e.g, result of a study, americans are more interested in the results and how to apply it. Germans want to understand how you got to the results, what the process was behind it so they can understand that your results are correct.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#318

Post by 3pt14159 »

tekknik wrote: post #313
3pt14159 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using checkboxes in GitHub issues is my secret weapon. There is no way to mark an issue as done or glaze over the details that way. Checklists in general are a great thing. I wish there was a startup that made community sourced checklists for common tasks like opening up a PR or writing an email asking for a raise.

on the flip side of this, there’s those of us who hate the superfluous (opinion) processes that seem only to slow down, not speed up. PRs don’t need checklists IMO. If they do maybe your team is too large.

I think a little checklist would help me remember things that are easy to forget, like updating documentation or making sure that a test exists to reproduce the issue. That said, at the end of the day tools exist to help us, not slow us down. If they is a small PR that fixes a typo then I want to be trusted to skip the checklist completely.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#319

Post by noisy_boy »

rmk wrote: post #292
noisy_boy wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes its just about the mindshare. The HR person chatting with the VP: "You know that new girl, what's her name, yeah Julie, she setup a nice onboarding guide, yeah I liked it, very useful..."; casual stuff like that adds the layers of impressions that construct how everyone sees you. And I have observed those impressions to be more lasting and impactful than your last code review.

Meh... Ultimately it has to result in something meaningful; without that, it's just thankless work. Many places (particularly growing companies) have managers who simply do not know how to evaluate technical work (which should be the biggest determinant of monetary or career development rewards). SV has very good technical people (i.e., the foot soldiers are very motivated and above-average people), but the managers…

I generally agree with you and that kind of solidifies my point. Those mediocre managers won't be as impressed by the milliseconds you shaved off in your clever commit compared to the shiny CRUD front-end or nice checklist or anything else that they can actually understand and relate to. And they are the ones in charge of the comp.

Re: To find great remote employees, prioritize candidates with strong writing skills

#320

Post by torgard »

soneca wrote: post #80

I believe I am a good writer. On my first job as a developer I kept getting very positive feedback on my writing. I ended up even starting a newsletter with writing advice for software developers[0]. So 4 months ago I started looking for a remote job. I applied to 250+ positions. All very suited to my skills (e.g. I wouldn’t apply to any job asking for “senior” or “fullstack”). I got about only ~15 interviews, 1 offe…

Subscribed! You are indeed a great writer.
Post reply on HN