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If you're remote, ramble
371–380 of 479 posts
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two rules about any job I take these days. 1. I will not work at in office job. 2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.
Sp you want to be the special remote guy?
I said just the opposite. I don’t want to be the special remote guy. I want to work for a company where everyone is remote.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two rules about any job I take these days. 1. I will not work at in office job. 2. I won’t work for a company that is not “remote only”.
Hard to follow this rules unless you are living in a low cost of living area. Remote people from India/Afrika will be happy to work for a fraction of western salary.
I lived in Atlanta GA in 2020. My company went remote - a startup - and stayed remote from then on (well it got acquired by an all remote company shortly afterwards).
A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about a position as an SDE. It would have paid $75K - $80K more than I was making. But would have required me to relocate to Seattle at some underdetermined time in the future. There was no way in hell I was going to relocate to Seattle and sell my big house in the burbs that I paid $340K to have built in Atlanta in 2016 to work at Amazon.
She kept talking and suggested I apply to a “permanently remote” [sic] role at AWS ProServe. The position paid about 20% less but still around $60K more than I was making. I said sure why not?
I got the job and two years later we ended up selling the house anyway and moving to cheaper, no state tax Florida and downsized to a condo (and sold our house for twice what we paid for it a year later).
I currently make the same as a staff consultant working permanently at another company as I did as an L5 working at Amazon - still remote (not much by BigTech comp standards. But comfortable by every other metric) - and that’s after turning down an offer for a permanently remote role for a large non tech company where the director who was a former coworker was going to create a position for me to oversea the cloud architecture and migration. It would have paid around L6 level at Amazon - all cash.
I just didn’t want the headache of working for BigCorp anymore.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#374There is a kind of leader that's threatened when they don't control communication. In these cases, random thought bombs on slack feel like chaos. Like people are going in random directions not rowing together. I don't think this is true of course -- people are just sharing inspiration and ideas. But in some places / cultures just rambling on slack can be dangerous and put a target on your back. You can be labeled as…
> Somehow this is more embarrassing to this leader than random hallway conversations you'd have in a regular office environment.
It seems impossible to escape the feeling that something written down is somehow firmer or more significant than something said in person. Have you ever been more comfortable saying something painful or awkward in person than via text or email? Spoken words exist for a short time and then disappear, but even a text message sits there and stares at you for long after you send or receive it. It's not just the controlling CEOs; I think they're just a specific case of this much, much wider phenomenon.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
Um, why? The other day I had a killer headache. Just couldn’t shake it. I did everything I needed to that was time sensitive, then went AFK. I don’t see any reason to be suspicious of others if they do similarly—we all have days when we’re just not at our best for some reason.
To defend @bagacrap, they said they tend to be a bit suspicious. And I am, too, when I hear this weekly from the same person (and when I ask back next day, if she recovered, she asks me "from what"?) I'm all in for more times off for parents, more PTOs, sabbaticala, etc. But come on, having "a cold" twice a month... IT IS suspicious.
You've added two conditions not present in the original comment.
Some people may "abuse" such things, but I'd say most people legit have days when they're under the weather and feel fine the next day.
Also, if you have kids in daycare or something? A cold twice a month is pretty much the norm as I understand it. I love my nieces, but there's a 50/50 chance each time I see them I'm going to wind up with a minor cold. Toddlers are awfully efficient at spreading disease...
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but then a bunch of people started doing it literally Most people doing "agile" do literally the opposite of what is on the manifesto.
Lol yep. Our company decided “sprints” were now to last 4 weeks, but there’s also no task scheduling, no retro, no sprint planning… just tasks get given whenever they come up based on what they feel like. So… what’s the point of a “sprint”? We don’t even do monthly releases. It’s hilarious. I suspect we do “agile” in name only so they can pretend to the board that there is a system at all.
You already got to oppose of the manifesto in the "Our company decided" part...
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have an organic channel like this that's just called "Study Hall". People constantly ask technical questions and they know it's a judgement free zone. Probably one of the most productive chat channels in our org.
>and they know it's a judgement free zone. that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that. If some underling somewhere says something that exposes their ignorance or naivety to either a policy problem or a technical problem you'd better realize that it's going to trigger a 'review mechanism' somewhere down the road withi…
> that's the thing that's so inorganic about this whole thing : it's not a judgement free zone, it's a zone that tricks people into presuming that.
I am surprised that I had to scroll this far to find this observation. If I see a person's posts in multiple channels, I don't switch ON and OFF my mental image of them based on channel like a SQL where clause where channel personal. Based on the same premise, the person posting also probably knows this fact and isn't going to be totally free and relaxed asking whatever comes to their mind due to fear of judgement - the same eyeballs are going to be looking at the posts, irrespective of the type of channel.
As someone posted elsewhere, it is all going to be cultural and if that is right, it pretty much doesn't matter how you structure channels.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#378Earlier 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…
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…
> I know that concentrating knowledge / ownership at a person is not always good, but perhaps a better way to manage this is to... hire someone else who is competent or make other people more vocal.
> And yes, I don't like managers trying to shape communication patterns.
I'm a manager who shaped communication patterns (e.g. default conversations to a public channel) because we're solving different problems. By moving conversations to a public channel away from an individual, we're improving redundancy and reducing single points of failure. Our primary responsibility, which understandably garners discontent, is to prioritize the system over the needs of individuals, within reason.
There are many issues resulting from defaulting conversations in private channels or DMs that you've probably seen first-hand.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#379This reminds me of something I did in one of the previous companies where I worked.
Like anyone else, when I joined the company, I had various questions: how to access certain systems, how to handle permissions, how to debug specific services, etc.
I compiled all these questions and answers as notes in a Git repository that my teammates could access. I wrote the notes using QOwnNotes, utilizing its Git integration. So, when someone had a question for which I already had the answer, I could simply share my notes, or create/update a node and share it.
The names of the notes were straightforward and easy to follow, such as:
- aws.md
- azure.md
- kubernetes.md
- staging.md
- production.md
- useful-commands.md (jq, sed, base64, etc)
My teammates used this resource frequently. As I was preparing to leave the company, I suggested them to fork my notes repository. I later heard that they continued to use it for many months afterward.
Re: If you're remote, ramble
#380The first thing this puts me in mind of is mcom.bad-attitude, the internal Netscape newsgroup for this sort of thing.
jwz wrote about how well that worked out on his blog.