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If you're remote, ramble

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Re: If you're remote, ramble

#391

Post by Xelynega »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #359
xandrius wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re-reading your own message should definitely be a bell for you to notice either your lack of trust in others and/or your twisted perspective that work is the goal of life. Unless you are the one paying for that person and they are not performing as by contract, even if someone needs an extra day off to chill, you should be happy they do take it as it creates an environment where you also could take it off if you so…

I’m neutral on this topic between you and GP, but I do think you’re discounting the fact that distrust can be legitimate. You’re assuming that we should trust blindly, it seems.

I don't think they're discounting that distrust can be legitimate, they're questioning whether it's useful to distrust somebody when it's not your job to micromanage them or they're providing adequate output.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#392

Post by rr808 »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #203
majke wrote: post #132

Let 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…

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.

As a senior judgement is a real problem as others have suggested. I suspect its a reason why AI is popular. I can ask those dumb questions I should know without embarrassing myself by asking someone, or even worse put it in writing with my name on it.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#393

Post by bombcar »

saltcured wrote: post #259
TimTheTinker wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Ouch, my wife has encountered almost exactly that in a recent brush with a biotech company that seems to have been infected by FAANG expats. She was advised that any kind of sidebar conversation is a faux pas. I struggled to guess at the real motive. Is it some project manager's blatant control freakery? An org-level, cynical management attempt to commoditize their knowledge workers? Or some kind of emergent failure…

Probably cargo culting from companies with 50k+ employees (where minor friction for one is way outweighed by more availability for all).

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#394

Post by whoknowsidont »

Aurornis wrote: post #158
majke wrote: post #132

Let 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…

> I would encourage everyone to just go to the appropriate topic channel and discuss it there.

These just become apologetics channels. Not productive.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#395

Post by fallous »

Aurornis wrote: post #158
majke wrote: post #132

Let 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…

A common mistake that some managers make is pushing the burdens of managing onto those you're managing. Any of us who have been managers can look back and see things that we tried to push down to those we've managed because it made it easier for us while later realizing that wasn't the best solution.

If there's a catch-all channel that employees are using to share knowledge that's not a bug, it's a feature. If, as a manager, you want a more structured means of conveying institutional knowledge generated within such channels then it's on you to put that together. Trying to push that burden down the chain often results in that institutional knowledge being shared verbally or via private emails/DMs in order to avoid the burden of documentation, which is a net negative.

Such information is a force multiplier for teams as well as a great asset for onboarding new hires. Both of those are direct benefits for the manager and the company, so take the advantage of that kind of spontaneous documentation rather than insisting on passing on the cognitive burden.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#396

Post by wonderwonder »

Aurornis wrote: post #158
majke wrote: post #132

Let 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…

This is why so few people have loyalty to a job. Managements role appears to be simply killing all individuality and fun in the workplace.

"First Warning, this is an unauthorized topic in an incorrect location. You are permitted to discuss this topic but only in the predesignated area."

"Did you complete your TPS reports this morning?"

"Yeah... I'm going to need you to come in on Saturday. We have a go live in 3 weeks for our mini waterfall agile release and you currently have 2 bug tickets assigned."

This murders the last spark of connectivity for remote workers who are already left out of the daily in person banter and bonding that in office work provides.

Comments like these really make me appreciate that we are simply numbers in a spreadsheet and no longer real people to companies and leadership.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#397

Post by wonderwonder »

wting wrote: post #378
majke wrote: post #300

Earlier 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…

> 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…

"WE ARE THE BORG. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. YOUR UNIQUENESS WILL BE ADDED TO OUR COLLECTIVE. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE."

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#398

Post by wonderwonder »

serf wrote: post #213
ZeroCool2u wrote: post #203

Earlier 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…

I'm a tech lead and I also tried to encourage the judgement free zone on the devs channel. I do this by intentionally asking question that I should know the answer to but don't as I just never got around to figuring it out as I have 16k other things to worry about. So rather than spend 2 hours chasing something down, I just ask. I know that this is a question a lot of juniors can answer. I avoid people thinking I am dumb by also taking time to answer the more technical questions and posting architecture and optimizations on the same channel.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#399

Post by wonderwonder »

bagacrap wrote: post #101
kmarc wrote: post #96

Earlier 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.

I get 3 weeks of sick time. While I rarely take more than a week, most of the time that sick day is because I am just sick of work and need a day. I never say why I'm sick, I just say, taking a sick day today.

Its my time, I'll take it. I have 5 weeks of vacation. I use every one of them.

No one ever asks why I worked 60 hours the prior week and the one before that, that's never noticed. So I'll just do what I want and if that bothers some people, then so be it. I do feel bad though as the other dozens of devs on my team are offshore and they work non stop and its just expected.

Before they got rid of the onshore people though, I never batted an eye when my co-workers took off 2 or 3 days with no warning, its their time.

"as a senior on my team, I over announce certain stuff to let the other team members know that WLB is ok." I'm sure your team very much appreciates this.

Re: If you're remote, ramble

#400

Post by Gigachad »

ogou wrote: post #178

After watching so many work chats disintegrate from politics, social commentary, or pedantic arguments I have totally avoided all unstructured channels. Since 2020 I saw two people get fired after discussions got out of hand. There were many more team meetings, code of conduct edicts, and all hands declarations about communication issues. It wasn't until the bans on politics in Slack arrived until things got better.…

Never do casual conversation on the record. It's always going to result in this kind of stuff. If you want to get to know your coworkers, go out to lunch with them or chat face to face. That way you can limit exactly who is listening, gauge the response. And anything you say will be lost to time.

Obviously you can still get in trouble if you say something very inappropriate, but anything middle of the road will be forgotten.

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