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Head of Remote Work
- axegon_ 6y agoUp until not too long ago I used to work at a company where more than half of all 5000 employees had the title "manager", "head" or "lead" in their title. To put it extremely mildly it was a bureaucratic hell. I'm really tempted to call them and suggest yet another "head" title.
- nicoburns 6y agoHead of heads?
- cosmodisk 6y agoChief head of not so chief heads?
- keiferski 6y agoSurely none can be more ridiculous than Chief of Awesomeness. I saw that once and thought, do people really put that on their resumes?
- axegon_ 6y agoOh, game on: Someone had this as a signature in her mail(not joking I actually copied it): > Lead Senior World Director of Marketing and Monetization, Research and Development.
- asien 6y agoHappened to me at my last job. Everyone was manager of something . We had chief tech happiness officer. His job was to make python script to make devs happy. I’ve never heard of that before. The company went bankrupt after wasting 200M in venture money and generating 10K in revenue. Was fascinating to be part of that experience. Nothing was being done , just a bunch of people making brainstorms all day long while 10 devs were doing everything and being told to change idea every other day. Was a relief when I quit after few months, when I look back at it no doubt it was a who’s the "coolest of the club" culture. No actual talent was there.
- tawtawtaw 6y agoWorked somewhere similar and saw similar outcomes. I think having too much money removes the feedback loop that lets a team know if they are on the right course, so like you say, it comes down to a popularity based culturr
- 908B64B197 6y ago> His job was to make python script to make devs happy. I've never heard of that before. That's kind of nice. Once a project grows a certain size if you have the budget for it it's cool to have a dedicated small team that takes care of the dev environment (maintaining the build and test pipeline, adding static analysis and making sure there's some working default config for at least one IDE). Also take care of the commit hooks and helps out when migrating language and tool versions.
- gnicholas 6y agoHow do you raise $200M with only $10k in revenue? That is, if your A round was $10M, your B round was $60M, and your C round was $130M (I'm just making up numbers here), how was it that none of the investors ever needed to see any material revenues?
- mortenjorck 6y agoFounders with just enough cachet in the VC community.
- 6y ago
- itisit 6y agoIn my experience business titles don't mean much. They don't actually indicate seniority, managerial/leadership ability, expertise, knowledge, understanding, and a multitude of other valuable and praiseworthy attributes. Ever speak with someone with a <blink>Fancy Ass Title</blink> only to discover the person severely lacks the experience and thoughtfulness you'd expect from the title? Depends on the company, of course, but it happens at startups and corporations alike. However, there is some utility in recognizing when someone flaunts a lofty title aggressively, they are most certainly not the person you should be dealing with to get something done properly.
- djohnston 6y agoIs this like the "tool smith" from the surgical team? While I've enjoyed remote work a lot, I don't think it's here to stay. For places that will allow employees to start going remote 100%, if even a minority of the team returns to the office and has daily facetime with management, those other remote employees will return IMO. In other words, post COVID, if your company isn't 100% remote then I don't think anyone will be full remote there, it's a disadvantage.
- jblarneyforward 6y agoWhat about companies with multi site offices? Isn’t that effectively remote?
- theptip 6y agoNot if you structure your org right. Infra-office (ie in person) for the high bandwidth interfaces, usually the whole team is in the same office. Inter-office for lower bandwidth interfaces, ie between teams and functions. You definitely have some interactions that are effectively remote, say if your project involves working closely with $remote_team, but in general the highest-order terms in the equation should be in office, if you are doing a traditional WFO org.
- jayd16 6y agoWe'll have to see how fast the transition back is. You're right that if remote work stays it has to work with conference rooms and larger groups at the office. I think if the transition back is fairly gradual then the office infrastructure and culture will grow and WFH has a chance.
- ethbr0 6y agoI've worked fully remote, fully in-office, and a blend (3 days in + 2 days WFH). For me, I preferred blend. (Caveat: office ~25 minutes away, some on-site campus amenities including dining, and WFH included scheduling flexibility) I could slot annoying business-hours-only chores into my WFH days, or shift work earlier and later if I needed to be there for a kid thing. And 2 days of that a week felt about right. I got the facetime and meeting stuff done my other 3, and had quieter, individual progress time those 2.
- Ozzie_osman 6y agoOne of our first hires as a startup was a BizOps hire. She's awesome. We've been distributed pre covid and felt like we needed someone to help oversee processes, culture, etc... All the things that are important for ANY company but crucial if you're distributed. So she's basically our Head of Remote.
- peter_l_downs 6y agoSounds like bullshit akin to "Chief of Staff" but hey, if companies are going to spend time focusing on how to make their employees' remote lives better, more power to them. Related reading: The Job Status Cycle https://chiefofstuff.substack.com/p/the-job-status-cycle https://chiefofstuff.substack.com/p/the-job-status-cycle > Phase 3: Harvest > Competition intensifies as New Title attracts more and more interest. Momentum from the high status of the earlier phases begins to be overwhelmed by declining exclusivity. Hiring managers and recruiters have caught on and start repainting old job descriptions.
- whymauri 6y agoHow is "Chief of Staff" a BS title?
- pc86 6y agoI always viewed it as people wanted their secretary to have more cachet akin to the WH COS. The go-to behind-the-scenes, "assistant POTUS" type roll. Realistically though, that type of job exists in politics but it simply doesn't exist in business. The WH COS-type duties should be handled by a COO, Managing Director, EVP, etc. Any time I've seen COS used in a Silicon Valley context it's a glorified secretary/scheduler.
- Havoc 6y agoDon't think that'll stay hot for long
- tawtawtaw 6y agoCulture is over-rated. Covid is an opportunity to question why businesses are structured how they are, in particular whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results. I say this because work from home leads to rethinking work as a place you go to put in time, as it has been at least since the industrial revolution. And reimagining work as a series of outcomes someone wants to pay you for, because they see value in outsourcing them to you. But instead, companies will just make online versions of the same corporate BS that goes on in the office.
- rohan1024 6y agoThis is surely going to happen. It's going to take decades but sure it will. And when this will be the norm current structure will not make any sense to that generation.
- ethbr0 6y ago> whether process and conformity oriented central functions like talent, culture, and most management can be done away with, in favour of individual accountability and a focus on results Absolutely agreed. Look at how effective Valve has been with a non-hierarchical culture!
- nostromo95 6y agoWell despite anecdotes of workplace drama, they’ve definitely been effective at continuing to manage Steam, which is likely orders of magnitude more lucrative than developing single player videogames. Everyone points to Valve failing to deliver a Half-Life sequel as a failure but it’s more a symptom of changing organizational priorities.
- tikhonj 6y agoAlso, when they did deliver a Half Life game, it was incredibly well executed and novel in a way that could simply not happen at a different company with a different culture. Normally I'd dismiss claims like that as puffery, but here it's concrete: no other big studios have invested in a VR game at that scale. And, veering into less quantitative observations, I haven't seen any VR game—and not many "normal" games either—with the level of attention to detail that Alyx got. I've listened to some of the design commentaries for the game, and I was really impressed at how much time, effort and user testing Valve was willing to put in to every detail. VR is a new medium, and it's impressive to see an organization learn how to take advantage of it so thoroughly. It takes a special culture to make space for people to try things and indulge in perfectionism—takes a lot of money too, of course, but other AAA studios have just as much but don't hew to the same standard. I know Valve's approach is controversial and I'm sure it's not perfect, but it's clearly doing something right that very few other companies are. I've seen small teams work in ways like that, but never at scale. One of these days I'd love to work at a company trying something like that. (Probably not in video game development though :P.)
- notfromhere 6y agoHow is this not something that just rolls up into a COO function
- yowlingcat 6y agoTo be fair, "rolling up into the COO function" is a pretty broad cross section.
- relaunched 6y agoIt's pretty cringeworthy to think you can bring someone in, externally, to cultivate your culture. It's like all of the pretentious devops leadership that comes in, or the tool-bags that advocate for tools as if they were culture. I don't care what you say, using slack / zoom / github doesn't really say anything about your culture, nor is it in and of itself indicative of a "good engineering culture". We never learn our lessons, you can't just hire someone into a role and have them change your company. It's just slightly more naive then hiring a digital change management consultant. As far as I'm concerned, hiring a head of remote for a remote company or a head of culture or a head of digital or a head of innovation is a sign that your leadership doesn't know what to do or doesn't think the thing is important enough to spend their time listening to their employees, diving into themselves and cultivating the "head of" _____ . It's pretty tone deaf.
- specialist 6y agoPer corollary to Sturgeon's Law, there's a handful of talented, effective product and project managers. So it's possible that Darren “oracle of remote work” Murph is useful. He's certainly mastered the self-promotion consultant schtick. Slapping a "scrum master" sticker onto someone doesn't make them useful. And if I was pondering delegating some much needed remotefulness stuff, I'd probably eschew a lifestyle media celebrity.
- relaunched 6y agoI'll add, be wary of folks that are hard core self-promoting. Typically they are better at marketing themselves than they are at doing the thing.
- enraged_camel 6y ago>> It's pretty cringeworthy to think you can bring someone in, externally, to cultivate your culture. Terry Tate disagrees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzToNo7A-94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzToNo7A-94
- pc86 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Brajeshwar 6y agoI skimmed through the article but the idea of someone just focusing on the people, while they work remotely is a definite must. Personally, I have worked, and managed remote teams for the last 15+ years. The one thing I realized was that if this scales beyond the typical 5+ close-knit team, there should be one person whose only job is make sure the remote teams are "working." I would treat this akin to a Project Manager but knows how to tweak things for remote. I have wrote few Job Descriptions with the designation in the lines of "Remote Team Liaison", which is more of syntactic sugar for "Head", "Lead". However, I'd love that this is one of the characteristics of almost every Project Manager, HR, etc. instead of a separate person.
- srich36 6y agoPeople often argue that remote working flexibility is the future, but I think it will be detrimental to both younger employees (losing out on mentorship) and those that do go into an office. An office is at its most effective when everyone is there to collaborate; it loses most of its benefits when only some people are in person. Because of this I think there will be many companies advertising themselves as office-only as a benefit.
- sircastor 6y agoI think it can be, but only of your business is monolithic. My work affects and spans offices in 3 time zones, and very disparate ones at that. I have a few local colleagues, but I can’t think of a situation where talking over the wall or desk has been more effective than a slack message or a call.
- srich36 6y agoFair enough. My main work experience is at a smaller startup that has a heavy focus on collaboration so my opinion is biased towards that. In my experience trivial things can be solved with a slack message/call but I greatly prefer in-person interaction for more in-depth debugging, etc. But I understand how that’s not necessarily applicable to all situations. My main concern, and the reason I posted the above comment, is I think companies may over -correct with hybrid work models. For those that prefer office work a hybrid work model is barely better than a remote-only culture; the office loses its benefits when everyone isn’t there. I’m not arguing these remote-only/remote-first cultures shouldn’t exist - in many cases they provide large advantages - but think there will be a significant desire for office-only environments for those that prefer office work.
- shahbaby 6y agoPersonally, as a new employee, the idea of trading all the benefits of remote for some in person mentorship is absurd.
- srich36 6y agoI’m not arguing you should. But there are undoubtedly some people who would. And a hybrid work environment is detrimental to those who want that in-person experience. There should be opportunities for remote-only/remote-first cultures and in-person only jobs going forward. My argument is that a hybrid model misses the point - you lose almost all the benefits of in-person work in the process. EDIT: I’m a new employee as well, just so it doesn’t seem like I’m projecting what new employees would want without at least some personal experience
- cmdshiftf4 6y agoPost-COVID I see three scenarios: - Companies go back to the office, but with more of an onsite/remote split and better support for it - Companies that reject remote and return to the office fully - A whole host of companies that go fully remote, or start as a fully remote Given the experience we've all had during COVID, employees will thus be now better able to self-select to work for companies within the above scenarios. Therefore, this position feels pretty transient to me intuitively, although given Gitlab spearheaded its creation maybe my intuition is completely off? Regardless, I personally loathe the expansion of HR in the modern org in terms of their jurisdiction, visibility and power and this position seems to be just another tentacle on the beast. As with everything HR related, it also feels like once it exists it won't not exist.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- spike021 6y agoI'm really hoping for the first. Pre-COVID I was pretty happy with WFH 2 or 3 days a week (sometimes Monday/Friday to bookend the week if possible). But this way I also still get to work with people in person at least a couple days a week. I'm definitely not the type to want to be working by myself at home all week.
- oblio 6y agoI think it's quite likely as a long term trend for a big enough number of companies. Face to face meetings are much higher bandwidth than anything tech can offer us so it will remain a competitive advantage for at least a while. Also most people are sociable and yes, work counts, too. I'd bet on a split something like this 10 years from now: 60-80% split, 10-20% no remote, 10-20% fully remote.
- sokoloff 6y agoI'm inclined to think the first two groups will be split more evenly (with <= 10% WFH being counted in the second group). There are plenty of people who will drift back towards "it's just easier when everyone's in the office..."
- ZguideZ 6y agoI'll pass on that one...yuck.
- hardsoftnfloppy 6y agoha gaaaaaaaay dot youtube dot 10 hours