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Disclaimer: Head of Engineering, been working in startups only. > In a startup, if you tell an engineer to do something and it turns out it's impossible I see

• notabee 3y ago
  > Additionally, I stipulate that looking for inscrutable clues in people's faces can instead be replaced with building a culture where you reward people for speaking (or writing down) their mind and all contributing towards the common goal, and there is a healthy amount of discussion (preferably written). As a technical manager, your role is to provide a clear goal to your teammates, and work with them to a good solution, not analyze their body language and making decisions based on that... To add to that, a lot of engineering types are also very neurodivergent and just do not communicate on that level the same way as other people, leading to copious misunderstandings and miscommunications when it's not a "say what you mean, and mean what you say" sort of environment. That probably makes a certain other type of person uncomfortable, when their main skill is social hacking and not necessarily efficient management, planning, or collaboration.
• skirmish 3y ago
  > What is great about remote is that it kind of forces you to write down your ideas in some format It really doesn't for some people. I have coworkers who will never communicate through text; after the first 1-2 messages they always say "let's just have a quick conference call", and then it ends up endless as they talk. I personally mostly avoid them as much as I can.
  • ath3nd 3y ago
    Now imagine these people being in the office, next to you, tapping you on the shoulder why you are deeply in focus, and then asking: "hey, how was your weekend?". You spent 2 hours in traffic for this. My point is, there are different types of people, and some are more competent, some less. Organizing our work life, cities, traffic and everything around Joe the react dev, so he can have a structured way of working (like kindergarten, same time, same day, nice routine) where his manager can see in his body language that Joe is a tool, that's insane to me. All the power to people who'd like to spend the workday with Joe the react dev physically, but I prefer having my distance from people like this, which remote is great for.
• valval 3y ago
  It’s funny how arrogant you are about all of these very basic human traits being relics of the distant savage past, as if you were levitating above everyone else.
  • ath3nd 3y ago
    I find it funny how people think that the natural state of humans is to be crammed in offices, or factories or mines in pursuit of wage labor, with manager overseers, and how this is now considered to be "for communication and collaboration", while this is a relatively recent invention. Before the "closure of the commons" in England, wage labor world-wide was virtually non existent. It took a series of very harsh and restrictive laws and concerted effort of capital and lords over many generations to force the peasants and independent craftspeople, to leave their fields and workshops and join wage labor in the mines, and later, the factories. Offices were really invented much later, but are an artifact of that same type of thinking, and so are managers, a new type of "work" all about managing how others do the work. With that said, all through and through and up to today, body language has been an important thing of how people perceive information and how they communicate. That's not something I dispute. I dispute that we need to be at a place for 8-10 hours a day so we can read each other's (and our leader's) facial expressions, in order to do good work. If people can't have the time or ability to clearly express their views in a written format, and instead I have to stare at their faces to guess what they mean, I don't want to be working with those people. Programming is deep and creative work. You need to sit and think deeply, in that way it's NOT comparable to factory work (which is the field where most "modern" managerial techniques come from). You don't do the exact same thing all over, repetitively, without a thought, despite how Agile, Scrum, or any kind of managerial trash is trying to convince you. The manager of today's office very often is nothing but a glorified taskmaster: - daily checking if you are on time with this and that - giving you this or that small piece of work that later needs to be pieced together to make a finished product The same way, in factories, craft was lost because people were doing only a their small part before finishing the product, many modern office environments push for and think of programming as "factory work", thereby destroying the craft, producing cheap items, that were often lacking in quality. I like to think and do programming work as the result of the craft of many independent professional craftsmen, who will organize in groups when needed, and work deeply independently or in self-organized groups, rather than a factory floor with a taskmaster looking for clues into other people's faces whether their daily quota is finished or not. So let the craftspeople organize however they want, they can read each other's faces and debate the merits of this and that on Zoom, and they can find a fit for their product and go to meet in person if they desire to do so. You don't need a manager for that or to force people to go to a specific location so you can observe them.