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i sort of agree wit your sentiment, although probably would use more nuanced language about it. i’ve had this exact conversation with my 70+ still working fath
by dijksterhuis 2y ago
i sort of agree wit your sentiment, although probably would use more nuanced language about it.
i’ve had this exact conversation with my 70+ still working father so many times now. i’ve heard the rant in the article over and over again. and, like, he blames remote work too. “its the fucking zoom bullshit”.
but then i explain to him how i do remote work and suddenly gets it. like, remote working means you are required to work in a more direct and efficient way. you have to work hard at comms. you have to write everything with purpose. no “oh hey did you look at X”. instead “hey we need X done by T because otherwise Y. if you need to speak to P about it, they’re available this afternoon. contact me if anything is unclear and i’ll explain it to you on a call asap. let me know when you’ve read this please.”. like, i’ve debugged a production outage on my phone with other devs while in a doctors waiting room.
the problem is, yeah, a lot of people do treat it like a chance to sit at home doing the bare minimum.
and i think you kind of hit the nail on the head for something i hadn’t clocked. they can get away with it because “management” utterly suck at their jobs and haven’t adapted. like, i hear about people stuck in zoom meetings all the time… WHY?!? you don’t need face to face comms to work remotely. at all. it’s clinging on to the old ways of doing things!
up until now i’d been putting it down to a purely generational “can’t teach old dogs new tricks” thing. maybe it kind of is, just not in a way i’d seen before.
- spondylosaurus 2y agoBingo. Remote work requires/rewards good communication, and amplifies the ill effects of poor communication. You have to put in the effort, but a lot of people don't know how or don't think they need to!
- greesil 2y agoWhat I've noticed is that people don't seem to have the attention span to read the document or memo I wrote, and the meeting is so they can get the TL;DR.
- dijksterhuis 2y agooh god yeah these people do my head in. i haven’t found a good strategy for them yet.
- greesil 2y agoConstantly passive aggressively say "as per my document" in the meeting. I see the upside of companies that have memo culture.
- rcarmo 2y agoThe Amazon Way used to be for you to send out a memo so that people would be productive at a meeting, and cancel the meeting on the spot if more than a third hadn’t read it or read enough of it.
- greesil 2y ago"used to"? What do they do now?
- Swizec 2y agoIf you can tldr your memo or message, maybe you should write a shorter memo or message. People are busy. Nobody got time for waffle. Get to the point or get out of the way.
- greesil 2y agoRead the book The Mythical Man Month, then work at a big company, and then you'll appreciate the challenges of organizing five different teams to accomplish a large and complex task.
- isoprophlex 2y ago> the problem is, yeah, a lot of people do treat it like a chance to sit at home doing the bare minimum The thing is... I've been in offices before COVID that were full of people doing the bare minimum. And they were able to do that because management, generally, has always sucked and was never good at their jobs.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago> i’ve had this exact conversation with my 70+ still working father so many times now. > but then i explain to him how i do remote work and suddenly gets it. I don’t understand how he gets it if you have to have the same conversation numerous times.
- dijksterhuis 2y agohe gets it on that call.... then he gets pissed off about it all over the next few months after he's forgotten our call about it. then he complains about it on the phone to me. then i remind him, then he remembers or i explain it again. repeat.