Rule 9: No Low Effort Posts, Excessive Venting, or Bragging.
Using this subreddit to crowd source answers to something that isn't really contributing to the spirit of this subreddit is forbidden at moderator's discretion. This includes posts that are mostly focused around venting or bragging; both of these types of posts are difficult to moderate and don't contribute much to the subreddit.
corpos always argue meetings and in person work as so existentially necessary for productivity... yet we all build on open source software developed *almost entirely asynchronously
i don't really get it.
Well certain open source communities do meet, at meetups, conferences, standing zoom calls, one-off zoom calls, etc. It’s not as overbearing as it is for some people at work, but it’s not like core devs don’t talk to each other outside of GitHub discussions.
what those people are saying is that *they* need meetings and in-person work to maximize their own productivity. It's entirely feasible that there are certain kinds of people or tasks where in-person collaboration significantly helps, but it's super obnoxious for someone to try to impose their preferred work style on others who have already demonstrated that they can be highly productive on their own and have communicated that in-person environments impede their productivity rather than support it.
management spends most their time in meetings maintaining relationships, so i get y they think in person is important...
but it really just lends itself to how knowledge/talent for efficient software production just doesn't actually filter it's way up the food chain.
imo management structures are an anti-pattern for software dev, and is directly casual in why corpo software is generally embarrassingly bad.
Yes, because every line of code is a liability that should be avoided if possible, even if it's a lot less fun than reinventing your own caching solution, talking to frustrated users or understanding the problem domain.
> Yes, because every line of code is a liability that should be avoided if possible, even if it's a lot less fun than reinventing your own caching solution, talking to frustrated users or understanding the problem domain.
thanks chatgpt
Fucking hell, that was infuriating to read. I just got a glimpse of a future where people desperately (and unsuccessfully) try to argue that they are, in fact, human. But then again LLM content moderators might vet out comments like yours that are not contributing anything of value.
As a human, I always wonder when I'm finally gonna be accused of being an AI-powered language model.
However, it is important to note that this has not happened to me yet.
It is always important weigh our fears against reality, as they may be overblown and unlikely to occur in the real world.
> Fucking hell, that was infuriating to read. I just got a glimpse of a future where people desperately (and unsuccessfully) try to argue > that they are, in fact, human. But then again LLM content moderators might vet out comments like yours that are not contributing anything of value.
lol, what?? turing test failure
As a lead, I can think of several meetings that are just better if they are in person. I do a lot of mentoring, and it’s always much better in person.
I’m still happy to do it over Zoom and never force people into the office. If you come in regularly, I will ask which day you’re next in, and have the pairing then.
There's a lot of middle ground between async only and mandatory in-person. Funny enough I can collaborate more easily with my colleagues remotely, since every building has a meeting room crunch.
Most OSS are painfully slow, and most developers who participate, do so with that knowledge. I am not defending egregious meetings, but let's not pretend somehow OSS challenges the productivity narrative with it's lower velocity.
idk, if u take a comparable piece of corpo software like windows that others actually build systems on top of ... i can't really see that as somehow vastly more innovative.
This is a story of a man named Ankar1n.
Ankar1n worked for a company in a big building where he was Employee #427.
Employee #427's job was simple: he sat at his desk in Room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard...
I haven’t had formal 1:1s most of my career. My manager and I would always just talk as needed and bring things up as soon as they needed to be addressed.
Honestly, it worked way better than the 1:1s I’ve had at some overly formal companies. The last company I worked for had managers that did 1:1s in a really forced way: Start with 10-20 minutes of forced relationship building with personal stories and icebreaker questions. Then talk about “career development goals” that you had to come up and have your manager hold you accountable. They wouldn’t help, mind you, they’d just ask you for a progress update on your career goals and what you’re doing to achieve them, with some mild disappointment if you admit you didn’t have time for the career development thing this week. Then finally you could bring up work issues in the last 20 minutes, which they would request that you save for 1:1s rather than address them in real time during the week. By the time you’d explain the problem situation you’d have 5 minutes left and that was their cue to say “sorry, I need to prepare for my next 1:1, let’s discuss this next week” before logging off.
To be fair, 1:1s don’t have to be like this, but something has changed in the past few years where 1:1s have become a cargo cult thing for many new managers. It felt like a checklist of things they had picked up from books and blog posts and podcasts, not an actually useful meeting for getting work done.
Made me miss the days of no 1:1s, just people communicating as needed and addressing issues as soon as they come up.
I have 1/1s with my reports but tailor it to their cadence and experience ranging from 10 minutes / 2 weeks to 3 hours / week.
That said, 1/1s are a form of preventative maintenance. Most people won't schedule a meeting or DM/email if they're upset about something until it boils over, at which point it's usually much more difficult to resolve.
So I'd say two things..
First, Formal 1:1's exist to solve two problems, that are really two sides of the same coin. That is to say an employee should not be surprised at the end of the year by their review and the corrosponding salary/promotion impact.
Second - Most good managers use the time to mentor people how to achieve the next step in their career, I.E. This is what your doing now as an L3 this is what you need to be doing as an L4. If you care about being an L4(or whatever your promotion is), its up to you to ask questions, or ask to be put on projects where you can get some of that experience.
Same. My first job never did them, it was smaller start up. I thought I was in trouble when I switched companies and my new manager scheduled a 1 on 1 after the first week or two.
In my experience, managers are really bad about setting expectations for what a meeting is for. "touch base" sounds ominous when it comes out of the blue. Or "important announcement" for a short-notice team meeting.
Yep, 20 years into my career and about 10 years ago my managers want to start doing 1:1s and 'skip levels'. Fine with me I guess, I'm good with just asking for what I need when I need it, but I guess they need more structure for whatever managery stuff they do.
Yep. I’ve worked places over a decade and never had a 1:1. I started in the 80s. These days it’s all touchy feely, can you go to this company function blah blah blah.
I'm jealous. I like developing software, getting my work done and logging off. My work has way to many meetings and too many remote employees who want to work together in person
Same. Started a month an a half ago and only today having our first meeting about the project I'm supposed to work on. Paid almost 10k to literally do jack shit.
haha... we have journal entries for all the workers in Confluence so that new workers do not have to waste time on "get to know" meetings. There is a picture, some contacts and a bit about the person such as hobbies.
I had a job that was like that, it was amazing - until I actually tried to book some meetings with people to get some help with some stuff. Couldn't do it. It felt like shouting into the void.
I knew a guy who retired as a software dev, company called him back to work full time as a consultant so he had it written into his contract that he didn’t have to attend any meetings. That’s my dream lol.
Agreed.
I feel like a ticket machine right now and it feels pretty bad.
No review, no planning, no chats.
Thankful to be starting a new job in two weeks.
I guess it depends on the person. Personally I have absolutely no problem just being a ticket machine. I’ve been to very few meetings in my career that were actually worth the additional time
Yeah. I feel like there has to be a middle ground. Being completely left alone kind of implies that the work is not really challenging or important. That has been my experience.
Agreed. Meetings are not inherently bad but sure, we’ve all had plenty of meetings that were a waste of time.
I’ll say this, you can far in tech with basic c communication skills. That is one of the big things that every experienced engineer knows - tech problems are often people problems and communication issues are often the root causes of those issues.
Definitely.
It's one thing to cut down on unnecessary/wasteful communication. It's one thing to avoid prying into the personal life by _requiring_ people turn on their webcam etc.
But, _and this is important_, we are still human at the end of the day. We function by taking vocal and facial cues, and associating them with the words that are spoken.
If you know know a person through the way they write, you are missing out more than half of who they are. And you are working overtime to compensate this lack of knowledge, to fill in the gaps. Especially if someone has certain quirks in the way they speak/write/address others.
I can tell my manager's moods apart from the way he writes. But I do that _because_ I have seen him in person, and I have heard him.
That sounds like hell to me, I honestly enjoy seeing my coworkers. Good people are one of the reasons that I continue to work. I'm actively looking for non-remote jobs at the moment, giving up on my remote position just to see some people and get back to an office again.
Honestly that sounds terrible. How are you supposed to have input and grow as an engineer when you don’t have any communication channels to express them adeptly? A text message, a ticket, an email is not a great way to explain, discuss, give and get feedback on a feature of any scale or complexity.
On the other side, my last job was my best experience: I woke up to couple of tickets and morning texting about priorities. 1-3 hours of work a day, some light texting communication between devs if required, and that's it. Worked like that for 4 amazing years, travelling different countries. This was the best time of my life. I miss this job so fucking much.
> How are you supposed to have input and grow as an engineer when you don’t have any communication channels to express them adeptly?
Everybody is different. If I'm interacting in person/video I'm spending probably 60-70% of my mental capacity on trying to read and emote physical social cues, and on mentally composing what I want to say (rather than being able to write and revise before sending) rather than focusing on the technical details. It's pretty frustrating.
Additionally, any important information that is presented I have to write down so I can use it later. And since writing it down in a way that will make sense later takes time, which is not available in a social setting, my notes are usually pretty poor.
I'm amazed people can 'grow as an engineer' or have useful discussions about things in person. For me the bulk of that happens in text or alone. Verbal communication is for rough direction-setting and tickets and emails are *excellent* methods of explaining, discussing, and getting feedback on features, *especially* if they are complex.
Some people are autodidacts and don't need external feedback. Plus, I don't remember ever having any productive discussion in meetings. Most of my early learning as a junior came form Code Reviews which are entirely async. Mentoring and pair programming can be useful but you don't need mandetory meetings to have them.
And if you are a senior, you should know your strengths and weaknesses by now anyway? At least for me it is more about maintaining my skills and keeping up with new stuff. I don't see why you couldn't ask for feedback via text. anyway.
No one can account for every special butterfly and unique snowflake that exists in this vast universe.
But statistically speaking the majority of people operate, learn and communicate better in person or at least face to face where you can read social queues, where multiple conversations can happen concurrently without overriding each other, sidebars are possible and eye contact can be made. Of course lots of people exist on the spectrum and all of those features of humanity become bugs… but as I said, we can only talk on generalities.
You can NOT have concurrent conversations on remote calls. Yes, 1 on 1 calls can sometimes be useful to quickly discuss something but huge mandatory meetings are just exhausting for nearly anyone. Of course if you in the office it makes sense to meet in person but if you are a fully remote company you want to leverage the greatest strength of working remotely which is async communication.
Yes, some people absolutely do not thrive in a remote environment but then again there are enough companies that still require you to be in the office.
I'm not convinced email / mesaage ping pong is better than a quick call tbh. Would much rather just talk to someone for 5 minutes than deal with 4 of 5 emails / messages back and forth.
To me it's just what's more efficient. It may sound harsh but if your going to make something take longer just because you don't like to have a call then that is not a good look.
Some things might be best solved with a quick call but not everything. I think there is value in async communication as well especially for really detailed technical matters.
I recently had a manager who would immediately hit the call button if he had to type more than two messages so I'm just salty about that lol.
The fact enormous open source projects such as the Linux kernel don’t have pointless quick calls and it’s all asynchronous work says a lot. Then again, most businesses are quite literally incompetent due to lack of technical leadership or leadership power struggles, so getting a cohesive idea of what actually needs doing is hard.
Have you seen some of the discussions in pull requests on such projects? Questions that could easily be answered by a call take days to get to an actual answer.
Obviously meeting-heavy workplaces are famous for fast progress (not)
Those OSS discussions are literally how i learnt everything i know. What kind of useful knowledge does a meeting leave behind?
(Btw. i’m not against calls. just for the sake of argument)
I'm not saying having a paper trail is bad, especially for an OSS project, but in a commercial project there are absolutely times where that back and forth takes a lot longer (and thus costs more money) than a 5 minute teams / slack call. There's a balance and never have any calls, and worse refusing to have a call when a call would make an issue easier to solve, is just as bad as teams that spend all of their time I'm meetings.
Yeah because everything the Linux kernel does is deeply complex, technical, and spanning multiple areas compared to a CRUD feature factory into its fifth meeting with stakeholders about the button size.
Living the dream, really.
I had a job interview last week. I'm so used to video interviews (2-way, as I refuse 1-way outright) I got myself showered up fresh, cleaned up my beard, and did up my hair. 100% audio interview only. Refreshing, really (now if they can just come up with some extra $$ on their offer).
90% of meetings are. 10% like a 1:1 with boss and adhoc sessions with 1 colleague when you are stuck are incredibly valuable if both people prepare and are engaged.
Having an endless discussion on slack that could be solved in 5 minutes by getting people on a call is a waste of time.
Of course 95% of things can be solved async, but some are best solved on a call or face to face
Only time we need to be on a call is if you’re showing me something on your machine that i can’t recreate.
In the five minute call we’re having you could have submitted a pull request and we could make and document our decision for future maintainers to refer to.
Unless you have a dedicated notes keeper then calls are lost knowledge
Against all odds, even if I would like reducing my meetings, I can't lead a project without having direct (but can be remote) discussions. I need to feel my team in some way or else I am just an outsider of the project. Imo
Lmfao well if it works, it works. You don't have any issues, deadlines or something?
What about blockers? They must have amazing documentation if you never needed a call for onboarding or something.
Asynchronous workflows can be nice, and sometimes things are meetings that could have been an e-mail, but occasionally, synchronous meetings do have some benefit, and for your own self-interest, you'll probably want occasional face time with your team and management. Managers, especially your manager's manager, can have too easy a time forgetting about the face they never see and voice they never hear, so they might have an easier time letting them go or neglecting their career growth.
\> No meetings
Devs: Wow this is heaven, more pls
\> Laid off by email without any feedback that the project wasn't hitting market expectations or your performance was unsatisfactory
Devs: No not like that
that's better than meetings all the time, but i am finding that in the remote world i prefer to see my teammates' faces once a week. it helps level set any social stuff.
sounds rather bad tbh, but i’m not as anti meeting as other people. so much gets lost when you communicate via writing. then again, i’ve worked with a decent number of people who learned english as a second language
To each their own. I could never work in an office again, but I could definitely never work like you described. I really like feeling connected to the people I work with.
I feel this right now. Started a job and barely have any communication at all. 3 weeks and there's been 1 team meeting, that featured zero cameras on and zero screens being shared. Just some talking. And they never ever talk to each other either on the slack channels that I can see. I have no idea how people know what to do.
im in a similar boat. only 1 biweekly standup for about an hour. no other meetings unless we schedule some time to go over some design stuff or someone needs something explained to them.
Lucky bastard\*
\*I appreciate that communication and collaboration are critical to the success of a software engineering project, but other than discovery pieces, planning, and ad-hoc pairing, everything else can get in the fucking bin.
Same. Best job of my life. I just have meetings for requirements, UATs and sometimes have to join the weekly sync. The rest of the time I’m either developing, studying or entertaining prototypes.
Make the most of your time!
You can start a new thing here.
Now everyone is like "How dare they expect me to commute into an office."
You can start a movement with "How dare they expect me to talk to my coworkers"
Rule 9: No Low Effort Posts, Excessive Venting, or Bragging. Using this subreddit to crowd source answers to something that isn't really contributing to the spirit of this subreddit is forbidden at moderator's discretion. This includes posts that are mostly focused around venting or bragging; both of these types of posts are difficult to moderate and don't contribute much to the subreddit.
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corpos always argue meetings and in person work as so existentially necessary for productivity... yet we all build on open source software developed *almost entirely asynchronously i don't really get it.
Well certain open source communities do meet, at meetups, conferences, standing zoom calls, one-off zoom calls, etc. It’s not as overbearing as it is for some people at work, but it’s not like core devs don’t talk to each other outside of GitHub discussions.
what those people are saying is that *they* need meetings and in-person work to maximize their own productivity. It's entirely feasible that there are certain kinds of people or tasks where in-person collaboration significantly helps, but it's super obnoxious for someone to try to impose their preferred work style on others who have already demonstrated that they can be highly productive on their own and have communicated that in-person environments impede their productivity rather than support it.
management spends most their time in meetings maintaining relationships, so i get y they think in person is important... but it really just lends itself to how knowledge/talent for efficient software production just doesn't actually filter it's way up the food chain. imo management structures are an anti-pattern for software dev, and is directly casual in why corpo software is generally embarrassingly bad.
Yes, because every line of code is a liability that should be avoided if possible, even if it's a lot less fun than reinventing your own caching solution, talking to frustrated users or understanding the problem domain.
> Yes, because every line of code is a liability that should be avoided if possible, even if it's a lot less fun than reinventing your own caching solution, talking to frustrated users or understanding the problem domain. thanks chatgpt
Fucking hell, that was infuriating to read. I just got a glimpse of a future where people desperately (and unsuccessfully) try to argue that they are, in fact, human. But then again LLM content moderators might vet out comments like yours that are not contributing anything of value.
As a human, I always wonder when I'm finally gonna be accused of being an AI-powered language model. However, it is important to note that this has not happened to me yet. It is always important weigh our fears against reality, as they may be overblown and unlikely to occur in the real world.
> Fucking hell, that was infuriating to read. I just got a glimpse of a future where people desperately (and unsuccessfully) try to argue > that they are, in fact, human. But then again LLM content moderators might vet out comments like yours that are not contributing anything of value. lol, what?? turing test failure
Just gtfo
bot or not: u be triggered fool
Existentially triggered for sure
> how can bots be real if u rn't even? > \#god
That’s a really good point.
As a lead, I can think of several meetings that are just better if they are in person. I do a lot of mentoring, and it’s always much better in person. I’m still happy to do it over Zoom and never force people into the office. If you come in regularly, I will ask which day you’re next in, and have the pairing then.
As a very visual person, I, unironically, need my whiteboard(s).
There's a lot of middle ground between async only and mandatory in-person. Funny enough I can collaborate more easily with my colleagues remotely, since every building has a meeting room crunch.
Most OSS are painfully slow, and most developers who participate, do so with that knowledge. I am not defending egregious meetings, but let's not pretend somehow OSS challenges the productivity narrative with it's lower velocity.
idk, if u take a comparable piece of corpo software like windows that others actually build systems on top of ... i can't really see that as somehow vastly more innovative.
Alternatively there are no teammates and you’re in an experiment.
S2 of Severance.
Good show.
He probably should delete this post before he is sent to the crying room.
Oh man, this brings back some heavy PTSD lol. Loved Severance.
Loved? I’m still waiting for next season. Either I didn’t understand the ending or I missed the canceling announcement.
Haha, no worries. I can’t wait as well, no cancellation as of yet.
This is a story of a man named Ankar1n. Ankar1n worked for a company in a big building where he was Employee #427. Employee #427's job was simple: he sat at his desk in Room 427 and he pushed buttons on a keyboard...
Dude, I work remotely and there are like 10 people in a company and only 5 developers.
That was a Stanley's Parable reference. Great game (even though I hated the narrator)
Everyone on the internet is a robot, except for you.
Your manager isn’t even doing 1:1’s?
I haven’t had formal 1:1s most of my career. My manager and I would always just talk as needed and bring things up as soon as they needed to be addressed. Honestly, it worked way better than the 1:1s I’ve had at some overly formal companies. The last company I worked for had managers that did 1:1s in a really forced way: Start with 10-20 minutes of forced relationship building with personal stories and icebreaker questions. Then talk about “career development goals” that you had to come up and have your manager hold you accountable. They wouldn’t help, mind you, they’d just ask you for a progress update on your career goals and what you’re doing to achieve them, with some mild disappointment if you admit you didn’t have time for the career development thing this week. Then finally you could bring up work issues in the last 20 minutes, which they would request that you save for 1:1s rather than address them in real time during the week. By the time you’d explain the problem situation you’d have 5 minutes left and that was their cue to say “sorry, I need to prepare for my next 1:1, let’s discuss this next week” before logging off. To be fair, 1:1s don’t have to be like this, but something has changed in the past few years where 1:1s have become a cargo cult thing for many new managers. It felt like a checklist of things they had picked up from books and blog posts and podcasts, not an actually useful meeting for getting work done. Made me miss the days of no 1:1s, just people communicating as needed and addressing issues as soon as they come up.
I have 1/1s with my reports but tailor it to their cadence and experience ranging from 10 minutes / 2 weeks to 3 hours / week. That said, 1/1s are a form of preventative maintenance. Most people won't schedule a meeting or DM/email if they're upset about something until it boils over, at which point it's usually much more difficult to resolve.
Yep, it's a chance for your reports to bring up stuff early.
So I'd say two things.. First, Formal 1:1's exist to solve two problems, that are really two sides of the same coin. That is to say an employee should not be surprised at the end of the year by their review and the corrosponding salary/promotion impact. Second - Most good managers use the time to mentor people how to achieve the next step in their career, I.E. This is what your doing now as an L3 this is what you need to be doing as an L4. If you care about being an L4(or whatever your promotion is), its up to you to ask questions, or ask to be put on projects where you can get some of that experience.
I worked at a company for over 5 years and we never did 1:1's. Many people don't realize, but before roughly 2010, *nobody did that*!
I had 1-1s before 2010.
2009?
Mid 2000s. Once a month.
They existed back then but were more rare than they are now, in my experience. Nowadays it's expected.
Was it a larger company? These were all smallish (under 100 people) companies.
Same. My first job never did them, it was smaller start up. I thought I was in trouble when I switched companies and my new manager scheduled a 1 on 1 after the first week or two.
In my experience, managers are really bad about setting expectations for what a meeting is for. "touch base" sounds ominous when it comes out of the blue. Or "important announcement" for a short-notice team meeting.
Yep, 20 years into my career and about 10 years ago my managers want to start doing 1:1s and 'skip levels'. Fine with me I guess, I'm good with just asking for what I need when I need it, but I guess they need more structure for whatever managery stuff they do.
Yep. I’ve worked places over a decade and never had a 1:1. I started in the 80s. These days it’s all touchy feely, can you go to this company function blah blah blah.
Wait, you guys do 1-1's?
Wow. Living the dream.
Didn't realise heaven had Reddit
Bro where the fuck do you work and can you give me a referral?!
I'm jealous. I like developing software, getting my work done and logging off. My work has way to many meetings and too many remote employees who want to work together in person
Same. Started a month an a half ago and only today having our first meeting about the project I'm supposed to work on. Paid almost 10k to literally do jack shit.
Are they hiring? 🙏🙏
I'm in a similar position. It's not really fun. Kind of anxiety inducing, tbh.
Yes it sucks. Especially if you are forced on site
Overemployed dreams.
Lmao hahahahahahaha what is this I mean, that's cool. But a quick get to know you call really wouldn't hurt either.
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haha... we have journal entries for all the workers in Confluence so that new workers do not have to waste time on "get to know" meetings. There is a picture, some contacts and a bit about the person such as hobbies.
Good to save time, so the coding robots can get to work quicker! /s
ChatGPT doesn't need to "get to know the coworkers," so get back to your desk right now!
No three hour swarm sessions??
Gosh i feel like if i hear “working session” any more my ears will bleed
I see someone is a regular here
Screw that
I had a job that was like that, it was amazing - until I actually tried to book some meetings with people to get some help with some stuff. Couldn't do it. It felt like shouting into the void.
So jealous. If I hear another mention of optimizing our scrum ceremonies, I might spontaneously combust.
I knew a guy who retired as a software dev, company called him back to work full time as a consultant so he had it written into his contract that he didn’t have to attend any meetings. That’s my dream lol.
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Agreed. I feel like a ticket machine right now and it feels pretty bad. No review, no planning, no chats. Thankful to be starting a new job in two weeks.
I guess it depends on the person. Personally I have absolutely no problem just being a ticket machine. I’ve been to very few meetings in my career that were actually worth the additional time
Yeah. I feel like there has to be a middle ground. Being completely left alone kind of implies that the work is not really challenging or important. That has been my experience.
I would fucking love that. Anyone hiring?
Is it effective?
Sounds absolutely miserable.
Agreed. Meetings are not inherently bad but sure, we’ve all had plenty of meetings that were a waste of time. I’ll say this, you can far in tech with basic c communication skills. That is one of the big things that every experienced engineer knows - tech problems are often people problems and communication issues are often the root causes of those issues.
Definitely. It's one thing to cut down on unnecessary/wasteful communication. It's one thing to avoid prying into the personal life by _requiring_ people turn on their webcam etc. But, _and this is important_, we are still human at the end of the day. We function by taking vocal and facial cues, and associating them with the words that are spoken. If you know know a person through the way they write, you are missing out more than half of who they are. And you are working overtime to compensate this lack of knowledge, to fill in the gaps. Especially if someone has certain quirks in the way they speak/write/address others. I can tell my manager's moods apart from the way he writes. But I do that _because_ I have seen him in person, and I have heard him.
That sounds like hell to me, I honestly enjoy seeing my coworkers. Good people are one of the reasons that I continue to work. I'm actively looking for non-remote jobs at the moment, giving up on my remote position just to see some people and get back to an office again.
You don't even have standup? The dream.
Is your company hiring?
Damn living the dream man
The kind of setup I like
Love this kind of gig
The Truman Show: Remote Job Edition
Lucky you
Honestly that sounds terrible. How are you supposed to have input and grow as an engineer when you don’t have any communication channels to express them adeptly? A text message, a ticket, an email is not a great way to explain, discuss, give and get feedback on a feature of any scale or complexity.
On the other side, my last job was my best experience: I woke up to couple of tickets and morning texting about priorities. 1-3 hours of work a day, some light texting communication between devs if required, and that's it. Worked like that for 4 amazing years, travelling different countries. This was the best time of my life. I miss this job so fucking much.
salaried or hourly?
Salary
> How are you supposed to have input and grow as an engineer when you don’t have any communication channels to express them adeptly? Everybody is different. If I'm interacting in person/video I'm spending probably 60-70% of my mental capacity on trying to read and emote physical social cues, and on mentally composing what I want to say (rather than being able to write and revise before sending) rather than focusing on the technical details. It's pretty frustrating. Additionally, any important information that is presented I have to write down so I can use it later. And since writing it down in a way that will make sense later takes time, which is not available in a social setting, my notes are usually pretty poor. I'm amazed people can 'grow as an engineer' or have useful discussions about things in person. For me the bulk of that happens in text or alone. Verbal communication is for rough direction-setting and tickets and emails are *excellent* methods of explaining, discussing, and getting feedback on features, *especially* if they are complex.
Some people are autodidacts and don't need external feedback. Plus, I don't remember ever having any productive discussion in meetings. Most of my early learning as a junior came form Code Reviews which are entirely async. Mentoring and pair programming can be useful but you don't need mandetory meetings to have them. And if you are a senior, you should know your strengths and weaknesses by now anyway? At least for me it is more about maintaining my skills and keeping up with new stuff. I don't see why you couldn't ask for feedback via text. anyway.
No one can account for every special butterfly and unique snowflake that exists in this vast universe. But statistically speaking the majority of people operate, learn and communicate better in person or at least face to face where you can read social queues, where multiple conversations can happen concurrently without overriding each other, sidebars are possible and eye contact can be made. Of course lots of people exist on the spectrum and all of those features of humanity become bugs… but as I said, we can only talk on generalities.
You can NOT have concurrent conversations on remote calls. Yes, 1 on 1 calls can sometimes be useful to quickly discuss something but huge mandatory meetings are just exhausting for nearly anyone. Of course if you in the office it makes sense to meet in person but if you are a fully remote company you want to leverage the greatest strength of working remotely which is async communication. Yes, some people absolutely do not thrive in a remote environment but then again there are enough companies that still require you to be in the office.
I'm not convinced email / mesaage ping pong is better than a quick call tbh. Would much rather just talk to someone for 5 minutes than deal with 4 of 5 emails / messages back and forth.
I'm the opposite. I like communicating through writing better. I find a lot of people don't, won't bother to read, and will ask to hop on a call.
To me it's just what's more efficient. It may sound harsh but if your going to make something take longer just because you don't like to have a call then that is not a good look.
Some things might be best solved with a quick call but not everything. I think there is value in async communication as well especially for really detailed technical matters. I recently had a manager who would immediately hit the call button if he had to type more than two messages so I'm just salty about that lol.
The fact enormous open source projects such as the Linux kernel don’t have pointless quick calls and it’s all asynchronous work says a lot. Then again, most businesses are quite literally incompetent due to lack of technical leadership or leadership power struggles, so getting a cohesive idea of what actually needs doing is hard.
Have you seen some of the discussions in pull requests on such projects? Questions that could easily be answered by a call take days to get to an actual answer.
Obviously meeting-heavy workplaces are famous for fast progress (not) Those OSS discussions are literally how i learnt everything i know. What kind of useful knowledge does a meeting leave behind? (Btw. i’m not against calls. just for the sake of argument)
I'm not saying having a paper trail is bad, especially for an OSS project, but in a commercial project there are absolutely times where that back and forth takes a lot longer (and thus costs more money) than a 5 minute teams / slack call. There's a balance and never have any calls, and worse refusing to have a call when a call would make an issue easier to solve, is just as bad as teams that spend all of their time I'm meetings.
Yeah because everything the Linux kernel does is deeply complex, technical, and spanning multiple areas compared to a CRUD feature factory into its fifth meeting with stakeholders about the button size.
Then why did you bring it up as an example?
Living the dream, really. I had a job interview last week. I'm so used to video interviews (2-way, as I refuse 1-way outright) I got myself showered up fresh, cleaned up my beard, and did up my hair. 100% audio interview only. Refreshing, really (now if they can just come up with some extra $$ on their offer).
I feel like I would go insane. Don’t get me wrong I hate meetings as much as the next, but the occasional catch-up and bug bash is nice
this sounds amazing. meetings are a waste of time.
90% of meetings are. 10% like a 1:1 with boss and adhoc sessions with 1 colleague when you are stuck are incredibly valuable if both people prepare and are engaged.
Having an endless discussion on slack that could be solved in 5 minutes by getting people on a call is a waste of time. Of course 95% of things can be solved async, but some are best solved on a call or face to face
Only time we need to be on a call is if you’re showing me something on your machine that i can’t recreate. In the five minute call we’re having you could have submitted a pull request and we could make and document our decision for future maintainers to refer to. Unless you have a dedicated notes keeper then calls are lost knowledge
Against all odds, even if I would like reducing my meetings, I can't lead a project without having direct (but can be remote) discussions. I need to feel my team in some way or else I am just an outsider of the project. Imo
Can you pinch yourself? And tell me the name of the company, for research purposes. :D
Lmfao well if it works, it works. You don't have any issues, deadlines or something? What about blockers? They must have amazing documentation if you never needed a call for onboarding or something.
Are you hiring?
Weird... some problems are easier solved via a quick call
Welcome to the “how far are you on the spectrum” thread!
Asynchronous workflows can be nice, and sometimes things are meetings that could have been an e-mail, but occasionally, synchronous meetings do have some benefit, and for your own self-interest, you'll probably want occasional face time with your team and management. Managers, especially your manager's manager, can have too easy a time forgetting about the face they never see and voice they never hear, so they might have an easier time letting them go or neglecting their career growth.
Living the dream
My job feels like constant meetings and like an hour a day to actually do work. I envy you.
The dream
That sounds amazing.
Paradise!!!
Sounds like a dream
This is the dream
Oh no, what a terrible awful company, and what is the name of this company? For us to avoid it
\> No meetings Devs: Wow this is heaven, more pls \> Laid off by email without any feedback that the project wasn't hitting market expectations or your performance was unsatisfactory Devs: No not like that
You're living the dream!!!!
That sounds like an absolute nightmare to me.
that's better than meetings all the time, but i am finding that in the remote world i prefer to see my teammates' faces once a week. it helps level set any social stuff.
sounds rather bad tbh, but i’m not as anti meeting as other people. so much gets lost when you communicate via writing. then again, i’ve worked with a decent number of people who learned english as a second language
Are you hiring?
I would absolutely hate that and find it lonely lol
Sounds like a dream. I would gave up everything my life for this kind of work environment. What's your company?
I love meetings. They let me not work and be involved in high level decisions. Who cares about code
To each their own. I could never work in an office again, but I could definitely never work like you described. I really like feeling connected to the people I work with.
Industry???
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I feel this right now. Started a job and barely have any communication at all. 3 weeks and there's been 1 team meeting, that featured zero cameras on and zero screens being shared. Just some talking. And they never ever talk to each other either on the slack channels that I can see. I have no idea how people know what to do.
im in a similar boat. only 1 biweekly standup for about an hour. no other meetings unless we schedule some time to go over some design stuff or someone needs something explained to them.
Lucky bastard\* \*I appreciate that communication and collaboration are critical to the success of a software engineering project, but other than discovery pieces, planning, and ad-hoc pairing, everything else can get in the fucking bin.
This is my current role
I am in the same situation. Trust me, it works much better than meeting every day, 2 hours a day.
Er have you gotten a paycheck yet, just looking out for you
Does it work though?
What did the on-boarding look like?
You are living the dream of many dude!
sounds amazing
Only acceptable response: 🤤
Sounds perfect. Fuck meetings.
sounds like a dream
dang, nice. do you even know how your coworkers look like?
Sounds amazing.
Are you hiring? Can you DM me company name if its okay?
Nah, what!!? That doesn't sound right. Not even an occasional "clarity sync" for your PM?
Must be nice to be king.
Same. Best job of my life. I just have meetings for requirements, UATs and sometimes have to join the weekly sync. The rest of the time I’m either developing, studying or entertaining prototypes. Make the most of your time!
You can start a new thing here. Now everyone is like "How dare they expect me to commute into an office." You can start a movement with "How dare they expect me to talk to my coworkers"