I switched to fully remote work 2.5 years ago, and my tips are somewhat similar. All of these things have positively contributed to both my own well-being and job satisfaction, and they've been positively mentioned to me by higher ups in reviews and such. I didn't start these things with that intention but it has been a welcome side benefit - I started to do all this because working remotely left me feeling isolated and lonely. Now, things are pretty good and I can't really imagine going back to work in an office!
- Use Slack for water cooler talk, but not just "on brand" links like articles about software. Make or join a #videogames, #movies, #music, and/or #photography channel and talk with people outside your team. If it makes sense, some of these hobby channels can have little activities or contests. Our photography channel runs an inconsistently updated photography "contest", but mostly we just share our favorite shots and talk about gear we can't afford.
- Have a team happy hour about once every other week, during company time. We do ours on a Friday, just after 1pm for me (central time). It's late enough that many people are ready to relax a bit before the weekend but early enough to let the people on the west coast join. Just grab a drink (hard or soft) and talk about stuff!
- Do activities after hours with coworkers, if they're open to it. I run a bi-weekly movie night (on weeks we don't have the happy hour) and invite everyone on the team to come. Frankly, it's usually only a couple regulars, but those that come seem to enjoy it and it's really improved team camaraderie. On some nights we switch it for a game night. Among Us is a newer game that is absolutely perfect for this.
We actually allow team talk time every day. The IT meeting is supposed to be about discussing what we've done and what we'll do, sorta scrum-style, but management knows and allows it to run as long as we like while we socialize. This was even the case before we went fully remote for Covid. I believe the CSRs do the same, but I haven't been to their meetings.
They tried a scheduled after-hours happy our with the whole company, but people showed up for a few weeks and then it died off.
We have Discord and have a few channels including #general and #random. We haven't found the need to get more specific since there's only a few of us. It might be nice to have those specific ones shared with the entire company instead of just the team, though. I think I'll suggest that.
The photography one in particular caught my attention because a few people on the team wanted to do a flat-lay photo contest with a prize, but CS just wasn't into it. We're still considering doing it unofficially.
We just watch the same movie at home, and sit in discord for light discussion/jokes. I just count down to press play so we're all somewhat synced up. It's close enough.
Hmm sounds like a good idea for a social app that syncs the movie watching experience. If someone wants to make a toilet pause or rewatch a scene it's hard to sync again.
SyncPlay + MPV is a nice open source way to go about it, sharing time control and synchronizing playback.
With youtube-dl installed, you can also stream YouTube together as well (Google Hangouts used to be about to do this before they purged all the integration features), not just local media files. But playing from local media files though helps save a lot of bandwidth when watching with friends with limited connectivity, or in prioritizing voice/video call quality.
There's also browser extensions such as Netflix party, or mobile apps such as Rave, but the first is still buggy, and the later is a bit sketchy.
Plex also has a watch together feature, so everyone can just stream from your own media server, no exchanging files beforehand, but only supports mobile platforms so far, looks like browser or PC support is still in the works.
Discord has been the best internet voice app I've found for movie watching, as the voice activated mics and background noise suppression improves the watching experience for everyone else considerably.
Thanks for the overview of available products! It's great to hear that others saw this as a potential market as well. Google wasn't the first search website, MS office not the first word processor, Apple didn't invent the mouse. The market still seems ripe for someone to make a "proper" social media watching product, and I think there is no better moment for it than the current corona times.
My partner and I did "3, 2, 1, play" with Netflix at the start of lockdown (we don't live together). I'm surprised the big streaming companies don't do a 9pm movie equivalent to normal TV.
There's something fun about putting on the TV and knowing that friends could be watching and you could tell them to put it on or talk about it the next day. There's plenty of films I wouldn't choose to watch but would keep it on if its there.
I looked for an app like this and a few exist, but all of them fall short of meeting our needs in quality, universality, and ubiquity:
- Quality was lacking on many of them. They looked and felt like a side project from some bored dev in lockdown, probably because they were! But I wanted something polished.
- Universality wasn't there, meaning that it would work with all the big streaming services. All the ones I found were specific to a single service, provided by that service, or only worked with a handful. We watch movies from all over so it needs to support all of them.
- Ubiquity is the big one. What I mean by that is that you can use the sync service on every device. Lots of the streaming services have their own half-assed group watch feature now, but most only work on their website and not in the Apple TV or Roku or WebOS or whatever else app. We all watch our movie differently, so it really needs to be cross platform.
I'd like to see an app or web extension that basically screenshares someone's desktop, and comes with chat functionality. High quality screenshare with chat, not sure how legal this is but this would be ideal for movies or live sports (especially in these dire times).
I'm on the spectrum and have no interest/ability for social posturing.
I absolutely destroyed the triplebyte front end technical test and was FastTrack-ed. Then I received zero interest, twice, despite trying to express my interest to companies. Both pre/post covid.
Right now I'm feeling extremely discouraged and frankly exhausted. Just had a phone interview for a local (Vancouver) startup. The outsourced HR person (blankslate partners) didn't even call me as scheduled, nor provide me with a number, nor respond to my email, until trying to gas light me hours later saying there must be a problem with the phone lines.
I applied for a Vue contract, to be bait and switched to a platform (toptal) only to be faced with a ridiculous algorithms test. For the front end, which is even more bizarre. No wonder they can't find Vue devs.
Everyone else just doesn't even get back to me. So I'm stuck taking whatever insane contracts come along. Right now I have one where they want a visual programming environment plus basically a WYSIWYG survey creator in a week, with no specs, no design and no API. Turns out there's no back end and it just needs to dupe investors I guess. Don't worry though, there's some terrible, uncommented existing code that is far worse than starting from scratch.
I'm technically very adept, I learn very quickly and I'm always pleasant and polite. Every contract I have ever taken on has been a smashing success. I have great reviews from people I have worked with.
I rarely complain but I'm just really having a hard moment. Just the act of writing a cover letter is emotionally and mentally exhausting. The mental gymnastics I have to perform to try and figure out what people are actually expecting and how my words will be misinterpreted are truly exhausting.
I just love programming. It's given me a purpose and I have a knack for it. I hoped it would help me find a role in society, but right now I'm not sure. Everyone talks a big game about diversity but I've yet to see it in action. I've had very experienced people look at my resume, and said it was good.
Of course I'm going to keep trying. I just needed to let that out.
In case it helps, IME many of the smaller shops are looking for folks like yourself offering no nonsense business relationships predicated on skill and professionalism vs "can you sort a list".
I know I am - I've bookmarked your website. I run a small R&D shop specializing in one-of-a-kind projects that typically have very non-standard toolchains. We are good at what we do, but we are not good at frontend work and often need a frontend dev to help us internally market a successful project -- e.g. we can build the best system ever, but if no one can see or feel it, it's always an uphill conversation to explain the value add to someone in the client organization.
Yep, should go for a smaller company, typical SV startup, they will appreciate somebody who can program and not mind the like of social skills. The issue might be location though, you either live in a tech hub or you don't, most people don't.
I'm not sure why your reaction to this advice is that it's posturing.
In any work environment, whether in person or remote, you're going to benefit from building relationships with the people you work with. This happens more naturally in person because conversations start 'automatically' e.g. around the watercooler, and the content that fills those conversations is the exchange of information and opinions that builds relationships.
The challenge with remote is that there is no automatic way for those conversations to start. Instead you have to consciously plan them, but the content of the conversation should be as natural as it would be otherwise.
There is some cynicism in that you'll benefit from actively building a relationship with the seniors and maybe you put more work in to that than would come naturally but that is again exactly as true in person as remotely.
They probably called it "posturing" because it is entirely synthetic. No one really cares about the game last night or whatever other nonsense there is. It is all just hollow talk to fill what might be considered "awkward silence" by some.
I'm willing to bet some high percentage of "watercooler" friends wouldn't go out of their way to help you if you were stranded on the side of the road in a rough part of town.
I prefer a small network built on something more substantial than what is premiering on Netflix.
It's hard to develop relationships when your default attitude is "idgaf about topics that interest you" and justify it as "no one cares about that" when it's not true.
Your example of a real friend also is basically "a true friend should be your personal cabbie if you're in a poor neighborhood" doesn't really show much perspective beyond your own needs and prejudices.
Being condescending about other people's interests doesn't make one a better human. It's okay to not be interested in what's premiering on Netflix, but maybe a "let and let live" approach to people being interested in things you don't care about would yield better outcomes.
Put a different way: You're essentially self-alienating yourself from a lot of people. Relationships are more readily formed and maintained when you don't knock people for their harmless interests. I don't care much about sports but I understand other people do and there's nothing wrong with that, and sometimes you find that socializing over a game can actually be enjoyable if you're not negatively predisposed.
The toxicity of MBAs have taken over after 2000 crash and 2008 financial crisis. You either have to hurdle HR or an out-of-touch manager in order to gain any entrance. There are exceptions of course still, but it's nothing like pre-2000. Companies are not invested in their people or processes anymore, use and discard is the order of the day. They've been getting away with it so long, you see what kind of leadership that generated right at the top, what consequences and long-term damage that resulted.
On the positive side, it's when we hit rock bottom, we can bounce back, unless they aim for dead cat bounce. There are people working to bring the good work-environments back. Diversity is just a by-product of that fight. Just stop supporting leadership that conquers and divide. Stop doing things just because someone tells you to.
I understand what you're talking about. The interview stage might be upsetting for quite a while but it's over when you find a right company.
Just a reminder that you could create you own company (consulting or product) to exclude hiring interviews and cover letters from your life completely.
Can't we assess this article on it's own merits instead? It's offering advice that is completely independent from past scandals on the platform it's hosted on.
From the article, I thought this advice hit home the most:
"The problem is that lack of engagement in meetings is often interpreted as apathy or a general lack of engagement in your work, even in cases where that's the furthest thing from the truth."
Remote workers need to be more persistent in getting involved and speaking up where they can, otherwise they can easily recede into the background where colleagues are left wondering if they are participating as much as others - even when they are working just as hard, or even harder.
> "…The problem is that lack of engagement in meetings is often interpreted as apathy or a general lack of engagement in your work…"
> Remote workers need to be more persistent in getting involved and speaking up where they can, otherwise they can easily recede into the background where colleagues are left wondering if they are participating as much as others
Or one can try to stay away from working at companies where "engagement" in meetings or work is conflated with actual results that one is responsible for delivering? Probably goes against the some of the ethos of the need to drink the local flavor of the koolaid and sing the $COMPANY hymns with ones colleges…
I don't trust Triplebyte. I don't think it's in the best interest of developers to deal with an intermediary. What you posted is only one example of what can go wrong.
Having a decentralized job market for developers is the way to go.
I haven't forgiven them for making me sign up to discover that "remote" means "remote, US-only", then making deleting my account a pain in the ass (you need a password for that - if you sign up using social SSO, you don't have one.)
Startup School ran a "skill test" once, for founders, in association with triplebyte. In exchange for something very trivial ("YC interview") you now give them the license to judge your "skills" for a lifetime. Even if not that, it seemed like a very inappropriate, unnecessary, dishonest bait. Yeah, no thank you very much.
How is that relevant to this blog post? Do you think we should stop reading any posts hosted by triplebyte for a mistake they made months ago and didn't even roll out?
They handled the fallout very well. Completely rolled it back and gave a heartfelt apology that actually just said sorry. I think we should forgive them, as long as the good behavior continues.
More like: "Getting noticed if being doxed and then shuffled into a mediocre job are your thing"
The article is clearly marketing. Advice #1 is effectively just saying "don't suck". Obviously you should be producing good, useful, readable, and maintained code. That's not the path to getting noticed, but more like a prerequisite for not getting fired.
Which the author apparently did not follow. Why does this need 3rd party JavaScript just to display the background behind the source code example? With uBlock Origin, it's white text on white background...
And in line with my impression of that article, here's the "amazing" jobs that wait for you when you succeed with TripleByte's advice:
https://triplebyte.com/jobs
It's all about becoming a tiny cog in a big machine.
I’ve interviewed with both Facebook and Coinbase via Triplebyte. Guess what? Both forced me through a complete gauntlet of interviews and disregarded Triplebyte’s report entirely. So what is the point of Triplebyte in all of this?
I think the point is getting an interview at companies that would otherwise completely ignore you if you applied through the normal process. Probably most valuable for people who do well on the tests but don't have a particularly impressive looking resume/CV.
I went through Triplebyte personally a few years back - twice. I was able to pass their evaluation/interview without any prep and got in to the matching phase.
The first time: I got matched with one company which ended up hiring someone before I could interview and another company that declined to go further after a phone screen.
The second time: I wasn't matched with anything.
The only reason I ended up trying to go through them was because I had a virtually nonexistent response rate through the normal application process while looking for my first job and I thought it would help me get through the initial resume filtering stage which is where I assume I get dropped all the time.
We (Remind) hire a lot through Triplebyte. We replace our technical phone screen with Triplebyte's report, but we still do our full onsite. Our onsite is very focused on collaboration and communication rather than just coding ability and we don't get those signals from Triplebyte.
I have found that when you feel the need to use an inline comment for a TODO or to explain why a line of code seems out of place but isn’t, adding your name to it helps people figure out what’s up.
In particular, old TODOs can be quite cryptic. If the code has morphed enough, and your coworkers have poor VCS discipline, tracking the author down can be challenging.
> Did you recently read an interesting article about how ML could solve the pandemic?
> Share This Stuff On Slack
Shows a picture of him messaging himself on Slack (you can tell by the "Jot something down" placeholder text)
Edit: all the examples are that way, it seems.
Overall some decent advice, though I don't necessarily agree with all of the points. Such as sharing news articles aka reposting HN in random channels throughout the company Slack.
Or coffee breaks outside of office/work hours, how about just virtual happy hours _during_ work hours or something. Or grab a coffee in the morning during work, you know - when most people usually consume caffeinated beverages
Also, doesn't this guy just work at Triplebyte blogging/interviewing people? His Linkedin says he's a technical interviewer at Triplebyte. When was the last time he remote engineered anywhere?
Do not use Slack/Teams as your water cooler. Don't add the clutter...please. Look how popular Yammer isn't. That is water cooler talk for Slack and Teams.
Yeah... no! None of the people evaluating my work ever open git. So it’s all gossip. Don’t be naive thinking that coleagues will praise you or that any manager knows how to look at code in git. If you write code that is that good you will be considered a threat by your coleagues and by the manager.
- Use Slack for water cooler talk, but not just "on brand" links like articles about software. Make or join a #videogames, #movies, #music, and/or #photography channel and talk with people outside your team. If it makes sense, some of these hobby channels can have little activities or contests. Our photography channel runs an inconsistently updated photography "contest", but mostly we just share our favorite shots and talk about gear we can't afford.
- Have a team happy hour about once every other week, during company time. We do ours on a Friday, just after 1pm for me (central time). It's late enough that many people are ready to relax a bit before the weekend but early enough to let the people on the west coast join. Just grab a drink (hard or soft) and talk about stuff!
- Do activities after hours with coworkers, if they're open to it. I run a bi-weekly movie night (on weeks we don't have the happy hour) and invite everyone on the team to come. Frankly, it's usually only a couple regulars, but those that come seem to enjoy it and it's really improved team camaraderie. On some nights we switch it for a game night. Among Us is a newer game that is absolutely perfect for this.