Tough Call: Handling “Difficult” Remote Conversations Like a Pro [video] | Hacker News Reader

Tough Call: Handling “Difficult” Remote Conversations Like a Pro [video]

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48 pointsdeepersprout24 comments

I was laid off a few months ago over Zoom. The thing that irked me about it was I got an invite to it with a dishonest description the night before. Since this was a director I didn't ordinarily communicate with, I wanted to make sure I knew what I was talking about so I did a few hours of research on the fake subject that night.

Same. One manager of mine gave me a special project to work on which turned out to be busy work while they waited for HR to complete the lay-off paperwork. The meeting to share my results was remote, and had him and an HR person it it. Fuck that guy.

I wonder how many "performance improvement plan", salary reduction, or layoff discussions are happening over chat, email, and video this week. I imagine this week's unemployment numbers will eclipse last week's record setting number.

I've had to lay people off in the past, but face-to-face. Which is, at best, a terrible experience for both parties. Can't imagine having to do it remotely.

https://mobile.twitter.com/mjnblack/status/12436416374204538... (posted in HN as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22707935) as as a particularly bad example.

Oy. Pre-recorded video? That requires both a shit company and a shit manager. Personally, I'd have made sure to do something more than what the company decided.

- Knock, knock. - Who's there? - Not you anymore, lol.

Everybody who still works here, take a step forward.

Slow down, Steve.

I heard that front-line managers / supervisors didn't even know about this, so even the good ones didn't have a chance to get out in front of it. A top level decision-making process that made even good managers look like a-holes.

Urgh. That's depressing.

Lol, that's shitty.

I read about a dev rel person who just finished a podcast about how important her role is in times of corona and remote work.

She got layed off that same day and the dev rel team was eliminated.

Oh wow. Anywhere we can read the story?

https://twitter.com/FeyNudibranch/status/1243642077495218176...

My workplace just sent out an email Friday afternoon saying that they're Fedexing layoff paperwork out starting Monday. I agree with you that the unemployment increase is just getting started. Luckily I'm in pretty good financial shape, but the next few months are gonna be rough for a lot of people.

"My workplace just sent out an email Friday afternoon saying that they're Fedexing layoff paperwork out starting Monday."

Ugh, feel for you. Hopefully they have some sane severance package.

The most efficacious way to make these conversations less “difficult” is offering a generous separation agreement.

I'm also curious about how remote dismissals are returning company laptops.

I could keep mine, easy. Also the desktop PC. I was terminated via email, no big deal.

When it happened to me (before all this, summer 2019) they gave me a FedEx account number and asked me to FedEx it back. It was a company account so I just had to show up and make a minimal effort of stuffing it in a box. And I was across the country from HQ. I imagine even with people stuck remote even in the same city, they could just do the same and have people FedEx it back, either now or later.

I wonder what the max weight is for a Fed Ex. I would be tempted to send them the laptop wrapped in bubble packaging and foam, inside a steel safe. With the combination on a Post-It note. I really want them to get that laptop.

I’ve seen termination agreements where any severance pay is contingent upon returning hardware like computers, etc.

47min video. Presented slowly, very little of the info is about "difficult conversations". It's largely about giving presentations. A written summary of key points would be helpful.

I watch videos that don't have slides at 16x using Video Speed Controller extension[0]. A 47 minute video becomes a 3 minute video I can go through and judge information density, slides quality, topics addressed, depth of said topics, whether there's a topic that matters to me that's addressed there.

Then I decide if I'm going to watch the thing, which I note using Taskwarrior with a +watch tag, a link to the video, a description on what it's about. Then I watch it and take some notes, augment some issues with the information acquired or references, etc.

I don't really do this with great quality speakers I'm familiar with, as I'm sure I will learn things.

[0]: https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

Do you keep any notes or record of the good talks/speakers online? It sounds like it would be valuable!

Sort of. Since all I think about in my waking hours is product, company, roadmap, and vision, my notes are very specific to these issues and goals and simply have become the company's knowledge base.

The notes for the talks are practically non existent and are just a subset, and a few lines at most.. Other notes are about strategy, handbook to be able to operate the company from paying taxes to hiring, onboarding, and firing to how to write issues and commit messages, to tools we use or could use, to features and roadmap, to the experience from soup to nuts of different stakeholders, to the induced demand and workers influx it hopefully will cause, to what the company should focus on for the next two months to become what it will in the next five to ten years with nth order effects. Different x maginification from the bug fix to the economic consequences on countries with poor connectivity, and how closing an issue relating to compressing static files moves us a hair.

Success is the team not missing a beat if I disappear, because everything would be in place for continuity and growth and slashing cumulative lifetimes of suck.

I've always had a proclivity for writing, but there are other reasons I'm doing it that much and want to do it more. Some hard transitions and developments that almost killed the company, and we turned it around with some hard learned lessons and the earned "wisdom" not to have it happen again.

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