Getting noticed as a remote engineer
triplebyte.com
triplebyte.com
- 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.
How does this work? You guys meet up in person?
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.
Anyone else have suggestions?
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.
- 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.
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.
Thanks for the info!
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.
Just a reminder that you could create you own company (consulting or product) to exclude hiring interviews and cover letters from your life completely.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
Having a decentralized job market for developers is the way to go.
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.
Nope, they doxxed everyone and only backpedaled when they got caught.
> 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…
The blog post is marketing fluff
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 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.
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?
LOL, fake it until you make it.