Hacker News Reader

As an IC, the people who dislike talking to their coworkers are ignoring the effect that Zoom has on team cohesion. Personally, a single in-person meeting is more effective for getting to know my coworkers and bonding with them than any number of Zoom lunches and socials and happy hours. And even ICs have to talk to other people to exchange ideas, get buy-in, and solve cross-functional problems. It's _so_ much easier to do that when those people are also your friends rather than strangers. They don't need to be friends you go out with after work everyday for drinks, just friends you know well enough to have a conversation with that isn't awkward. This dynamic was very apparent to me having worked at a company that did have cohesion and one that didn't.

I used to think ICs should just be able to code away in a cube but lack of communication has much larger costs than being slightly less productive because someone interrupted you. Now more than ever building the _right_ thing is more important than building the _best_ thing. Maybe some people here feel they should just be able to code away because their EMs have handled the buy-in part and they just get work assigned to them but I think lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.

> Zoom

I’m both a remote maximalist, and a Zoom hater.

I reconciled this by eliminating meetings. Turns out, 99% of all software can be built, managed, scaled, and sold asynchronously.

Can you provide more details about how this works? I'm stuck with Zoom meetings that I feel are long and ineffective, but I'm not sure how to sell my manager on eliminating them.

I started my own company. Not necessarily to get rid of meetings, but because I absolutely cannot stand the modern tech work environment.

I’d think managers would see the elimination of meetings as a direct threat to their job. So I don’t have any good suggestions.

You could just try skipping them? See if you get in trouble? Push it all the way to getting a pip. That’s what I’d do lol.

Until managers realise they can actually manage in writing, and the fact it gives back plenty of time to actually engage directly with the few individuals who need more 1/1 interactions to address issues they are having. I think managers benefit even more from less meetings since they have even more meetings in the first place.

Simply don't join the meetings. For this not to fire back, it's also simple: inform the organiser in advance that you won't join, that s/he should let you know if your presense is absolutely necessary for input, and to email the outcome if relevant to your work.

After a while, you can stop informing them as they've gotten used to your absence and realised you aren't needed. Whoever remains in these meetings tend to feel even better selling each others thin air without practical participants making negative comments during those discussions.

It worked for me. Of course beware there could be retaliation on principle. If that's the case you better update your CV and start seeking another remote position anyway.

This sounds like a really good way to make sure you get the smallest raises and the least promotions. You'll never be seen or heard!

My view is that raises and promotions don't tie to whether someone is heared or not. If one criteria matters, it's negociating skills. After that probably comes competence.

Not joining meetings should provide you with as much time saved to focus on actual work. Growing competence, and lead to higher/better throuput.

I've seen a number of people playing the "let's be heard/noisy" card. It often works for a while but not in the long term.

Time spent at "work" can be spent with a short sighted objective, or a long one.

Even if I made a mistake of interpretation and attending meetings can result in better outcomes, I would still favor mental health and maximising time spent to improving my competence, over fears to loose my job or not getting a promotion raises from the current employer.

In my experience, it's not necessarily the person who does the most work that gets promoted, but the person who gets the most recognition.

Sitting at home never seeing, hearing, speaking, or interacting with people save for brief slack messages just doesn't seem like the best way to get recognition.

This, right here, is what is wrong with meeting culture.

It would be nice if it wasn't this way, but unilaterally excluding yourself from this meeting culture only hurts you.

So much this. Until a company adopts a no-BS policy towards meetings, I do not see the point. 80% of my time in company meetings is just wasted. I have talked to my colleagues about this - they feel the same. At least with remote work, I can politely tune out of useless meeting filler by muting audio/video.

Contrast that with grad school, where every minute of my meetings with my advisors was time well spent.

But now you'll see a lot of people replying to you "but hey... how are we supposed to make friends and be a family then?".

Can't agree more with you.

What's an IC?

Individual Contributor

Individual contributor. Someone who doesn't manage people.

Individual Contributor, usually. A non-manager.

Individual contributor. A bit of a misnomer since once any project grows beyond a small handful of engineers the work becomes largely collaborative.

> lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.

All fine, though in practice I have found that building the "_right_" thing equates to building the vision of the loudest/senior most person in the room irrespective of merit. Until that culture changes, I am more than happy to be a Jira ticket consumer.

> Zoom lunches and socials and happy hours.

WTF??? My god, I cannot imagine sitting through something like that. Is it really a thing?

Yes. There are even companies specializing in this sort of thing.

https://getmibo.com/

They're awful. I have at least one Zoom social bs thing per week. They're never good, they're always emotionally draining and they always suck!!

I also detest the zoom social and avoid whenever possible. My team did have one remote activity which was pretty cool though - a virtual escape room. Everyone was remote but the escape room employees were in the physical space. So we used a mix of online collaboration and verbal discussion to direct the actions of the escape room rep within their physical space, which was all viewable through high quality webcams. I was skeptical when I first heard about it but it turned out to be a really great team activity.

I'll add one more thing - the physical space makes it much clearer what you should be paying attention to. If there's a group of programmers standing behind someone's chair looking stressed, there's probably an outage I can be helpful with.

If I see an engineering manager and a product manager have what sounds like a rancorous conversation, that's something I am going to check in on later.

If I see someone always coming over to my team, I'm going to ask who they are because I probably need to know them.

All of this simply doesn't happen so easily in full-remote, and it has huge cumulative networking, team-building, etc effect over time. That said, I am not looking to come in to the office every day either, but I'd love to have at least occasional (weekly/monthly/whatever) in person connection to people and teams I work with.

This is a really important point that's not getting voiced much here. Numerically there are more ICs in a company/forum/world, so the managerial voices don't get heard in places where the numerical advantage matters.

The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?

That’s not what my (Apple) leadership told us. Individual and team productivity rose this year, to the extent that they started giving us a day off once per month or so. They were concerned that people were over-working, that the situation everyone was in was too stressful, and we needed “reconnect days” periodically.

That's interesting because the person I spoke to also said that they've reduced the daily number of work hours. Not because productivity was high but because stress was high due to the pandemic & perhaps working conditions at homes.

ICs do have it simpler. Leadership comes with complexity and accountability. Sometimes yes, it is hard. I'm trying to avoid reading too much into your anecdotes, but it sounds like you are saying remote work is less desirable because it makes your life harder. I suppose that is a fair point, but I'd wonder what your goal is as a manager - to make your life easier, or to make the team perform better?

> In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it.

Why would anyone stand up and run over to tell someone about things in person when they could send a message and notify everyone at once? Like, this just seems like you want to work "in the 90s", not work "in an office", because unless your office has like five people total in it, this doesn't seem like a realistic way people would communicate.

> But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.

Zoom replaces in-person meetings you also might not have been in, and frankly are even less likely to have been in because you can't easily be in two meetings at once, record the meeting to attend later, or attend the meeting while in transit or doing other work (all things that are reasonable as you are there as a manager to track what is happening, not do the work: you might even be in two meetings at once! sounds crazy, but people do that in person all the time, by running back and forth between two conference rooms, only now that is trivial).

As for chat: wasn't that your fault? If you need to watch the support team interacting with the engineering efforts, make sure their chat is configured so you can see it... if the workers are colluding to create secret back channels using personal Slack accounts that management isn't aware of in order to get their work done, something much more serious has failed at your company that you should be addressing before demanding everyone congregate in an office building.

I literally did all of the things I am known for without having met any of the people I did them with, as we met online and coordinated online and achieved great things having to talk in person... or on video, or even on the phone, because it was more than sufficient to talk via IRC and e-mail.

Here's something to consider:

> because I never see them "together"

That sounds like a very common problem which is that many companies somehow don’t share visual representation of their organisation effectively. I routinely ask that during interviews and it’s generally a scramble to get me nothing.

> If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.

Ah, this probably illustrates a lot of the disconnect. Most tech workers have relatively short futures at their companies.

Good points. The part that I have a different experience with is that you’d have spotted someone running over in the office to realize there’s communication between certain team members. To me that sounds either lucky or anxiety inducing. Should I as manager be keeping one eye on the group and one eye on my screen? I think these information gaps are much easier to catch by clearly communicating the process rather than keeping an eye on your surroundings.

> now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.

It sounds like all you need is a social graph of interactions from your chat software. That could lead to micromanagement deviance, but if the graph is open to all employees, I believe it would be fair and help everyone.

> ...you have a different and much more complicated concern.

That concern seems to disappear when I attend meetings seemingly all on phone and webex and that goes for at least half a day. Company never flies me to meet folks in other offices in different cities face to face.

How would you deal with employees that were in a different office? What about offshore contractors? I find it hard to believe that managers need to see people together in a physical space to be effective.

Every single pre-covid meeting I was in had at least 1/3 remote participants (either WFH or located in other offices around the world).

These are certainly valid concerns you raise, broadly speaking. However, as mentioned in numerous other comments, there is a compelling case to be made that remote work is more productive for a lot of people. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it also affected retention. Far from the suggestion that some people simply can’t be bothered to commute as you rather dismissively suggest.

In any case, the fact that this may make things marginally more challenging for management in the near term as we collectively adjust to this reality is, frankly, a pretty lame justification for opposing remote work categorically.

You are assigning to me a much more extreme view than I hold. I neither dismiss the desire to do remote work (I express some of it for myself) nor oppose it "categorically".

I am simply saying that the "pros" are obvious to everyone but the cons are more subtle and may not be relevant for everyone. I also think someone's ability to self assess their own productivity is suspect:one may feel productive because they coded undistributed all day - when I'm reality the most productive thing they could have done that day is perceived that two juniors were arguing over a silly point and set them straight - something they'd have done in the physical but not virtual office.