Mourning loss as a remote team
sofuckingagile.com
sofuckingagile.com
Thank you for your humane response to Pete's death, for creating room for the team to grieve and official acknowledgement that it was no longer business as usual. This is one of those moments that leadership really matters. There's more to being a leader than shipping a volume of features, you are also an important figure in the lives of your team and they need you in a time of crisis.
Or the person died and they didn’t say it was a suicide.
Because if it’s the 2nd, that seems pretty normal. My right to know doesnt trump the family’s right to privacy.
This just seems bizarre to me to expect a special “all hands” session or something to discuss this.
Provide counseling services? Sure.
Put a “how Jimmy died” meeting on everyone’s calendar? That’s odd.
When a coworker died at work we usually understood the family was the one that needed support, not us. And if the family asked for privacy, then they got it.
And if any of us needed support, we helped each other. We didn’t need HR to pencil in a meeting.
And no, when someone dies their cause of death is not automatically public and most people (including employers) respect that.
When the day-to-day doesn't address the simple human aspects of work, it becomes even harder to address the difficult aspects.
At one place, a guy who had left the company a few months prior died in a car crash. The guy had a wife and newborn baby. The CEO shared the news and the company made a contribution to a GoFundMe for the wife and baby. I think the company offered grief counseling.
At another, larger company, someone died shortly after I joined, so I never knew them. We were all notified, once again I think a grief counselor came, and the guy’s desk was left as a memorial until we moved offices a few months later.
We really need to start talking more openly about these things. If your coworker dies in a car crash nobody feels like they can't talk about the car crash or even acknowledge the cause of death. Yet with suicide, nobody wants to say it. The result is even more pain mixed with frustration.
https://mentalhealth.org.nz/media/reporting-and-portrayal-of...
I guess to be safe they sort of publish it without many details. Just "Person found dead at such and such".
It later clarifies that the clustering evidence is only focused on teenagers and young adults.
I would assume that those 3 cases are not applicable to the vast majority of full time working environments. If people are using this study as a reason to avoid discussing death by suicide in the workforce, it's because they just don't want to deal with it. If they were motivated by a higher moral purpose, they could ask for advice from a mental health professional or non-profit.
While there may be some cases where it is the right thing to do, silence by default perpetuates the shame and taboo around the subject which can affect the living and prevent them from seeking support.
It doesn't seem particularly helpful to send out a notifications to people other then those that would be affected by having to take on my workload. And what good would come from them being told I was dead vs just left?
While I have a strong emotional reaction to it, I don't think it's a bad thing, it is a part of life and a reminder for me to savor life.
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So give them time off to grieve.
Once you say that “they need you [the manager] in a time of crisis” you are putting the tragedy in a work-related context. The crux of the issue is the tragedy that happened. Not how the supposed leader responds to it.
The worker bees can get space to grieve alone or among their peers.
I came in on a Saturday to let the team know of his passing, and to work. We had scheduled a weekend hackathon—if I recall, this had been my idea originally.
My boss, very sincerely concerned, asked me, “why are you here? You can go home.” I told him there’s no where else I’d rather be. That wasn’t only because he was such a great boss, but that was a large contributing factor. He kindly, gently said he understood and that I should stay and contribute whatever felt comfortable and leave whenever that felt like what I needed. That didn’t make mourning feel any less difficult, but it made me feel like I was right that work was where I needed to be that day.
My point is not that this is the form all leadership should take. It’s true that giving people time off to mourn is almost definitely the best default. But there is a compassionate kind of leadership that can be this welcoming and compassionate comforting.
I think a lot of people still don't realize that everyone deals with emotions differently, even though they've been told that a lot in the last few decades, and perhaps a lot longer.
And yes, I agree that a lot of people have trouble recognizing different ways people process emotions. It’s been a persistent thing in my life, I’m well over in the differently column for a lot of people (ADHD/autistic).
If he had merely offered to let me go home—or, worse for me, insisted—I would agree that it wasn’t particularly noteworthy as far as compassion goes.
Sometimes all that’s needed is for the manager to not be a giant fucking dick.
My aunt passed away a few years ago, and I took a few days off work to go to her funeral (a few hundred miles away).
When I mentioned that I was going to take a few days bereavement leave, my manager at the time responded by rules lawyering whether the death of an aunt qualified under the company’s bereavement policy (it did). He otherwise said all the right things, but that’s what I remember nearly 10 years later.
Help your people and don't be a dick and you'll be amazed at the bounty of unearned gratitude that comes back around -- and often not just once, but continuing for years. Being a good boss is "the gift that keeps giving" to good bosses everywhere.
My wife caught COVID last month while I was out of town. Since I continued testing negative, we decided that I would stay at the farm until either I tested positive or she tested negative. I posted a message on Slack explaining where I was and why, just as a “why is Tony joining all meetings remote this week” kind of update.
Immediately, three of my previous reports reached out directly to let me know that they were more than happy to drop off anything she might need: groceries, medication, Dairy Queen, anything. That is the kind of relationship a manager/leader and their reports can have. We’ve never really done much outside of work socially. We do the odd team dinner to mark special occasions. Two of them have had car trouble and are handy but didn’t have the tools they needed; I had the tools (tubing bender for a brake line, electric impact for getting a stuck bolt out) and dropped those off on the weekend.
The big dance I have always tried to do is make us into a team that always has each other’s back. I’ve made it clear that sometimes The Business wants us to do weird things that don’t always make sense and we’ve gotta just do it, but in general I’m doing my best to shield them from nonsense and help make sure we’ve got an environment where everyone can do their best work.
I dunno, it was all an experiment and it seems to have worked out.
As long as one is the person with the authority in a relationship one cannot really know which option it is.
The other piece is that this team has done this kind of stuff in the past for each other. As an example, one guy blew a timing belt on the highway about 150km out of the city (on Sunday night coming back to town for work Monday morning). Two of the other people on the team loaded up tools into their truck and drove out to meet him, try to see if they could fix the car on the side of the road, and when they realized they couldn't they towed it away from the road and gave him a ride back to town.
I mean, I could be misreading this, but it seems like I, without really knowing what I was doing, put together a really tightly gelled team that jumps at the opportunity to help each other out. And in the process, I guess I got to be a part of that even after I left.
There are benefits to the latter approach ... I could futz around on my phone in particularly boring or useless meetings. But keeping the cameras on does make connections feel more personal and overall I prefer it, particularly for small meetings.
Plus, everyone gets to see my dogs roughhousing in the background.
The fact those meetings are occurring is a failure of the culture, and especially the move to WFH. It's been the key differentiator for me post-COVID; companies that are begrudgingly remote try to keep the office norms in place, just now remote, vs the companies embracing remote finding new workflows, which means leaning on async communication, collaborative documents, etc, instead of meetings, and synchronous meetings only when absolutely necessary.
And it's been eye opening; in those former cases, no one wanted "social" Zoom meetings, myself included. But in those latter, people asked about it, championed it happening, etc.
People only have so much time they want to be in meetings online, and making sure it's used to build team bonds, instead of squandered on business problems that could be solved other ways, seems like a huge part of making remote be successful.
A significant component of that is that my only work experience is in a fully remote team of varying time zones. I imagine that changes the perspective of how these things should go compared to someone who's used to the social interactions of the office.
On the professional world, where money and titles are put on the head of people, things hardly ever go that way, I believe for many reasons but mainly due to competitivity.
Regardless, really happy to hear your experience and story. I'd love to be at an actual team as you put it.
I think there's a fundamental divide between people. Some see the workplace and the people in it as an integral part of their life. Others see it as a place they spend 40 hours a week that enables them to live their actual life. Neither are wrong and I think a lot depends on the type of company you work for. For me personally there's nothing intimate or sanctified about my relationship with my boss.
But I do agree with your general point. Being someone's boss can have a large impact on their life. I'd reach for terms like responsible, ethical, or kind.
And once you have to do that it might be prudent to let it become a part of your identity. It is after all something that you have to do for half of your waking time outside of weekends and vacations.
People put on a polite friendly face at work, but that doesn’t mean they’re your intimate friends. Sometimes, but I think it’s not so common as you’re implying.
Mental health is an enormously under-discussed issue in an increasingly digital society that hides suffering in so many of us.
Work becomes an increasingly integral element of our connection to others while certain employment becomes increasingly transactional.
We all can do better. So sorry to read about another human being lost too soon.
It’s not seriously discussed because it’s under-discussed.
I think most people understand the seriousness of cancer, or a heart attack, or other life threatening ailments. They accept that those things are often outside of one’s control, and so there is never any hesitation to take it seriously. When someone in a work setting is diagnosed with something serious, everyone pays attention.
Mental health issues are hard for some people to understand if they haven’t experienced their own challenges. And because it’s not discussed frequently/seriously enough, it’s easy to downplay it or believe that the person struggling can change just by thinking hard enough.
And the people suffering from it don’t feel the same freedom to share those struggles because they’ve also been conditioned by the same collective mindset about mental health and worry what opening up about it will mean for them.
Someone with severe depression who struggles with suicidal ideation has to wonder if people will think less of them, or if they’ll be understand at all. Even though awareness has grown, those old stigmas and default behaviors remain just under the surface.
Someone with a terminal illness will receive an outpouring of support and encouragement.
I’m happy that awareness continues to grow, but there’s a long way to go.
This is exactly right. Even in the last few years I feel more understanding about mental health struggles, and I strive to be supportive as well, but even I judge people who take time off for mental health reasons, and I hesitate to tell people about my own struggles.
Bingo. This is the root of the problem IMHO. We're really good at recognizing and empathizing with a gaping physical wound, but if we can't see it/touch it/feel it/etc it's hard to grok.
It is a mind problem, but that makes it harder, not easier to address. The only real solution IS "happy, not depressed", but it is terribly difficult to do if you have poor tools and learned patterns.
Medicine can help break up patterns.
My own struggles have taught me that at least in some cases it seems to be more like a "mental obesity" than a "mental disease". It's not necessarily that there's something wrong with the person's brain, but that their depression/anxiety is a perfectly normal reaction to a lifestyle that's toxic.
If you never take the time to do the activities you really, truly enjoy (by this I mean the type of thing where afterwards you feel better and think to yourself "that was great; I'm so glad I took the time out of my day to do that" - not necessarily things that are hyper-engaging), don't eat vegetables and fruit every day, sleep poorly, live alone, don't make the time to socialise with others and are constantly surrounded by a hostile environment (cluttered, tripping over things, disgustingly/unpleasantly unclean sights and smells), then the depression is just a "healthy" response.
That's just not true. You can't do all of them, of course, but you can take one step at a time over the course of months/years. It's a positive feedback loop that really does help.
>If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above.
Again, I'm not sure this is true either (at least in the general case). For many people, there's no obvious cause for their depression, but they "just are". There's no peace that needs to be made or trauma that needs integrating, just learning to live life in a way that isn't toxic to your mind.
For me, therapy and mindfulness meditation were both beyond useless.
Learning to stop over-intellectualising everything and implementing strategies to make mundane, day-to-day life more pleasant and wholesome has done wonders.
> For many people, there's no obvious cause for their depression, but they "just are"
And for many people, their depression can be traced back to specific events or situations.
Mine: C-PTSD from a pretty screwed up childhood. Most people I know would never know, but I’m working to build an entirely new way to frame the world and my responses to it.
I appreciate that not everyone has the same background, but what I’ve learned through my journey is that there are more people with similar challenges than I ever realized. And in a way that’s the theme of this thread.
> You can't do all of them, of course, but you can take one step at a time over the course of months/years
The key here is the word years. At least for a period of time, one step at a time is mostly indistinguishable from “don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things”.
Yes, one can be making progress, but it often takes some time to see the results.
> Learning to stop over-intellectualising everything
And this characterization of the problem is exactly the kind of undercurrent that continues to stigmatize mental health issues, IMO. “Just stop over intellectualizing everything” is not going to help someone who’s currently “in it”. Certainly not going to help if someone is at the point of being suicidal.
> For me, therapy and mindfulness meditation were both beyond useless.”
And for me, therapy probably saved my life.
> and implementing strategies to make mundane, day-to-day life more pleasant
No offense, but this is “rest of the fucking owl” stuff. I’m pretty sure most people focused on improving their depression want this.
The answer is not just “implement strategies” any more than a novice painter’s journey to master is to “paint better”.
The process is often long, slow, and pretty difficult.
It isn't an either-or situation. As you said, everyone has a different experience.
When I spoke to professionals or listened to others having the "mental health conversation" the focus was entirely on dealing with trauma or, if there was no trauma, taking antidepressants because clearly my brain was broken.
Being told to "draw the rest of the fucking owl" was one of the most eye-opening and empowering things I heard, precisely because the conversation focuses on people with experiences similar to yours.
I was told by society and doctors that I was a victim of my neurochemistry and that could never change. Turns out I was just bad at looking after myself as an adult. I am now less bad at it, and one day hope to even be good.
I agree “just doing stuff” can help to. But for many people, as others have pointed out, such advice is not immediately actionable. People can be made to do stuff, but if they hate doing those things then they’ll still be depressed.
The reason some of us downplay mental health issues is because we hear stats like "97% kids are ADHD" or "74% of university students are on Ritalin" or "108% of Americans are on anti-depressants and visiting psychiatrists"
"Mental health" (without further qualifications) is closer to herpes than to cancer.
Quite frankly, this is a poor excuse. I don't draw sweeping conclusions about "physical health" issues because of cherry picked stats about extremely prevalent physical health issues.
"73% of adult Americans are overweight" doesn't make me downplay physical health across an entire spectrum of issues.
Another conclusion one might draw is "holy shit, this is a crisis!". And there is growing evidence to support this. Humans haven't evolved to deal with the realities of the current century. We're only just starting to understand the impact of modern technology and many other developments of the last decade.
If someone sees a crisis and concludes that this must be something to dismiss, that says more about that person than it does about the crisis.
> "Mental health" (without further qualifications) is closer to herpes than to cancer.
And yet, people still take herpes seriously. People don't just dismiss ailments that aren't cancer.
But there's a more fundamental issue with the entire line of thinking raised by this comment. A key point that many people miss is that mental health and physical health aren’t really two distinct categories at all. The two are deeply intertwined, and usually inseparable.
Who you go to see, or what actions you take when you start to have issues will change, but you also see a dermatologist for skin problems, a cardiologist for heart problems, etc.
Societal reactions reflect that, both dismissive (“just exercise more”, “don’t be lazy”) and constructive (“we should find the cause - is it endocrine disruptors / social media?”)
Will you explain how/why you agree with that sentence?
To be clear, nothing in my comments concluded anything close to this. Your agreement is certainly not with me.
If I said “poverty is more similar to overspending than homelessness”, I’d expect someone to tell me this is a meaningless (and ridiculous) comparison, and rightly so.
Such conclusions are not useful, and don’t help anyone involved: not the person struggling, not the person trying to understand the struggle, not the people trying to fix it.
Will you help me understand the point you’re trying to make here? Because it’s unclear.
Causes of death are not fungible, dying in a freak accident and dying from suicide in a high pressure setting should not be treated the same.
Especially since we know that suicide can act like a contagion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/#_sec_0078_ and the demands of the program they were in were almost certainly a factor
Your teammates are not entitled to know your cause of death. That's a personal thing, but you aren't there any more to choose if it's okay to share.
Your cause of death isn't a personal thing either by the way, it's a matter of public record in most states (and of course word tends to get out with something as emotional as a death)
If there is public record, they are entitled to that and nothing more.
The death person and his/her family have their own right to privacy and it trumps curiosity of collegues.
Again, this isn't some random suicide, these are people in a known high pressure environment already aware this person committed suicide.
The organization can pretend nothing happened (even though everyone already knew), or they can take charge and try and help these people cope with that devastating news and help anyone who might already be in a bad place...
Once you're dead you're dead, that's why causes of death aren't personal... there's no person left.
The organization doesn't even have to frame it in of terms this person's death, just a simple call out that "if anyone is struggling with this loss or needs help come to us".
Anything is better than pretending it didn't happen.
> Once you're dead you're dead, that's why causes of death aren't personal... there's no person left.
The family and actually close friends are left. And people who are about to die deserve to know their privacy will remain private too.
People learned this person committed suicide and the organization decided not to address it. That is strictly worse than addressing it no matter how you slice it.
OTOH, I’ve worked at office buildings that provided a clear view of a jumper, and there were formal communications that counseling was available to anyone who witnessed the jumper and felt they needed it. Which sort of underscored the fact that jumpers in the middle of busy downtown areas aren’t broadly reported to anyone who wasn’t likely to have directly seen them in the first place.
A number of us went to the funeral and his wife told me (I had met her once before) that she was so happy that his co-workers came to pay their respects. It made her feel that he had a larger impact than she knew of and it was comforting to her.
I hate, hate, hate the way corps try to brush away any unpleasantness like ignoring it means it didn't happen!
I personally don't mind it. It's a good reminder that we as individuals are just replaceable cogs in the machine, that all of us are only as valuable as the productivity we can contribute in the future, and that our sense of loyalty to it should be adjusted accordingly.
Don't ever expect a corporation of any kind to act like a human or a family, because it's not, even if they try to put on a humanoid face.
Having said that, I expect more corporations will start trying to act more humanely in the face of this kind of trauma, precisely because those that don't will engender a sense of deep distrust and disloyalty from their employees, which will make them weaker in the long run. The more generations of people go through the machine and see how it really works, and teach their children the truth, the less they'll be able to take advantage of naivety. This also tends to be a reason that the powers that be want tighter control on social media, so people can't as easily share widely the truth of their lived experience that will preemptively poison the trust of others towards machines designed to use and discard people.
This is why I think that, more and more, people who have a heart, are moving away from big entities like this. I expect in a couple of generations corporations will be a thing of the past, or something so far removed from society, that it will no longer exist as a social norm.
The biggest problem is not the people, its the amount of people that organize together to make something happen. When you live and work in a sea of people vying for attention, to be seen and heard, there is no possibility of humanity. Its the size that makes or breaks the organization, not the people in it. It breaks accountability and it breaks social connections.
I see smaller organizations all the time that act responsibility. These organizations usually consist of smaller teams. This is the future, a new way of living, small decentralized organizations providing the world with what it needs in a human way.
You could just shorten this to "body", which has the same range of meanings. If you want to say "corpse" in English or Latin, you can use a more explicit word, but you don't have to.
The idea of "incorporation" is that something comes into existence - that it becomes "corporeal", not "soulless".
Alternatively, in a couple of generations, people who have too much heart/soul and can't stomach being part of a corporate machine will be bred out of the gene pool and/or thrust into the powerless underclass, while the psychopaths that have no problem with them will acquire the most resources and reproduce the most, passing on their genes and their way of thinking to their children.
Some might argue this already happened generations ago.
The only people who are people are people.
A man had been injured on a journey and was lying on the road, wounded. A good Samaritan saw him and helped him get up. Onlookers then retorted, "Well, the good Samaritan only helped him get up to signal their virtue!"
Another way to put it, is that while the individual might act selflessly with pure and honest empathy, with no conscious expectation of something in return, this kind of behavior wouldn't have survived in our gene pool if there wasn't some evolutionary advantage to behaving that way.
So, the onlookers would really have to specify whether they're talking about the conscious being who is the good Samaritan or if they're talking about the unconscious entity that is the generic big brained ape that has deeply embedded survival and reproductive instincts that drive their conscious behaviors and desires outside of their control.
I can simultaneously say that the person was honestly just being good while acknowledging that the biological entity may have achieved some kind of advantage by signalling their virtue. Alternatively, I could also say that the good Samaritan is actually acting in a way that is a detriment to his survival, and only happens because of a bug in his generic and psychological programming or an old beneficial feature that is no longer good for a new environment and will eventually be removed via natural selection.
And, like @Scarblac wrote, sometimes it's a bad idea -- if the others see through it?
This particular story teaches us that we should judge people by their individual intentions. Western cultures tend to judge that way[1]. Most other human cultures will ignore intentions and judge by outcome. They will also punish a whole family or clan, not an individual (except within their own clan or family).
So, according to our culture, we should judge people by their intentions. What about companies? Given that a company has many legal rights of a person, maybe we should judge it like a person - by the goodness of its intentions? Or maybe we can only judge individuals. But then why do so many individuals justify what they do with the needs of a company? Even questions about death, it seems.
[1] See Henrich's books: "The Secret of Our Success" and "The WEIRDest People"
That aside, I don't think you can judge the intent of a company's actions. Let's ignore the small family business for now, but if you look at a big corp, decision making is a distributed responsibility with individuals checking off their part as it passes through their department.
There is no single person you can ask to determine intent. The intent of the many people making the decision could be contradictory, or someone like the CEO could be acting in bad faith and misleading his employees to approve a decision that benefits the CEO and no one else. We see this more frequently with crime or negative actions, where sometimes the CEO is the scapegoat but we conveniently forget the various VPs and individuals that contributed to the decision.
My point is that companies shirk responsibility by obfuscating individual responsibility, and I think that would apply the same way to judging a company's intent.
Lastly, judging implies a verdict, and you can't put a company behind bars. Yet companies are more than capable of committing atrocious crimes the likes of which rival war crimes (child labor/slavery in foreign countries, polluting waterways/airways and poisoning entire cities, running propaganda campaigns against the interest of public health, etc.) I find it ridiculous that a company can enjoy our rights but shirk our duties and accountability.
Evolution does not "work" on behalf of individuals. It works on behalf of species. So if a member of a species is willing to sacrifice himself or take risks for the whole, that is an evolutionary feature not a bug.
If a species were truly focused on the individual, I imagine it would quickly die out, which, let's face it, seems like a threat to our species in our modern world when people choose not to have kids because they don't want the responsibilties involved.
That is on of vectors how culture is created.
Too many people will ignore things like this. Too many people will stand around helplessly--if nothing else, at least call 911. The number of times I have been the first person to actually call 911 at an accident is embarassingly high--I have only ever been the first person on site once. The rest of the time a crowd was gathering but nobody bothered to call 911.
Personally, I'll take help even if they're doing it selfishly. And I'll thank you just the same.
Means you’re preventing someone from obtaining a blessing if you don’t take their gift. And by definition, it’s less blessed to receive than to give. But if everyone only gives, no one receives, grinds to a halt.
Metrics on virtue make things so difficult.
But the Samaritan acted. Helped someone. Did a thing.
Action is not signaling. Action is action.
Maybe it helps one’s reputation doing it for the Gram, but you are actually helping another person and that is something.
In this case it was at the cost of their own reputation given how Samaritans were viewed at the time.
The Bible might say that if you are doing it only because of how you feel or what it means reputationally it is not the same as doing it out of compassion alone, but it’s still doing something and different than signaling.
> Action is not signaling. Action is action.
I don't really understand why those would have to be exclusive. I think taking action to help people is important, and if suddenly everyone became aware every time someone helped someone else to the point where it became an expectation, I guess I don't really see why this would be a problem. At the end of the day, if more people are genuinely being helped due to being charitable becoming table stakes, I don't really care whether the help only happened due to ego or due to actual benevolence. I can see it becoming a problem if people weren't actually helping people and only signalling, but I don't really see how that would apply to companies giving people time and space to grieve and then also setting the example for the rest of industry.
To the company as a whole, yes. To each other? No, I don't think I believe this. This doesn't mean you owe anything to your teammates in terms of staying in a job if a better opportunity comes or if you aren't happy or treated right, but we're still all human beings seeing each other every day, and if you build a bond with those you work with, it's not any less real just because you only happened to meet due to the coincidence of being hired by the company. I've only been out of college for less than a decade, and I've had some coworkers I did not get along at all with, some who I was indifferent towards, a great many I had casual friendly relationships with, and a select few who are this point are as close to any friends I've met outside work and remained that way after one or both of us moved on from the job where we met. I still don't think I'd be completely emotionally unaffected if someone who I was currently working with in the first two categories happened to die, and I certainly would be if someone I worked with in one of the latter two groups did. It's not at all uncommon to feel grief or numbness when even a casual acquaintance outside of work dies, and the fact that whatever company you work for happens to consider you only a value-generating machine doesn't magically make this go away. Humans are humans even when working together, and I don't think pretending that's not the case is in any way more emotionally healthy than acknowledging it.
Many years ago, we hired a guy from halfway across the country. For money reasons he left his wife and kids behind and started the job ASAP, with the plan to rent an apartment and go back to get them over a holiday weekend approximately 1 month away.
So he worked with us for about 4 weeks, and then when driving his family here on that holiday weekend they were hit by a drunk driver; he and his wife were killed and the kids needed to be airlifted to a big city hospital.
Our CEO intervened with the insurance companies to backdate everything so his life insurance would pay out and the kids' medical bills would be paid for as long as they needed to be paid. He made sure that the kids got airlifted again - to the hospital nearest to their grandparents, and then said that any employees who wanted to travel to attend the funeral would get paid time off to do so (he went too).
Remember that study that found psychopathic traits in upper management?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
instead, building friendship outside of work(if you have friends at work, that's good too), and spending more time with your family,etc. I think this is also called work-life balance.
This does not work for people that needs extra help though, e.g. those who experiences mental illness, depression, down-cycles in life etc. HR and benefit package should have a humane way to do it better, at least, providing free hotline as a medical insurance add-on for all employees.
A good manager should stay aware of personal concerns cautiously in the team other than just checking their agile sprint schedule, it's part of your work. For years that a direct manager never met a key team member, never video chat with him/her, still keeping him as a contractor after 7 years, sorry, I put quite some blame on the manager.
A good manager takes great care of his team, which in the end, will benefit his own boss/company too. Blaming the corporate for your team members' lack of benefit is barking the wrong tree, it's you who did not fight hard enough for your key team members, you're the one should be blamed.
I was IT director and I had to do a post mortem (no pun intended) about his activities in the facility by checking his badge-ing in and out of various doors to determine the time of death... that was super fn weird.
We were able to determine he went to the break room at ~1am or something, made himself a cup of tea, went back to his cube and died before he even drank his tea.
it was an EVP... married with kids....
He may be dead now but he left lockheed to become a park ranger.
---
head of HR comes to me with sme issue with her blackberry.. I have her unlock it, and my phone guy is right there as she was claiming some issue...
We open her phone, and the first thing that pops up is a video of her giving the evp of sales a BJ...
my phone guy NOPED THE FUCK OUT ASAP...
that was fun trajectory to manage...
Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of, or at least, treated and compensated vastly different than their "staff"/"full-time" peers who are often doing the exact same work. For fun, google the phrase "permatemp".
E.g. I had a past job as a middle manager where my team interfaced heavily with a group of contractor developers overseas. When the time came to demo new features and place superlatives upon the various teams, I noticed my leadership cadre said nothing about the contractors and did not acknowledge any of the work they had done.
I spoke up about it when the floor was given for anyone else to give kudos where they desired, and mentioned the overseas team and thanked their team lead for working with me on delivering. He spoke up and expressed his gratitude in kind.
Apparently, this got my CTO into "trouble" with "legal" because I guess merely acknowledging contractors was some kind of a "problem". As a result, my boss got in trouble. As a result, I got written up. I was out of that company within six months after relationship with my boss and CTO deteriorated immediately after I opened my darn mouth.
For expressing gratitude.
To contractors.
We still got paid handsomely, but It sucks to be left out from the end credits.
I was a contractor myself, and I still work with contractors every day. I wasn't treated as badly as that, but I was not too happy with how I was treated either. I and my team lead try to go out of our ways to acknowledge and include all workers, without regard to their actual employers, in all the team's meetings and interactions, and acknowledging their contributions.
It's still not enough. Just last week, I found out that a team member is now considering to leave, and one of their reasons is being treated as "less worthy" by the higher-ups in my company. There was some internal confusion where they forgot to assign them an office, and since they're a contractor, HR ended up putting them in a somewhat remote office, away from the team, completely ignoring our protests.
The thing is, we (my team lead and I) don't know what to tell them, how can we convince them to stay after this. We're at a loss.
On a sidr note: at least they were paid for overtime.
In Germany there are laws against this type of 'contracting' as you seem/are fully depending on one client.
Ultimately, once again, the government is telling me how I have to work or run my business. I didn't ask them to do that, and I don't want them to do that.
They give demos, leadership gives them kudos, and they feel part of the team.
Contractors are team mates with a different employment structure but if we’re in the trenches together that distinction gets thrown out.
Well, it didn't sit well with me then, and I became friends with that guy and the other contractors. We're still friends to this day. I'd say he got the last laugh because he started his own company and is doing well. But I promised myself that I would never treat any contractor like that ever. I'm a Director now, with a team of my own. Similarly, it has a few contractors, and every single one of those guys is treated like an FTE, with regular 1x1s, objectives, and personal development. As a leader, I invest the time in them like they're my own, because they are people too - regardless of the SSO number or the ".consultant" in their email address.
If you work in a large company, HR is going to have a shit fit when they find out. And if you don't, why not just hire them full time?
I don't think the rules around the "benefits" were especially clear from a legal standpoint. Therefor the company would always err on the side of caution. If some auditor somewhere could perceive an action or event as employee specific and a contractor took part then the company could be penalized for it. In my case, it was pretty standard things like in-office birthday parties and monthly staff meetings.
It's not right, but I can understand why it happens. The legal team in a big corporation is extremely risk averse.
In a sane world, common practices like forbidding a "contractor" from working with any other company would be more legally risky than letting a contractor participate in an in-office party.
You can be compliant with the spirit of the law and still be targeted by some ideologue using the law as a cudgel.
I know of companies where referring to vendors by name is frowned upon.
>Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of
This is like the one scenario where being a contractor is better than being salaried. Asking for more hours and getting paid for them is absolutely not being “taken advantage of”.
As an aside, if you are being compensated less than permanent employees as a contractor, then your rate is not high enough. The ‘fully loaded’ cost of a permanent employee is higher than their stated salary, due to tax, insurance, pension contributions etc - all of these need to be deducted from the contractor’s billable rate to provide an accurate comparison between the two.
Sometimes though companies can’t hire FTE so they bring in a of contractors (or outsource), vet and manage them poorly, or give them controversial projects and then they have to lean on the FTE. Also they are often not on call.
The week before I started, he passed away in a car accident. I was really looking forward to working with him, but I never got the opportunity.
As soon as I found out, I again emailed everyone I knew at the company to express my condolences.
When on-boarding I said “I know I’m joining at a rough time for the team”. It turned out it was the day after his funeral (which I found out my manager and at least some devs attended). They didn’t seem to be expecting empathy from a brand new hire, but some folks were obviously still mourning. I’m glad I acknowledged their loss. We didn’t dwell on it, but it might have been really awkward if I had just charged like a bull into a China shop saying “I’m so psyched to be joining your team!!!” as if nothing had happened.
In my inbox, I also found an email from our CEO to the whole company (about 100 employees) from the week of his passing.
There is also an archived Slack channel to memorialize him where different folks who knew him shared their fond memories. The company established an annual teamwork award in his name. And a lot of folks contributed to a GoFundMe for his son’s education.
All of these things are strong indicators that I’m at an awesome company. We don’t say we’re “a family” (don’t believe it if your company or prospective company claims that - often it’s an outright lie and otherwise it’s code for a toxic culture with no boundaries), but we do care about each other.
No matter your position, if empathy doesn’t come naturally, learn it. It will serve you in so many situations in life.
My favorite way of framing this discussion is use the term "village".
A village is a close-knit group of people with aligned interests (economic and otherwise), activities, rituals, beliefs, and ties of friendship.
It's unfortunately a loaded word now.
I agree.
Team is probably the best way to describe it (indeed, it's the most used).
Village is a bit more of a personal wish, for me.
It's also easier to get measure on how people are doing emotionally when you see them in person semi-regularly. (Not always, of course, but when you get to know people in person and learn their body language, you get a sense of their emotional baseline, and it gets easier to notice when something is off. Of course, none of this matters when there is no HR support because an employee is "just a contractor")
Can't understate the importance of breaking bread.
A strong manager of course would not mandate micro behaviors like webcam use. A strong manager perhaps might 1) give space for the team to develop their own norms, 2) subtly nudge those norms with intention to test a hypothesis, gauge the result, and iterate and 3) once healthy norms have developed, take steps to formalize them (while taking care to maintain space for healthy dissent).
I hope I didn't imply that "cameras are required for distributed teams!!" I don't agree with that and you're right that it's super impractical a lot of the time.
I do hope to suggest that in-person team-building shouldn't be overlooked for the success and well-being of distributed teams.
I used to have a lot of Australian colleagues and their connections made calls with 5+ people just horrible.
A decade or so ago, I worked at a remote-only company with 1600 employees and we never cammed up. We had a large number of employees with serious medical conditions or other personal issues that prevented them from holding down normal jobs and really appreciated not having to go on video.
This is the reason I treasure my current company. The work I do works around my disability perfectly, they don't demand I have video on, they're very understanding of my health issues, ... I got seriously lucky and hope I don't have to leave this position for a long time.
When a company wants a video meeting, what are, to you, better ways to say "please join the meeting with video, but if you have a disability that makes you not want to use video, that's totally fine"?
I hope you're doing ok in spite of the disability
I would rather not specify, as it is quite personal. Suffice to say that I'm very affected physically and mentally day-to-day, so I'm typically unable to put effort into my appearance.
> When a company wants a video meeting, what are, to you, better ways to say "please join the meeting with video, but if you have a disability that makes you not want to use video, that's totally fine"?
I'm unsure how to best communicate that; the only thing I can think of is to just state up-front that video is not required. I typically don't have issue with just never turning on a webcam.
> the only thing I can think of is to just state up-front that video is not required
Ok :-) Hmm, maybe saying something like "appreciated but not required" -- since it's also good for team building, if the others get to see each others sometimes.
Sorry for the late reply
Every couple of weeks I'll start a meeting with camera on for a minute or so just to say 'hello' to some folks, let them see I'm still 'here' in some sense, then camera off (usually). It feels useful to have some initial face/camera time to get a sense of the other person, but again, it's not something I generally routinely will leave on.
I had a period of a month or so last year where I moved to a Mac mini and... there's no camera. I didn't have a working webcam at all laying around, and it took me a month to bother to get a new one. No one missed anything of value by not seeing my face during that time. :)
Over the last 5-6 years, it's only been a noted issue with a handful of folks, and never been a deal breaker. The compromise is 'on' now and then for the start of a meeting. There's a humanizing aspect which is easy to lose sight of, but in most meetings, it's typically not that useful anyway. When there's more than a handful of folks, not all camera boxes can be see (too small, too many), and if/when you're working with a smaller group, there's usually much more value in sharing a document/editor/whatever.
How do you know this for a fact? You think sharing your face isn’t valuable, why do you think this applies to everyone you work with, too?
> it's only been a noted issue with a handful of folks, and never been a deal breaker
In my experience it’s not realistic to expect people to proactively note constructive feedback on one’s unhelpful behaviors. It takes creativity and effort to collect candid feedback.
Do you work with anyone for whom the language spoken at work is not their first language? They might appreciate any advantage you could offer to make yourself easy to understand.
The 'issue', such as it has ever been raised, was "why don't you have your camera on?", and in one case it was "I have no camera", and in another case it was "I'm walking around, you won't see me or you'll get dizzy trying to look at me".
> It takes creativity and effort to collect candid feedback.
I'm not sure how much I actually want to spend time 'collecting candid feedback' vs a) getting stuff done and b) supporting other people in getting their stuff done. Camera on/off has not been noted as enough of a hindrance (as in, any at all) by anyone as an impact on their ability to get stuff done. We also have phones and direct meetings where people can collaborate that way.
Forcing "cameras on" is... the covid-era version of "butts in seats" it seems.
> Forcing "cameras on" is... the covid-era version of "butts in seats" it seems.
I guess you mention this to give depth to your sentiment. No disagreement from me or any other commenter on this article on this statement! Something we all agree on for once :)
Video calling is still a relatively recent thing. It will become more unusual not to have video calls, but the past is less likely to have had it, not more.
What i did learn is that depression is taboo, therapy isn’t talked about openly, insurance doesn’t cover therapy well and there aren’t enough therapists in existence that the burden of depression seems to heavy. It’s not because we didn’t turn on cameras but because of systemic failures in our culture and a fascination with puritanical beliefs at all costs. Come to work depressed, come to work sick, work all day long, have no life, have no vacation, never mind the cost of living surpasses your ability to afford to live and now just living seems like the worst option.. replace work with school…
not a single person here seems to be talking about how we’ve normalized suffering and as long as it’s always someone else, it’s their loneliness it’s their depression it’s their problem. we celebrate the people who would be psychopaths if we knew better.. it’s odd
we have a society in place that doesn’t afford opportunity for all and not only doesn’t afford it, but is politically motivated to make sure people suffer for wanting to live it how they wished they could.
the puritanical fetish at all cost - mostly because they suffered through it and so should you…
Let me tell you: you are a good parent merely for having this attitude.
My company (Europe branch of big US corpo) was actually pretty good with handling that. They offered paid leave for one guy who wanted a intense therapy/camp. Unfortunately covid came and ended the program. The guy eventually left not long after.
I noticed very similar behaviors between the two people with depression I had in my team even though they were completely different otherwise. I still meet them occasionally for a beer and I really like them on personal level but they weren't good employees even though I did everything I could (I think?) to make their working conditions... good? (sorry couldn't find better English word). Flexible working hours, decision if they want smaller or bigger tasks, regular meetings, etc.
Of course at work I've seen people's faces but as someone who grew up online, only voice comms seems normal too.
No, cameras and “virtual happy hours” don’t cut it. I was hired remotely 6/2020 and the rest of my division is remote. I didn’t meet any of my coworkers until 9/2022. I didn’t meet most of my teammates until even later (long story, there is distinction). But this was completely due to Covid not company culture.
It’s made a world of difference. My manager just said that if any of us feel that we need to get together for a few days, he has no problem with us meeting at any of the corporate offices around the US, just give him a heads up.
The first, was a suicide of a teammate who was in his 20s. The company's reaction was kind of shitty. They didn't point the other team members to things like the EAP. They didn't offer bereavement time to the team members. They even docked time from PTO allotments for those who missed a half-day of work to attend the funeral.
The second, was a teammate in his 30s who died from cancer. I've been remote with the team since the beginning and never met anyone in person. He'd been struggling with health issues for the few months he was with us (he'd come back from a 6-month medical leave of absence before joining our team). The level of empathy and support from management at all levels was superlative. They made sure that we were aware of all the support that was available, let us know we were able to take off time if we needed it to process his death (including a member of the team who's a contractor), etc. Suffice it to say that I'm very happy with my current employer and know that they have my back if I need support.
Compare https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... versus https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
I am slowly going blind (long, boring story; only relevance to the topic is during a discussion with the eye-guy consultant he mentioned that he had had a close personal friend of his kill himself the day after a night out and that he (the consultant) wished that he had been able to somehow sense that his friend was so close to the edge....
I looked at him softly and with compassion and said to him that there was no way in hell that he would have ever known or be able to sense something like that because the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it).
My heart bled reading this article but having grown up in a life of violence (early start in Africa, a bit of a chequered past led me in to the world of I.T. (machines are better than humans... they can tell you why they are sick, what part(s) are broken and then either report a (1) Fixed or a (2) Not Fixed... any how, that's how I wandered into IT field mixed in with some ex military stuff including a lay-over in Dubai that lasted for two-weeks... the bloke at Heathrow customs glanced at my transit stamps and asked me where the fuck I had been for two weeks (10 day gap in departure from place {x} to arrival at LHR ....
I looked him in the eye and said simply ..... 'Good god, my arms are tired from all that flapping and those head-winds were a bitch!'
He muttered something along the lines of "f*ing smart-arses", stamped my passport and waved me through.
Whole point of the above? I dunno but nick & karma points burnt telling it.
If you take nothing else away from this – Please know that you likely would have had no way of knowing so please don’t feel guilt…. They made a decision and it was one that you (the loved one grieving) would have been unlikely to have changed even if you had have known. At best, you would be likely to have simply delayed it for a while.
YMMV
Thank you for pointing it out (Unfortunately the edit window has closed otherwise I would add them :) )
Thanks for caring though, and hang in there :)
While this might be generally true (and it's especially true in the sense you wrote the message, i.e., there's a good chance that no one could see it coming), I would add something. It's, as I said, mostly true, but far from being the case 100% of the time. Ok, that was probably obvious, but the thing is: sometimes we interpret it as the contraposition (which is, after all, equivalent to the original statement): the ones who broadcast their intentions are not serious about it. And that's a huge mistake to make, when it happens to not be true. Someone who broadcasts that kind of intentions might be overdoing that kind of millenial "everything sucks" gallows humor you see a lot in Twitter... or they might be serious.
So, pay attention to people talking about that suicidal ideation. Many times, it's more than a joke.
BTW I also agree that in many cases an intervention can only delay the decision but not prevent it completely. I know it can be a hard pill to swallow for many people (and for good reason), but I strongly believe this to be true.
He grabbed me for a lunch time meal about a week before he committed suicide, wanted to chat about my faith. These conversations happen from time to time, especially working in tech which seems to bias towards atheism, so I didn't think anything of it. It was a type of conversation I've had dozens of times over.
In hindsight, of course, it was obvious he was looking for help. I can rationally tell myself over and over again that there was no possible way I could have known, but I highly doubt I'll ever convince myself of it.
A lot of anxiety-ridden people have a sort of "Hulk secret" that they seem to handle stressful situations well because they are always extremely stressed. If they couldn't maintain a calm exterior while freaking out inside they couldn't get through the line at the grocery, so when shit starts hitting the fan for real that mask makes other people think they don't feel it.
The hardest thing I have ever done as a manager was gather my team into a room and let them know that one of our team members, a young woman just beginning her career, died in a car accident. The accident happened the night before my wedding. I came back to work 36 hours after my wedding, and a few days before leaving for my honeymoon. The first email in my inbox was from a friend of hers telling me what had happened. I walked into work to an office full of people wanting to hear about my wedding and instead I had to tell them that someone they knew and cared about was gone.
She sent me an email sharing her joy about my wedding that I didn't read until after I had already learned of her death.
Six years later and the memories are still painful.
It's also sad to see the complete disconnect at the workplace, where people are no longer building relationships thanks to remote work. I do not know about others, but I am loath to discuss personal life on slack or on zoom. I am much more likely to do it at lunch, in person, with colleagues, or in hallway conversations. Nothing at remote work in the past two years has replaced that.
I just don’t think the end state is a cohesive company doing their best work. Just a bunch of individuals doing their micro task.
On the other hand, saying nothing is safe. And if I do have the opportunity to pick between two equal candidates, and one is like me and has shared interests and one is not, I’m supposed to choose the latter to encourage diverse team building.
A job is not a place for friends. Not in corporate America anyway.
Suicide is infectious (as strange as that sounds) and I've found it tough to reconcile that showing compassion for the suicidal can actually encourage more suicide. It's an act I’m not able to comprehend and that paralyzes my response.
I was dismayed to read the section Did We Ignore the Signs?, but I understand. Similarly, I feel a sense of personal responsibility for the well-being of those I've hired. It's common for those left behind due to suicide to carry guilt, but it's neither healthy nor constructive to think that way. Please take the opportunity to be responsible for your own mental health, and that requires you not to feel responsible for the mental health of those around you.
May Pete rest in peace and sincere condolences to the friends and family left behind.
Well at least they won’t have to deal with your judging looks.
It's important to have empathy for all those left behind, and it is sad for those who take their own life, but there is a danger in elevating their actions to being virtuous or somehow noble. The consequences are indeed quite selfish for all those left behind.
And to HR, I have a similar message. Do your job. Just because someone is a contractor, doesn't mean you can't put in a little effort when bad things happen. One of my co-workers died of covid early in the pandemic. The place I was contracting at basically disappeared him, it was disgusting. Part of the reason I was laid off may have been because I started contacting managers up the chain saying basically "do _something_ to acknowledge that a member of the team has died for Pete's sake!"
A relatively solitary and cognitively intense discipline like software engineering could be one place in society (one!) where genuine introverts are understood and appreciated.
(I certainly agree that we should acknowledge when a team member dies and give people space to be sad!)
(I'd think, I don't work in HR, so no idea what actual directives they have).
It's almost as if happy employees are in a company's interest. Not paramount, but not neglected either.
There'll always be culture of omerta when you don't give someone a piece of the company.
If I'm an hourly employee, our interests are not aligned. You don't value me enough to share the wins but I know I'll be sharing in the losses by getting fired.
To everyone pretending otherwise - wake the fuck up.
No emotions come into this.
(this is not to say you can't have friends at work, but the company is not your family and will drop you the day you aren't productive any longer)
I see this from time to time and it irritates me. I'm not in HR. I know some people who are and people who go into that line of work often do care about making people's lives better.
Certainly if that conflicts somehow with a a requirement to protect the company, they may have to prioritise the latter. But that doesn't mean that they have 'one job'.
They can also want to help people, have a ton of empathy and be literal saints. But that's their personal motivation and not what the job actually is.
And I'm a software engineer, I solve business problems with code. If I decide to to write some code that doesn't help the company I would probably be fired or at least put on a PIP
Perhaps you should ask someone in your HR department to tell you more about their mission as I doubt they'd share these views.
That's all you do
That's a fine motive, but it's similar to joining Facebook in order to help people improve their attention span
This entire thread has stories of broken corporate culture causing people to leave the company and somehow you’re translating that as win for HR?
In most cases, HR aren’t the ones “dropping” you (it’s your manager). They’re the ones ensuring it gets done in a way that least disruptive to the rest of the org.
I do think the right thing is for the manager to acknowledge the situation and maybe hold some kind of gathering in remembrance. Possibly even pull together something to send to the family of the deceased. But I don't think this means anything coming from HR, it's gotta come from people who knew the person.
It sounds like they developed a good working relationship and that camera/no camera didn't make a difference at all.
This sounds cheesy, but EAP (employee assistance programs) are one benefit. Me and my partner recently did hospice care for my mother-in-law.
Hospice care is physiologically and emotionally draining. After she passed I was in a bad mental health state (I have bipolar that’s well-managed, but long-term, high-stress situations can still trigger problems).
I wound up phoning the EAP hotline and trauma dumping on a random therapist for an hour. Sometimes just having someone to talk to is the difference between spiraling out of control and being able to take care of a mental health situation.
The next day the news came that he had died from a hard attack. It was very sad, and also strange to have someone pass so soon after joining, and even more strange to know that, perhaps apart from his wife, I was the last person he may have talked to. Like in the poster's case there was a time zone difference, and we never met in real life.
I was sorry for the family. I also reflected on the situation: I had (virtually) crossed roads with yet another nice person, he conveyed his passion for knowledge in one of the last acts in his life, then passed in his sleep; the premature time of death aside, that is actually a positive ending in a way. Recalling that memory from years ago, I do not remember his name, but I clearly envisage the shared excitement about the beauty of graphs; that is the impression that stayed with me until today. May he R.I.P.
As a suggestion, I propose to those teams affected to hold a remembrance event for a lost colleague, where stories and images can be shared, ideally in person and in commection with a meal, but if not possible at least as a virtual shared meal.
Now, he got laid off during one of the "smart realignments" our oversized corporation did. Didn't make sense at all but it happened. Me and another colleague (both immigrants) were the only one who reached out, I tasked my reports to write him testimonials on LinkedIn etc, my other friend connected him to where he eventually will find a job. He was a proud man, with personal issues, this was really too much.
Two months later he took his life away.
It was really hard to this day to think about this. I was always supportive of him so I don't have that kind of guilt, but I always think, what would happen if he was not laid off, if things were different.
Anyhow, in a weird way, I understand this. We really need to show more support and understanding to each other way more, remote or in person.
After that I was in charge of team and we had so much fun and care about each other, I got a message from a new guy who joined the team around I was leaving, just telling me how unique and good experience he had and how they are trying to preserve all the good things I instituted.
As some who is bipolar and struggled with suicidal thoughts most of my life, you wouldn’t know. The thoughts had been so constant they became background noise I learned to ignore. By the time I was ten years old, I knew I had to hide anything that wasn’t “normal”.
As far as never meeting the person you knew…
I’ve lost a friend I only knew online this way. I never knew their face, their voice, or their real name, but we had been on the same mod team for two years. We found out because their SO posted some details on Twitter.
A few people organized an online memorial service. I think we used Twitch for the audio for some readings and Discord for discussion.
These things were no different from the friends I’ve known in person. Relationships are relationships.
It's easy and convenient to keep the workplace professional and file those concerns away as "not your business", but they're important.
A good friend of mine (after years of being a good colleague) had immigrated from Ukraine to Canada a year ago and was weeks away from his family joining him when the unfortunate recent events unfolded. His wife and newborn child forced to drive a car from Kharkiv to Poland for a full week before they were even remotely "in the clear". He offered to continue working during this time when told to take time off fully paid, and said it kept his mind off of the things he couldn't control and that he was eternally grateful that he had this job in the first place and that his family's relocation was already prepared, saving him weeks of striding through refugee paperwork.
The lesson was clear - had he been an affordable contractor there we left in Ukraine vs a valued team member who we cared about on a personal level it would have been a dire situation for his family and our company.
Take the time to genuinely ask your people how things are inside and outside of work.
Reminds me of something slightly humorous I encountered back in the 90's, based on my particular career path. I had used unix extensively in the time before tilde meant "login/home directory". Then I moved to windows and was doing C++ dev, where tilde means destructor. Reading Slashdot one day, there was an announcement that somebody had died, with a link to page about him, and it used an URL with a tilde and his name for his homepage, they way universities often did. Not knowing the convention, I thought "oh cool, somebody set up a memorial page and they used the destructor syntax in tribute!"
But I would like to hear the take from a founder who built an HR team to know if maybe I am missing something.
I'm really curious if it's really different being an employee vs a contractor in that respect.
I’m curious (genuinely) what the company could have done different for you in these cases? Personally I wouldn’t expect anything from the company other than paid leave/general empathy from managers with amount of leave varying depending on the loss (e.g. loss of a partner requiring more time than loss of a grandparent). I’m not sure what else I would want from my company or what they could offer.
Similar programs are available to employees in other countries.
Your note is very thoughtful. All we can do is our best. Grieving is very personal - from a colleague / employer standpoint we just support each other as best we can, if we can.
I’ve been with my employer for a long time now and have experienced a lot of coworkers passing away. Cancer, heart attacks, suicide, and undisclosed. The whole spectrum. Some of these coworkers I worked close with while others not so much. Either way it affects you and really puts things into perspective with how fleeting our lives are. Thinking about this gives me a lump in my throat.
I recently had an ok performance review a few weeks ago, but it was difficult for me to hear some of the negative feedback considering the past year I’ve been dealing with my dad’s situation. That’s not to say the feedback wasn’t all fair, but it wasn’t the best timing when I was trying to get back to normal. My goal was really just to survive last year, not necessarily advance in my career or get a raise.
My old boss died suddenly in an accident a number of years ago. Well-liked guy, been there for years, most everybody in engineering knew him. For some reason our leadership decided that they needed to have an all-hands -- the entire company -- where they announced that (these exact words) he "had been found deceased". Completely blindsided.
Sudden all-hands meetings still make me nervous years later.
In the context of this thread, I suppose what I'm trying to say is -- fully remote can create too much distance and that's not good. But at the same, you need to let people handle mourning in their own way. And maybe break the news gently.
The world is pretty fucking broken and you have every reason to feel how you do. I don't have pithy advice, I'm just another guy on the internet.
But things can change. I promise they can. I don't know how or when, but they can. And you're not alone. I promise there are so many people fighting the same battle.
Don't give up.
What are they going to do, fire you? Who cares.
And honestly, if you've taken advantage of FMLA, you're actually doing better at taking steps to help yourself than I was!
Medication really helped me. I've been on bupropion for about two years, and it's made for a drastic improvement. I'm actually able to see things for how they actually are, and not let every minor stumbling block or criticism make me think I'm a complete and utter failure.
If recommend finding a mental health clinic nearby and scheduling an appointment to talk about depression. The appointment will probably take half an hour, and at the end the doctor will give you a prescription. This is extremely routine -- you're not suffering from anything a million people haven't gone through already.
If you're scared on being institutionalized or something, just... Selectively tell the truth. I mean, I can't say this is the best idea, but it's what I did when the psychiatrist asked me if I had suicidal thoughts.
I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that your brain is just another body part. If your knee hurts, you go to a doctor and get it looked at. If your vision is blurry, you go to an optometrist and get glasses. If your brain is giving incorrect responses to stimuli, you go to a psychiatrist and get medication. It's fine and it's normal.
I've spent the last decade working at a large company on fully remote teams. Nobody I have worked with during that time has lived within 120 miles of me. Most aren't even in the US. They're in London, Dublin, Rome, India. I've occasionally had the fleeting thought: who is going to come to my funeral? I have family and friends, people I know in the community through various things. But there will be a big demographic left out.
I turned 50 a few weeks ago (and just today attended a memorial service of someone I'd known since middle school), so perhaps this is just hitting me at the right time. But it does bother me a bit, and I don't really see an obvious solution for it.
It still makes me tear up to think about. He was so young and so cheerful. So full of life. Having faced loss like the article describes, I can't say that the nature of the loss makes much of a difference. Death affects everyone close to it, pretty universally. Questions about whether it was preventable or not, fair or unfair, etc., only serve to color our painful rumination.
Every so often, I'll remember him, and I'll repeat one of his catch-phrases to a friend who was on his team. Inconsequential as this might be, I like to keep the good memories of him alive.
That you can have an integrated member of the team clearly be a second-class citizen, that’s just hard to fathom.
Things like: Putting them on the same mailing list as regular employees, inviting them to the same company-wide meetings, including them in international company get-togethers and christmas parties, paid vacation time and sick leave, listing them in the company directory and org chart, paying a day rate so they aren't counting specific hours, a training allowance, giving them the same credit for work as employees, equity including vesting, any of the HR functions that were mentioned in this story (such as bereavement support), etc.
The idea that a contractor can't have HR services or that nobody in the company knows about them just "because they are a contractor", or that they have to be paid by the hour with no paid time off, is really just down to company policy. Some companies have better policies.
If anything our contractors seemed to have looser schedules and would often take planned extended vacations for a month or so since they didn't have any real limit on vacation time, just however long they didn't want to be working.
If anything, inside of Ops stuff, contractors are usually amazing to have around since they often have worked at a lot of different companies and have seen different patterns and practices in person to compare.
Usually contractors make more than FTEs for various reasons. It's only in the context of H1B body shops that contractors really get abused. Otherwise, the trade is higher pay for less stability.
My last team had one. Compared to the internal employees he earned more money, paid less tax, could work for multiple employers, could work from home 5 days a week instead of 1(pre-pandemic), and had more say over what projects he worked on. No way would he have agreed to join as an employee.
But as exciting as it felt, there was an impedance that made things so difficult for me and my brain. It rapidly started to erode my self-confidence, I began pushing so hard trying to solve every task and every little detail in the most perfect way possible and felt like I was failing at everything. I certainly was failing at one thing and it was communication. The language was a barrier (English is not my native language), and I think there might have been some kind of «cultural mismatch» at play too. In hindsight, I think my employers were also failing to read what I was writing on the wall. I let them know I was struggling with mental health issues and I think I made sufficiently clear what my struggles were. They tried to help me the best they could but kept insisting on things that were irrelevant to me. Apparently they thought maybe I was doing "just a theatre" because I was afraid of asking to renegotiate my compensation (I wasn't). That was particularly frustrating to me.
At some point, feeling like a lightning rod in the middle of a thunderstorm, I was on the brink of doing what can't be undone. I had it all planned.
Lucky me, my wife was wakeful enough to notice what was going on and helped me get out of the pit.
This sounds like guilt, one of the stages of grieving. I hope you get counseling.
This is the second time I've written this in the course of a week, over two different items. Seems it the time for it.
Getting therapy is not a weakness. They're professionals there to help you get the best outcome.
A therapist will never say to you, "You know what? I don't think we're a good fit" or "I don't think I can help you as effectively as someone else." It's up to you to figure that out, unfortunately. Personally, I have found that the more decades a therapist has in the field, the more helpful they are to me.
A lot of the best therapists do not take insurance and are not part of a group practice. Why? Because they do not want the enormous paperwork hassle. And if they are good, they get enough referrals to fill their schedule with people who can afford to pay out of pocket.
Also: this is one of those fields where credentials aren't as important as raw experience. Masters-level social workers can sometimes be more helpful than PhD- or PsyD-level clinicians.
> A therapist will never say to you, "You know what? I don't think we're a good fit" or "I don't think I can help you as effectively as someone else."
Would you say more about this? If I were a self-respecting therapist and I read this I would feel defensive on behalf of my field. The therapist is the professional in this situation- it’s obvious they have an ethical responsibility to catch bad therapist/client fits. I honestly have so many questions here!
- Why should we not expect the therapist to catch scenarios of bad fit?
- Do therapist professional associations make any attempt to set an expectation in this regard?
- Tactically, could therapists be required to set an auto survey to go out, say every three months asking “Is our work helpful?”, to make it easy for the patient to speak up, and once the patient has spoken up, the therapist has some limited timeframe to remediate the relationship or it’s terminated by default?
- Is the reason that I perceive a market for lemons simply that therapists’ profit motive is a moral hazard? IE the worse the therapist, the less likely they will catch (admit to?) a bad fit, so due to probability, over time, we patients will converge on the bad therapists? How could we systematically mitigate this “externality”?
- If therapists could collectively improve the therapist shopping experience, could they grow the market for therapy? IE how many people like me are out there, that need therapy but don't seek it, because of distrust for the the industry. Is anybody working on this?
My background: for 8 years, I was married to a doctoral-level clinical psychologist with an active practice. I learned a lot about the industry from her. I've also seen many different therapists over my lifetime. Finally, I've the great fortune to have discovered a wonderful therapist almost a year ago. This was not my first wonderful therapist. But I've also had a number of poor matches over the years.
> it’s obvious they have an ethical responsibility to catch bad therapist/client fits
I can't really answer why they never come out and say, "I don't think I can help you as effectively as someone else." I don't really know. They just don't. I'm sure if you ask enough therapists, you'll get the odd exception here and there, like a therapist not comfortable with a client's erotic transference who then lets the client go. I don't know.
> Why should we not expect the therapist to catch scenarios of bad fit?
Perhaps they don't have the perspective. Perhaps they are trained to think they can help everyone, to some degree or another, and perhaps that's generally true. I don't know. But like finding a teacher who resonates with you, you won't learn the material as well or progress as fast unless the two of your resonate.
> Is the reason that I perceive a market for lemons simply that therapists’ profit motive is a moral hazard?
I don't think the majority of therapists go into their field for the money. I think there are lemons because of lack of experience and the highly-personalized experience; one person's lemon is another person's diamond.
I can't answer your other questions. I just want to emphasize that you need to advocate for yourself. If you don't feel like the therapist is helping you after 3 sessions, move on. Yes, you should have some progress after 3 sessions in my opinion. Doesn't have to be earth-shattering but should be something.
Re-read my above comment because I edited it several times after your post, adding more info (e.g. info about insurance)
Try not to Zoom your appointments. Go in-person!
So even if I had locked computer/phone (which I don't have) and wife couldn't just reply any email (several dozens per day) or see phone number in email I can only imagine it would take them only few hours to realize I'm not answering and my phone would start ringing like crazy.
Btw we never talk personal life, they can only learn about it, if I explain why I won't be available in certain hours because I'm going to hospital or we just politely wish each other nice holidays, all emails are strictly work, we don't even chat and during occasional video training I never switch on my camera.
So considering all of this what kind of company is this they don't have his phone number to call? And how can they not notice he is not answering his emails and not just call to check on him? Unless he is not that important part of team they won't notice he is missing until his wife let them know.
It's as if the relationships between the team are much different than with direct management and the disclosure happens privately between middle management and by the time they're gone, the team is left clueless.
I think we need to bring more empathy into the workplace. Especially the remote workplace. I operate on the premise that everyone is battling problems that you don't know about, but even knowing a generalized detail can help in the long term. It takes courage to be vulnerable which not many are willing to do in the workplace, but helps teams become closer and more caring in the long run. It's hard to give bad news, but it's even harder on everyone to say nothing at all.
I do think that due to legal reasons, companies will say as little as possible to employees. We had an exec suddenly leave and we had a large meeting about it where the VP told us, but you could tell that there were a few talking points he had to stick to. Basically that the director was no longer with the company and that there wouldn't be a discussion as to why. Nearly two years later I learned it was because he said some rude shit on social media and got canned.
If someone is leaving voluntarily and on good terms, I'd expect an email or announcement. Maybe even a farewell party. But if you hear nothing, I'd assume it's because they declined to have one or they did not leave voluntarily. Either way, best to leave sleeping dogs lie, unless you really felt a connection to that person.
So while it's hearing nothing, an irish exit, or even greener pastures, I do believe it's up to someone to communicate it in a common sense way so people aren't surprised months down the line.
Welcome to tech dystopia, I guess.
Just because people organize their own things, it is not "dystopia". Some people don't need and/or don't want a nanny or a nanny state.
> I was the person who hired him and even during the interview process we didn’t use cameras.
anyways this is why I'm a big fan of hybrid working. We often think about ourselves in this moment but actually it's important for others who may actually need human interaction.
A friend of mine died of suicide back in college and it wasn't clearly communicated, there wasn't any support offered, etc. And this was a group of people gathered in person almost daily. We found out the details from an online news site.
Unfortunately suicide can kill people wherever, whenever. Problems handling it aren't solely the preserve of remote companies.
My sincerest, heart-broken condolences to @sofuckingagile.
> [...] and even during the interview process we didn’t use cameras.
Yes, appereance does not matter (mostly) for your job performance, but seing a face just makes it more human.
If you are imminently suicidal, you can be hospitalised but there is little to no support outside of that. Bluntly, there are a lot imminently suicidal people and limited resources. If you attempt to commit suicide and are unsuccessful, that wouldn't speed up the process.
Also, it is worth saying the rate of suicide in Scotland is very high. I live in a small place in Scotland with essentially no poverty, and there are still 10 or so suicides every year. I know someone who works as a psychologist within the NHS in Dundee (probably one of the worst cities globally for suicide/deaths of despair), and it is totally out of control. There isn't sufficient funding, and there is no way to acquire sufficient funding...it isn't possible (and btw, it isn't just suicide...heavy drug use in Scotland has been an issue for many decades).
The level of underfunding is, however, such that mental health providers are a huge part of the private health sector: Priory Group is a very big one.
Another factor is that a lot of training for psychologists is paid by the NHS, and funding for training has been going down everywhere (even in Scotland, which has a left-wing govt running the NHS).
It is just a resources problem. Even in the private sector, there isn't a supply response to higher prices. Ironically, the UK has lots of people who do undergrad Psychology, just none of them actually go on to practice because entry is so tightly controlled (for some reason, the NHS in Scotland is attempting to train nurses to do psychology with a couple of days training...that is going as well as you can imagine).
I understand no-one in the US wants to hear it...the UK system doesn't work (fully public health doesn't work, almost no countries in Europe with good healthcare have it, Australia is very similar to the UK, introduced private healthcare...their results are miles, miles, miles ahead).
This is related to why I abhor arrogance or any signs of holding oneself over others. It’s fundamentally unkind. If you truly are the Wisdom In Flesh Come Down From Heaven then you’re breaking your humble vow in any shows of arrogance. So be humble and show us all what you know. Let us learn from your actions and deeds. Don’t tell us your greatness or demand your authority.
I didn't know you, but you were a person and it's sad you're not among us anymore.
Our line of business is seriously f*ked up if we don't take care of people like you.
Thanks for sharing this story, it's important that we all remember that connecting with people is so much more than having a video chat to talk about features, deadlines and whatnot.
At the cost of being rethoric I wish we've all learned to be better, let's put people over deliverables again.
It won't cost us a dime, it will repay us with a lifetime of stories to tell and memories to share.
Take care of your team and your peers. You may not be family, but you're something else kinda like it.
While I think it's important for workplaces to take care of their employees, I feel like Pete's issue was that he was too close to work. And on top of that, he wasn't even an employee, just a contractor with no benefits, PTO, etc.
The real problem here is that Pete was not integrated as an employee. If he were, he could have taken PTO, accessed health benefits, and gotten help. I don't know the complete story, so I won't extrapolate further, but I feel sad thinking that this team almost feels "responsible" for his suicide. It wasn't the remote team's fault for not catching on, it was the company's fault for not acknowledging the health and security of their contractors (who, I reiterate, should have been employees).
Don't mean to offend anyone, I just felt the way contractors are treated is sometimes unjust.
The article is about a coworker. This isn’t about the company, it’s about the people you work with.
Building relationships with your peers is a healthy activity. Mourning the loss of a coworker is normal and expected.
If anything, going out of your way to avoid building relationships with peers would be a toxic behavior. Working at such a place where everyone avoided caring about each other beyond the minimum necessary transactions to get their job done would be miserable.
I have a family and kids and friends. But I absolutely have friends who I have made at work as well. I quite regularly go out for a beer with people I worked with in the 1990s.
The narrow workplace acceptable box is full of activities and thoughts that I'm long bored of. That means workplace interactions will be boring by definition.
You also don't want to bring up things like playing video games too much, or going out for drinks too often, unless people get the wrong impression about you. Getting too personal about issues you are facing in life also can be career limiting.
In a very depressing topic, this caught my eye. It’s a shame that it’s normalised for so many that extra work doesn’t mean extra pay. Salaried work seems a bit evil like.
It feels like a similar debate to the "unlimited vacation" discussions. It really depends on what your natural proclivities are to determine which option of the options is "a bit evil" and which is "natural"
This is so fucking embarrassing and full of shit.
Rest In Peace to Pete, and fuck the author of this post.
Sad really.
I feel self-conscious joining from my couch occasionally, but am pushing through it, there’s no reason why we can’t normalize harmless alternatives to desk locations. So just want to check that I’m not missing some material consequence of this behavior.
Thanks for sharing the story. RIP Pete.
The company had never had to handle something like this. Thankfully, HR and execs had the right priorities - concern for his family, respect for him and his family in how the news was shared with co-workers (especially with cause-of-death being unclear at first), concern for how it would affect close co-workers and others in the company, awareness that people would need to process and grieve in their own way.
HR talked with the family and got their permission to make an announcement to co-workers, and some guidance on the wording. HR offered to send this, but I felt that would feel too impersonal. I wanted news like that to come across in the most personal way possible, from someone (like me) who knew and cared for him.
The amazing response from the company was a big part of the healing. So many people wanted to do something. The family decided to have a private ceremony, and asked that instead of flowers, donations be made to an animal charity his daughter loved. People really felt for his daughter, and wanted to send cards and letters (which the family was happy to support). One of the teams (that hardly knew him) decided to have a commemoration during their weekly meeting.
The hardest part of all of this was (a) when his daughter called me to arrange for return of his work equipment and (b) when a family member suggested that one way I could help would be to share some of my experiences with his daughter about working with her dad. I have girls of the same age, so pretty close to home. It was hard to write that letter (#b), but it was also healing for me to think about the many positive ways he'd affected me and our team.
A few days later, it felt right to me to have some "closure". I sent a note to the company thanking everyone for the different ways they had respectfully honored our co-worker and supported his family. I also shared some of my memories working with him, and how much I missed his contagious happiness. As sad as it was that he wasn't with us anymore, I wanted to remember how much fun it was to work with him, and that's what I was going to focus on.
I hope I won't have to go through that again any time soon, but when I do, I hope it goes this well.
this is so bizzare.
It's hard enough to get a social "fix' over video. Audio only? No way. And I say this as an introvert who just knows that sometimes I have to take my "social medicine", because it's good for me.
Maybe you feel connected with only audio. I can pretty much guarantee there's someone on your team for whom you're just some voice with a label (name).
Because IRC is an all day background conversation.
Audio meetings? They are an objective focused limited time thing.
Nobody has time to sit in a video meeting with their friends all day (especially since it's multiple groups of people at the same time). But it'd be a better connection.
Deaths of people whose faces I’ve never seen and voices I’ve never heard hit just as hard as any other. I’ve attended an online funeral with only text for interaction from a hotel room a thousand miles from home. It was just as real as ones in person.
Compare that to my IRL social circle which has turned over a few times as my college friends and I scattered around the country post-graduation, or as I've moved around since then.
Video doesn't provide any additional connection to me. I find I just look at myself more because you can't hide your own video in MS Teams. And then when someone shares their screen and includes a video of yourself, you see yourself mirrored which is definitely a distraction.
Video calls are unnatural anyway. In a meeting or social setting you generally don't sit facing everyone, face to face, watching all their movements.
I'm not convinced by "natural, therefore better". The "can see everyone" is the one thing that's better with video than in person. But yes in person as a whole is better.