charity.wtf
cofounder/CTO @honeycombio, co-author of Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering. I test in production and so do you. 🐝🏳️🌈🦄
1,018 posts
11,887 followers
253 following
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Huh whoever it is evidently blocked me too. Sensitive feels all around on this topic, it seems. My first two bsky blocks!.....that I know of. 😉
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makes sense
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same
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Yep, for sure.
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Yeah. I get a lot of joy and juice out of having ad hoc, unpredictable conversations about work and work-adjacent stuff **with my coworkers.**
I have no energy to spare for randos in my day, period.
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But it happens a lot. Yeah, I've seen it too.
And it's not always easy to predict where the potholes will be.
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I agree - and I’ve been working remotely for over a decade now. I’ve seen problems resolved in 10-15 minutes in person that we had spent months circling around. It was a real WTF moment - like why was this so hard remotely and so easy in person? And I’m not saying that’s always the case…
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I didn't say they were "unavoidable realities", I said they were defaults.
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Ehhh.. disagree on the merits (implicit is good enough in lots and lots of contexts) but I think I mostly get your point. Leadership skills are rare (and situational).
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Yep.
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Yes. Like I said, I think a core aspect of the problem is that you face these scenarios as a remote company when you are 5-10x smaller than a location-based company facing those scenarios.
The problems you're facing as a 100 person remote startup are similar to those a 500-1000p co grapples with.
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ah that guy must have blocked me
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i don't think anybody's saying they're insurmountable, so much as confessing they have failed to surmount them and things still aren't getting better.
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groan... be careful what you ask for 🫣
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OH SHIT, ACTUAL RESEARCH
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Whuf. Sorry.
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Yep, that sounds about right to me.
Some folks will straight up refuse to travel, but I'm about ready to say it's not optional. In-person connection is the yeast in the dough that makes the recipe rise.
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🎯🎯🎯
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It's a big, gnarly, messy problem, and my heart goes out to anyone who uprooted their life under false promises.
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💔
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Yes. See my comment about needing to "grow up" as a company, to have the infrastructural maturity of an in-office company with 5-10x your size.
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Not sure what you're asking, exactly?
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Is this what's happening? I have only heard the opposite -- that juniors can't get hired, people only want to give jobs to super experienced seniors. 🤔
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Yesssss. There is a ton of specialist domain expertise in building these organizations!
It's not rocket science, but I am also so irritated by all these folks who are hand waving away everything that goes into making shit work like it's just *obvious* what to do.
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That's quite the sweeping statement.
Seems pretty straightforward and understandable to me. You've got a company not built for remote work, suddenly forced to go remote.
New hires didn't gel because *the company wasn't built for that.*
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Leadership is certainly an important variable.
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One of my favorite books is "Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy," by Barbara Ehrenreich.
I don't even know how many times I've read this book. (SO GOOD, go read it!)
We are social mammals; we evolved for embodied connection. It's like...relationship lubricant, of sorts.
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I feel like you are hand waving away some pretty big challenges.
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I mean....it certainly can be, sure.
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Pretty much.
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Is this something you've spoken to many company leaders about?
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Glad you've got it figured out. 🙃
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And there isn't nearly as much prior art (or books, mentors, talks, material etc) to learn from and adapt to fit your needs.
Nor as much consensus on what the hard problems actually *are*.
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I love how convinced everyone is, after hearing a two sentence, third hand description of the problem, that they can confidently diagnose and dispose of the situation some other company is desperately struggling with.
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I don't think it was a problem with hiring.
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Yep, attrition and morale are inversely correlated. This exactly.
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Finished the thread, if you care to read the rest of it.
The tldr is employee morale never improved, and new hires never felt as connected or dialed in, and it was leading to high turnover rates.
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i agree, i think hybrid would work best for most folks.
we still have an office, but we are not going to order folks to RTO, so .. it's just never really spun back up. people have offsites there, but most days nobody goes into the office. and since nobody's there, nobody goes in. etc. 💔
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hey dude, good for you 👍
(do i need to append a 10000-word disclaimer to *every single post* about how broad the spectrum of collective human experience may be, and that i recognize that my experiences and generalizations stem from SF-based tech startups, and exceptions no doubt exist? groan...)
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yep, agree.
this is basically what my entire original thread was about.
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What about my statement leads you to think I was trying to generalize, or represent literally anything other than my own personal experience?
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how are you defining capitalism, in this instance?
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I agree, FWIW, I can't imagine working for a company with a mandated office policy. It's infantilizing.
(Wait, how exactly are we disagreeing?)
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Cool 👍
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You're missing my point. I'm not referring to my coworkers as "friends", I'm saying I got together with my actual friends more when work forced me to leave the house every day and I was used to flexing my social skills.
Now it exhausts me, so I do it rarely.
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Did you read the thread?