This was heartbreaking to read. What disturbs me most is the lack of any face-to-face time for this distributed team. I understand that not everyone likes to use a webcam, but to have gone 7 years without ever seeing your colleague's face seems, in my opinion, a symptom of a big managerial problem. Software engineers are usually humans, and teams composed of humans should make some effort to interact in a human way -- face to face (even just once a year!)
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")
I was also surprised by the complete absence of face to face interaction. It seems very odd; though I hope it is not something that the author ends up regretting as well. Mental health needs to be talked about much more and de-stigmatized.
I don't know, would it be more awkward for management to force you to turn on your webcam? I think the lack of face to face and the free language of this post shows some empathy. Maybe they could/should have arranged an in person trip sooner than that or something
+1 I hate cameras, and pushing social media was a source of mental health issues for me. Lost a couple of colleagues recently, who I had never seen, I don't think cameras would have helped. Especially not when mourning loss.
Face to face meetings are imperative, but not câmeras. Plenty of people are camera shy but just fine over dinner or a swift pint.
Can't understate the importance of breaking bread.
+1 to that would be awkward, and post shows some empathy
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).
Seems like a bigger managerial problem to disregard employees personal reasons for why they make not want to turn their cam on in the name of an easier measure if anything.
Am OP, can speak to the lack of cameras. We actually crafted our process in the Microsoft Lync era. Video was brutal. Also because of the diverse accents (Vietnamese, Portuguese, Russian, Scottish) it was easier to 'listen' without distraction. Obviously if you were starting today, cameras would be on. As you pointed out, probably a mistake.
Nowadays, with high definition and close to no perceivable latency. Early video chat was so bad that having the video on was more distracting than helpful.
I'm so very sorry for Pete's suffering and the loss to you and your team.
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.
You'd be surprised how normal this is, historically, among remote-first companies (pre-pandemic).
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.
> 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 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.
Ok, then I better understand. Thanks for the reply.
> 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.
I'm on a couple of remote teams, and set the expectation that I won't be 'camera on' all the time during meetings. My reasons are more practical than privacy oriented. I'm often pacing during meetings, and connected via phone and desktop. I can see and hear what's going on, and can talk back, but when my camera is 'on' it's just constant movement, which distracts folks.
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.
Speaking in absolutist terms, I can't know as 'fact', true. The output/quality/pace of the group was about as close as it could be during that period of no camera whatsoever. But the comparison is my normal MO which is camera on a few minutes per week. So the delta wasn't that different to begin with.
What efforts have you made to get candid feedback here though?
> 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.
No, everyone (bar one person) has the same native language. The person with non-native English does not care, and often has their camera off as well.
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.
Ah, you don’t need to choose between collecting feedback to feed your growth, and a) and b). At least, in my career I found pursuing and considering candid reflections from others that I admire, on my behavior, has made me more effective in a) and b). I acknowledge it’s not for everyone. I also enjoy working with people that share this interest in learning how others perceive ourselves, it makes me feel cared about, imbues a certain empathy to our relationship, and helps us keep our egos in check. It matters more for managers than ICs, for obvious reasons. FWIW
> 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 :)
I'm probably a minority but I don't care about my company or coworkers or building relationships. I'm just here to do a job to make money. As soon as I find a better offer I will happily quit. So being forced to use a camera to attend unnecessary meetings is just annoying to me.
For a long time I was like this too -- until I arrived at my current job. My dev coworkers are good friends, and I care immensely about their well-being.
> but to have gone 7 years without ever seeing your colleague's face seems, in my opinion, a symptom of a big managerial problem.
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.
Depression is something we never talk about and don’t treat as a health concern. My daughter attempted suicide and it wasn’t for any reasons I could relate to. That was a hard lesson for me.
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…
Depression is hard. Much harder on the side of people having it, but being a manager and knowing people with that illness is also not easy.
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.
Maybe it's different, but I've known people for a decade without ever seeing their face. Just communicating through text, text to speech software, or through VOIP while playing games. You can build deep connections and know their voices very well to hear when things are off.
Of course at work I've seen people's faces but as someone who grew up online, only voice comms seems normal too.
If a company cares about their employees getting to know each other - and they should - and they are distributed, they should budget for travel for them to meet in a central place - not withstanding a worldwide pandemic.
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.
Yeah, working remote has many advantages when looking at it "rationally", but humans (even software developers!) are social beings and a lot of that gets lost with remote work. I tend to also not turn the camera on more often than not, have to remember to change that...
We lost a valued team member in late ‘19 and two others through the past two years. I choked up talking about him on several calls.
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.
In my experience, you definitely have to shop. You have to find someone who is a fit for you personally. Don't settle until you find someone who truly helps you; someone you anticipate seeing each week. It takes time and is an investment in yourself. Have patience and expect to spend a lot.
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.
Thanks. I could benefit from therapy to address trauma I experienced with a previous (awful) therapist. And I get a sinking feeling considering the shopping I would need to do.
> 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?
> Would you say more about this? If I were a self-respecting therapist and I read this I would feel defensive
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)
My partner sat in the same cube pod as someone who took their life. One day they were just gone and a crying family member came by to take away a box of things. There was no official acknowledgement of what happened, no service or memorializing, only hushed whispers. It was terrible.
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.
Is this the norm? I don't see why they wouldn't at least announce it an email. It's a bit of a weird topic for a work email, but it's certainly better than doing absolutely nothing.
I do not know if it is the norm but I have also worked at an organization where one employee committed suicide. Leadership said nothing and everything was toned down. Some people spoke up and complained though. My interpretation is that the response was a combination of culture (although suicide is not "taboo" here it is not a preferred topic) and not wanting to bring undue attention to the organization.
I'd like to think that if you spend 8 hours a day with someone everyday, and suddenly they are gone, it would be a decent thing to tell you what happened to them.
Framing discussions around cause of death as privacy is a double standard. If you say someone died in a car crash, nobody gasps and tells you to respect the deceased's or their family's privacy. It's so extreme that is anyone even brings up privacy with regard to a death or cause of death everyone assumes they committed suicide, or did something criminal that ended in their death, or something else negative. Cause of death is posted in the newspapers and otherwise discussed in public all the time, there is no right to privacy around that piece of information.
No offense, but when a coworker dies it’s not about you.
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.
Yeah, I’ve worked at a couple places where someone died, and it was definitely acknowledged by management and I feel like it would be incredibly weird not to.
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.
Reactions from management and everyone else is typically different for suicides than for car crashes and other causes. In my experience, suicides are hushed and not discussed while car crashes and heart attacks are. It’s a terrible double-standard.
Same. I don't think it's with mal intent, I think it's the result of a (misguided) attempt to give the passed privacy or spare them the embarrassment/humiliation/stigma that some people (mainly those who have never struggled with depression/suicide) think is attached to it. A good friend of mine committed suicide several years ago, and it was like pulling teeth trying to get somebody to just tell me WTF was going on. The most I could get was "Douglas passed away." Nobody even wanted to say it was a suicide!
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.
I've had the same experience - when someone passed, no one would tell me the cause of death. I surmised the cause because of that, but never got external confirmation. It was just so ... strange.
Family and friends can feel blame, or anguish over the suicide being condemned to hell (Catholic doctrine until quite recently), so it might be insensitive to highlight that.
It may be because there is evidence that discussing suicide increases the likelihood of more suicides. I'm sure there's more nuance that could be done in theory / I would assume there exists some "right" way to discuss it that may actually be healthier, but it's easier to just look at studies and say best to just avoid it altogether.
That link says something different: "a description of the death as a suicide before the coroner has released their findings and stated the death was a suicide"
> This evidence is derived from three bodies of research: studies of the impact of media reporting on suicide, studies of suicide clusters, and studies of the impact on adolescents of exposure to a suicidal peer.
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.
Depends on the company. I know for a fact that if I died tomorrow, only two people would actually notice at all and neither of them are coworkers.
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?
Not noticing doesn't mean the world doesn't care. There are a lot of reasons people vanish and it's harder to notice the absence of something than its existence, and people usually vanish for positive reasons, so I think nothing of it. I cried after discovering some people I hadn't known personally but were adjacent to me have died. I didn't notice their absence but I can empathize with the suffering they felt before their death, or the feelings of their family coming to grip with their absence.
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.
> 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.
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.
Several years ago, I lost a friend to cancer. He had previously worked on my team, and was well liked there. My boss at the time, who I adored and still do, hadn’t known him as well but understood that his death devastated to me.
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.
My limited experiences of grief has shown that I react largely the same way at first, and then later probably need that time off. So I'd rather come in and get some work done until things really hit home, and then take that time. Others clearly need the time right away instead.
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.
Yeah I react similarly to what you describe, and if I recall I did take some time off to grieve later.
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).
That was the right move by them. But I can’t say that it takes much compassion to in order to allow/remind an employee that they don’t have to work on a Saturday (hackaton).
The compassionate part was being emotionally receptive to hear and understand why I wanted to be there in the first place despite it not being his instinct about what I needed, to trust me that I knew what would be best for me, and to gently remind me—without pressure—that it would be okay if what I needed changed. I understand that’s a bunch of emotional nuance, which may still not come across. But that nuance can be really hard for even close friends to get right when the other (or both) are grieving.
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.
> Once you say that “they need you [the manager] in a time of crisis” you are putting the tragedy in a work-related context.
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.
It sounds distasteful only because the vast majority of bosses out there aren't worthy of the mantle. An individual's relationship with their immediate boss is one of those intimate things in life and it deserves sanctity.
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.
I’m not saying this as any kind of brag. To be honest, I ended up as a manager by accident and when the team grew too much I found someone else to do it. I still work at the company and come by to help the team out once in a while. That shift happened about 6 months ago.
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.
Of course this looks like the fruits of your leadership (“not to brag”) from your perspective. On the other hand it can look different from the other side when you see your peers jump at the opportunity to please the boss.
As long as one is the person with the authority in a relationship one cannot really know which option it is.
Yeah, that was the part that really gave me pause. While there was always a clear "I'm the guy that you have to listen to" relationship when I ran the team, there wasn't ever, from what I could tell at least, any real attempt by anyone to try to suck up or anything. And now, they've got their own manager to try to suck up to if they want to, but the new guy seems to have a similar style as me (he was the senior-most person on the team when I left).
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.
I think some of that is a lot harder to when remotely, though. You can't do team dinners, and the alternatives feel forced to me. It's also a lot harder to socialise with people that you only interact with a few times a day (if you're asynchronous) because they don't feel like a part of your life like in-personal colleagues would. So it ends up being a very I'm impersonal relationship.
During the time of COVID I've had two jobs, one where the culture is (usually) to keep the cameras on at all times, and one where the culture was to keep the cameras off even when speaking.
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.
>> I could futz around on my phone in particularly boring or useless meetings.
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.
I mostly agree, but I have some resistance to those "social" meetings. I'd rather spend that time working, and I'd never take a social call like that outside of work hours, like I see it happen in other companies.
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.
I might be off here, but I have only been able to feel this sports-like team behaviour in actual sports teams when no money is involved; where everybody tries to be the best and at the same time help their peers to be their best, for no actual personal gain or interest.
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.
>An individual's relationship with their immediate boss is one of those intimate things in life and it deserves sanctity.
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.
"live their actual life" is a subjective view. For lots of people what they do at work is part of their core identity and an integral part of their "actual life".
Sure. I was of course referring to the fact that they have to work in order to survive.
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.
I’m of the former opinion and it boggles the mind a bit thinking that some people view the place they spend the majority of their waking hours as ancillary to their “real life.” Maybe my real life is just boring though :p
Of course it is part of my real life. Doesn’t mean that I necessarily like it, though. And I would be doing something else if I could. (Don’t tell my boss^W^W my noble leader though.)
I felt it was part of my real life. But after leaving the first company (then each subsequent company) I almost never saw any of them again.
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.
For me, the definition of what is "real" is: will I continue to be engaged if I didn't have to, e.g., if I was free of my need to work. My boss doesn't fall in that category, my friends (childhood / some good friends I made in my career) do. Is it possible to have a great boss who you can also consider a friend/mentor well after you are not working for them? Definitely, but that doesn't happen that often. So in absence of having that kind of relationship, yes, they are ancillary to my real life. How much time I spend with them in the work setting has nothing to do with it.
During my doctoral years, two students in my department took their own lives (separate events, to be clear). The events themselves were horribly tragic, but the lack of even a clear acknowledgement of the causes of death left a surreal sense of denial.
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.
> Even though awareness has grown, those old stigmas and default behaviors remain just under the surface.
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.
> Mental health issues are hard for some people to understand if they haven’t experienced their own challenges.
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.
I think the biggest issue comes from thinking that since it's in the mind and not in the body, you can just cure it by yourself: be happy, not depressed!
Which is obviously wrong and comes from ignorance.
As someone who has experienced a lot depression myself and with family, I think the chemical/body mechanism is grossly overstated.
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.
Right. The phrase "it's all in your head" takes on new connotations because hey, guess what, I live in my head 24/7. Yes it is in my head. It's inescapable. Medicine is tools and technology, and it's a wheelchair for the mind's broken legs.
Depression and suicidal thoughts have a lot of public awareness and sympathy, at least in my country which has had public health campaigns about it. There are still many mental health problems that are stigmatized because they come with behaviors and feelings that are rightly stigamitized in normal people who have the power to not do them. Things like anxiety, anger, violence, inappropriate sexual feelings, and self-pity.
I would argue it's understood poorly and discussed in an unhelpful way.
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.
This is a bit of a chicken-or-egg problem. If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above. So I come back to the idea that you need to look inward, into the core causes of your depression, and make some sort of peace with them — freeing you to move forward. Therapy helps.
>If you’re depressed, you don’t have the energy to do the beneficial things you’re recommending above.
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.
This comment highlights just how different each person’s journey is.
> 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.
>And for many people, their depression can be traced back to specific events or situations.
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.
Fair - people definitely have different paths, and I don’t mean to suggest that therapy is a panacea. I will say however that not all therapy is focused on trauma; it can also address patterns of thought and behavior which are not conducive to your happiness. In short, I think good therapy is often about learning how to have deeper relationships with yourself and with others through being able to practice vulnerability in a safe, controlled environment. That’s helpful to people whether or not they’ve suffered deep trauma, as feeling connected to others is often the first step out of depression.
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.
> it’s easy to downplay it or believe that the person struggling can change just by thinking hard enough.
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.
> The reason some of us downplay mental health issues is because we hear stats like "97% kids are ADHD"
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.
I agree, “mental health issues” are much more similar to obesity than to cancer.
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?”)
> I agree, “mental health issues” are much more similar to obesity than to cancer.
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.
Do you think it wasn't acknowledged specifically because it was suicide, or was it an overall culture of not addressing the cause of death in general? Because the second one sounds fine to me.
If it's specifically with suicide, then the company has a stigma with mental health, which is not okay. However, if it's always "teammate died" with no extra information, I can respect it.
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.
If there's whispers the cat is out of the bag... the most respectful move is to simply address it and extend counseling
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)
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.
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.
The organization is liable for their own communications. They aren’t liable for the rumor mill. It doesn’t have to make sense objectively; the organization’s actions only have to make sense from their perspective and incentives.
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.
That is the worst! I remember when a long-time team member died unexpectedly one weekend. We all learned about it at the Monday standup meeting and we luckily had the common sense to cancel the standup because no one wanted to talk.
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 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.
That's the rub, at least for me. The poster above you is right, corporations are just corporations. If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin:
corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body.
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.
> If you look up the etymology of the word it comes from latin: corpus (genitive corporis) "body, dead body, animal body.
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".
> 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.
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.
Once heard this in response to a discussion of an org's virtue signalling. What do you make of it, in this context?
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!"
An evolutionary psychologist might argue something like that.
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.
It's not self evident that virtue _signals_ are evolutionarily advantageous. Actually being virtuous is what provides a benefit to your society / tribe / species.
But this is humans we are taking about. Humans have evolved genetically to be maximally flexible in behaviour. Our psychology is learned from role models and repurposed by our cultural institutions[1]. So here we are, discussing a story passed down over generations, to guide our moral values. This is culture, not biology.
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"
The fact that a company has the legal rights of a person is a mockery of human rights in my opinion, and Citizens United a huge mistake.
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.
> 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.
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.
To reap benefits of cooperation, there is no need to signal it. It still helps the species survive and thrive, even if the only organism aware of an act of cooperation is the one providing help.
People forget: in this story, the Samaritans were enemies and known to be hostile. So how is it virtue signaling, to another group of people to whom you don't want to belong? In this story it was an act of altruism.
The Samaritan knew this was his opportunity to be immortalised in a religious text so he pretended to be extra good. And he nearly got away with it for 2400 years, until all of us in this thread figured it out.
In an ideal world, the onlookers are secretly good souls, working acts of kindness and charity away from the public eye. In practice, they typically have no virtue to signal, and their comments are merely a variation of "sour grapes".
To the person injured, the reason for being helped is less important than the fact that he was HELPED.
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.
I don't think of it as virtue signal as much as it is community building, which certainly has a reproductive advantage if the community is stronger because of it.
They say that, but what actually bothers them is that it makes them look bad. They might have wanted to help the man, but they all invented reasons not to, because they knew the majority would respond exactly as they did…
Precisely. These are the kinds of people who say that buying a more energy-efficient car/biking/eating less meat/volunteering/donating to charity etc is "virtue signaling," because they're just pissed off that it makes them look bad.
If the Samaritan had tweeted about how he felt the person really was deserving of help, he would have been signaling. Maybe they scheduled a seminar for their company on how best to help people after having walked by?
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.
> But the Samaritan acted. Helped someone. Did a thing.
> 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.
Virtue signaling would be if you took a picture of the guy and posted it on social media complaining that such an outcome was possible in this world without doing anything that could actually help.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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).
Job places are never your family, it's just a place to make money to keep life going, my take is, don't expect too much from the company you are working at other than paychecks.
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 had a colleague die in his cubical at Lockheed...
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.
I had another colleague at Lockheed that forgot that when he was on VPN, his default printer was an MFP in the office... he *printed* (2AM) out a bunch of gay porn not realizing he was on VPN... yeah that was also super FN weird when HR came to me in the morning and handed me a manila envelope containing said printed out gay porn... and demanded "I NEED TO KNOW WHO PRINTED THIS OUT NOW!"
it was an EVP... married with kids....
He may be dead now but he left lockheed to become a park ranger.
Disclaimer: I'm about to disclose some personal information so will probably burn this nick shortly.
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.
> the serious ones don't broadcast their intentions (simply because they don't want to be stopped from doing it).
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.
I had someone I knew from two consecutive jobs commit suicide. We'd routinely cross paths through meetings, water cooler chats etc. Nice guy, smart engineer. Capable of handling stressful incidents without batting an eyelid and spotting the shorted path to the best resolution. The kind of engineer you'd be lucky to have on your service team.
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.
> Capable of handling stressful incidents without batting an eyelid...
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.
I've been working a Full Time Employee in the industry for over 8 years at multiple companies. Never once has HR done anything remotely useful to help me when there were family problems or tragedy, except maybe a couple weeks of paid leave.
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've been working a Full Time Employee in the industry for over 8 years at multiple companies. Never once has HR done anything remotely useful to help me when there were family problems or tragedy, except maybe a couple weeks of paid leave.
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.
I thought the same thing. The only thing I'd want from an employer would be time away and space to deal with things on my own or with family/friends. No texts, calls, emails about anything work related. If you have social connections at work, some show of support from colleagues (cards, flowers, calls, donations, etc) may be appropriate, but I would not expect that. Struggling to think of anything else most employers should be expected to do.
Our company offers its US employees access to a service called Wellthy. It is good to know that when you are dealing with issues in your personal life you can reach out to a dedicated, named individual that has expertise in the area you are struggling and that is there to help you navigate and organize. Even if it's just for the feeling that you are not alone.
Similar programs are available to employees in other countries.
How people can feel connected as a team without even video I'll never understand.
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).
I can remember being on IRC in the mid-90s and hearing that a channel regular had passed away. I'd never met them, heard them, seen their picture, and never even talked to them privately. But somehow there was a real sense of loss and sadness, anyway.
I'm still on IRC, and find it better than audio only.
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.
I’ve had online relationships that are just as close and just as real as the people I know in person.
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.
Many of my longest friends are from online relationships, be it people I met online or from people I met in person but where circumstanes have left irl meetups very infrequent (e.g. moved countries).
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.
So if you ring your parents you don't feel connected with them? You don't feel connected with your friends playing online games?
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.
I've witnessed a company name a hall after a guy who took his life. We all knew that the main reason he did it was because the company wouldn't secure his position. He was an expert on a very specialized field and losing his job meant he would have to move to a different country. It still feels hypocritical when I think about it.
It is generally accepted that a company's mission is simply to make money for its shareholders. Management will fire good, well-performing, committed people without thinking twice about how it impacts their life. But then someone dies in a car accident or takes their life and ... it's memorial time? It feels off.
What you're describing is a company naming a hall after an employee when that employee was just numbers on a spreadsheet to them. What this article is talking about is a specific team, who had a personal relationship with Pete, adding that memorial as part of their own coping process. The former is definitely cynical and offputting, while the latter is human and heartfelt.
You’re conflating company with the team and direct peers. You’re right about the company mission but the workers are human and make connections with their peers.
I agree that companies should be less exploitative and generally evil, but that doesn't subtract from this particular case. I agree that it can be done cynically though, and that's messed up.
That's the very reason why I don't want full remote as a norm. I want to see my people and meet colleagues, for a good laugh or whatever but for human interactions that I value a lot. Very sad story here, twice as sad with that profound lack of human interaction...
For me, "my people" are at home. The transactional work relationships do nothing for me on a human or social level. It's like when a pretty waitress is nice to you, it means little since she is paid to be nice.
whereas I generally like people. You say: "The transactional work relationships do nothing for me on a human or social level" perhaps the mistake you are making is seeing any interaction with the people at work as purely transactional - or being absolutely determined to keep it that way.
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.
Here's the problem. If I talk with my friends and misspeak or say something I don't mean, worst case is I lose the friendship. At work I lose my livelyhood. That means I have to have a constant cognitive overhead at all times at work, I am unable to explore ideas that don't fit into that narrow box. If your life fits entirely into the confines of polite society maybe you don't have this worry, but I can't bring my full self into these situations and that makes it feel transactional to me.
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.
Everything except politics, religion, sexuality, drug use, firearms, philosophy and your ambitions in life (unless they are die working here).
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.
I'm pretty sure I know about the sexuality of my coworkers - not something that come up as a matter of conversation much, just gets mentioned in passing and most of the company has pronouns in their e-mail signatures, now so that's gender sorted. Firearms doesn't come up because I'm in the UK. Yes, I know about the ambitions of most, and who is thinking of resigning in a month or so. I think I'm the onlly gamer and people think it's highly amusing that I watch Twitch streams in my late 50s, but hey.
Sure, I'd tend to avoid politics and religion - but those are hardly massively limiting constraints.
Very sad. I'm not sure if this is problem of remote working but more of a relationship / communication / poor company culture issue. But, it clearly does show remote work done wrong. The theme had been set from the interview...
> 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.
Not reading the article because I think I'll find it too upsetting but I think you're right that the issues described aren't necessarily remote based.
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.
Thank you for sharing such an honest piece. Suicide is a tragedy without peer, the result of pain, illness, and some part selfishness. I feel compassion for Pete and his fight with mental illness, sadness for the friends and coworkers left behind, and anger on behalf of his wife and children who will now carry an incredible burden.
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.
Sadly, it is infectious. That may be why traditions have tended to marginalize it when it happens. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker discussed it in one of his books by noting that when a prominent suicide happens and is televised, there is a corresponding slight uptick of accidents in the area. He suggests that merely the suggestion of suicide can tip the balance in favor of reactionary recklessness for a tiny percentage in response to a bad event.
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.
I lost a colleague year ago. Both him and me were at the similar level, we had really good professional relationship. He had family issues and while we talked, he never wanted to share too much (but I knew what is happening). We did know each other in person before we went remote because of pandemic.
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.
Depends on the particulars. In some countries in Europe, contractors pay much less taxes than FTEs. Hence, a lot of people prefer contracting. The additional benefit of being outside of grasp of HR and their processes (I'm mostly a contractor and never once in my life had to formaly define "yearly goals" or write up evaluation of my peers) is also nice for a lot of people.
Isn’t it difficult/impossible to employ a remote worker from a different country? I assume the company was American, while the contractor worked from Scotland.
The company is free to treat contractors as well as an employee in many respects, if it chooses, even if pays them as a contractor internationally and has the legal constraints associated with that.
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.
It's interesting that you think that they're "clearly" "second-class". I've never had a feeling that the contractors on the teams I worked on were treated any differently. Obviously I didn't know their pay/benefits, but that's even true of folks in different offices/countries that are FTEs.
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.
> Obviously I didn't know their pay/benefits, but that's even true of folks in different offices/countries that are FTEs.
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.
Worked in the vicinity of a guy in one of our US offices who flip flopped between employee and contractor a few times on his own initiative. He eventually settled on a FTE role when he became a manager and to my understanding that was a company decision that no we can't have a contractor manager.
In developed countries (so not the US) that have public healthcare, I've heard contracting roles are much more common, typically preferred by workers, and pay better.
I don't know, I was offered W2 at my job and declined it. As a contractor I get to invest far more of my salary towards tax deductible retirement accounts and I get paid for OT. I don't get paid time off which is unfortunate. But I have had projects where I consistently worked 80 - 90 hour weeks. I am lucky enough to get my benefits via my wife's job though. I do agree with you though regarding someone that wants to come on board as a w2 employee, stringing them along for so long is pretty bad.
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.
Managers, one solution here is pretty easy. For instance, if your team has a daily status meeting, just tell them "every other Friday, cameras are encouraged". That's it. Don't make it mandatory, don't make jokes about "Joe never turns his camera on, what does his place look like?" In a world that is getting more and more lonely for a lot of people, this can be a life saver.
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!"
I would like to gently caution and remind everyone that seeing coworker faces once a week may not have been the make-or-break in why Pete took his own life. And for all we know it may have made him feel worse.
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 say this both being a non-unionized often-contractor, but in some other industries that would be the union. Ignoring all the politics sounds that, growing up I certainly got to witness my dad’s coworkers and union come together to help out their members personally when tragedy struck, as well as planning social events and fundraisers. Some parts of union can be really bad, but they’re not exclusively bad.
In a HR org that is damaging to the company, they always side with the company; What is unique to HR, is that can often turn them AGAINST an individual worker.
I could see the difference with "commodity" employees, and that sucks, but what's the big difference if we are talking about programmers? The company is obviously very interested to make us not want to leave, and also probably interested that we feel like caring about the product.
Taking good care of employees and contractors can be in the company's interest, though. It's costly to lose them and having to hire new ones, and ex employees talking badly about a company also is not good.
(I'd think, I don't work in HR, so no idea what actual directives they have).
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.
Such mandatory face-time—and mandatory social interaction in general—can make things better or worse. It can make things better because someone might need more social interaction. On the other hand it can make things worse because some people are more lonely in a crowd rather than when they are by themselves.
Had 2 panic attacks from a well being manager forcing social interaction to keep up team moral. So yeah there is no easy solution, we're all different.
HR has 1 job. Protect the company, they aren't your friends at all. If announcing a teammates passing helps the company they would do it, if they don't think it would they wouldn't.
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'.
I'd be interested to see the logic applied to other jobs. What's your job using this kind of reductionist logic? Are there any jobs that aren't "protect the company" in some way?
If you're working for a for-profit company .... uhh no?
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
If there's one thing I've learned from mgmt it's that happy teams make for performant teams. The employees trust that I'll support them in creating a fulfilling work environment and look out for them. If I'd take all decisions with the companies profits in mind I'd break that trust which wouldn't lead anywhere good. When an issue arises I'll sometimes be on the side with sr mgmt, sometimes with the team, sometimes it will be more complex than choosing sides. Not all decisions can (or should) be boiled down to dollars and cents.
Perhaps you should ask someone in your HR department to tell you more about their mission as I doubt they'd share these views.
I see this often and it is a ridiculous over simplification.
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 wouldn't expect HR to do anything, nor would I expect them to send out a mail if someone quit or were fired.
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.
I was thinking mostly about my experience working fully remotely for the last two years at more than one contracting job. And saying that if I was a manager, I would definitely tell people on Fridays or every other Friday "we turn on cameras if you are comfortable with it."
Sorry to hear for their loss. It's tough losing coworkers. Feels like we've lost more than our fair share over the past several years.
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.
> He was a contractor remember, so more hours means more money, and I could reconcile this without thinking twice.
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.
See, I feel like it's almost the opposite - I like salaried because I work my 40 and then feel no guilt for slacking off after that unless it's an incident/emergency. If I had a contract that paid me for overtime/hourly, I'd have days where I didn't have anything going on in the evening and it would be harder to not just put in an extra couple hours of work for some extra money.
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 a larger issue. And it's not just limited to remote contractors. Even in the cushiest of office jobs with full benefits, seasoned HR and regular check-ins these personal issues can and do impact employees - often times not resulting in death but universally in personal suffering.
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.
We once hired a new colleague, and a week later I had a WebEx call to say 'hi' and we chatted about graph algorithms. It was a good-vibes call, and we closed saying we both looked forward to collaborating on research topics of mutual interests.
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.
I interviewed with my current company (where we work mostly-remote) last year. One of my interviewers was a very sharp, experienced, and nice developer. After I learned they were going to make me an offer, I emailed my interviewers, and this developer emailed me back saying he was looking forward to working together.
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.
No, not a family. A Team. Being a member of a team requires hard work and that everyone pulls their weight. Bad players often get traded, and sometimes another team snags a good player. I don't like "Family" because families are (ideally) a place where you are unconditionally loved. Nope. At work, I hope to like my coworers. But we're not family. We are a Team. And no matter how much I like somebody, if they aren't pulling their weight, they're likely to get "traded".
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 286 ms ] threadIt'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.
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.
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!
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://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27909275
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...
https://youtu.be/xYemnKEKx0c
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...
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.
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.
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.
I've witnessed a company name a hall after a guy who took his life. We all knew that the main reason he did it was because the company wouldn't secure his position. He was an expert on a very specialized field and losing his job meant he would have to move to a different country. It still feels hypocritical when I think about it.
It is generally accepted that a company's mission is simply to make money for its shareholders. Management will fire good, well-performing, committed people without thinking twice about how it impacts their life. But then someone dies in a car accident or takes their life and ... it's memorial time? It feels off.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.