[HN Gopher] Traits of good remote leaders
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Traits of good remote leaders
Author : sfg
Score : 294 points
Date : 2020-09-10 11:18 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| api wrote:
| I am hoping remote work will "nerf" in person charisma. It's not
| that charisma is bad, but in person it often seems to overcome
| any other concern. I have seen so many examples of total fools
| who nevertheless gain power and leadership on charisma alone. It
| has the power to overcome reason and speak directly to the brain
| stem.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| I've been remote for ~5 years, and in mostly-remote orgs during
| those times. You can ABSOLUTELY bully people remotely, dominate
| conversations, and play games.
|
| Leave someone off the invite, have side-bar convos via slack
| without people knowing, mute people in calls -- and being the
| loudest, pushiest person in the room absolutely works on skype
| if the meeting presenter won't mute you.
| extremeMath wrote:
| Meh, I have that in person charisma. I get a bit panicky online
| because you can't see someone's face.
|
| I don't know if I'm talking too much or if they are bored.
| Online I'm quick/short.
|
| That said, I enjoy being a tech guy over a leader. I tried
| leadership in done personal business and I don't like playing
| politics or psychology tricks.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Since I'm visually impaired (legally blind), I always have
| that uncertainty you described, even in person. I'm often
| conscious that I might be talking too much. At some point you
| just learn to live with it.
| jacknews wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| Remote working does remove some of the rapport and chemistry
| from relationships, which is regrettable, but on the other hand
| it also reduces the ability for people to 'dominate the room',
| intimidate, etc.
|
| These kinds of people are sometimes intellectual giants, but
| very often simply bullies.
| vsareto wrote:
| I think it's the other way, the rapport and chemistry allow
| you to resist someone when they're (consciously or not)
| dominating the room. You're more easily divided if you don't
| have that with your coworkers.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| It's both.
| jacknews wrote:
| I think you're in a bad place if things have devolved to a
| herd-metality us-vs-them.
|
| But I find well-aimed questions can often derail attempts
| to railroad a situation from a position of power, and it
| can be very uncomfortable to field those questions in an
| in-person setting. Much less so remotely.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Something else will replace it. The people who are effective on
| calls, emails and chat will get the brownie points instead.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Sure, but being effective in calls, emails, and chat requires
| fewer advantages from factors that aren't under your control.
| Consider that on an audio-only call, a blind person can be
| just as effective as a sighted person, if not more so (edit:
| until sighted people learn to go without visual cues as if
| they were blind). And in email or text chat, a person with a
| thick accent, a person with a speech impediment, or a deaf
| person can be as effective as someone who speaks well in the
| team's common language.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I can't quite pinpoint it, but something feels off about
| this reasoning.
|
| No matter what, some group of people is going to be at a
| disadvantage. It doesn't really make sense to me that you
| want everyone to specifically cater for the minority, as
| opposed to the majority.
|
| Trying to somewhat accommodate everyone? Great. Forcing
| changes to accommodate minorities? Doesn't really make
| sense to me.
| raziel2p wrote:
| "Everyone" kind of includes minorities. And how do you
| define "trying"? Is making social media posts on
| diversity enough to qualify as trying, even if your
| hiring process only hires white dudes?
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Here are the best responses I can give to that:
|
| 1. Fully abled people are already, as John Scalzi put it
| (with regard to another category), playing on the lowest
| difficulty setting, across all of their lives. SO I think
| it's not so bad to take away some advantages, to level
| the playing field.
|
| 2. There are different kinds of disadvantages. There are
| disadvantages from skills you haven't yet learned, and
| there are disadvantages from abilities you can never
| have. What I propose is to replace the latter category
| for some people with the former category for others. Of
| course, if biotech someday allows us to give physical
| abilities to people who don't have them, that changes the
| equation. And perhaps my thick accent example was weak;
| my understanding is that it's possible, with great
| difficulty, to change one's accent.
| dongping wrote:
| Yes, indeed, having a peck order in group is natural.
|
| The different favorable trait would then have effect on the
| productivity, though. Asynchronous communication is way more
| friendlier to deep work like programming.
| mdifrgechd wrote:
| I've thought about this too. The voice and content that
| dominates in online discussions for example is very different
| than my experience with in-person collaboration. I don't know
| if it's better or worse, but different skills are needed to
| be effective, and they are not necessarily correlated with
| having the best ideas or being best at the job. So there will
| be a new equilibrium point that will benefit some and set
| others back. But I dont see it being more or less fair in the
| end.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| IME remote managers have to communicate more explicitly, which I
| prefer.
|
| Remote also feels more empowering should one encounter a bad
| manager. During my WFO days I had a boss who berated me privately
| and publicly; even in front of clients. It was humiliating and
| destructive. Only when a more senior (by age, not rank) engineer
| finally rebuke them did the situation improve.
| spurdoman77 wrote:
| The good thing with WFH is that if your superior pisses you off
| you can just start drinking beer and stop working, and no one
| will probably notice.
| blaser-waffle wrote:
| At least for a couple of days. You can't just punt things
| down the road indefinitely. I was remote for a while before
| COVID and trust me, I've played myself that way in the
| past...
|
| To the parent's point: 100% agree, you essentially need a
| different style of communication. Has to be more explicit and
| include some built-in check-ups and dates. It's easy to pop
| in and see if someone is frustrated, a lot harder to see them
| failing remotely.
| roland35 wrote:
| I've seen this happen in the office too after some stressful
| or particularly frustrating events at the office! Everyone
| has a "meeting" scheduled in the unused old conference room
| in the basement with beverages provided...
| acron0 wrote:
| If that's the case where you work then I wish you good luck!
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| That manager was fired for other reasons. Company folded
| years ago, also for other reasons.
|
| Ironically I think the hardest part is not internalizing
| the temptation to be an ass to others. Maybe if I had
| called them out on it myself? IDK.
| mjayhn wrote:
| I have a string of terrible workplaces that I'm pretty
| sure gave me work-anxiety/ptsd (not to belittle worse
| experiences, but these were bad) and I still have a lot
| of shame that I didn't speak out more or do more - but I
| was at the start of my career and had no power to do so
| that wouldn't have directly affected my ability to eat.
| That was 10 years ago, now I just try to be the opposite
| for everyone and amplify peoples knowledge that there
| really are abusive places and on the inverse there are
| supportive and collaborative places.
|
| On the flip side I can say after 5 years there I never
| once referred a soul and in fact helped many get jobs
| elsewhere and have pulled friends out of them when I
| could.
| hanniabu wrote:
| > remote managers have to communicate more explicitly
|
| Can you provide an example of this and whatever the implicit
| alternative is?
| bfuclusion wrote:
| What you don't get on remote work is the manager going around
| to your cube and saying "work on this" with no record of it
| happening. Since they have to communicate via things which
| leave logs, and you have to communicate what you're doing and
| why more often, all that stuff is above board. In ideal
| places it would always be above board.
| theptip wrote:
| Explicit:
|
| "Ok, so action items from this meeting are:
|
| * Bob, you were going to investigate bug foo and circle back
| tomorrow.
|
| * Alice, you had an idea that you were going to explore,
| please let us know when you can deliver that."
|
| Implicit:
|
| "Great meeting folks, see you tomorrow".
|
| [Next week]: "Bob, did you investigate bug foo yet? What do
| you mean you thought Alice was going to do it, I asked you
| to!"
| enriquto wrote:
| This is an interesting read, if a bit light. Unfortunately, its
| quality is diminished by the ridiculous stock photos that have
| nothing to do with the text.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| The stock photos were people working remotely and looking
| relaxed. Which, I think, is part of the point of the article;
| stuff "leaders" would normally do in meetings are kind of lost
| on somebody who is in their study feeling secure.
| ericmcer wrote:
| I definitely do not get up, shower, do my hair, put on a
| collared shirt, and then go back into my room and sit at my
| desk. The stock photos in this were jarringly non-candid for
| what remote work actually looks like.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| There's definitively a bigger expectation that women should
| dress up while at the office. Personally, I'll still wake
| up early, do my hairs and a put on a light makeup just for
| the 30 minutes long morning meeting. Sure, I'm wearing
| pajamas pants but you wouldn't know it.
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journa
| l...
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-you-
| wear-m...
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167
| 4...
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/299431552_The_Impa
| c...
| triyambakam wrote:
| I used to be that way, but now I do the full routine as if
| I were going into the office. I like it and I feel better
| about myself and more focused. I also am now very strict
| about having an actual home office which I go in from 9 to
| 12 with only my work computer, check out for lunch for an
| hour, then back in the office for the last half of the day
| with one break in the middle. This has made me really
| productive and let go of feeling like I need to be online
| all the time, working until 11pm, which I used to do
| because I always felt distracted and that I wasn't fully
| focused - in my boxers, watching Youtube and taking lots of
| breaks.
| enriquto wrote:
| Anyhow, these photos are clearly not of people at work.
| They are posing for the photo, and the work "material"
| they have does not make sense.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Sorry yes, I agree there.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Getting shower and dressed "for work" is most common advice
| given to people getting used to working from home along
| with keeping a regular work scheduled and having space
| dedicated to work.
|
| Just because you or I may not get dressed up ... my wife
| certainly does.
| whack wrote:
| This is an interesting comment, if a bit light. Unfortunately,
| its quality is diminished by the ridiculous tangent that has
| nothing to do with the text.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| So I am not the only one who noticed that all the books were
| facing backwards or their cover not visible in the stock photo
| (probably for the same reason they don't show brand of the
| phones being used in movies, unless it is a deliberate product
| placement).
| afandian wrote:
| Sadly the BBC (which as an institution I will defend) feel
| the need to put pictures on everything, whether salient or
| not. I'm sure there's research that says that readers like
| their news articles to have pictures, but they don't always
| add anything.
|
| Yesterday, though, the pictures editor made a masterful
| choice.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54088206
| moltar wrote:
| And typos:
|
| > actually dothe work of gettingprojects done
| eternalban wrote:
| Are you entirely sure they have "nothing" to do with the
| content.
| 0xcafecafe wrote:
| I have bookmarked a javascript snippet which a friend wrote to
| enable better text reading experience on such websites. It just
| hides all images in the page.
| steve76 wrote:
| Remote work always ends up like this for me:
|
| A private room with the meeting always on opened with screen
| share. I'm online when I'm at my desk.
|
| Speakers on, so people can shout for me through my house.
| Everyone at home learns to either laugh at them or ignore them.
|
| No matter what someone else does, I don't criticize them.
|
| I learn quick to ignore people. I work through their chatter even
| people calling me by name.
|
| I always focus on the most important problem and nothing else.
| When that's done, I move onto the next. I don't leave until at
| least one of those are completely finished a day, regardless of
| other people.
|
| If I ask someone to contribute, and they mess up big, I just say
| "Great Job!" and redo their work. Don't expect any contributions
| of merit. Next time I give them something simple or just pay them
| and get rid of them.
|
| I now have a grave grim stare, like judges do. If it bothers
| people I don't look away on their time. I look away on mine. Even
| remote, people can still be very dangerous or just waste your
| time.
|
| At start I say no unless it's perfect. I often give an hour or
| two at no-charge if I don't know. I'm never afraid to walk away
| at the slightest problem. I'm here to make money not babysit or
| cleanup.
| supergeek133 wrote:
| There is also another important factor... mutual respect.
|
| To be stereotypical, I'd go ahead and assume that a majority of
| people on HN work in tech and likely are paid a decent salary.
|
| The one thing I find in bad leaders (remote or otherwise), and
| relational in poorly run companies is the lack of trust.
|
| I've worked with leaders who micromanage as much/more than I was
| when I worked a minimum wage/high supervisory job. This is bad
| and holds back many employees/companies. It encourages "shared
| courage" and centralized decision making.
|
| I'm usually amazed at how much responsibility people are given
| who make over 6 figures, but yet how little _decision_ power they
| are given. Even when the leader may not have the same knowledge
| level as their employee.
|
| I've had the pleasure of working with many people who respect
| that I know how to manage my time, that I know things they don't,
| and the understand that I appreciate the same about them.
|
| I can imagine how much the "wrong" side of this is amplified when
| you suddenly aren't around each other all the time.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I suspect that the ideal primary role of a leader in a remote
| setting is to serve as a communication channel.
|
| In person, it's somehow easier to tune the office chatter in and
| out as needed to keep track of what your colleagues are up to. I
| have yet to find an electronic replacement for this phenomenon.
| Email, if nobody thought to CC you, you simply won't find out. If
| people deal with this by defensively CCing everyone, you drown in
| email. Slack's value is inversely proportional to its uptake: The
| more people talk on it, the more it resembles a sort of workplace
| Twitter where it's simply impossible to try and keep track of
| what everyone is saying, so you give up and resort to only
| looking at it when you're trying to slack off. Threads attempt to
| work around this by replicating the problems of email in a chat
| app.
|
| I suspect that an old-school web forum like phpBB could work
| well, but any technical merits won't overcome the social
| perception. There's just no getting around the nerd factor there.
|
| The only technique I've seen work well is the manager-as-
| dispatcher approach. This poor soul becomes the designated
| firehose-drinker. They get CC'd on every email, and they
| subscribe to every Slack thread. They keep an eye out for
| anything that Sam or Pat might want to know about, and check in
| to make sure that Sam or Pat is keeping an eye on it.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > They keep an eye out for anything that Sam or Pat might want
| to know about, and check in to make sure that Sam or Pat is
| keeping an eye on it.
|
| This is miserable for everyone. Don't make Slack the center of
| your workflow. Don't let spontaneous Slack chats dictate your
| process.
|
| The manager's job shouldn't be to scour Slack for information
| and then ping every person who might need to participate in or
| read each conversation. That just amplifies the noise. It's
| terrible to be deliberately ignoring Slack for 30 minutes to
| focus on work, only to have your manager ping you back into
| Slack to make sure you don't miss something.
|
| Instead, the manager should be forcing important conversations
| to happen outside of spontaneous Slack conversations. If
| something important is decided in Slack, the decision needs to
| be recorded in the tracking ticket, Wiki, or other important
| location. If it changes anyone's active work, they should be
| interrupted. Otherwise, they can pick up the information from
| the single source of record (ticket, wiki, etc.) rather than
| being expected to follow every detail of Slack all day.
|
| Small groups working on tasks together should have private PMs
| or channels to discuss implementation details, not giant Slack
| channels with 10s or 100s of members.
|
| A good manager will avoid design by committee and will stay
| ahead of the spontaneous Slack firehose by arranging planning
| sessions and scheduled meetings where necessary.
|
| Don't let the Slack chaos drive your workflow. Don't try to
| make managing Slack someone's job. Manage the workflow first,
| deliberately rather than reactively. If important conversations
| are happening spontaneously in Slack too often, that's a sign
| that you need to fix your workflow.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Sorry, allow me to rephrase. I didn't meant that the
| manager's job is to dogpile everyone onto every issue. It was
| to make sure that work is being judiciously assigned to the
| right people, and everyone else is getting progress updates
| as needed.
|
| My working hypothesis here is that, when there is someone
| that the team trusts to do that, it will ultimately reduce
| the level of overcommunication and design-by-committee.
| Everyone feels more comfortable focusing on their immediate
| work, and limiting their active participation in things that
| don't require their active participation, because they know
| they'll get the memo.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| It doesn't matter much if the manager dispatches the pings
| ASAP or buffers them up for later. You're still letting
| Slack chaos drive your process instead of leading with
| process and using Slack as a tool.
|
| In some ways, having the manager buffer up the pings is
| even worse, because then each person has to revive the
| topic again if they want to have a voice. People don't want
| to be left out of important conversations, so the only
| solution is to watch Slack like a hawk all day. The people
| who spend all day in Slack instead of doing work end up
| dominating the decision making while the people who focus
| on work suffer.
|
| Instead, don't hesitate to gather people for a scheduled
| call after lunch, at the end of the day, or first thing
| tomorrow morning to clear it up. Record important decisions
| in a single source of truth that isn't Slack, like your
| Wiki or ticket tracker.
|
| Treat Slack almost like you would in-office conversations:
| If you have a spontaneous watercooler conversation about an
| important topic in-person, you wouldn't go gather everyone
| involved to come to the watercooler to continue the
| conversation. You'd send out an e-mail update to others who
| need to know. Or you'd scheduled a follow-up call or
| meeting to discuss it.
|
| The in-person rules of communication and avoiding
| interruption are a good template for how to behave in
| Slack.
| gadabout wrote:
| You keep assuming that the manager is only delegating via
| Slack pings, which is not my experience at all and also
| not what mumblemumble specified.
|
| The best managers know what the appropriate communication
| channel is for their employees and the issue at hand, and
| I don't think any strong managers are going to point to
| Slack pings at their preferred method.
| ticmasta wrote:
| >> scheduled call after lunch, at the end of the day, or
| first thing tomorrow morning
|
| This sounds great in theory, but one of the key issues
| with managing remote teams is there is no common time in
| the day that is "after lunch, end of day or first thing
| in the morning".
|
| The reality is most remote scenarios require you adopt at
| least some async process; fighting this is a losing
| battle.
|
| Some good news: your manager's job was always facilitate
| internally and protect externally; how this is
| accomplished has certainly changed but the core essence
| of management, if anything, is even more crystallized
| now.
| lukethomas wrote:
| async is not a losing battle. Trying to handle async
| communication processes manually is.
|
| Right now, most async communication processes (like
| status updates or daily standups) involve a ton of manual
| effort to make sure that people share this information.
|
| I strongly recommend creating systems and using
| automation as much as possible here.
| bfuclusion wrote:
| This thread basically enumerates why I started my
| company. Manual control of workflow and keeping up to
| speed is at best a waste of time. I want my _Computer_ to
| do the boring repetitive crap.
| mjayhn wrote:
| I feel like I need to mention this in case some eyes see
| it that need to hear it. If you're running global teams
| and you have a side of that team that has to show up at
| the ass-crack of dawn every morning while you get to show
| up at 4PM with the entire context of a full work day
| behind you - ROTATE THE TIMES or ASK the engineers on
| both ends of the spectrum how they feel about it and be
| understanding if some of them don't want to show up at
| 8am anymore. Not to mention it puts us into a super weird
| conversation where we're half asleep and trying to sound
| like we know what's going on to someone grilling us with
| full cognition.
|
| Also, async is one thing. Respecting your peoples time is
| another thing. Slack, etc can show you what time it is in
| that employees time zone. How do you feel when the first
| thing you do is open Slack while sipping coffee and
| eating your bagel and your boss has 10 messages to you
| from 6am-9am your time?
|
| Probably not the best start to your day. Let people log
| in, socialize, be humans and colleagues for a little bit
| before you hammer them, especially now when work is the
| only real human interaction some people are getting.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > How do you feel when the first thing you do is open
| Slack while sipping coffee and eating your bagel and your
| boss has 10 messages to you from 6am-9am your time?
|
| Feels like it's a day that ends in 'y'. (My boss and our
| team get along famously and are all in the same time
| zone, yet have loads of traffic on our channel(s) between
| 6 and 9 most days.)
| mjayhn wrote:
| Oh totally in team slacks, I'm talking more about the "do
| this as soon as you wake up" DM you types, usually the
| "Hey.."'ers.
| bfuclusion wrote:
| Async is the way to go here. The only time an engineer
| should have to care what time zone somebody is in is when
| it's an actual emergency.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Process should follow people, not vice versa. If you only
| allow collaboration at 10am on Tuesdays for project X and
| 2 pm Friday for Project Y, you are missing a lot of
| collaboration.
| mjayhn wrote:
| > You'd send out an e-mail update to others who need to
| know. Or you'd scheduled a follow-up call or meeting to
| discuss it.
|
| Just my anecdata; this is the polar opposite of what I
| want. I do not ever, ever want a meeting or a follow up
| call over an async slack message unless it _must be a
| meeting_.
|
| Some managers really need to talk to their engineers and
| see what the engineers need to perform best and not make
| every assumption based on what they, the manager, are
| used to from the last 10 years of their career at 1-2
| places.
|
| Forcing a square into a round hole makes engs leave and
| I've worked for a lot of managers who feel like they
| stopped growing a decade ago or are using outdated
| ideologies because the people who promoted them are so
| far away from the real people creating the sauce now.
| freeqaz wrote:
| This comment makes me realize that I've experienced both
| sides of this coin now. I've had the manager that asked
| for daily email updates. And I've worked in a grind silo
| until I was finished.
|
| There is a balance between them. I think where you draw
| that line largely depends on the team. An effective
| manager navigates a team by helping to unblock and de-
| risk efforts. It's hard for a manager to do that with
| zero information.
| mjayhn wrote:
| Yeah I've finally gotten enough experience to feel like
| I've run the gamut of management styles and the best
| advice I can give is that managers need to explicitly ask
| questions to some people and genuinely work to improve
| their performance. Some people (especially new or those
| who think they're under-performing) won't want to rock
| the boat at all and will hold their frustrations with
| things like I mentioned in forever.
|
| I used to be very bad at that. Now I'm pretty firebrand
| for employees to be treated right as I've finally been to
| companies that I felt did so (then back to companies that
| don't) so I recognize what I consider abusive places/mgmt
| pretty quickly.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| You aren't disagreeing, you misread
|
| Parent wrote
|
| >> You'd send out an e-mail update to others who need to
| know.
| [deleted]
| mjayhn wrote:
| I'm vehemently disagreeing about using email as a
| communications means in 2020 when omnichannels, slack,
| ticket-systems, etc exist. I don't want a mail client
| pinging me with mostly trash throughout the day between
| All Hand emails, tech emails, out of band sales people,
| etc.
|
| That's really my point, some of us work completely
| differently. Ask your engineers how they can perform
| best..
| watwut wrote:
| Mail is better then slack in that it is non interrupting.
| It is good for usual stuff that can wait hours or few
| days and is neither bug not feature request. Which is
| quite common thing.
|
| Slack is good for chat and quick discussion.
| lukethomas wrote:
| Most workplace communication tools are focused on improving
| the efficiency of communication. I think of this as laying
| "pipes". It's never been easier to jump on a video call or
| ping someone in Slack or email. What happens is that the
| information/communication doesn't flow on a repeatable or
| predictable basis.
|
| What people really need when remote is a way to help create
| and automate a series of communication habits/workflows, so
| instead of hunting around or perusing Slack to understand
| what's going on, the information flows to you. Like a series
| of communication pumps.
|
| Right now, most managers manually collect this, which is an
| epic waste of time.
|
| Self plug, but after 8 years working remotely and constantly
| running into the workplace chat firehose, I've built software
| to help automate any routine update at work
| (https://www.friday.app).
| bfuclusion wrote:
| Right. Dispatching work with slack is like trying to command
| an army via town crier. Not a great experience.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Or just don't use Slack. Use something like Zulip that is
| deliberately designed to convert synchronous chat streams
| into asynchronous communications:
|
| https://zulip.com/#tour-carousel
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| >A good manager will avoid design by committee and will stay
| ahead of the spontaneous Slack firehose by arranging planning
| sessions and scheduled meetings where necessary
|
| A great point. They will ideally also have enough context,
| experience and intuition to 'individualize' comms - providing
| detail from an earlier briefing to the ux person while
| omitting the unnecessary technical details that are more
| relevant to the other team mate who is working on a security
| feature.
|
| As a team lead, I do subject myself to a bit of a firehose
| outside my immediate team in the hopes of stumbling across
| little nuggets of useful info and context, but if I
| orchestrate communications within my org well enough, that's
| the only time it occurs.
| Animats wrote:
| _" I suspect that the ideal primary role of a leader in a
| remote setting is to serve as a communication channel."_
|
| Someone needs to do that job, but it doesn't have to be the
| leader. It's an admin job. In non-combat military units,
| sergeants do that.
| bfuclusion wrote:
| At this point, it should just be a machine. It's not too hard
| to figure out somebody's role, and from there you can decide
| who to alert.
| mgh2 wrote:
| We can all benefit from less politicking leadership
| ticmasta wrote:
| I largely share your opinion and conclusions; good managers
| were always a combination of filters and selective connectors
| and I don't think this has changed. If anything it's far more
| important these days. What I fear (and hate) as a manager is
| that you're right - I need to be privy to every conversation,
| topic, initiative, etc and then pull in only the absolutely
| minimally required resources. This consumes all my time and is
| extremely tiring.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| I hear you; that is exactly why I noped out of management and
| decided I'm perfectly happy to continue living at the bottom
| of the org chart.
|
| It seems like one of the great tragedies of tech is that the
| kind of personality and temperament that would predispose a
| person to being able to genuinely enjoy this kind of work
| probably also tends to greatly diminish that person's chances
| of ever being promoted into a position where they'd be asked
| to do that kind of work.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > I suspect that an old-school web forum like phpBB could work
| well, but any technical merits won't overcome the social
| perception. There's just no getting around the nerd factor
| there.
|
| So, how do we "sell" forums to our friends and colleagues
| without them knowing they're using one? :)
|
| If forums are inherently useful and the issue is just
| perception, then this sounds to me like a design question.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I miss the style of conversation predating
| social media, but I think that if the reason was purely
| perception based, we'd find a solution. Think of any annoying,
| seemingly useless, or just impractical rituals we follow every
| day.
|
| Forums provide a much better signal vs. noise ratio due to its
| async nature and increased effort required to submit content.
| And, that's great.
|
| But, it's also terrible, because most people just won't bother
| putting more effort into written communication. This is too
| much friction. This isn't how we talk any more. And, I think
| that's the main reason why forums are not mainstream.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > workplace Twitter where it's simply impossible to try and
| keep track of what everyone is saying,
|
| This can be alleviated by aggressive threading
| noahtallen wrote:
| > I suspect that an old-school web forum like phpBB could work
| well
|
| It's funny that you say this, but at Automattic (where I work),
| we use a tool called p2 [0] which is built on WordPress blogs.
| So it's basically a blog with real-time comments, and each
| team/division has their own p2. As our saying goes, "p2 or it
| didn't happen" -- and it's probably the main thing that keeps
| communication healthy. It's easy to follow the set of blogs
| applicable to your work, easy to cross-post to other blogs,
| it's globally searchable, and easily sharable. Thus it avoids
| the problems you mention with email and slack. We use slack a
| lot as well, but few use email at all.
|
| Like you say, it works because everyone buys into it and uses
| it.
|
| - [0]: https://wordpress.com/p2/
| williamdclt wrote:
| We swear by Notion, it looks like it's a similar use-case
| maliker wrote:
| I'm an engineering manager with 10 reports.
|
| What's worked for me is 1-on-1 meetings with each team member
| each week. We set strategy for high level goals (e.g. a
| quarterly software release), measure progress, and I let them
| know about work other folks are doing that is related. I trust
| them to use slack/email/phone to get the work the done, and I
| don't closely monitor those channels.
|
| Doing 1-on-1s is a lot of meetings, but I don't think as a
| manager you can avoid that work and still move effectively
| towards a larger common goal. Eventually though, a lot of
| people learn to execute more complex and valuable work, they
| get promoted, and then we meet less. But then there's hiring.
| The cycle continues.
|
| I'd be interested to know how folks who have 2 layers of
| reports learned to work effectively with that size setup.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| The problem with only talking once a week is that you miss
| things that aren't volunteered in the moment.
|
| You should be collecting agenda items all week by listening,
| and then discussing them during the meeting.
|
| Also, waiting for the meeting and sharing information live is
| both laggy and a waste of face time. Share the info in
| advance, and ask for follow-up in meeting if needed.
| [deleted]
| jordache wrote:
| facebook workplace
|
| or yammer are good options for async communication approaches
| w/o the need for defensive ccing
| majormajor wrote:
| Forums aren't really more inherently "old-school" than instant
| messages.
|
| A flashy new version of AIM is popular, a flashy new forum
| could be too.
|
| I think the difference here is that forums were popular for
| communities where people were active at different times, while
| chat was real-time. For in-person offices, things then trended
| after the physical real-time nature.
|
| If people stay more remote after this, though, and time zones
| are less uniforms, I think that's ripe for a change.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| How is slack not a flashy forum?
| majormajor wrote:
| The most immediate way Slack is more "flashy AIM" than
| "flashy forum" is that threads don't bump back to the top
| when they get recent activity.
|
| If someone replies to someone else's message in a thread
| and it scrolls off my view, they could have a 50+ message
| conversation in there that I would never see.
|
| In a "traditional" forum, if a topic is that hot, it'll
| stay on top of the topic list. Even in a more threaded
| forum like HN, where ordering is done separately, when I
| refresh, I'd see there were more replies on a hot sub-
| thread, in a way that can disappear entirely in Slack.
| MichaelApproved wrote:
| Isn't most of this addressed by using a project management tool
| like Asana or Basecamp?
| stakkur wrote:
| _researchers conducted a series of in-lab experiments with 86
| four-person teams, and also traced the communications and
| experiences of 134 teams doing a semester-long project in a
| university class_
|
| This research isn't based on what's happening in the real work
| world, with real workers, in real companies. After reading the
| summary, I'm having a hard time giving this much weight.
| werber wrote:
| IMO, the best leaders I've had were great I've had have been
| great online and in person. And I've always preferred a mixture
| of IRL and off site work. It has never mattered to me if a person
| is extroverted or introverted, messy or organized, just that I
| can trust them and that they trust me. When that contract is
| fractured there is no way to have a healthy working relationship
| in my opinion. Mutual respect is the most important thing in the
| office to me
| [deleted]
| eb3c90 wrote:
| I suspect it is still important to get to know people and build
| trust in the flesh, even if having a remote leader can be good.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| IMO the best of any kind is one that designs themselves out of
| the hot path. What does that mean for leaders? Don't _be_ the
| conduit to good communication, instead tend to it like something
| external to you. Processes and tooling are like code for
| businesses and can be updated over time to fix the bugs.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I think this is definitely true. But the biggest reason it's
| rare in practice is because middle managers who aren't viewed
| as essential to day-to-day operations are likely to be made
| redundant by senior leadership.
|
| Managers bias towards taking an overly hands-on,
| interventionist style, because that creates a lot more visible
| signals that they're not easily replaced. There's no incentive
| to build a well designed process that the team's empowers self-
| driven success. As often happens to programmers, that type of
| manager often finds that he's engineered himself out of a job.
| Much better to create busywork, lest senior executives start
| asking "what exactly would you say you do here".
|
| What often separates out great senior leadership is recognizing
| the pernicious influence of this bias. John D Rockefeller was
| famous for having tons of middle managers who barely worked at
| all, took naps in the afternoon, and the like.
| bfuclusion wrote:
| I mean that works if all you want is to rise to middle
| management. When you start having actual revenue or project
| goals then that method falls apart.
| shubb wrote:
| This study seems to answer the question of 'who would the team
| select as a leader', but in reality project leadership at
| companies is rarely a democracy.
|
| People move jobs a lot in the tech industry, so as a result
| senior roles are often filled externally. It helps to have a
| recommendation, but roles are rarely filled by asking the team
| who they would most like to work with an approaching them.
| Normally companies advertise roles and try to use some kind of
| standardized process. So CV writing and interview technique are
| critical.
|
| Promotions often happen because people apply for the role up when
| it is advertised competitively. My observation is that people
| succeed at this by focusing on performing against their current
| objectives, not being a problem, requesting training, and picking
| up the tasks relevant to their current role that will be on the
| job description for the next one up. That next role up might be
| in another team so your own teams favor matters less. The main
| thing is not to have been a problem to management and to present
| yourself well during the application process.
|
| I think external upwards moves are more likely to be powered by
| skill at believable exaggeration, and internal promotions by
| rules compliance and consistent ambition driven box ticking.
|
| Finally, some people get promoted because management need someone
| they trust to do that job now, at least temporarily. This happens
| when a new project team is created and someone is told they are
| in charge of it, or someone quits and their duties are
| reallocated to an immediate report. These reward competence yes,
| but such a people keep their winnings or fall back by their
| actual short term success - if things look shaky management go
| out externally for a permanent replacement and quietly put them
| back where they were.
|
| I don't really see any of this changing due to work from home.
|
| It is probably different at high levels of management because
| these roles seem to be filled more based on relationships.
| Hoasi wrote:
| > "Suddenly it's not just about who talks the most, but rather,
| who is actually getting stuff done."
|
| One wishes. That almost sounds too ideal to be true.
| [deleted]
| fivre wrote:
| there are actors who excel in the status quo through virtue of
| said quo lauding their strengths (here, putting on a good face
| during sync communication) alongside basic competency in other
| skills (having a bare minimum capability outside their face
| fronting forte)
|
| when that status quo slips away, it exposes those who were merely
| charlatans acting the lauded part (putting on a good facade face
| while lacking depth in teh actual capabilities society and
| organizations rely on, simply fronting a good appearance)--the
| changes uncovers those who failed to put forth the front out of
| ignorance of or disdain for it. it raises those whose true
| strengths mattered more all along, but to which broader culture
| was blind to, having long lost its way tacking too hard towards
| praising the facade, assuming it implied the foundation
|
| fires burn away some moss; the hardwood remains--it was always
| there, but now we get to see it, and further see that some of the
| most elegant fungus was naught but a large clump of mold growing
| upon itself alone, without much underneath
| khalilravanna wrote:
| Unless I'm reading the summary of the study's findings wrong, the
| study showed what people are _selected_ as leaders, right? Which
| is super interesting but not the same as who _is_ a good leader.
| The summary of the article inaccurately states, "Strong in-
| person leadership skills don't necessarily translate to being a
| good virtual leader", which feels like a huge leap with no
| evidence. Unless being chosen as a leader by the group directly
| correlates with who is actually successful as leaders this
| doesn't seem like a huge takeaway. Would be very interested to
| see something more substantive on this front.
| mannykannot wrote:
| The article is based on a study that it links to. Like just
| about every other study, it is done within the context of
| existing work, in this case 'multilevel leadership emergence
| theory'. While it is possible that this field is flawed to the
| core, I am not yet ready to assume that it is, so that, for
| example, there is little correlation between who gets
| _selected_ for leadership and who is _suited_ for it, without
| having first done some digging into the literature myself.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Assuming leaders are good is a huge leap that needs
| justification.
|
| There's no reason to assume that, and millenia of history to
| the contrary. If leaders were mostly good at leading,
| organizations would rarely fail.
| khalilravanna wrote:
| Thanks for the added insight. I guess I have two follow up
| questions to that.
|
| 1) Is anyone who does have the context able to weigh in?
|
| From my own digging I'm not seeing a lot of agreed upon
| definitions of "leadership emergency theory". I found one
| paper [1] which I read the abstract of. It again, like the
| OP, seems to talk about how "leaders emerge in teams that
| lack a hierarchical structure". From my experience this
| doesn't seem incredibly useful given all managers/leaders
| I've seen have been _appointed_ by someone else. It 's not
| some subconscious, democratic process where they're chosen by
| the group.
|
| 2) Kind of meta, but did the writer of the article do the
| research that seems necessary for this? And if not is this
| acceptable, given that I can only assume numerous people will
| take this at face value and may even make organizational
| changes as a result?
|
| [1] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/LODJ-
| 08-...
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| My takeaway: in-person leadership is a charisma game where
| somebody fools everyone into letting them be boss. Perhaps to the
| detriment of the project and goals.
|
| Virtual leadership is based on performance and productivity. It
| related directly to achieving goals.
|
| Another big win for virtual work? It factors pointless, harmful
| charisma out of the equation?
| jordache wrote:
| 100% wrong and no doubt myopic to your own personal and likely
| limited experiences.
|
| a venn diagram of good leader qualities and charismatic
| qualities has non-trivial overlap. A leader lacking people
| skills has a very limited ceiling in what he/she can affect.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Explain the OP then? Almost a perfect experiment in removing
| charisma from the work equation - everybody works remotely
| and communicates through a limited channel. And things get
| better.
|
| And perhaps delve into 'charismatic' as it relates to loud,
| aggressive or overbearing.
| jordache wrote:
| one can convey charisma through digital/remote channels.
|
| Just because the physical connection is gone, it does not
| mean a robotic / formulaic approach is now the only way to
| lead/manage humans
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It reduces the effect. It becomes possible to squelch the
| loudmouth, take turns talking, hear from everyone. It
| removes physical intimidation and most body language.
|
| Nobody is suggesting 'robotic' or 'formulaic'.
| xauronx wrote:
| In my experience the "loudmouth" in-person is the same
| way on a video call. They always get their two cents in,
| and are sure to jump in regardless of whether or not
| another person is patiently waiting their turn.
| nblayer wrote:
| Where do these Venn diagrams come from? Some glossy Gartner
| Group business quadrant presentation?
|
| Charisma does one thing: Make other people work for you and
| let you steal their output and take credit for their
| successes.
|
| The leaders of the successful Asian tech nations don't seem
| that charismatic, but rather competent and intelligent. The
| West should take note.
| jordache wrote:
| rational intuition of what motivates people - You
| complement the meats of motivation (pay, meaningful work)
| with a leader that possess strong people skills, charisma,
| and you have the conditions for a potential best case
| scenario outcome.
| bstaunton wrote:
| Also the potential for the worst case scenario, as many
| charismatic dictators show.
|
| And in two companies I worked at, the minute a
| charismatic, clueless bureaucrat swaggered in, took over
| the orgs and started barking orders (in a polite and
| charismatic fuck-you way), all top developers left, as if
| by magic.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Lets be honest: how many horror stories do we _all have_ ,
| about in-person leaders that were selected because they were
| the loudest, or most aggressive, or talked over everybody else,
| or sucked up to the big boss?
|
| Does that happen 10% of the time? 30%? 60%?
|
| If virtual work reduces that effect, its all to the benefit of
| the workers and the work, in my view. It seems a slam-dunk.
| raintrees wrote:
| The virtual version of Joel Spolsky's "Good managers move chairs
| out of the way to assist programmers getting work done" (heavily
| paraphrased from memory).
| hownottowrite wrote:
| I worked remote for most of the 90s. Wooo 9600 baud!
|
| Competency was probably the most important trait. A boss without
| a clue was easy to dupe and avoid, but also a pain when you were
| actually doing plenty of work. A boss that knew what was what
| would be on your case if you slacked, but also super relaxed if
| you were producing to expectations.
|
| Clear communication was also critical but it was even more
| important to be measured in the volume.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > A boss without a clue was easy to dupe and avoid ... A boss
| that knew what was what would be on your case if you slacked,
| but also super relaxed if you were producing to expectations.
|
| Very true. We struggled with this at a past company. Most
| engineers were inherently honest and hard working, but maybe 1
| in 5 were constantly playing games to convince their manager
| that they were working harder than they really were.
|
| Managers who were formerly engineers had no problem spotting
| this. It was the managers with non-technical backgrounds who
| struggled to gauge if their employees were really working hard.
|
| My workaround was to coach non-technical managers to pick up
| clues from the person's peers. If you privately ask 3 random
| team members to estimate tasks and 1 person constantly gives
| estimates 10x longer than anyone else, that person should be
| watched closely for performance issues.
|
| It also helps to group people together to finish tasks, then
| ask each of them how it went in private direct conversations
| (your schedules 1:1s). The person's honest peers will give
| strong hints that another person isn't pulling their weight.
|
| Trust your employees until they prove themselves untrustworthy,
| but be careful. We had at least one confirmed situation where a
| remote employee took another full-time job but didn't quit our
| company. Instead, they worked on doing the bare minimum to keep
| their manager satisfied so they could collect paychecks until
| we were forced to fire them. I suspect this play will become
| more common now that WFH is on the rise.
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| 10x is excessive, but I'd also watch closely the relationship
| between estimates and actual time taken. My estimates are
| probably 2-3x longer than they where when I first started out
| because I realized that I was consistently underestimating
| tasks. Despite being warned about it consistently in college,
| I still find that virtually everyone, when asked to estimate
| a task, gives an estimate based on the best case scenario
| where they encounter absolutely no issues while executing the
| task.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| I remember reading a research (don't have a link, sorry)
| that when one employee gave a one-week estimate and another
| employee gave a two-weeks estimate for the same task, and
| each of them delivered the output in two weeks, most
| managers perceived the first employee as more competent.
| Which, if true, would explain why most software projects
| are underestimated -- people instinctively perceive this,
| and want to be seen as competent.
|
| An interesting experience is to estimate things in your own
| life. You plan to do something, write down when you expect
| yourself to finish it. It is quite humiliating to notice
| the effort you put into convincing yourself that you are
| more productive than you actually are. Unlike with job, you
| can't make the excuse that impressing other people is a
| good strategy. Yet, it can take a lot of work to stop doing
| that.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| The golden rule of estimating: double it and add 20%. The
| sooner you start doing that, the sooner you start
| underpromising and overdelivering instead of the other way
| around.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Starting out I was told double it and move up a unit.
|
| 2hrs === 4 days.
|
| A week == 2mths.
|
| Anything past that would never get done.
|
| He was a cynical bastard but not a bad guy and sadly he
| was in a lot of dysfunctional environments not that far
| of the mark.
| srtjstjsj wrote:
| Why add 20%? That's upside precision for something so
| inaccurate. 2.2x is a good way to set a budget for
| someone doing a task _after_ it 's already been done once
| by someone else.
|
| The golden rule of estimating is to measure past
| estimates and use them as a multiplier in future.
|
| The platinum rule is to stop estimating because it's
| useless.
| bfuclusion wrote:
| Right. Estimating before you even know what you _don't_
| know is tea leaf reading. It's better to ask the person
| who wants it done "how much is this worth to you", or
| "what's my budget to get this done", and then work from
| there.
| ci5er wrote:
| I constantly give estimates that are about 1/2 ~ 1/5 of the
| actual because I am overly optimistic (and the thing about
| unknown unknowns). I have done this for 20 years, so you'd
| think that I would get over it, but apparently I am a dumb-
| ass.
|
| But apparently, this is in the opposite direction of what you
| are talking about. That said! If I were to pad my
| guesstimates, then it could legitimately look like sand-
| bagging. I don't know that there are any easy answers. I am
| trying to become more accurate (if for no other reason than
| not having to work over Christmas holidays to keep up with my
| promises), but estimation is hard!
| whatupmd wrote:
| I've worked in an environment like this. How did you discover
| the second full-time job in the end?
| mywittyname wrote:
| Also, not all engineers who mislead their progress are doing
| so out of malice or laziness. Sometimes they have too much
| work and don't want to be the person complaining about the
| work load, especially if they think everyone else is managing
| fine.
|
| If a manage doesn't pick up on it early enough, then shit
| will eventually hit the fan.
| KKKKkkkk1 wrote:
| > My workaround was to coach non-technical managers to pick
| up clues from the person's peers. If you privately ask 3
| random team members to estimate tasks and 1 person constantly
| gives estimates 10x longer than anyone else, that person
| should be watched closely for performance issues.
|
| So I had a boss who would call a group meeting, bring up a
| problem that needs to be solved, and ask people who can do
| it. One engineer would explain that this is a research-level
| AI problem that would take years to solve, another engineer
| would say he's going to have some time to hack on it later in
| the week, and a third would say that he can pull an all-
| nighter tonight and solve it. So the manager would pat
| himself on the back for a job well done. He created a spirit
| of healthy competition in the team, he exposed the slacker
| (the first engineer) for what he is, and he squeezed the
| third engineer for all he got. A year later, the team would
| be back in the same place, with the manager calling a meeting
| and bringing up the same problem, which as it turns out the
| users are still suffering from and higher-ups in management
| are pestering him about again.
| stripline wrote:
| > A year later, the team would be back in the same place,
| with the manager calling a meeting and bringing up the same
| problem, which as it turns out the users are still
| suffering from
|
| I thought the third engineer pulled an all-nighter to solve
| it?
| watwut wrote:
| Cause the all night hero did not actually solved the
| issue, just made it less visible for release checklist
| purpose. Which is not the same as fixing it for users who
| kept complaining.
| saberdancer wrote:
| I am guessing that the first engineer was right. Usually
| there is not one solution to the problem and judging
| who's the slacker by estimates might be wrong. You can
| usually hack something up quick, but making a strong and
| lasting solution requires more time.
| sida wrote:
| Can you share your stories around how working remotely in the
| 90s was like?
|
| e.g. there probably wasn't video chat. So how did you
| communicate? Were you coding? What were tooling like for coding
| remotely back then? etc etc
| bobbane wrote:
| I worked as part of a distributed team from 1989-1994. I was
| on the US east coast, one guy was in Ohio, two guys were in
| California, and two were in Japan.
|
| I worked at the end of a Telebit Trailblazer, so I had a
| 19200 baud link to the internet. I remember emailing myself
| GCC - staged the tarball on a remote host, uuencoded it and
| sent it home as multiple email messages.
|
| We mostly did stuff via email, with the occasional conference
| voice call. I had to learn to restrain myself and not try to
| solve user problems when I first saw them - because of the
| distribution of time zones, I would tend to be the first
| person awake.
|
| This was definitely coding - we were selling and supporting
| Interlisp-D and its many derivatives.
| sktguha wrote:
| How did you work remotely without screen sharing and all ? I
| mean what if the need to something similiar to screen share
| arose ?
| ghaff wrote:
| Not the 90s but I worked remotely to a significant degree in
| the 2000s. By and large, we did not have screen sharing
| although companies would present to us using tools like
| WebEx. Mostly we just mailed documents around, used email
| (with some chat latterly), and phone calls.
| theaeolist wrote:
| And the evidence for these considerations is what?
| sfg wrote:
| They reference a study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.10
| 07%2Fs10869-020-09698..., titled: "Who Emerges into Virtual
| Team Leadership Roles? The Role of Achievement and Ascription
| Antecedents for Leadership Emergence Across the Virtuality
| Spectrum".
| westurner wrote:
| Fortunately the references are free to view.
|
| "Table 4 - Correlation of Development Phases, Coping Stages
| and Comfort Zone transitions and the Performance Model" in
| "From Comfort Zone to Performance Management" White (2008)
| tabularly correlates the Tuckman group development phases
| (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, Adjourning) with the
| Carnall coping cycle (Denial, Defense, Discarding,
| Adaptation, Internalization) and Comfort Zone Theory (First
| Performance Level, Transition Zone, Second Performance
| Level), and the White-Fairhurst TPR model (Transforming,
| Performing, Reforming). The ScholarlyArticle also suggests
| management styles for each stage (Commanding, Cooperative,
| Motivational, Directive, Collaborative); and suggests that
| team performance is described by chained power curves of re-
| progression through these stages.
|
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C43&q=%E2.
| ..
|
| IDK what's different about online teams in regards to
| performance management?
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| The primary role of leaders is communication, so I'm a bit
| confused by this idea that the leader is whoever "does" the most.
| You're not leading much of anything if you have time to do the
| work yourself I believe.
| john_cogs wrote:
| In my lived experience at GitLab, leaders can deliver results
| through efficient communication that enables others to do their
| jobs successfully (rather than waiting hours to respond to
| messages), helping team members iterate on the scope of
| projects to ensure progress is made on goals, and modeling our
| company values which helps others better understand the values
| and incorporate them into their work.
| troughway wrote:
| The surprising thing to me is that there is no mention of the
| copious online communities we have had for the past few decades.
| The number of WoW guilds alone is staggering. If you want to know
| the "surprising" traits, just look to the people* leading these,
| you have ample data there.
|
| *BBC put up some qtp photos with makeup. In reality: pasty,
| overweight nerds, neckbeards and warlocks.
| joubert wrote:
| ""To me, this is half the story," she says, pointing out that
| though the study data touches on interpersonal relationships, it
| more heavily measures task-oriented actions, which are only a
| portion of what drive leadership. "The next logical step is [to
| study] how team members manage interpersonal relations and
| behaviours and who emerges as leaders. We don't really know
| that." For example, a follow-up study might explore whether doer
| leaders maintain interpersonal skills over time."
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| the WEIRD sample strikes again! I hope we at least have a round
| of reproducibility crises in management research within a decade,
| because evidently it's not reached them yet.
|
| > The researchers conducted a series of in-lab experiments with
| 86 four-person teams, and also traced the communications and
| experiences of 134 teams doing a semester-long project in a
| _university class_
| triyambakam wrote:
| What is WEIRD in this context?
| bobbiechen wrote:
| >Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about
| human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals
| based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated,
| Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-
| brain...
| phaemon wrote:
| Look at weirdceo.com
|
| Wisdom, Emotional Intelligence, Initiative, Robot, Dastardly
| or something like that.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Perhaps I'm ignorant and I'm missing something obvious - but
| how exactly are we going to apply this particular experiment to
| pre-industrial, uneducated population? We're talking about
| communication in remote _virtual_ meetings.
|
| The original WEIRD paper contrasts the industrial societies
| with small-scale ones. Can we even find small-scale societies
| that do virtual remote work?
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