Exactly why I love my lightweight extra large packable poncho.
It's completely water proof, but it's got a shit ton of ventilation, I can wear exactly what I need to stay warm and if it starts raining, sleeting, snowing, etc. on with the poncho, I stay dry and warm, all of me stays dry, and not just my upper body.
I've actually done trail running in my poncho, but it's a pain, frankly most people don't need all this "technology" to stay dry and warm. I use a cotton tee, a wool sweater and a cheap insulated jacket with pit zips, and a poncho. It works for anything down to about -20F, of course you still need to protect your legs for warmth, because the poncho protects them from the water.
My poncho is so old it could vote, I don't even know who made it, I do remember it was cheap, but not flimsy, it has some body so that it won't act like it's still packed. I may not meet today's standard for packable, but eh, what's an extra couple of ounces in the scheme of things.
Not everyone has the freedom to quit their job, small towns, limited skill sets, transportation issues, family issues, etc. etc. etc, otherwise the number would probably be at 75%.
But what if all employees are humans. And like humans, they are irrational in their criteria of what makes a boss "good". For example, they want bosses that never demand work from them and let them go home early every day. Even if they get this, their standards will adjust and they will take the same level of issue with smaller things. Being a boss and attempting to be liked by your employees is a lost cause and foolish endeavor.
But this is not true. If this is true no reputable company would have employees staying >3 years. If you're hired at a reputable company >1 year, chances are you do get offers or you have a greater chance to get it. Good bosses are rare, but they do exist.
My 3/4 bosses as intern were great. One guy was really incompetent, but he got me when the manager, who hired me, quit. So it’s almost ok.
After graduation the quality of managers varied greatly. There was a guy with 20 yeas experience, who took my mentoring very seriously. He fired me when I started my own company. Good decision actually! A boss before him was a great narcissist, if I were smarter, I would be able to play him and got higher. Not really the one to run from. Then there was a bunch of old dudes (totally incompetent) building big corp’s first electronics. They had no experience in the field and were really annoying. I quit. There was small company later with whole family in management: 2 sons, dad and mom. And a 2nd engineer. It was a part time position, so I was able to stay and suffer. No chance to stay with them for a 5 day workweek. My current manager is very restrictive. I can do things only old good way, all cost saving efforts and innovations are not needed. Heck, I could save company my early salary dozen times, but all the ideas were rejected.
I just bought a new refrigerator and it comes with an app. I installed the app out of curiosity, the first thing the app demands is that I allow it to track the location of my phone at all times.
I've worked in 4 very successful organization that were almost 100% remote work, the percentage of remote work employees by company, 98%, 99%, 92%, 98%.
These companies were no different than the 3 successful companies that didn't support remote work at all.
All 7 companies were process driven companies, with discipline. The processes were not overly complicated, nor bureaucratic in nature, but they were followed religiously. If the process wasn't working everyone still followed it, but the issues were raised and addressed quickly. Which meant everything worked and made sense.
I've worked at 4 unsuccessful companies 2 that were almost 100% remote, and 2 that were almost 100% not remote. What these 4 companies had in common was a lack of process, or discipline. Chasing the "next thing", blowing up schedules because "we need it now", zero planning. These companies need everyone in the same location because nothing is written down, everything is rumor, tribal knowledge is key and if you don't get to sit in a room and look at everyone to figure out the politics nothing works.
Bottom line is if you want to be successful you need to plan, have process and be disciplined in your approach to running the business. If you do these things managing remote employees is no different than having everyone in the same room. If however your company is a mess, trying to manage remote employees is next to impossible.
What do you mean by success? I have worked at three highly successful companies by the metric most people quantify success in a company - making lots and lots of money - and process at these companies was something of a joke.
I have also worked at companies that were highly successful and followed processes as you say religiously.
I haven't ever worked anywhere with a sizable remote worker employee pool though.
That Andy Rachleff quote about product/market fit comes to mind "when you have it, you can screw up almost everything and still succeed"
An example: Larry and Sergey deciding to do away with managers back in the early 00's would have decimated a startup that didn't have a burgeoning monopoly. Was barely a bump in the road for Google.
I think it might be more like what I read in a book about Hughes one time, that basically when he was at his craziest he was still making incredible amounts of money and the theory was that once you reach a certain size/power it takes on a life of its own and you continue to make money despite fucking up a lot - although one can see a lot of countervailing examples I think in a case of some of the companies I've been at simple economic inertia meant they still did well.
> and if you don't get to sit in a room and look at everyone to figure out the politics nothing works
This is actually a big problem in my experience, because remote workers are cut out of the "inner-circle of people" when office politics kick in. Face to face time helps networking a lot and creates much stronger ties than slack chats ever can.
As long as they pay me I don’t give a fuck. Don’t patronize me with pats on the back for doing what I agreed to do, just pay me.
Don’t get emotional, when you get bored and it’s time to move on get a better offer from somewhere and tell them to counter it or you walk, then follow through.
When you’re a remote worker you must learn to not play any sort of games. Say what you mean and mean what you say and you’ll be respected in the industry.
At the end of the day, all that matters is getting paid.
Sure. And to get paid well you have to be given the opportunity to do work that matters. What you described is a perfectly valid way of doing office politics: being a no-bs person that people respect for the ability to get the job done and have canidid conversation with. But that's also politics.
Depends, if you are a contractor then yes. As an employee you probably also hope to earn some raises and promotions, as the only way to get paid more. And that always involves a lot of politics.
> All 7 companies were process driven companies, with discipline. The processes were not overly complicated, nor bureaucratic in nature, but they were followed religiously. If the process wasn't working everyone still followed it, but the issues were raised and addressed quickly. Which meant everything worked and made sense.
That sounds like a strict requirement for remote work to work, and intuitively so. In your experience, how was the training done for less experienced IC ?
I’m just as curious about how the managers were trained to be process-driven. Manager behavior seems to me just as if not more important than IC behavior here.
Since managers have power, and engineers usually don’t personally know their skip levels, managers can easily replace async documented process with lovely hours-long face-to-face 20-person meetings. And they can silence dissent! They can wreak havoc in a way no IC could ever do.
> replace async documented process with lovely hours-long face-to-face 20-person meetings.
This has been a particular pain-point for me at times. Example: two meetings with the same team members on two connected subjects of about 45mins to an hour in length, spaced half an hour apart when they could easily be combined. That's just in one day. There are others that have mirrored those throughout a week. The meetings don't need to be as long as they are, but they're scheduled for that long and the rest of the time is often filled with awkward chit-chat. But it fills the manager's calendar slots so that they appear effective, even if a lot of time is being squandered. Add on all the frustration of the back and forth across floors, wandering the halls looking for a meeting room that isn't double-booked or waiting on people to vacate rooms, etc etc.
IC time is more directly controlled this way. Occasionally it makes sense, but the amount of duplication is, at times, staggering and can be frustrating.
We had a client one place I worked that liked to schedule 1-2hr meetings, never bring up the topic at hand, and then the three or four folks from their company would just chat things through on the phone with one another, mostly unrelated to anything we could conceivable influence or care about, while we sat there twiddling our thumbs. This was probably a majority of their irregularly scheduled meetings. One or more of us would get roped into one of these every week or two. A couple of their folks also liked to schedule 30min calls with 3-4 people in response to Slack questions that should have been answerable in under 5min (total time spent, not necessarily within 5min, not everyone's always ready to respond on Slack at the drop of a hat) with no phone call. I strongly suspect they had a culture that rewarded their middle managers for having calendars full of meetings, with no regard whatsoever for whether the meetings accomplished anything.
I'd love to hear from managers and others who saw compensation increases from having their meeting calenders arificially full, and not from what that managers got from those meetings.
Has anyone ever promoted a manager because they have so many meetings?
The only point I'd disagree with is "these days". Overmanagement is the perennial problem in my experience. More do'ers less say'ers is my proposed solution.
I don't know why this comment was downvoted for trying to provide clarity, because I too, started scanning OP's reply in search of a meaning for that acronym that appeared from thin air. If someone disagrees then they should simply state what they think is the correct definition. But in my opinion this comment contributes value by making it clear that not everybody is familiar with this jargon.
Uhm, I would expect a reply to provide that clarification.
I expect to find useless and inappropriate comments downvoted, but there is no official policy that I remember, so those are only my ideas of how downvoting would help moderate a discussion.
Then the people that downvoted should provide a correction. I still don't know what IC is supposed to stand for. I'm assuming it's not integrated circuit which is what I think about when I see IC.
In my experience, tribal knowledge is the biggest issue. Some people (and teams) hold on to critical pieces of information and treat it as political and social currency in order to climb the ladder. You know the type: they might casually drop hints that they are in-the-know, or humbly brag about having been made privy to certain important information. This tends to build up their perceived image in the workplace, as everyone starts to see them as an influencer and gatekeeper, and try to gain their favor.
Good processes, specifically those that favor radical transparency, are a good way of getting in front of these types of issues, and are especially important for making remote setups work well.
Not that relevant, but caught my eye. A 98% or 99% remote company is effectively a 100% company right? 1% or 2% is not enough to be considered a "headquarters".
There's an old adage that headquarters is wherever the CEO works. Most major corporate headquarters moves are to be closer to wherever the CEO calls home. Taking that adage to its literal extreme there will only ever be 99% remote companies as effectively the corporate headquarters is still the CEO's home. Though of course the adage isn't meant to be taken solely literally, and its more just a lens into a power relationship, and even a "majority remote" company may still need (or unintentionally build) the power of a headquarters on paper. (Maybe not directly to make the CEO happy, but accountants for tax reasons, shareholders for accountability reasons, or other reasons.)
>There's an old adage that headquarters is wherever the CEO works.
Is that an adage or it is the literal meaning of the word "headquarters"? The head's quarters - and the premier definition of headquarters if you look it up in Merriam.
I've worked for a company where the CEO's home office had less than 10% of employees, and the HQ (for lack of a better term) halfway across the country had greater than 70% of employees.
Seems like it would depend on role distribution. If all the senior leadership work from an office together and everyone else is remote, I'd call that office the headquarters regardless of employee percentage.
Even a 92% remote-working company would seem to me to be functionally indistinguishable from a 100% remote work company. You still need to have the processes and practices in place to support an almost entirely remote team.
I wonder why most companies can't operate separate teams with these different flows? The "we need it now" crew having their own team who tries to line up dev with the upcoming, etc? I can understand needing functionality "urgently" - in an agile manner, however that will certainly have more costs short-term and potentially long-term if cutting corners.
Agile processes still require disciplined management. If you have hurricane leadership, it'll still fuck everything up, and you won't deliver any value.
Very well put. My current company falls in the category of tribal knowledge. It's chaos :). People work 10 hours a day with more than 4 hours of meetings and nothing gets done. People at all levels delegate work downward and setup meetings to get 'status'.
I would assume that most companies have a physical location somewhere and it wouldn't be difficult to track the number of employees that regularly report on-site.
The only thing holding back remote work is leadership's ego. Remote is cheaper, more productive and healthier yet there's something about walking through an open office and not seeing a buzz of activity that makes leadership feel like nothing is happening.
It could be survival instinct instead of egos. Most companies have too many managers. There are places where you have one manager for every 5 engineers. Bonkers!
I work on a software project where I was the only dev, with a scrum master, 2 BAs, and 3 project managers. Along with 4 representatives from Business. It's an absolute nightmare!
Recently another dev joined me, but so did about 6 other non devs, I don't even know what they so.
This is all to deliver a software feature.
I feel I strongly need to get a new job...
Someone cry for me.
Funny thing is that in the beginning of agile, scrum master was hardly a dedicated position, it was more of a role.
But then, agile at that time was a movement by developers, now it became the turf of project managers.
True. Middle managers probably feel more worth when the five engineers are huddled in a pod around them, usually with headphones on so they can concentrate.
I had a pretty horrific left knee injury wrestling. I was carted off to the hospital, when the accident was described to the Orthopedic surgeon he actually recoiled and was concerned I may have totally destroyed my and that it might not be repairable, it was 1979. From the time of the accident until I was in surgery it was less than 3 hours.
Somehow I managed to only stretch all my knee ligaments, ACL PCL,MCL,LCL, a few small inline tears, but nothing severed, but he said they were like overused rubber bands all stretched out. I did however shred all the cartilage. The cartilage was a mess, so much so that when they surgically removed all the cartilage from my knee. I have the video of the surgery, all my knee cartilage was removed, they scraped the bones in order to give me the smoothest ride possible, but it doesn't do much. When you don't have cartilage in your knee it's pretty obvious.
Fast forward 22 years to mid 2001 when I start following the teachings of Linus Pauling regarding L-Ascorbic Acid and L-Lysine for heart disease prevention. I started taking high levels of both in divided doses during the day. My stress levels plummeted, and my overall health significantly improved, but after about 6 months I started to notice my knee was changing, a lot. My pain was going away and I didn't notice the bone on bone activity, after about 9 months my knee stopped hurting completely.
In fact it felt so good that I started walking for exercise, normally after 5 minutes of walking I felt like I was gun shot in the knee, but nope I was able to walk fine for as long as I wanted. I then started jogging and then running, no pain, no pain at all.
I've seen my orthopedist and while he's not willing to just give me and MRI, based on all of his examination he said my left knee is no different then my right knee and he didn't believe me that I had all my cartridge surgically removed 20 years before. I took the video, just in case, and I played the video. My knee has a unique scar from when I was a child and fell on a bottle, I had the scar when they performed the surgery and shot the video and I still have the scar, so there is no doubt that all my cartridge in my knee was surgically removed in 1979.
L-ascorbic acid and L-Lysine are basic building blocks for cartilage. I'm just a sample size of one, but I know my cartilage is back, maybe not all the way back, but more than enough back that my knee rock solid stable, it's smooth as silk, I have no pain and my orthopedist can't find a difference in my knees.
So in the 80's the BBC had a program called Tomorrow's World. They had a race horse which had worn its cartilage which would have meant retirement. Surgeon opened front knee enough to drill up into bone from where the cartilage had worn our, bone marrow (stem cells) spilled out, sealed up knee and the stem cells adopted/became the tissue it was next to which included new cartilage. Horse recovered quickly, like allowed to walk around in a day or two and was back running when stiches were removed. No visible signs of pain. Hailed as a success for worn cartilage.
I don't understand why the medical professionals use metal alloys for joint replacements considering how the metal is attacked by the immune system and deposited elsewhere in the body. Doesn't make sense.
L-ascorbic acid is vitamic c and L-Lysine is one of the essential amino acids. This doesn't seem to be particularly groundbreaking supplementation.
You get a whole bunch of L-Lysine every time you eat meat/chicken/fish/milk/legumes. Vitamin C is a common supplement.
Were you 'dosing' at extremely high levels? excess vitamin c is secreted in urine. Your body can't store excess amino acids either - they are converted to ammonia and then into urea/uric acid in the liver.
When I read the name L-Lysine, it suddenly reminded me that I used to buy it exactly for that reason.
A doctor recommended to have surgery on a joint, but I didn’t have the money or insurance. So I did some research and started taking supplements that contained L-Lysine among other things. Also started doing light exercises just to increase the blood flow to that joint. And some how it was fixed.
I think is the only supplement that has actually worked for me.
Edit : glucosamine was another of the supplements I was taking.
I do physical labor and take two supplements to keep my joints from bothering me: Glucosamine Chondroitin Complex and Instaflex Advanced.
I started the first one many years ago when I was lifting 30-80 pounds shoulder high all day at work. It noticeably reduced the joint pain I experienced after about two weeks.
The second I started using this summer and wow. I'm 50 years old and feel like I can play racquetball again.
With my business my right shoulder was deteriorating due to
raising buildings using a handyman jack. I could not lift a glass of water off the nightstand while in bed. Since taking the Instaflex, my shoulder has steadily improved and I'm confident I will soon have my full strength back.
I wonder if eating gelatin would work similarly; it's basically collagen. https://chriskresser.com/you-need-to-eat-gelatin-here-are-th... -- or conversely I wonder if your supplements would work better for me. (I was starting to suspect arthritis until I added this into my diet.)
All I can say is that it made an unmistakeable difference for my problem within a week, and it seems safe to try. It's my general understanding that proteins get broken down to amino acids in digestion, so the expected advantage for generally healthy people would be in getting enough of the right ones in the right proportions.
I can only hope that you'll take this story and evidence to a nearby research university/hospital/med school and convince someone that they could win fame and fabulous prizes if they found out you were correct and pursued the research successfully.
I work for a Healthcare startup and we are actually delivering health care and value to patients, care providers and insurers, and we are scrutinized 50 ways from Sunday in order to get table scraps, because most of them don't think we have a real business. But dog walking seems like the next market defining breakout.
Reducing output isn't going to happen, well it won't happen until it's too late. It's like the smoker that gets diagnosed with cancer, and then decides to quite smoking.
It's also ludicrous that think that warming will stop and hold at 1.5 or 2.0c adding less won't stop the increase in climate warming, it will just cause the increase to be slower.
The other thing that's ludicrous is that we aren't monitoring the earth's output, the warming oceans, melting glaciers and thawing permafrost are now contributing greenhouse gases due to the warming climate, they are now locked into positive feedback loops. Which means every cycle the changes get a little bit bigger as the cycles feed themselves. Unless we can start to reduce the total amount of greenhouse gases in the upper atmosphere these feedback loops are just going to keep running.
duh, whether it's true or not when their accusations are release the initial knee jerk reaction from the sheeple will be to sell which will drive down the price.
Shorting GE before making the accusations is profiteering in my book. If it turns out they were wrong they'll still be able to make money on the short, buy back in with the profits and then when the stocks rebound they cash in again.
The entire stock market is a ponzi scheme for insiders.
No, if Markopolos's allegations are correct then this is exactly how financial markets are supposed to work. They are about price discovery - the reward for this information integration is the profit that Markopolos and the Hedge Fund have made / are about to make. If these allegations prove to be baseless then they will receive a hefty fine by the SEC which I'm sure will at the very least take away any profits they've incurred.
>If these allegations prove to be baseless then they will receive a hefty fine by the SEC which I'm sure will at the very least take away any profits they've incurred.
No they will not. There are no rules against exaggerating information about a company you don't operate. The SEC does not fine hyperbole as it's not covered by the exchange act.
The so-called short-and-distort scheme may violate the Securities Exchange Act anti-fraud provisions, as well as SEC Rule 10b-5, just like the better known antithetical "pump-and-dump" scheme. It checks all the boxes: (1) misrepresentation to the market (through articles, blogs and social media); (2) materiality (often including false statements about a company's financial condition or viability); (3) an intent to deceive (manipulating the market to create downward pressure on the share price to make a profit); and (4) connection to the purchase or sale of securities (initiating a selloff of securities to allow the short seller turned analyst to cover their short position). Likewise, this scheme may violate state securities and consumer protection statutes and common law.
>Shorting GE before making the accusations is profiteering in my book
It's also how you call companies out on their bullshit and counter their PR deflection game.
And yep, if I do a shit load of accounting research, figure out one of the biggest conglomerates has about $38 billion in fraud, you bet your ass I expect to get paid for the effort. I'm morally on board with the authors getting the first shorts in.
> If it turns out they were wrong they'll still be able to make money on the short, buy back in with the profits and then when the stocks rebound they cash in again.
It's simple: GE is down, as of right now, over 11%. Knowing the sensational allegations of the report would have a short-term deleterious effect, they shorted the stock. They can turn the profit from the successful short around into buying GE at its depressed price, and profit a second time when the stock returns to normal levels after the report is found to be exaggerated.
I believe that most of what believe about our climate has been pushed by "researchers" operating based on the attached strings, going back to the mid to late 80's, and I also believe that things are much worse than anyone thinks.
The earth and climate was operating in a very delicate balance, and humans disrupted the balance starting with the industrial revolution. Humans kept disrupting the balance until the changes we've wrought pushed the earth and climate past another tipping point, a tipping point where the earth and climate started operating independently of human greenhouse gas output. Which is where we stand today. Human output isn't helping, but we've gone past a point where eliminating our output will bring the system back into balance. The earth itself is now driving the climate changes, not humans.
The earth and climate have 3 very large and powerful positive feedback loops running, warming oceans, thawing permafrost and melting glaciers, and the resource driving all three feedback loops are greenhouse gases. The oceans, permafrost and glaciers harbor massive amounts of greenhouse gases, and typically positive feedback loops don't stop until they run out of resources, and I believe it's true for the 3 I've outlined.
Hubris got us here, "oh, how can humans disrupt the earth and climate, it's so massive, everything will be fine." Back in the day I got labeled as a tree hugging crazy hippy, basically by everyone.
Hubris still driving us, "if we reduce our output just a little bit we can completely change the direction of the earth and climate, this massive system" Today I'm labeled as climate change denier, because I don't think we can fix things, and I'm still labeled as crazy.
It's completely water proof, but it's got a shit ton of ventilation, I can wear exactly what I need to stay warm and if it starts raining, sleeting, snowing, etc. on with the poncho, I stay dry and warm, all of me stays dry, and not just my upper body.
I've actually done trail running in my poncho, but it's a pain, frankly most people don't need all this "technology" to stay dry and warm. I use a cotton tee, a wool sweater and a cheap insulated jacket with pit zips, and a poncho. It works for anything down to about -20F, of course you still need to protect your legs for warmth, because the poncho protects them from the water.
My poncho is so old it could vote, I don't even know who made it, I do remember it was cheap, but not flimsy, it has some body so that it won't act like it's still packed. I may not meet today's standard for packable, but eh, what's an extra couple of ounces in the scheme of things.