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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not self evident that virtue _signals_ are evolutionarily advantageous. Actually being virtuous is what provides a benefit to your society / tribe / species.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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
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.
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.)
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember
Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of, or at least, treated and compensated vastly different than their "staff"/"full-time" peers who are often doing the exact same work. For fun, google the phrase "permatemp".
E.g. I had a past job as a middle manager where my team interfaced heavily with a group of contractor developers overseas. When the time came to demo new features and place superlatives upon the various teams, I noticed my leadership cadre said nothing about the contractors and did not acknowledge any of the work they had done.
I spoke up about it when the floor was given for anyone else to give kudos where they desired, and mentioned the overseas team and thanked their team lead for working with me on delivering. He spoke up and expressed his gratitude in kind.
Apparently, this got my CTO into "trouble" with "legal" because I guess merely acknowledging contractors was some kind of a "problem". As a result, my boss got in trouble. As a result, I got written up. I was out of that company within six months after relationship with my boss and CTO deteriorated immediately after I opened my darn mouth.
>> Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember
>Amidst the loss here, this line stood out to me and brings to mind all the terrible ways contractors are taken advantage of
This is like the one scenario where being a contractor is better than being salaried. Asking for more hours and getting paid for them is absolutely not being “taken advantage of”.
Your comment REALLY resonates with me. When I was fresh out of school, I joined an enterprise software team as a junior engineer. The team was mostly FTEs, but there were 2 or 3 contractors as well - one of whom was extremely talented. It was the talented one that everybody ganged up on. He was ridiculed (it was supposed to be in good fun but I think it went too far), and he was abused and given all the hard problems to solve. Here's the thing - this guy made up for all the rest of those shitty FTEs. He fixed all their problems, he did all the real work, developed the best features, and fixed all the hard bugs. The lead engineer was an absolute joke (I once caught him making changes to a live production database). The roles were all reversed.
Well, it didn't sit well with me then, and I became friends with that guy and the other contractors. We're still friends to this day. I'd say he got the last laugh because he started his own company and is doing well. But I promised myself that I would never treat any contractor like that ever. I'm a Director now, with a team of my own. Similarly, it has a few contractors, and every single one of those guys is treated like an FTE, with regular 1x1s, objectives, and personal development. As a leader, I invest the time in them like they're my own, because they are people too - regardless of the SSO number or the ".consultant" in their email address.
This reads like a LinkedIn parable. I hope you're also providing them with avenues to become full-time contributors if they want to, and ensuring they're fairly compensated and have access to the resources as discussed in this thread.
Well, I’m not a preacher, and LinkedIn is brutal. Regarding providing the avenues to full time, that’s sort of the plan. I hope to convert them - if they want to. Some people enjoy being contractors I’ve found, others are just there looking for the next full time gig.
> Similarly, it has a few contractors, and every single one of those guys is treated like an FTE, with regular 1x1s, objectives, and personal development.
If you work in a large company, HR is going to have a shit fit when they find out. And if you don't, why not just hire them full time?
I would rather have a team of all-FTEs than a mix. But the company wants more contractors because when cost-pressures arise, they can dump them without any thought. In fact this happened during COVID, hundreds of contractors at my firm were let go in one fell-swoop. Some FTEs were also cut, but it was like a 4-1 margin of contractors to FTEs, maybe more.
This is probably an unpopular opinion but as a contractor, I’m not expecting to be fully integrated into a company, nor lauded for my efforts. As a contractor, I understand that I am plugging a gap at short notice, on a temporary basis. I anticipate coming in, being useful and getting paid well to do so. I then expect to leave and find something else. The flexibility, autonomy and well-remunerated nature of contracting is what appeals to me - integrating with co-workers and compliments on my work are a distant second.
As an aside, if you are being compensated less than permanent employees as a contractor, then your rate is not high enough. The ‘fully loaded’ cost of a permanent employee is higher than their stated salary, due to tax, insurance, pension contributions etc - all of these need to be deducted from the contractor’s billable rate to provide an accurate comparison between the two.
It was the same in the last two (American) companies I was working for. In both companies, my team and I have done some majestic work. Still, at the end when C-level people and managers were giving aknowledgements and thanks, my team was either not mentioned at all, or we've received some vague aknowledgements for our work...
We still got paid handsomely, but It sucks to be left out from the end credits.
I was a contractor myself, and I still work with contractors every day. I wasn't treated as badly as that, but I was not too happy with how I was treated either. I and my team lead try to go out of our ways to acknowledge and include all workers, without regard to their actual employers, in all the team's meetings and interactions, and acknowledging their contributions.
It's still not enough. Just last week, I found out that a team member is now considering to leave, and one of their reasons is being treated as "less worthy" by the higher-ups in my company. There was some internal confusion where they forgot to assign them an office, and since they're a contractor, HR ended up putting them in a somewhat remote office, away from the team, completely ignoring our protests.
The thing is, we (my team lead and I) don't know what to tell them, how can we convince them to stay after this. We're at a loss.
I was a contractor in corporate America for a while and experienced the same thing. The way it was explained to me was that you cannot give contractors the same "benefits" is a regular employee. If you do, then you have to treat them as employees, which means you have to offer the same healthcare, PTO structure, etc.
I don't think the rules around the "benefits" were especially clear from a legal standpoint. Therefor the company would always err on the side of caution. If some auditor somewhere could perceive an action or event as employee specific and a contractor took part then the company could be penalized for it. In my case, it was pretty standard things like in-office birthday parties and monthly staff meetings.
It's not right, but I can understand why it happens. The legal team in a big corporation is extremely risk averse.
This seems inconsistent with what little I know of employment law, or at least the spirit of the law. The difference between an employee and a contractor is mostly about the degree of control the employer exerts. Employees are more heavily controlled and therefore get more protections and benefits.
In a sane world, common practices like forbidding a "contractor" from working with any other company would be more legally risky than letting a contractor participate in an in-office party.
I was a long term, full time contractor from about 2015 until 2019. It worked out better for me since I was working as a nomad abroad. Around 2019, my client wanted me on as an employee. I never found out the precise motivations, but I suspect it had to do with the contractor laws getting tightened down for rideshare drivers. I suspect that I could have remained a contractor by the letter of the law, but that still might have skirted into territory the legal team was not comfortable with. This seems like the most reasonable read of the situation to me, but it’s still only my speculation.
For all we know, some attorney general was ginning up to collectively punish businesses that use contractors because recent press had made such businesses politically attractive targets. And your client was just trying to stay out of the crosshairs.
You can be compliant with the spirit of the law and still be targeted by some ideologue using the law as a cudgel.
To be honest I don’t think it is the cost of benefits but the ability to fire people quickly without having to find other work that is appealing to companies. If some big grand idea flops and it’s 200 contractors, just don’t renew the contract. If it’s a lot of employees you have to move them around or something. Also, often contractor money is a different pile of money than regular hires/payroll. So people looking to empire build can do it more easily with contractors. Companies looking for lower costs will hire lower on the skill ladder or choose different cheaper locales, or drive off with more experience and higher salaries.
The argument is that it's a legal risk. Look up the Microsoft co-employment lawsuit for the kinds of things they're scared of. As parent accurately describes, the contractors are doing the same kinds of work as full time folks... So to avoid the appearance of them being the same (and possibly suing for benefits), basically they get treated as second class citizens.
I know of companies where referring to vendors by name is frowned upon.
That’s dumb. I work with contractors who I consider not only my team mates (we work on the same shit) but also my friends. We play games together after work sometimes and chat once in a while on zoom.
They give demos, leadership gives them kudos, and they feel part of the team.
Contractors are team mates with a different employment structure but if we’re in the trenches together that distinction gets thrown out.
This happens at my BigCo job too. We literally are not allowed to give any official recognition of the incredibly hard work and immense talent of our contractors. "Contractors" - the human beings we work with day in and out, that build amazing products, that we joke with, share holiday photos with, wish well when they're sick, urge to take a break every once in a while, who seem to work well into what should be their kids' dinner time or bedtime. But because they get paid differently, they're treated like surfs. They always are forgotten in company e-mails, they always have a harder time accessing services, since they don't get a company laptop they're left to go through some RDP interface to use a machine on our network, they don't get the same vacation days we do. I really hate how they're treated.
And let me guess, when it comes to the types of work assigned to them they are not treated like the types of completely fungible hourly workers that you would expect from the type of treatment you describe?
As an hourly employee they legally have to be. If the company doesn't, they're in for a world of hurt if the employee decides to contact a lawyer. That assumes a level of privilege (knowing your rights, having enough money to pay for a lawyer's initial time, etc), but that level of privilege is common in software, so much so that no company with a legal department is going to let it fly to try and treat an hourly employee like a salaried one; there's just too much risk.
Why do companies choose contractors over FTE? Sometimes it’s just because it’s temporarily addition to the work force. If they are vetted and trained like FTE, great. Sometimes the difference is just how you get paid and it doesn’t matter
Sometimes though companies can’t hire FTE so they bring in a of contractors (or outsource), vet and manage them poorly, or give them controversial projects and then they have to lean on the FTE. Also they are often not on call.
Some people can make it work, but imo it's an orange flag for a path to burn-out, especially if it's an excessive number of hours and not a standard 9-5 (with all the rest of their clients put together). A lot of times contractors work for multiple clients at one time, so it's easy to forget "your hours" are not their only ones.
But it was not the company asking for more hours from the contractor, but the other way round. If they need to work more because they need the money, maybe it would be better to let them?
This German law sucks, Germany simply doesn't like independent people. It is also not "contracting", but contracting.
Ultimately, once again, the government is telling me how I have to work or run my business. I didn't ask them to do that, and I don't want them to do that.
In some time the future generations will come to consider this contractor/employee dichotomy with the same disgust we have for child labor. Same with surrogacy and many other things.
Funny you say that, the entire reason I even opened my mouth was because I used to be on those contractor teams early in my career. Experienced it first hand. It sucked. I knew how much it sucked. I promised to be a better leader than the ones I had and saw.
It's a glaringly obvious caste system. I hardly see the difference between being punished for praising a contractor and being shunned for associating with an "untouchable".
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".
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")
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's somewhat surprising to think that in the course of 30+ years of work life, I've only had two co-workers die. I wasn't especially close with either of them, but the contrast is noteworthy.
The first, was a suicide of a teammate who was in his 20s. The company's reaction was kind of shitty. They didn't point the other team members to things like the EAP. They didn't offer bereavement time to the team members. They even docked time from PTO allotments for those who missed a half-day of work to attend the funeral.
The second, was a teammate in his 30s who died from cancer. I've been remote with the team since the beginning and never met anyone in person. He'd been struggling with health issues for the few months he was with us (he'd come back from a 6-month medical leave of absence before joining our team). The level of empathy and support from management at all levels was superlative. They made sure that we were aware of all the support that was available, let us know we were able to take off time if we needed it to process his death (including a member of the team who's a contractor), etc. Suffice it to say that I'm very happy with my current employer and know that they have my back if I need support.
Regardless of company or team, suicide is far more stigmatized than cancer and carries with it associations, implications for people who hear it as a cause of death. There's a reason why liberal perspectives are pushing for "dies by suicide" as a replacement for "commits suicide".
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.
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.
> 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.
Thank you for sharing this piece. Navigating a loss like this in a purely remote environment must have been incredibly challenging — grieving feels like an exercise that we do best together in the same physical space. Sometimes you just need someone to give you a hug.
The hardest thing I have ever done as a manager was gather my team into a room and let them know that one of our team members, a young woman just beginning her career, died in a car accident. The accident happened the night before my wedding. I came back to work 36 hours after my wedding, and a few days before leaving for my honeymoon. The first email in my inbox was from a friend of hers telling me what had happened. I walked into work to an office full of people wanting to hear about my wedding and instead I had to tell them that someone they knew and cared about was gone.
She sent me an email sharing her joy about my wedding that I didn't read until after I had already learned of her death.
Six years later and the memories are still painful.
I think human connection and doing things as a community has fallen by the wayside in the modern world. It will be particularly bad with fully remote work: most people do better cognitively and emotionally when they have contact with a variety of people and have the changes of scene that are part of a normal day.
It's also sad to see the complete disconnect at the workplace, where people are no longer building relationships thanks to remote work. I do not know about others, but I am loath to discuss personal life on slack or on zoom. I am much more likely to do it at lunch, in person, with colleagues, or in hallway conversations. Nothing at remote work in the past two years has replaced that.
This hasn't been my experience at all. Plenty of social connection and discussion of personal lives in my team meetings, just less with coworkers who aren't on the same team.
I'm doing better cognitively and emotionally working from home - I can take breaks more freely and use them more fully, going on walks around my neighborhood instead of a dull corporate park, interacting with my fiancé instead of coworkers, napping on my lunch break. I have more energy, time and money to socialize with friends outside of work and pursue fulfilling personal projects thanks to not commuting. I'm more productive at work because I'm less distracted by office gossip and unproductive coworkers and because I'm happier.
Right. But the discussions about a benefit of in person work is that hanging out with coworkers end up as “I already have friends, I don’t need work fake friends”.
I just don’t think the end state is a cohesive company doing their best work. Just a bunch of individuals doing their micro task.
I will not be able to make friends at BigCo. My coworkers are all in wildly different stages of life than me, or don’t speak fluent English, and making any comment outside of a thin politically acceptable line could threaten my family’s livelihood.
On the other hand, saying nothing is safe. And if I do have the opportunity to pick between two equal candidates, and one is like me and has shared interests and one is not, I’m supposed to choose the latter to encourage diverse team building.
A job is not a place for friends. Not in corporate America anyway.
I agree that a job is not a place for making friends. But collegiality and good relationships with colleagues is still better than a complete disconnect from them. After all, a huge percentage of waking hours are spent at work.
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.
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!"
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).
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.
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.
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 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!)
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 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."
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.
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 honestly don’t know if HR does help in these situations, but I like to think they could schedule grief counseling
This sounds cheesy, but EAP (employee assistance programs) are one benefit. Me and my partner recently did hospice care for my mother-in-law.
Hospice care is physiologically and emotionally draining. After she passed I was in a bad mental health state (I have bipolar that’s well-managed, but long-term, high-stress situations can still trigger problems).
I wound up phoning the EAP hotline and trauma dumping on a random therapist for an hour. Sometimes just having someone to talk to is the difference between spiraling out of control and being able to take care of a mental health situation.
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 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.
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.
I really liked that his wife figured out how to submit a support ticket to send the death notice to his company, seems fitting in the age of remote work and in no way diminishing. As a tech geek, the tools of the trade are as comfortable as a favorite sweater, there's nothing wrong with a support ticket.
Reminds me of something slightly humorous I encountered back in the 90's, based on my particular career path. I had used unix extensively in the time before tilde meant "login/home directory". Then I moved to windows and was doing C++ dev, where tilde means destructor. Reading Slashdot one day, there was an announcement that somebody had died, with a link to page about him, and it used an URL with a tilde and his name for his homepage, they way universities often did. Not knowing the convention, I thought "oh cool, somebody set up a memorial page and they used the destructor syntax in tribute!"
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.
I had a coworker who passed from cancer some years ago. He never acknowledged it but he knew it was coming. When his time finally came his wife talked to the team leadership and invited all of us to the wake. I thought it was incredibly thoughtful of her to do so. We were all given a paid day off work and went to the wake and met people from his family and personal life. It seemed a little strange that even though many of us weren’t really part of his personal life, we were still part of at least some small part of his life nonetheless. I thought it was a really nice way of dealing with it.
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.
I have been working fully remote for over two years now. I certainly feel quite disconnected from my team now. I remember the days of commuting, water cooler talk, and just being around people.
I’ve been with my employer for a long time now and have experienced a lot of coworkers passing away. Cancer, heart attacks, suicide, and undisclosed. The whole spectrum. Some of these coworkers I worked close with while others not so much. Either way it affects you and really puts things into perspective with how fleeting our lives are. Thinking about this gives me a lump in my throat.
Sometimes I am amazed employers aren’t a little more sympathetic of personal situations as doing so can result in greater productivity (if that’s all firms care about). My dad was in the hospital this past September-November with complications from pancreatic cancer and passed away late November. My spouse’s father died from complications of multiple-myeloma the November before that. Needless to say this was a lot to process, and I really could have used a week or two off following my father’s death. In December, things start to slow down anyway but I didn’t have the vacation time left to take a break. Instead,
I continued working but had a hard time focusing and dealing with the past two years. I’m finally starting to feel myself again in March and am becoming more productive. If I could have had a week or two off, I think I would have been in a much better mental state and it would have been better for me and my employer in the long run.
I recently had an ok performance review a few weeks ago, but it was difficult for me to hear some of the negative feedback considering the past year I’ve been dealing with my dad’s situation. That’s not to say the feedback wasn’t all fair, but it wasn’t the best timing when I was trying to get back to normal. My goal was really just to survive last year, not necessarily advance in my career or get a raise.
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.
Ive been on fmla since first week of jan. i'm trading self harm for more time. the thoughts are killing me slowly until i lose the battle. i'm desperatly trying to bring myself to call EAP and get in a hospital but that scares me even more. I tried to resign my remote job and they refused to accept it and sent the cops. i don't know why i'm sharing this here.
The entire company went on holiday and i volunteered for the week between xmas and new years to keep distracted.
I can relate, and I was in a similar situation not too long ago. I remember dreading weekends because there was nothing to stop me from curling up in a ball and crying the whole day.
And honestly, if you've taken advantage of FMLA, you're actually doing better at taking steps to help yourself than I was!
Medication really helped me. I've been on bupropion for about two years, and it's made for a drastic improvement. I'm actually able to see things for how they actually are, and not let every minor stumbling block or criticism make me think I'm a complete and utter failure.
If recommend finding a mental health clinic nearby and scheduling an appointment to talk about depression. The appointment will probably take half an hour, and at the end the doctor will give you a prescription. This is extremely routine -- you're not suffering from anything a million people haven't gone through already.
If you're scared on being institutionalized or something, just... Selectively tell the truth. I mean, I can't say this is the best idea, but it's what I did when the psychiatrist asked me if I had suicidal thoughts.
I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that your brain is just another body part. If your knee hurts, you go to a doctor and get it looked at. If your vision is blurry, you go to an optometrist and get glasses.
If your brain is giving incorrect responses to stimuli, you go to a psychiatrist and get medication. It's fine and it's normal.
The world is pretty fucking broken and you have every reason to feel how you do. I don't have pithy advice, I'm just another guy on the internet.
But things can change. I promise they can. I don't know how or when, but they can. And you're not alone. I promise there are so many people fighting the same battle.
At every funeral I've ever attended, save for a few where the deceased was tragically young, many of the attendees are coworkers - current and former. It's always nice for the families to hear about the impact that their loved one had on people they worked with. I've heard all kinds of stories, from people who gave someone encouragement to try for a promotion, or picked up some of their work so they could be out of the office tending to a sick family member, etc.
I've spent the last decade working at a large company on fully remote teams. Nobody I have worked with during that time has lived within 120 miles of me. Most aren't even in the US. They're in London, Dublin, Rome, India. I've occasionally had the fleeting thought: who is going to come to my funeral? I have family and friends, people I know in the community through various things. But there will be a big demographic left out.
I turned 50 a few weeks ago (and just today attended a memorial service of someone I'd known since middle school), so perhaps this is just hitting me at the right time. But it does bother me a bit, and I don't really see an obvious solution for it.
We lost a coworker to COVID-19, early on during the pandemic. It was surreal to go from seeing his smiling face in the hall to reading the company-wide email about his passing. We had a virtual memorial service, and his friends, parents, and colleagues were all invited to share their stories about him. It was an emotional experience. For all the things I could complain about at that company, how they handled this situation was probably the most comforting and humane thing they could have been done.
It still makes me tear up to think about. He was so young and so cheerful. So full of life. Having faced loss like the article describes, I can't say that the nature of the loss makes much of a difference. Death affects everyone close to it, pretty universally. Questions about whether it was preventable or not, fair or unfair, etc., only serve to color our painful rumination.
Every so often, I'll remember him, and I'll repeat one of his catch-phrases to a friend who was on his team. Inconsequential as this might be, I like to keep the good memories of him alive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Back in 2020 I could very well have been the Pete in this story. I was struggling so bad with mental health issues, financial issues. On top of that, my father was giving the figh to prostatic cancer.
I was just starting working remotely for the first time for a Canadian company. My employers were the nicest guys I have ever meet online and I was thrilled to have been asked to work for them as a software developer.
At first I felt relieved because I finally landed in a job to do things I like using the tools I like with great people. Even though I desperately needed money, I was willing to work on a dime just to prove myself that I was sufficiently skilled to be "one of them".
But as exciting as it felt, there was an impedance that made things so difficult for me and my brain. It rapidly started to erode my self-confidence, I began pushing so hard trying to solve every task and every little detail in the most perfect way possible and felt like I was failing at everything.
I certainly was failing at one thing and it was communication. The language was a barrier (English is not my native language), and I think there might have been some kind of «cultural mismatch» at play too.
In hindsight, I think my employers were also failing to read what I was writing on the wall. I let them know I was struggling with mental health issues and I think I made sufficiently clear what my struggles were. They tried to help me the best they could but kept insisting on things that were irrelevant to me. Apparently they thought maybe I was doing "just a theatre" because I was afraid of asking to renegotiate my compensation (I wasn't). That was particularly frustrating to me.
At some point, feeling like a lightning rod in the middle of a thunderstorm, I was on the brink of doing what can't be undone. I had it all planned.
Lucky me, my wife was wakeful enough to notice what was going on and helped me get out of the pit.
Oh my, I hope you're feeling OK now. Some of what you're saying rings familiar to me, I've got a German/Swiss cultural background and was in Canada, and do think this background can give difficulties. I also do think that mental health problems are difficult for others to do anything with, so it may have made them nervous and act counter productively. I hope you're finding or have found good therapy. Let me know if you'd like to talk (contact in my profile).
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...
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)
I don't know what operation they are running, but I work 100% from home for years as contractor under same conditions as him (heck even my name is Peter), was never hired for this position in person, I don't think I even did any interview or video chat, just passed the test (though I work on stuff position in person many years ago, since then there are no people who met me in person working there), but when I communicate with different PMs they have all their Chinese work landline numbers in signature and they have clearly my number in system, since occasionally (maybe 5 times a year?) when I don't respond quick enough to their emails someone dares to call me from Chinese number in broken English.
So even if I had locked computer/phone (which I don't have) and wife couldn't just reply any email (several dozens per day) or see phone number in email I can only imagine it would take them only few hours to realize I'm not answering and my phone would start ringing like crazy.
Btw we never talk personal life, they can only learn about it, if I explain why I won't be available in certain hours because I'm going to hospital or we just politely wish each other nice holidays, all emails are strictly work, we don't even chat and during occasional video training I never switch on my camera.
So considering all of this what kind of company is this they don't have his phone number to call? And how can they not notice he is not answering his emails and not just call to check on him? Unless he is not that important part of team they won't notice he is missing until his wife let them know.
One thing I cannot understand in the traditional workplace is why certain leaves & sudden departures are never disclosed to a close team whether by the person or their manager. I've had many teammates come and go in the blink of an eye and I'm curious to this day of "what happened to X?". Were they PIPed? Are they fighting something? Did they win the lottery and decide to retire?
It's as if the relationships between the team are much different than with direct management and the disclosure happens privately between middle management and by the time they're gone, the team is left clueless.
I think we need to bring more empathy into the workplace. Especially the remote workplace. I operate on the premise that everyone is battling problems that you don't know about, but even knowing a generalized detail can help in the long term. It takes courage to be vulnerable which not many are willing to do in the workplace, but helps teams become closer and more caring in the long run. It's hard to give bad news, but it's even harder on everyone to say nothing at all.
When I left my last job I pinged everyone I was friendly with. Then I sent out an email to everyone I knew just so people knew I was leaving and how they could contact me. Not everyone feels a connection to their coworkers and if they want to just leave the job without fanfare that's fine with me.
I do think that due to legal reasons, companies will say as little as possible to employees. We had an exec suddenly leave and we had a large meeting about it where the VP told us, but you could tell that there were a few talking points he had to stick to. Basically that the director was no longer with the company and that there wouldn't be a discussion as to why. Nearly two years later I learned it was because he said some rude shit on social media and got canned.
If someone is leaving voluntarily and on good terms, I'd expect an email or announcement. Maybe even a farewell party. But if you hear nothing, I'd assume it's because they declined to have one or they did not leave voluntarily. Either way, best to leave sleeping dogs lie, unless you really felt a connection to that person.
Why is it so taboo to talk about people leaving, quitting, or even dealing with their own battles? Shouldn't we keep people in the loop with common sense disclosures? You don't have to say much and it makes people understand the situation and take on the responsibilities.
So while it's hearing nothing, an irish exit, or even greener pastures, I do believe it's up to someone to communicate it in a common sense way so people aren't surprised months down the line.
Yeah I agree, otherwise people can imagine all kinds of things. I just think it's up to the person leaving or someone they report to. HR is focused on completely different tasks.
Sometimes there is just nothing to say not everything is nefarious it could also mean that even if you think you had a close relationship to your colleague it really wasn't so close at all because otherwise they would give you a heads-up afterwards.
Is it reasonable to say "X is no longer with us, we'll figure out their responsibilities with hiring a replacement, dividing areas of ownership, etc" shortly after they depart (for any reason)? Or should the team have to put two and two together after realizing they aren't coming back? I feel like the latter is too common.
He was presumably making good money, so able to buy his own insurance? According to the article he was from Scottland, so presumably he would also have been eligible for care from the NHS, like every other UK citizen?
Just because people organize their own things, it is not "dystopia". Some people don't need and/or don't want a nanny or a nanny state.
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.
If you work remote, I encourage you to turn on your cameras, and encourage icebreakers and social chatting. Have face-to-face meetings if possible, but take time out to hang out with your remote colleagues. Do this daily. It is important for mental health, and will also help with team trust and productivity.
My sincerest, heart-broken condolences to @sofuckingagile.
I don’t know if Pete was working from Scotland in which case he would have had access to NHS, but if not, then I’m all the more convinced that we need such a system in the US so nobody need depend on their company status to have access to what should be basic healthcare.
I don’t know what is meant by abysmally long but it seems they are trying to rectify some of the shortcomings. It’s certainly better than nothing at all and I would hope if you’re imminently suicidal that that would put you in the urgent category though: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/nhs-people-patients-mi...
Abysmally long means 1 year plus to get an appointment. And you are usually only eligible for a limited course of treatment...if you are fortunate enough to get treatment, most people don't get treatment at all because there aren't the resources (you will get referred to a nurse within your GP, who will have done a few days training on basic advice). If you have anxiety or even something like autism, it can be impossible to get a diagnosis (and btw, this isn't just mental health...I have a physical illness, I have been waiting roughly two years for treatment and I expect I will be waiting at least another year or two...this is something that impacts my quality of life daily, not fatal but annoying enough).
If you are imminently suicidal, you can be hospitalised but there is little to no support outside of that. Bluntly, there are a lot imminently suicidal people and limited resources. If you attempt to commit suicide and are unsuccessful, that wouldn't speed up the process.
Also, it is worth saying the rate of suicide in Scotland is very high. I live in a small place in Scotland with essentially no poverty, and there are still 10 or so suicides every year. I know someone who works as a psychologist within the NHS in Dundee (probably one of the worst cities globally for suicide/deaths of despair), and it is totally out of control. There isn't sufficient funding, and there is no way to acquire sufficient funding...it isn't possible (and btw, it isn't just suicide...heavy drug use in Scotland has been an issue for many decades).
Yes, but it is prohibitively expensive for most people (ironically because the market is quite small...everyone tries to go through the NHS).
The level of underfunding is, however, such that mental health providers are a huge part of the private health sector: Priory Group is a very big one.
Another factor is that a lot of training for psychologists is paid by the NHS, and funding for training has been going down everywhere (even in Scotland, which has a left-wing govt running the NHS).
It is just a resources problem. Even in the private sector, there isn't a supply response to higher prices. Ironically, the UK has lots of people who do undergrad Psychology, just none of them actually go on to practice because entry is so tightly controlled (for some reason, the NHS in Scotland is attempting to train nurses to do psychology with a couple of days training...that is going as well as you can imagine).
That is already happening. The NHS is paying the private sector to perform operations due to long wait times (it will take half a decade for the waiting list to go down)...but these are usually the same NHS doctors, working in the same hospitals...they are just being paid 3x the price, it is the worst of all worlds (doctors are an extremely powerful lobbying group in the UK, they have tightly controlled entry to the industry so you have doctors making base £150-200k part-time on the NHS, then topping up with another £200-300k with private sector work...it is chaos).
I understand no-one in the US wants to hear it...the UK system doesn't work (fully public health doesn't work, almost no countries in Europe with good healthcare have it, Australia is very similar to the UK, introduced private healthcare...their results are miles, miles, miles ahead).
Here in South Africa the private healthcare system is excellent. There's also public health care which is good in some places, atrocious in other. If you've got medical insurance you're good.
Thanks for posting this and thank you to the organization for being honest and upfront about where your team was at with remote workers and the lack of communication with family. On the one hand, I really think remote work is great for many people who cant get into the office and I am glad its becoming more of a thing. On the other hand, I can see for myself, that remote work might put a strain on a person who doesn't go out much, or has mental health issues and that there can be a disconnection from others by relying to much on remote interactions. I learned a lot from this post and I will remember to reach out more and inquire about people I work with remotely, with care obviously.
The thing we can all do is be kind. I had a college dorm mate attempt to kill himself over a holiday. He didn’t show any signs and frankly we his friends probably didn’t have the maturity bandwidth to be the solution as we too were teens. I’d say being kind helps.
This is related to why I abhor arrogance or any signs of holding oneself over others. It’s fundamentally unkind. If you truly are the Wisdom In Flesh Come Down From Heaven then you’re breaking your humble vow in any shows of arrogance. So be humble and show us all what you know. Let us learn from your actions and deeds. Don’t tell us your greatness or demand your authority.
I didn't know you, but you were a person and it's sad you're not among us anymore.
Our line of business is seriously f*ked up if we don't take care of people like you.
Thanks for sharing this story, it's important that we all remember that connecting with people is so much more than having a video chat to talk about features, deadlines and whatnot.
At the cost of being rethoric I wish we've all learned to be better, let's put people over deliverables again.
It won't cost us a dime, it will repay us with a lifetime of stories to tell and memories to share.
I realize there are toxic side effects to "our team is like family," but it's been important to me to find ways to express any sentiment that recognizes the shared humanity of people coming together to work on common goals. I'm glad to hear the team was given space to grieve. It's not something that comes up in a typical management playbook.
Take care of your team and your peers. You may not be family, but you're something else kinda like it.
Having lost a loved one recently, I can say that never ever underestimate the effect of sharing grief with the family in-person. Just drop into Pete's home in Scotland and spend an evening with his family & loved ones. They must all be deeply in grief and your physical presence to talk to them about Pete would mean the world to them.
The article has a lot of reflection about how impersonal their workplace is but it stops short of discussing the impersonal nature of working with people you don't even see or share the same physical space with. The neglected mental health aspects of that sort of environment are obvious for anyone who cares to look.
> Pay attention to your team. Build closeness. Get to know about everyone’s family and private life. Take mental health seriously and talk openly about it. It may seem like prying, but you might catch a wobbler with a team member that you can address early.
While I think it's important for workplaces to take care of their employees, I feel like Pete's issue was that he was too close to work. And on top of that, he wasn't even an employee, just a contractor with no benefits, PTO, etc.
The real problem here is that Pete was not integrated as an employee. If he were, he could have taken PTO, accessed health benefits, and gotten help. I don't know the complete story, so I won't extrapolate further, but I feel sad thinking that this team almost feels "responsible" for his suicide. It wasn't the remote team's fault for not catching on, it was the company's fault for not acknowledging the health and security of their contractors (who, I reiterate, should have been employees).
Don't mean to offend anyone, I just felt the way contractors are treated is sometimes unjust.
> I feel like Pete's issue was that he was too close to work
The article is about a coworker. This isn’t about the company, it’s about the people you work with.
Building relationships with your peers is a healthy activity. Mourning the loss of a coworker is normal and expected.
If anything, going out of your way to avoid building relationships with peers would be a toxic behavior. Working at such a place where everyone avoided caring about each other beyond the minimum necessary transactions to get their job done would be miserable.
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.
> 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"
We had an outside facilitator oversee and guide a remote memorial service for a fellow engineer lost to COVID. I would suggest this approach. Their job seemed very difficult, but it was very important and useful to recognize the person lost and share our experiences.
Even though I had subpar due diligence that resulted in a almost-decade-long-contractor's wife not having any official channel to contact her husbands employer, this made me feel really bad.
This is so fucking embarrassing and full of shit.
Rest In Peace to Pete, and fuck the author of this post.
In my 40’s now and watching my father (boomer gen) go to funerals of people he worked with for years (in some cases decades). It makes me wonder who from work would bother going to mine, not out of guilt or obligation. The previous generation, for all their faults, seems to have a closer connection with their colleagues. Granted we connect differently these days, the bonds seem so temporary, fleeting even. They’re often anonymous.
While I do not always put my camera on... (sometimes I like wearing a raggedy old t shirt and taking a call from my sofa chair) I think this shows one major advantage to face to face communication which is human connection.
Would you spell out please why you don’t put the camera on when joining from your sofa chair?
I feel self-conscious joining from my couch occasionally, but am pushing through it, there’s no reason why we can’t normalize harmless alternatives to desk locations. So just want to check that I’m not missing some material consequence of this behavior.
I don't know I work for an old-school very corporate-feeling company. I feel like I would be presenting as too casual. I work in finance and while we (software developers) don't have to wear suits or traditional business-ware like traders, fund managers or other associates, sitting in my sofa couch in a t-shirt just feels like it would come off ass to casual.
One of the people I managed on a remote team suddenly died one night from an aortic aneurysm. He was in his early 40's, had his teen-aged daughter living with him (who fortunately was away visiting her mom). I'd talked to him only hours before. I'd only met him once in-person, just a few weeks before, when he and I and another person I managed had an informal "on-site". I'd learned recently the two of them had been really good friends for many years.
The company had never had to handle something like this. Thankfully, HR and execs had the right priorities - concern for his family, respect for him and his family in how the news was shared with co-workers (especially with cause-of-death being unclear at first), concern for how it would affect close co-workers and others in the company, awareness that people would need to process and grieve in their own way.
HR talked with the family and got their permission to make an announcement to co-workers, and some guidance on the wording. HR offered to send this, but I felt that would feel too impersonal. I wanted news like that to come across in the most personal way possible, from someone (like me) who knew and cared for him.
The amazing response from the company was a big part of the healing. So many people wanted to do something. The family decided to have a private ceremony, and asked that instead of flowers, donations be made to an animal charity his daughter loved. People really felt for his daughter, and wanted to send cards and letters (which the family was happy to support). One of the teams (that hardly knew him) decided to have a commemoration during their weekly meeting.
The hardest part of all of this was (a) when his daughter called me to arrange for return of his work equipment and (b) when a family member suggested that one way I could help would be to share some of my experiences with his daughter about working with her dad. I have girls of the same age, so pretty close to home. It was hard to write that letter (#b), but it was also healing for me to think about the many positive ways he'd affected me and our team.
A few days later, it felt right to me to have some "closure". I sent a note to the company thanking everyone for the different ways they had respectfully honored our co-worker and supported his family. I also shared some of my memories working with him, and how much I missed his contagious happiness. As sad as it was that he wasn't with us anymore, I wanted to remember how much fun it was to work with him, and that's what I was going to focus on.
I hope I won't have to go through that again any time soon, but when I do, I hope it goes this well.
Not to diminish the seriousness of this post but I'm a little curious why this site is named 'so fucking agile'. If it's just for shits and gigs then it would have been great if they called it 'sofa king agile'.
Another shining example of the ills of neo-liberalism, capitalism, and wage labor as well as how we adapt our humanity to the system rather than building up one around it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.