Quarterly would be a gross misuse of budget, imo. I think there’s tremendous value in physically meeting your team—-I can’t quantify it, but I can feel it—-so once a year is good, to me. Maybe twice if one is business and one’s a party or something.
Seconding this. My team meets annually for several days, at a conference that gives us plenty of social time together in the evenings.
As you said it's hard to quantify the value, but anecdotally I notice it most in 3 (distinct but somewhat overlapping) areas:
(1) Overall morale - everyone enjoys work more when you have a good relationship with your coworkers, so people are willing to do more than the bare minimum. People approaching burnout feel more enthusiastic about work afterwards.
(2) Everyone is more inclined to help each other out with tasks outside of their routine but within their skillset, reducing bottlenecks.
(3) Similarly, you develop a better sense of each other's personalities and skillsets in a way that's much more difficult when remote, so communication is more efficient, and collaboration more effective due to that increase in understanding and empathy.
How the hell do you get by with that? I’m jealous. I’ve gotten pinged by my fucking EVP for not responding to questions in chat fast enough (non-critical, too!). At least no one gets on me for missing emails. I don’t even read those.
You have a company policy that allows that. For example, if anything is decided in Slack, it has to be "codified" somewhere else, like a wiki. Then you'll be able to justify not reading through all messages.
I didn’t realize how important meeting people IRL was until I didn’t meet my team at my last job. I felt like an alien or something there. It sucked. A year and a half in, they planned a meeting, then fired me right before it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Place was lame anyway. Adtech is the devil’s work.
Agreed. Isn’t it better to donate to something that’s actually used than something that might have an audience of 1? It’d be nice to see donations to newer projects gaining momentum, but they get to choose how to hand out the cash. I just hope it’s not projects that are already exceptionally well funded (it’d be kinda ridicous if they gave $100k for Linux, for example).
I don’t know the answer, but I think it depends on how the money gets appropriated. You can’t buy a TV spot and call it good will, but could you setup a food drive in a large target city and you setup a bunch of fun shit for families and kids, and during which you also promoted your business. Can a corp write that off? Seems like the answer would be yes, but maybe not.
Are you saying that as a good or bad thing (an afternoon)? I have no clue if that’s good or bad, never done this kinda thing (more of a sysadmin than a SWE).
HIPAA is a joke in the first place. How to implement HIPAA compliance is entirely up to the company dealing with the data. There are no prescriptive standards to protect your data. Who isn’t HIPAA certified? It has to be the easiest thing to certify for from a technical perspective. Research teams run records through some NLP shit to depersonalize them, but we all already know it’s trivial to reverse engineer that data to its origin.
HIPAA is a legal framework to describe lawful disclosure of health information- defining who and when, and what steps must be taken when unauthorized / impermissible disclosure happens.
It is technologically agnostic, because it applies whether your doctor is fully remote and everything uses electronic records, or if the provider is still using pen and paper and carrier pigeons.
For actual security details, there may be some regulations with the change to the mandating of electronic records, but nothing in HIPAA ourself. For that, you want to look for organizations that have a certification like SOC2 or similar.
> HIPAA is not a joke, employees can be held personally liable for breeches
Okay, great. So which employees were held personally liable for these two breeches? I got "The Letter" telling me I was one of the victims for both of them.
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