rob_b

Being remote means you always have access to work, thus often resulting in you working much more than you would in an onsite only role.

That is not always the case. Clearly, you’ve never encountered “vim: command not found” but found vi to work without a problem.

I would say it’s a better opportunity to encourage users to use the corresponding language documentation to help ensure more accurate understanding.

“vi Oh boy. Here we go. Type vi index.html. This going to open vim which is an editor that's all in the command line.”

Not to sound pedantic, but vi is not vim. While vim was designed as vi-improved, instructing users of vi to use vim direction is not going to be a complete match and may cause confusion for those not familiar with it.

Why stop with monitoring the computer? It would be easier to just plant a device to monitor thoughts and every action. Surely, this would only be used for good, and after all, it’s all about safety.

The monitoring for safety argument is merely an excuse to eliminate the right to privacy and shift the power to a government entity. Never in the history of mankind has this power ever been abused.

Communication is definitely huge with remote work. I think it’s the crux for a lot of newly remote workers. You have to adjust your communication style when working remotely, which some people just can’t handle. This goes for all sides as well though. I’ve been in a situation where onsite employees refused to participate with remote employees, which obviously didn’t end well.

This is where the follow up email to your attempt comes in handy. You try to speed things up by the phone call, but if you don’t get an answer, then you send an email and mention that you called as well. In the cases where you do speak with someone, then you can adjust the content to reflect your appreciation for them speaking with you and then outline the issue(s) still remaining, assuming they weren’t resolved. There are obviously various iterations and combinations but the gist is to be persistent and try to take more control of the situation by incorporating a follow up into the mix.

The lying about the crisis is the part that I was referencing was shady. Working as a consultant for a previous employer is completely acceptable and provides mutual benefit.

No offense, but that approach would make me not want to hire someone like that or work with someone like that. It may appear that you’re pulling one over on your previous employer, but if anything, that is probably a blessing for them to no longer have someone that operates in a shady fashion like that employed by them.

Edit: The undesirable behavior was in reference to the lying about a personal crisis. I personally believe in transparency and wouldn’t attempt to capitalize on an employer’s sympathy by lying to them.

Agreed. The information presented currently serves a point. Removing items from the design for the sake of removing them is not efficient design. If anything, that is counterproductive.

The presented design would be better received as a personal preference. The tone presented is I’m right and if you don’t recognize that then you’re wrong.

Adults or not, the issues here are reasonable expectations and support. As easy as it is to shift the blame to the employee, the real blame belongs with management. As a manager, I accept responsibility for my team and if their performance is lacking then that is something that we address accordingly. If they can’t perform and the proper channels have been explored, then that is where continued employment should be evaluated.

That noise is the exact reason why I think the design over the years hasn’t strayed away as captured in the screenshots. One of my favorite parts of using GitHub is that the design is clean and easy to navigate. Throwing twenty widgets on there and cramming everything on top of each other adds clutter and distracts users from being able to visually navigate the page. I can’t speak for everyone, but given the chance, I prefer using GitHub over BitBucket and GitLab because the design is much cleaner and easier to navigate.

I’m not too sure which one I would consider worse. That approach would be similar to buying every desirable domain containing a certain keyword when you operate within the same market. I personally believe the way to beat out competitors in a market is by the quality of service and value added, not by utilizing an artificial barrier that prevents anyone else from entering. I can understand his approach even if I don’t necessarily agree with it. Although, I also believe that competition is better for any market.

The quality of the content is definitely hit and miss, with more seeming to be the latter. The problem with mediums (no pun intended) is that at some point the source becomes popular, which does gain the benefit of reaching a wider audience. The downside is that with that popularity comes noise. The noise is often comprised of a clickbait title with poor quality content. I would say that it suffers from the same issue that StackOverflow has, which is that it loses its effectiveness as the user base grows.

That is a completely inept comparison. Domain squatting serves no purpose other than lining the owner’s pockets in what many would consider an unethical manner. Domain names are finite and cannot be replaced as a manufactured product can. A more accurate comparison would be buying every lot of land in an area, another finite resource, without any intention to use the land for yourself with the only goal of then marking it up significantly to milk a potential purchaser without adding any value to the transaction.

I believe ‘his’ should be ‘he’ in this context - “His has built widely used software ranging from award-winning individual apps to corporate workforce software.”

You’re dismissing the observation that users habitually click accept or continue when prompted with a dialog. Sure, you can blame this on the users being lazy but it becomes ingrained into users when everything they access has a dialog, especially when that contains terms of service that would be twenty pages long in paper form (slight exaggeration). I cannot even count the number of times I’ve had conversations with people when observing this behavior. So many users inherently trust that what they’re agreeing to is not only safe, but widely accepted. After all, why else would the service be so popular and have so many users—“Someone out there had to make sure this was legit before me.”

I work with junior developers that are fully remote without any issues. We communicate via IM, Slack, email, and Skype as needed. Not sure how to do something, let’s have a quick screen share and we’ll work through it. Finished with your assigned feature, submit a pull request and I’ll leave comments accordingly or we’ll review it via a screen share. It’s not impossible to do but may require some to change their collaboration approach.

My approach has been to encourage email communication and then I just periodically check my email. This allows me the ability to get in the zone without constant distractions, while still providing the ability to assist when needed. If it’s an absolute emergency then I can be reached via mobile. There are also times though that I will sign into our internal instant messaging system or Slack and will respond there as well. My current tasks tend to dictate how “available” I am.

If anything, I’d see this as a security benefit. The way I interpret it is by maintaining this link it would allow someone to track down a stolen device that the new owner tried to purge and make their own. I’d put the burden on the seller if they were truly concerned about privacy as it isn’t Apple’s fault that they tried to give you a feature to locate your device.

The acknowledgment that task switching is difficult when fully immersed in an existing focus that requires creative thinking has been an area of conflicting points of view in my current position as a developer, especially since I tend to play project manager and business analyst consistently in my projects. The tasks individually may not always seem that difficult from the surface, but they always seem to require the necessary attention to ensure they are resolved efficiently and effectively, which can be difficult when you’re trying to orchestrate everything while trying to make sure that one piece specifically is executed properly. I’ve been told that’s just how things go and there’s no getting around it so I’ve been forced to adopt my own strategies. My constant insistence that there are times that I will be working on one thing and nothing else unless the sky is falling has helped to a point, although the way this has often been executed results in me pulling an all-nighter so that I can focus without distractions. Reviewing my time sheets will show adjoining 16-19 hour days when I’m working on a large project just due to the fact that I’ve built up inertia and I know that may not last once a client issue comes up or a new project comes down the pipeline. It’s not all bad though and I somewhat seem to thrive to be honest. I think a lot of it just comes down to how you’re wired and having an employer that is able to sympathize with you.

The prevalence of Alexa and other “assistance” devices shows that people willingly allow their privacy to be invaded for the perceived benefit gained from it. Advertising is one of those things where they want to analyze every action, effort, and thought, without any regard for the impact it has on the affected users’ privacy and there will be lines of potential customers waiting to signup after being enticed by the carrot. I think the blame is shared between both sides and I do believe the pendulum will continue to shift as long as technology continues to be embedded in our everyday lives.

I believe the goal was to identify the disconnect between what they envision and what the targeted users actually want. I’m in agreement that this is not something that I would want and am glad that the difficulties exist to being with.

This disadvantage will be one of the largest hurdles to overcome, dependent of course on the amount of participants and their corresponding access. Once more mainstream adoption occurs then this could be reevaluated and become a non-issue but how far away is that?.

While you can import pictures as mentioned, the overall experience seems to be much more. The primary focus seems to be to encourage collaboration and thus increase productivity in a geographically dispersed team. This aspect seems the most attractive from my perspective as a remote employee. Imagine a client meeting where you'd be able to directly annotate client feedback and improve the feedback cycle by making realtime changes that can be synchronized across multiple devices. We already use Google Docs and Sheets heavily in my environment for the collaboration aspect so this just seems to take it one step further by providing another outlet.

That last route threw me off at first as well. But it does provide excellent cover and who would suspect a simple janitor of anything. An added benefit is you get a key to almost anywhere.

Depending on your industry and location, recognition doesn't always come easy. Considering that a majority of employers will have a non-technical HR employee only makes things worse. I think that there is definitely a spot in the market for a company that can successfully break this barrier and improve the marketability and recognition of job seekers. The key is that a service like this isn't the be-all and end-all, but instead should serve as a supplemental indicator of a candidate's ability.

Checked out YouTube lately? Some content isn't bad, but there seems to be just as much noise that gives horrible advice and no one should waste their time watching.

I couldn't agree more. I've encountered many "programmers" that know a wide range of languages, but once you begin to delve deeper you realize that its a matter of quality over quantity. "Jack of all trades, master of none."

The corporate world is even more so plagued by this occurrence and explains why there are so many people in roles that they shouldn't be.