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.
For expressing gratitude.
To contractors.
>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”.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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 know of companies where referring to vendors by name is frowned upon.
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.
On a sidr note: at least they were paid for overtime.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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.
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 used to have a lot of Australian colleagues and their connections made calls with 5+ people just horrible.
Can't understate the importance of breaking bread.
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).
Of course at work I've seen people's faces but as someone who grew up online, only voice comms seems normal too.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Let me tell you: you are a good parent merely for having this attitude.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Remember that study that found psychopathic traits in upper management?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
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.
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.
When the day-to-day doesn't address the simple human aspects of work, it becomes even harder to address the difficult aspects.
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?
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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.
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!"
(I'd think, I don't work in HR, so no idea what actual directives they have).
It's almost as if happy employees are in a company's interest. Not paramount, but not neglected either.
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!)
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'.
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.
It sounds like they developed a good working relationship and that camera/no camera didn't make a difference at all.
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.
That you can have an integrated member of the team clearly be a second-class citizen, that’s just hard to fathom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
YMMV
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.
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.
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 pointing it out (Unfortunately the edit window has closed otherwise I would add them :) )
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.
Don't give up.
What are they going to do, fire you? Who cares.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My favorite way of framing this discussion is use the term "village".
A village is a close-knit group of people with aligned interests (economic and otherwise), activities, rituals, beliefs, and ties of friendship.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
Similar programs are available to employees in other countries.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well at least they won’t have to deal with your judging looks.
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.
This sounds like guilt, one of the stages of grieving. I hope you get counseling.
This is the second time I've written this in the course of a week, over two different items. Seems it the time for it.
Getting therapy is not a weakness. They're professionals there to help you get the best outcome.
> 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.
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.
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.
Compare https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%... versus https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...
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.
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.
Welcome to tech dystopia, I guess.
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.
My sincerest, heart-broken condolences to @sofuckingagile.
> [...] and even during the interview process we didn’t use cameras.
Yes, appereance does not matter (mostly) for your job performance, but seing a face just makes it more human.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
this is so bizzare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Take care of your team and your peers. You may not be family, but you're something else kinda like it.
This is so fucking embarrassing and full of shit.
Rest In Peace to Pete, and fuck the author of this post.
Sad really.
Thanks for sharing the story. RIP Pete.
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.
