I’m on the record as being a supporter of remote work for lots of reasons, but I’m not happy to have another one to add to the list: too many corners of the country have become unsafe to live in, with both reproductive and gender-affirming care newly criminalized. Oklahoma has effectively banned gender-affirming care for people of all ages through a prohibition on insurance coverage. In Texas, obstetricians are fleeing the sate because they can no longer give adequate care without fear of recrimination. In Idaho, the only hospital in the town of Sandpoint has stopped delivering babies, forcing people to travel 46 miles to get prenatal care. And that’s only a sampling: it’s clear this is a trend that is only going to pick up speed in the months ahead. Families need to be able to move to where they can be safe; no one should be asked to choose between their health and safety and their job. Remote practices won’t stop this appalling assault on human rights, but it may give people some options for surviving it.
Recent entries from the blog.
-
“The metaverse heralds an age in which hardly anyone still believes that tech firms can actually solve our problems,” write Anna-Verena Nosthoff and Felix Maschewski in this piece for Dissent. What stands out to me is what a break that is from the not-so-distant past, when people flocked to work at tech companies in part because of a genuine belief that they’d be doing some good in the world. Whether or not that was a reasonable belief back then, it’s become harder to sustain in the years since. I think it’s an often unremarked-upon aspect to the broader problem of burnout in the industry: it’s hard to stay committed to doing work you don’t believe is doing good (or, worse, if you worry it’s doing harm). And there’s a lesson there: if you’re trying to address the problem of burnout (whether in yourself, or in your peers), you’ve got to consider that it isn’t only the amount of work or the pressure, but also whether people believe in the work at all.
-
Wise words from Ethan Marcotte, who notes his discomfort with “adoption” as the sole or even primary metric for design systems. I’ve made the same choice in the past—adoption being the one thing that was readily measurable. But just because something isn’t measurable, doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable. Good design systems have the ability to impact the quality of communication and alignment among designers, engineers, product managers, and their peers. Maybe you can measure that—maybe you can’t—but either way, it’s worth attending to.
-
I’m not one to hate blog generally, but I do want to issue a corrective to this piece in the Times about how working from home may be unhealthy. The author rightly notes that being more sedentary is correlated with poor health, as is being isolated. But neither of those conditions is specific to remote work: getting to an office often requires long commutes spent sitting around, leaching time and energy that could be used more productively. And working in an office is hardly a guarantee of socialization, as many a cubicle worker will attest. My biggest bone with this piece, though, is the assertion that remote work has increased levels of stress and anxiety—without mention of the literal pandemic that has coincided with the huge increase in remote work. There are in fact lots of reasons for anxiety levels to have increased, and forcing people to commute back to an office solves none of them. As I’ve often reminded myself, remote work in a pandemic (and we are still in a pandemic) is not the same as remote work outside of it. But just as importantly: no matter how many op-eds call for a return to office, remote work just isn’t going back in the box.
-
Lots of good reflections in this piece about what went wrong with “design thinking,” but I’m particularly drawn to the notion of moving away from “empathy” as centralizing concept and towards care. I’ve long worried that the overwhelming emphasis on empathy in the workplace presumes we’re all Deanna Trois, with an alien ability to simply know what someone else is feeling. In reality, it’s often hard enough to sort through our own feelings about a situation, let alone intuit someone else’s accurately. Shifting the focus to care—or, I’d suggest, compassion—instead moves us away from shared feeling and towards taking action in support of people’s well being. As this piece notes, it also shortcuts circumstances where the empathy of the designer positions them as an expert over the user’s own testimony and desires. If your role isn’t to be empathetic but to care for someone, how does that change the range of choices available to you?
-
Quite a few companies are learning, possibly the hard way, that attrition tends to spike when layoffs are high. The conventional wisdom is that an uncertain market will see people burrowing in wherever they happen to be, worried that to make a move is too risky. But I’ve observed (and the data attests) that plenty of people have the opposite reaction: in a fucked-up market, making a move can paradoxically seem less risky and more likely to pay off. If you’re a leader trying to retain your best people, there’s good advice in here about specific strategies; but really it all comes down to one thing: ask your people what they need, and then deliver on it.
-
Also on the topic of uncertainty, I like this interview with Brian Massumi, who says, “uncertainty can actually be empowering—once you realize that it gives you a margin of maneuverability and you focus on that, rather than on projecting success or failure. It gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, to try and see….The question of which next step to take is a lot less intimidating than how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our problems will finally be solved.” A good question to ask yourself when dealing with uncertainty is, what’s the next experimental step I can take? Then take it and see where it gets you.
-
Sara Hendren shares resources for countering climate nihilism. All of these are valuable in their own right, but I was also struck by how so much of the advice is about viewing uncertainty not as a kind of enclosure—as something that prohibits action—but as an opportunity, as an open space into which anything can happen. Part of what good leaders do in times of uncertainty is help people see that in not knowing what the future holds, there’s a freedom to experiment. Some of those experiments may fail, while others succeed only conditionally, but it’s never the case that all movement is foreclosed. The trick is to help people see those potential futures—and the steps you’re taking to bring them closer.
-
A great many stories have been written about Senator Fetterman’s struggle to recover from a stroke while taking office as Pennyslvania’s junior senator. A lot of them have tried to spin his recovery into a tale of weakness, usually with a dose of patriarchy tossed in. But every story about how the Senate has adapted to accomodate his need for captioning, to this week’s news that he has checked himself in to Walter Reed to get care for depression, tells us something else: that we can choose to build workplaces that are welcoming to people with disabilities, and where people are encouraged to prioritize their health. As Sabrina Hersi Issa notes, “getting help is leadership.”
On the subject of imposter syndrome, I want to bring extra attention to this classic piece from Chris Xu, who writes about how unthinking application of the concept can often amount to treating self-awareness as a pathology. This is not to say that imposter syndrome isn’t real, but that the reverse—the belief that you are capable of doing anything, regardless of your experience—is not a salve. What we’re aiming for is an environment in which everyone’s experience and expertise is respected, while also being able to safely acknowledge that we all have things to learn. Or, to borrow from Xu’s brilliant nomenclature, in rooting out imposter syndrome, we’re not aiming to build a culture of blowhards in its place.
-
Returning to this short piece from Agustina Vidal from a number of years ago, about emotional justice at work. Vidal defines emotional justice as “policies that protect the emotional well-being of our staff by centering anti-oppressive and trauma-informed practices in our workplace.” Among those practices are “evaluations that uplift,” an idea that sadly remains underused. A great many review procedures start from an unexamined position of critique; what if we shifted that mindset to orient those practices in care and support instead?
-
Some years ago, a well-respected peer and leader on the team I served shared that she was leaving. This news came at a particularly uncertain and challenging time, and was met by a lot of long faces and heartbreak emojis. I was bummed. Lots of folks on the team were bummed. I wrote a short note to share with the team—the kind of thing I was wont to write often—part acknowledgement that things were difficult and it was right to grieve, part reminder that I and other leaders were available, part pick-me-up (to the extent the latter was even possible). I don’t recall exactly what I said, but I know I included something to the effect of, “Your work is bigger than this one time and place.” It’s a message I have often had to remind myself of, at previous moments of rupture—when a company came to an end, when a beloved colleague moved on, when a round of layoffs seemed to shatter whatever illusions of stability and safety I had held. It helped to remember that just because someone was leaving the proverbial building didn’t mean our work was coming to an end. As Gregg Bernstein writes, you can leave someone’s Slack channels, but you don’t have to leave their life.
Capitalism is capricious, and job security ephemeral. But your relationships with your people need not be either.
-
“What’s burning out health care workers is less the grueling conditions we practice under, and more our dwindling faith in the systems for which we work.” So writes Eric Reinhart, a physician at Northwestern University, in this piece about burnout among doctors. The big picture here—that demoralization about contributing to a broken system is a bigger issue than overwork—is one that I think applies broadly to a lot of other industries, tech among them. It’s true that too much work and too little stability is a big part of the epidemic of burnout we’re in; but people’s faith (or lack thereof) in the systems in which they work is at least an equal contributor. And just as challenging a problem to solve.
-
This evergreen post from Camille Fournier has great advice for new managers trying to avoid some very familiar pitfalls. While written in the context of engineering management, the counsel she offers is equally applicable to other disciplines and amounts to a warning to stay out of the weeds. As Fournier notes, “remember that your job is now about generating leverage by developing your team, which means delegating the technical work to them while helping them identify other skills they will need to successfully grow as an engineer.”
-
More proof of a trend that I’ve been harping on for a while: while we’ve seen lots of layoffs in some areas of the tech industry (ads, platforms, commerce), there’s still tons of growth in another area—climate tech. It’s one of the hottest areas of investing right now, and a lot of that investment is being further buoyed up by government funds. This article notes that in some cases the salaries aren’t as high as competing companies, but that’s often the case when comparing early stage to mature companies, and isn’t likely to be a long term trend. There are a few good resources in here for job searchers, but I’d love to see climate tech companies doing more outreach to help tech workers understand how to navigate a move into the field.
-
Rose Eveleth captures what I hear from a lot of my friends and clients, about a moment when she hit a level of burnout that required her to stop working for a while: “So when I couldn’t work—and I really mean physically could not, trust me, I tried—I panicked. What am I if not a person who works four jobs at once? Who am I if not the hardest working person you know? What then?????” The bad news is that when this question shows up, it hurts, and there are no shortcuts to answering it. The good news: once you answer it, you’ll realize you’ve been waiting to answer it for a long, long time.
-
This piece from Emily Stewart lays out the trend of interviewing becoming a lengthy slog through multiple rounds of interviews and take-home assignments and tests. And look, I get it: hiring someone who doesn’t turn out to be right for the job is a costly and frustrating mistake, for both the manager and the worker. And we’re right to suspect that the traditional mode of interviewing is insufficient to create the perfect assurance that we’re making the right decision. But then, any process is insufficient for allaying all doubts—homework and panel interviews and tests might get us closer to really knowing how someone will perform once on the job, but nothing will get us all the way. My rubric has always been: ask yourself if someone with both a full-time job and caretaking responsibilities could reasonably complete your process without losing sleep. And if you’re the candidate, take note of how a prospective employer respects your time during the interview process; it’s a good tell for how they’ll respect it on the other side.