Some thoughts on remote working...

Remote makes communication skills more critical. Some of this is valuable anyway (clarity, conciseness, logical structure) but can be compensated for with co-location. Some of this is easy with co-location but becomes difficult with remote (non-verbal cues, humanisation).
Externalise everything. People can't read your mind, especially with reduced non-verbal cues, nor can they remember everything. Get it of your head into something other people can interact with. Words and pictures, not just words. Logical structure, not just a freeform dump.
No unwritten rules (GitLab), AKA a simpler expression of Kanban's "make process policies explicit".
Distribute decision-making with decision rules/guard rails. This is an example of "no unwritten rules". At larger scales, I expect "just trust people to make good decisions" leading to either a mess or indecision.
Public silence means private conjecture (Basecamp). Essentially the importance of transparency but also directly addressing "elephants in the room".
3 collaboration modes (Automattic): real-time/synchronous (fuzzy front end, coordination); asynchronous (parallel effort, decoupling); storage/reference. I'm reluctant to say asynchronous is default given pairing/mobbing.
Watch the baton, not the runners. That is, focus on the flow and interruption of work OVER the flow and interruption of individuals.
Ad-hoc, on-demand interactions for timeliness; scheduled, regular interactions for ease of coordination.
Aggressively deliberate meeting design (whether to have it, who attends, when it occurs, how it's structured). Always consider the trade-off between ensuring a diverse perspective and time taken.
The appropriate time/effort taken depends on the type of decision. High impact, irreversible decisions deserve more time; low-impact, reversible decisions deserve less time.
Make your product development lifecycle/rhythm explicit, including when people should be involved. Another example of "no unwritten rules".
Prefer direct communication over intermediaries (Basecamp). I normally describe this as "shortening the gap between problems and problem-solvers" but also refers to peer-to-peer coordination between problem-solvers.
Make social connection deliberate to make building affective trust deliberate. This includes both regular, scheduled activities as well as potentially "automated serendipity" (automatic social questions, fika bot, etc.)

More from Society

We finally have the U.S. Citizenship Act Bill Text! I'm going to go through some portions of the bill right now and highlight some of the major changes and improvements that it would make to our immigration system.

Thread:


First the Bill makes a series of promises changes to the way we talk about immigrants and immigration law.

Gone would be the term "alien" and in its place is "noncitizen."

Also gone would be the term "alienage," replaced with "noncitizenship."


Now we get to the "earned path to citizenship" for all undocumented immigrants present in the United States on January 1, 2021.

Under this bill, anyone who satisfies the eligibility criteria for a new "lawful prospective immigrant status" can come out of the shadows.


So, what are the eligibility criteria for becoming a "lawful prospective immigrant status"? Those are in a new INA 245G and include:

- Payment of the appropriate fees
- Continuous presence after January 1, 2021
- Not having certain criminal record (but there's a waiver)


After a person has been in "lawful prospective immigrant status" for at least 5 years, they can apply for a green card, so long as they still pass background checks and have paid back any taxes they are required to do so by law.

However! Some groups don't have to wait 5 years.

You May Also Like

I just finished Eric Adler's The Battle of the Classics, and wanted to say something about Joel Christiansen's review linked below. I am not sure what motivates the review (I speculate a bit below), but it gives a very misleading impression of the book. 1/x


The meat of the criticism is that the history Adler gives is insufficiently critical. Adler describes a few figures who had a great influence on how the modern US university was formed. It's certainly critical: it focuses on the social Darwinism of these figures. 2/x

Other insinuations and suggestions in the review seem wildly off the mark, distorted, or inappropriate-- for example, that the book is clickbaity (it is scholarly) or conservative (hardly) or connected to the events at the Capitol (give me a break). 3/x

The core question: in what sense is classics inherently racist? Classics is old. On Adler's account, it begins in ancient Rome and is revived in the Renaissance. Slavery (Christiansen's primary concern) is also very old. Let's say classics is an education for slaveowners. 4/x

It's worth remembering that literacy itself is elite throughout most of this history. Literacy is, then, also the education of slaveowners. We can honor oral and musical traditions without denying that literacy is, generally, good. 5/x