13th January 2023
Mitchell Clark, reporting for The Verge:
Some third-party Twitter clients such as Twitterific and Tweetbot appear to be experiencing an outage, though the cause is currently unclear. Developers haven’t received any communication from the company about whether the issue is caused by a bug or something else, according to a Mastodon post from Paul Haddad, one of Tweetbot’s creators.
After my positive experience with Ivory of late, and the truly awful new home screen experience that Twitter is currently rolling out to iOS users, I was considering switching to Tweetbot, but I guess I’ll hold off for now.
It’s reasonable to suggest that this is just a minor glitch and when San Francisco starts to wake up it’ll be resolved, but it seems coincidental in the extreme that a bug would occur that appears to only impacts the most popular third party Twitter clients just as they’re rolling out a new home screen experience that introduces an algorithmic feed which has historically been resisted by a decent chunk of Twitter power users.
12th January 2023
Tom Warren reporting for The Verge:
Microsoft certainly isn’t the first big tech company to adopt unlimited time off. Salesforce, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, Oracle, and Netflix all offer similar unlimited time off policies for employees.
Let’s be 100% clear on something. Flexible / Discretionary / Unlimited time off, or whatever you call it is a scam. It’s often perceived as a benefit to the employee, but it’s really a benefit to the company and it really needs to be called out as such.
It creates situations where instead of time off being something that you earn and can bank towards a balance, every request is an imposition on your team, versus a clear cut entitlement. It makes your time off almost entirely at the discretion of your manager, and we’ve all had shitty managers. Having the confidence to tell your manager you’re taking your 30th or 35th day off is great, and I applaud you, but you can imagine how a discretionary policy makes those requests a lot harder for most people, especially traditionally underrepresented groups.
But when you have an ever increasing balance of days off, it creates a real signal to you, your manager and your organisation that you should take time off. And that creates a culture where time off is healthy, almost an obligation to be met.
Time off is a monetary benefit, treat it as such
Unlimited Time Off is 100% a balance sheet benefit to the company, as they don’t have to pay out accrued time off when an employee leaves. You’ll find that in most companies with these policies, the contracts of employment, which are really what matters at the end of the day, will be crystal clear on this point. You’ll only accrue the minimum required by law, and not a minute more.
Salesforce in Ireland used to have a policy called “Holiday Buy Back”, where you could sacrifice a day’s salary to buy a day off. When I pointed out it should be more accurately just called “unpaid time off”, I could almost hear the confusion coming from HR. So trust me when I tell you, your company considers time off in financial terms, and you absolutely should too.
If not unlimited, then what?
There’s at least two alternatives in my mind that are better than unlimited time off.
First off, give, you know, actually very generous time off balances. And make them consistent globally. So basically, if as a company, you’d expect a median of 28 days off under an unlimited time policy, then just make that the allowance.
The second, and better way in my mind is Minimum Time Off. All the benefits of unlimited, but without the downsides. Codify a generous minimum, and then let people take more if they want.
When I’ve been a manager at companies with unlimited time off, I have always implemented it as a minimum time off policy. I tell my team that I expect that by the end of the year, everyone has taken at least 25 days off, and that if we get to mid November and people are short of that, I’m going to be sending them home.
So if you’re a manager in a company with “unlimited” policies, I’d encourage you to take a similar approach to me, but always remember to advocate for the policy to fixed org wide, because it’s a better policy for everyone.
12th January 2023
I’ve been using Ivory as my main Mastodon client on iOS for the last week or two, and it’s very polished given that it’s still consider alpha/beta. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, given that it’s from the same team that makes Tweetbot, but it’s still nice to see.
I will say that it’s a much more Twitter-esque way of consuming Mastodon, which won’t be for everyone, but for those of us with one foot in each ecosystem, it does make it a bit easier to switch between the two.
5th January 2023
After the wave of layoffs at Meta (previously known as Facebook) in November of 2022, I recall messages in the Facebook group for former employees discussing how to handle elements of the redundancy process, like if it was possible to max out retirement saving contributions, or spending gym benefits whilst on garden leave, and a common response was to suggest asking Human Resources (HR) or to mention something that HR had told them. And it reminded me how much trust people place in good HR teams. But people tend to mix up the notion that because they have friends who work in the HR team, that the HR team are their friends, and they forget that HR may not always have your best interests at heart.
HR can definitely be helpful
This isn’t to say HR are your enemy or anything. In fact, a good HR partner can be an important resource, especially for a people manager. They can act as a sounding board to ensure you’re treating people fairly and not acting with an unconscious bias. In situations with under-performing team members, they can advise you on what resources are available to help your struggling report, be they career development training, mental health services and more. But it’s also important to remember that HR aren’t paid to be an advocate for employees, be they your reports, or indeed yourself.
Who HR are there to support
HR exist to represent the interests of the company and those interests always have a degree of divergence with employees. Sometimes the divergence is small and this is the ideal, but frequently the divergence is large, and the redundancies we’ve been seeing in the tech industry is a prime example of that.
It’s easy to look at the redundancy packages being offered by the likes of Meta, Stripe or more recently Salesforce and think “oh that’s so generous, they’re really looking after their employees”. That’s the natural thing to do, we all want to expect the best of others and I don’t mean to minimise how helpful these packages are to help people land on their feet, but to suggest they’re selfless on the part of the company is perhaps a bit much.
It’s all risk mitigation
It is almost certain that a calculation has been made as to what is the smallest amount of money they can spend without suffering some kind of consequences, be it brand reputation, or legal action, then present that as a generous offer to employees. We should be grateful, we should jump at it, they would like us to think. But there might be a better deal to be had, particularly if you’re in a jurisdiction where you have a degree of legal protection, like the European Union. It pays to get informed about your rights, because your HR and Legal teams are not going to do that for you.
Just look at the case taken by a senior Twitter executive in Ireland, where not just accepting the company position led to settlement by Twitter on what you can only assume were more favourable terms. So don’t let them railroad you into a decision until you’ve had a chance to get some advice. Your employer definitely got legal advice on anything they put in front of you, why shouldn’t you do the same before signing?
HR aren’t evil, they’re just doing a job
This isn’t to say your HR team are bad people. They’re almost certainly not. They’re just doing their job. But don’t forget what their job is, and it’s not to protect your interests, so make sure you have someone at the table who is.
3rd January 2023
Tristan Bove, reporting for Fortune:
Shopify will be eliminating all recurring meetings involving more than two people in a bid to give employees more time to work on other tasks, Kaz Nejatian, vice president of product and chief operating officer at Shopify told employees in a Tuesday email viewed by Fortune.
I tend to start every calendar year by declaring email/slack bankruptcy, but this is a pretty extreme version. Clearing the calendars of an entire company is certainly a new one to me, but I can’t say that I disagree with it as an idea. It forces you to be a bit more deliberate about scheduling a meeting rather than relying on the inertia of a meeting just…being there.
Slack was fairly good at async collaboration, and my days didn’t involve too many meetings, but there was always some. Intercom definitely leans on meetings for collaboration more than I’m used to, but I’ve been trying to slowly carve meetings out of my calendar that would be better suited to async collaboration, for example moving from a daily synchronous standup to a mix of meetings and prompts in a slack channel.
In my experience, it’s not so much the number of meetings that’s the problem, it’s the “swiss cheese” effect of having a bunch of small meetings that are spread throughout your week. I definitely agree with a company wide no-meeting day, and compressing larger meetings into a designated time slot as Shopify are doing here. These kinds of seismic changes in the working culture of a company are only possible when they’re an organisation wide mandate as opposed to small experiments by individual teams.
What I’m really curious to see is how this experiment plays out over a longer time frame. If we look at the calendar of a typical employee at Shopify in 6 months time, will it be filled with meetings again? Or will they have found a new way to collaborate? Only time will tell.