My partner sat in the same cube pod as someone who took their life. One day they were just gone and a crying family member came by to take away a box of things. There was no official acknowledgement of what happened, no service or memorializing, only hushed whispers. It was terrible.<p>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.
<i>Pete would ask to work more hours. He claimed he could use the money. He was a contractor remember</i><p>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 <i>the exact same work</i>. For fun, google the phrase "permatemp".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>For expressing gratitude.<p>To contractors.
I interviewed with my current company (where we work mostly-remote) last year. One of my interviewers was a very sharp, experienced, and nice developer. After I learned they were going to make me an offer, I emailed my interviewers, and this developer emailed me back saying he was looking forward to working together.<p>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.<p>As soon as I found out, I again emailed everyone I knew at the company to express my condolences.<p>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.<p>In my inbox, I also found an email from our CEO to the whole company (about 100 employees) from the week of his passing.<p>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.<p>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.<p>No matter your position, if empathy doesn’t come naturally, learn it. It will serve you in so many situations in life.
This was heartbreaking to read. What disturbs me most is the lack of any face-to-face time for this distributed team. I understand that not everyone likes to use a webcam, but to have gone 7 years without ever seeing your colleague's face seems, in my opinion, a symptom of a big managerial problem. Software engineers are usually humans, and teams composed of humans should make some effort to interact in a human way -- face to face (even just once a year!)<p>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")
It's somewhat surprising to think that in the course of 30+ years of work life, I've only had two co-workers die. I wasn't especially close with either of them, but the contrast is noteworthy.<p>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.<p>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.
Disclaimer: I'm about to disclose some personal information so will probably burn this nick shortly.<p>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....<p>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).<p>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 ....<p>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!'<p>He muttered something along the lines of "f*ing smart-arses", stamped my passport and waved me through.<p>Whole point of the above? I dunno but nick & karma points burnt telling it.<p>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.<p>YMMV
Thank you for sharing this piece. Navigating a loss like this in a purely remote environment must have been incredibly challenging — grieving feels like an exercise that we do best together in the same physical space. Sometimes you just need someone to give you a hug.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Six years later and the memories are still painful.
I think human connection and doing things as a community has fallen by the wayside in the modern world. It will be particularly bad with fully remote work: most people do better cognitively and emotionally when they have contact with a variety of people and have the changes of scene that are part of a normal day.<p>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.
Thank you for sharing such an honest piece. Suicide is a tragedy without peer, the result of pain, illness, and some part selfishness. I feel compassion for Pete and his fight with mental illness, sadness for the friends and coworkers left behind, and anger on behalf of his wife and children who will now carry an incredible burden.<p>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.<p>I was dismayed to read the section <i>Did We Ignore the Signs?</i>, 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.<p>May Pete rest in peace and sincere condolences to the friends and family left behind.
Managers, one solution here is pretty easy. For instance, if your team has a daily status meeting, just tell them "every other Friday, cameras are encouraged". That's it. Don't make it mandatory, don't make jokes about "Joe never turns his camera on, what does his place look like?" In a world that is getting more and more lonely for a lot of people, this can be a life saver.<p>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 honestly don’t know if HR does help in these situations, but I like to think they could schedule grief counseling<p>This sounds cheesy, but EAP (employee assistance programs) are one benefit. Me and my partner recently did hospice care for my mother-in-law.<p>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).<p>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.
We once hired a new colleague, and a week later I had a WebEx call to say 'hi' and we chatted about graph algorithms. It was a good-vibes call, and we closed saying we both looked forward to collaborating on research topics of mutual interests.<p>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.<p>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.<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.
I lost a colleague year ago. Both him and me were at the similar level, we had really good professional relationship. He had family issues and while we talked, he never wanted to share too much (but I knew what is happening). We did know each other in person before we went remote because of pandemic.<p>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.<p>Two months later he took his life away.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Many times you can’t know it was going to happen.<p>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”.<p>As far as never meeting the person you knew…<p>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.<p>A few people organized an online memorial service. I think we used Twitch for the audio for some readings and Discord for discussion.<p>These things were no different from the friends I’ve known in person. Relationships are relationships.
This is a larger issue. And it's not just limited to remote contractors. Even in the cushiest of office jobs with full benefits, seasoned HR and regular check-ins these personal issues can and do impact employees - often times not resulting in death but universally in personal suffering.<p>It's easy and convenient to keep the workplace professional and file those concerns away as "not your business", but they're important.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Take the time to genuinely ask your people how things are inside and outside of work.
I really liked that his wife figured out how to submit a support ticket to send the death notice to his company, seems fitting in the age of remote work and in no way diminishing. As a tech geek, the tools of the trade are as comfortable as a favorite sweater, there's nothing wrong with a support ticket.<p>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 working a Full Time Employee in the industry for over 8 years at multiple companies. Never once has HR done anything remotely useful to help me when there were family problems or tragedy, except maybe a couple weeks of paid leave.<p>But I would like to hear the take from a founder who built an HR team to know if maybe I am missing something.<p>I'm really curious if it's really different being an employee vs a contractor in that respect.
I had a coworker who passed from cancer some years ago. He never acknowledged it but he knew it was coming. When his time finally came his wife talked to the team leadership and invited all of us to the wake. I thought it was incredibly thoughtful of her to do so. We were all given a paid day off work and went to the wake and met people from his family and personal life. It seemed a little strange that even though many of us weren’t really part of his personal life, we were still part of at least some small part of his life nonetheless. I thought it was a really nice way of dealing with it.
We lost a valued team member in late ‘19 and two others through the past two years. I choked up talking about him on several calls.<p>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.
I have been working fully remote for over two years now. I certainly feel quite disconnected from my team now. I remember the days of commuting, water cooler talk, and just being around people.<p>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.
Sometimes I am amazed employers aren’t a little more sympathetic of personal situations as doing so can result in greater productivity (if that’s all firms care about). My dad was in the hospital this past September-November with complications from pancreatic cancer and passed away late November. My spouse’s father died from complications of multiple-myeloma the November before that. Needless to say this was a lot to process, and I really could have used a week or two off following my father’s death. In December, things start to slow down anyway but I didn’t have the vacation time left to take a break. Instead,
I continued working but had a hard time focusing and dealing with the past two years. I’m finally starting to feel myself again in March and am becoming more productive. If I could have had a week or two off, I think I would have been in a much better mental state and it would have been better for me and my employer in the long run.<p>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.
Sorry to hear for their loss. It's tough losing coworkers. Feels like we've lost more than our fair share over the past several years.<p>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.<p>Sudden all-hands meetings still make me nervous years later.<p>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.
Ive been on fmla since first week of jan. i'm trading self harm for more time. the thoughts are killing me slowly until i lose the battle. i'm desperatly trying to bring myself to call EAP and get in a hospital but that scares me even more. I tried to resign my remote job and they refused to accept it and sent the cops. i don't know why i'm sharing this here.
The entire company went on holiday and i volunteered for the week between xmas and new years to keep distracted.
At every funeral I've ever attended, save for a few where the deceased was tragically young, many of the attendees are coworkers - current and former. It's always nice for the families to hear about the impact that their loved one had on people they worked with. I've heard all kinds of stories, from people who gave someone encouragement to try for a promotion, or picked up some of their work so they could be out of the office tending to a sick family member, etc.<p>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.<p>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.
We lost a coworker to COVID-19, early on during the pandemic. It was surreal to go from seeing his smiling face in the hall to reading the company-wide email about his passing. We had a virtual memorial service, and his friends, parents, and colleagues were all invited to share their stories about him. It was an emotional experience. For all the things I could complain about at that company, how they handled this situation was probably the most comforting and humane thing they could have been done.<p>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.<p>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.
7 years as a contractor is abuse. It is abuse of the crappy enforcement of labor laws and abuse of the contractor.<p>That you can have an integrated member of the team clearly be a second-class citizen, that’s just hard to fathom.
Back in 2020 I could very well have been the Pete in this story. I was struggling so bad with mental health issues, financial issues. On top of that, my father was giving the figh to prostatic cancer.
I was just starting working remotely for the first time for a Canadian company. My employers were the nicest guys I have ever meet online and I was thrilled to have been asked to work for them as a software developer.
At first I felt relieved because I finally landed in a job to do things I like using the tools I like with great people. Even though I desperately needed money, I was willing to work on a dime just to prove myself that I was sufficiently skilled to be "one of them".<p>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.<p>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.<p>Lucky me, my wife was wakeful enough to notice what was going on and helped me get out of the pit.
I don't know what operation they are running, but I work 100% from home for years as contractor under same conditions as him (heck even my name is Peter), was never hired for this position in person, I don't think I even did any interview or video chat, just passed the test (though I work on stuff position in person many years ago, since then there are no people who met me in person working there), but when I communicate with different PMs they have all their Chinese work landline numbers in signature and they have clearly my number in system, since occasionally (maybe 5 times a year?) when I don't respond quick enough to their emails someone dares to call me from Chinese number in broken English.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
One thing I cannot understand in the traditional workplace is why certain leaves & sudden departures are never disclosed to a close team whether by the person or their manager. I've had many teammates come and go in the blink of an eye and I'm curious to this day of "what happened to X?". Were they PIPed? Are they fighting something? Did they win the lottery and decide to retire?<p>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.<p>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.
Very sad. I'm not sure if this is problem of remote working but more of a relationship / communication / poor company culture issue. But, it clearly does show remote work done wrong. The theme had been set from the interview...<p>> I was the person who hired him and even during the interview process we didn’t use cameras.<p>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.
If you work remote, I encourage you to turn on your cameras, and encourage icebreakers and social chatting. Have face-to-face meetings if possible, but take time out to hang out with your remote colleagues. Do this daily. It is important for mental health, and will also help with team trust and productivity.<p>My sincerest, heart-broken condolences to @sofuckingagile.
I don’t know if Pete was working from Scotland in which case he would have had access to NHS, but if not, then I’m all the more convinced that we need such a system in the US so nobody need depend on their company status to have access to what should be basic healthcare.
Thanks for posting this and thank you to the organization for being honest and upfront about where your team was at with remote workers and the lack of communication with family. On the one hand, I really think remote work is great for many people who cant get into the office and I am glad its becoming more of a thing. On the other hand, I can see for myself, that remote work might put a strain on a person who doesn't go out much, or has mental health issues and that there can be a disconnection from others by relying to much on remote interactions. I learned a lot from this post and I will remember to reach out more and inquire about people I work with remotely, with care obviously.
The thing we can all do is be kind. I had a college dorm mate attempt to kill himself over a holiday. He didn’t show any signs and frankly we his friends probably didn’t have the maturity bandwidth to be the solution as we too were teens. I’d say being kind helps.<p>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.
RIP Pete<p>I didn't know you, but you were a person and it's sad you're not among us anymore.<p>Our line of business is seriously f*ked up if we don't take care of people like you.<p>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.<p>At the cost of being rethoric I wish we've all learned to be better, let's put people over deliverables again.<p>It won't cost us a dime, it will repay us with a lifetime of stories to tell and memories to share.
I realize there are toxic side effects to "our team is like family," but it's been important to me to find ways to express any sentiment that recognizes the shared humanity of people coming together to work on common goals. I'm glad to hear the team was given space to grieve. It's not something that comes up in a typical management playbook.<p>Take care of your team and your peers. You may not be family, but you're something else kinda like it.
Having lost a loved one recently, I can say that never ever underestimate the effect of sharing grief with the family in-person. Just drop into Pete's home in Scotland and spend an evening with his family & loved ones. They must all be deeply in grief and your physical presence to talk to them about Pete would mean the world to them.
The article has a lot of reflection about how impersonal their workplace is but it stops short of discussing the impersonal nature of working with people you don't even see or share the same physical space with. The neglected mental health aspects of that sort of environment are obvious for anyone who cares to look.
> Pay attention to your team. Build closeness. Get to know about everyone’s family and private life. Take mental health seriously and talk openly about it. It may seem like prying, but you might catch a wobbler with a team member that you can address early.<p>While I think it's important for workplaces to take care of their employees, I feel like Pete's issue was that he was <i>too</i> close to work. And on top of that, he wasn't even an employee, just a contractor with no benefits, PTO, etc.<p>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).<p>Don't mean to offend anyone, I just felt the way contractors are treated is sometimes unjust.
That's the very reason why I don't want full remote as a norm. I want to see my people and meet colleagues, for a good laugh or whatever but for human interactions that I value a lot. Very sad story here, twice as sad with that profound lack of human interaction...
> He was a contractor remember, so more hours means more money, and I could reconcile this without thinking twice.<p>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.
We had an outside facilitator oversee and guide a remote memorial service for a fellow engineer lost to COVID. I would suggest this approach. Their job seemed very difficult, but it was very important and useful to recognize the person lost and share our experiences.
Even though I had subpar due diligence that resulted in a almost-decade-long-contractor's wife not having any official channel to contact her husbands employer, this made me feel really bad.<p>This is so fucking embarrassing and full of shit.<p>Rest In Peace to Pete, and fuck the author of this post.
In my 40’s now and watching my father (boomer gen) go to funerals of people he worked with for years (in some cases decades). It makes me wonder who from work would bother going to mine, not out of guilt or obligation. The previous generation, for all their faults, seems to have a closer connection with their colleagues. Granted we connect differently these days, the bonds seem so temporary, fleeting even. They’re often anonymous.<p>Sad really.
While I do not always put my camera on... (sometimes I like wearing a raggedy old t shirt and taking a call from my sofa chair) I think this shows one major advantage to face to face communication which is human connection.
"His wife had to create a support ticket". Jesus. I can't imagine my own family being able to even FIND how to create a ticket to alert my company.<p>Thanks for sharing the story. RIP Pete.
One of the people I managed on a remote team suddenly died one night from an aortic aneurysm. He was in his early 40's, had his teen-aged daughter living with him (who fortunately was away visiting her mom). I'd talked to him only hours before. I'd only met him once in-person, just a few weeks before, when he and I and another person I managed had an informal "on-site". I'd learned recently the two of them had been really good friends for many years.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I hope I won't have to go through that again any time soon, but when I do, I hope it goes this well.
Not to diminish the seriousness of this post but I'm a little curious why this site is named 'so fucking agile'. If it's just for shits and gigs then it would have been great if they called it 'sofa king agile'.
Another shining example of the ills of neo-liberalism, capitalism, and wage labor as well as how we adapt our humanity to the system rather than building up one around it.
How people can feel connected as a team without even video I'll never understand.<p>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.<p>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).