Moishe Lettvin Moishe

First, let me get this out of the way: I'm having trouble writing about anything practical or work-related with everything happening with COVID-19. I'm worried about my family, I'm worried about my friends, I'm worried about neighbors and anyone vulnerable. But this seems like a small, topical thing I can contribute to that might make a narrow sliver of people's lives a tiny bit easier.

I've been working remote -- out of my home or a rented office -- for a little over 7 years now. During that time I've conducted a fair number of interviews over Zoom or Google Hangouts. It seems like doing this might become the norm for a while, so I thought it might be useful to share some things I've learned.

General Stuff

Interviews are stressful. They're stressful for candidates and for interviewers. There's a continuum of how comfortable people are, obviously, but the fact is they are important and they can have big impacts on people's lives. The nervousness isn't for nothing. I've been a candidate probably a

Some random thoughts about making remote employees successful

have an advocate, ideally at the VP or C-Level, who is personally invested in making remote work. When I started at Etsy, I remember Kellan asking me directly "what can I do to make working remote better?" and Marc repeatedly checking in with me about remote qua remote. This has the obvious benefit of people who have power to make changes knowing about what changes to make and pushing things in a remote-friendly direction, but IME it also has an incredible effect on the morale of remotes. Remote morale is even more subject to perturbation than onsite morale, so this matters.
Avi Bryant said something once that really resonated: try to hire extroverts as remotes. I'm an introvert AND I'm shy and lots of the things I struggle with as a remote are, I think, tied up with that. My default action is not to reach out to people; it's a thing I have to nudge myself to do every time I need to do it, and minor barriers can grow in my head.

	#!/usr/bin/env python

	from urllib.parse import urlencode
	from operator import itemgetter

	import json
	import requests
	from flask import Flask, redirect, request
	import mailchimp_marketing as MailchimpMarketing

	/*
	This is a very simple and not very robust parser for nested lists.

	It doesn't copy the source input, but builds a structured representation of the
	input with pointers to values. This could be useful in memory-constrained environments.

	The syntax is:

	(value1 (value2 value3) value4)