I hear this wonderful question a fair bit, and I emphasize remotely in the title — most companies, even high-tech ones, will only hire for onsite, in-office positions. Not every person or every job is well-suited for working remotely from home, or as Pathfinder Linden (John Lester) and myself prefer, "networked" (since "remote" can sound… well, too distant!).
But ah, we're special. We really are.
You see, Linden Lab didn't just establish a virtual world where people can connect across the globe, no matter how physically distant — we "eat our own dog food", and try experiments in remote work for ourselves that I'm hopeful will scale and be adapted by other companies, like Cali & Jody's ROWE. This is the epitome of leading by example.
My answer to "What's it like to work remotely for Linden Lab?":
I recommend this enlightening book on a number of counts. In an increasingly crowded (and sometimes superfluously smelly) elevator of social media and marketing how-tos, Rohit Bhargava sets himself apart: one of the most noticeable distinctions Personality Not Included has is its non-linear, self-referential structure, which makes it easy (and rewarding) to skip around if you're compelled. I didn't, but the option is there, which can't be said for less adventurous texts.
The book largely deals with personality (of course) and the looming ennui of "faceless" companies that don't connect with their customers, which benefits no one. It sounds obvious, but as staples like The Consumerist hammer home time and time again, even the glaring gets forgotten. I suspect this is due to "idealogical incest", the echo chamber of corporations copying each other on the WRONG things, compounding their screwups by being over-cautious and de-humanizing themselves!
It's time to debunk the mindjunk and chop the slop… about me!
Torley paints a happy spin/fluff on everything
What kind of crap is this? This criticism is functionally useless.
And you now have a choice of how you want to hear me:
Normal Torley
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Not-Normal Torley
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To put it more diplomatically: read back through my blog posts (both personal & professional), Issue Tracker comments, forum posts, etc. and you'll see 1,000s of times when I not only acknowledged problems (from little UI bugs to critical crashes/content loss), but actioned them onwards.
After you've read all that, or even an ample portion and made the connections, then you have a solid base to work from. But people who go, "Torley's just in lala rose-tinted neon land!" would benefit from doing research. This isn't a SL problem. It's a human problem which speaks more about the person saying it than me. (E.g., someone has a problem with being happy, or is intensely suspicious of exuberant enthusiasm and wrongly perceives it as being "fake".) And it's often paired with passive-aggressive behavior, because I hardly ever get those questions sent to me personally; they tend to be scattered comments on blogs and whatnot, where I'm unlikely to see them.
Simple: if you have a genuine concern I can help with and want to collaborate on advancing it, contact me directly. Ask questions, don't make unfounded assumptions, and it's likely we'll do great things together.
Push it to the limit awwww yeah! Time to go for a ride…
Like I promised earlier, more details on what's been happening with my communications at Linden Lab, specifically concerning Resident aka Community Enlightenment and Video Tutorials.
The new blog will have multiple categories to allow topic experts to talk about their areas of expertise and to promote discussion and Resident feedback and ideas. Large topics will integrate with the forums, as we’ve done recently, to allow for richer and more involved conversation with Linden Lab and Residents than is possible in blog comments.
Cool yes?
When that happens, I'll be one of the "topic experts". I won't necessarily be following up in the forums (keep reading). As we've seen in the "How to report abuse" with GTeam video, I'll be collaborating with fellow domain gurus to bring you useful + fun knowledge in a way I earnestly hope is more focused and frequent than what we've had before. Tentatively, this includes laser-beaming with our Documentation Team.
Mini-self-constructed-FAQ follows, ask me in the comments for further followup…
