Less “hm they’re Vivek’s friends”, more “they are expressly Vivek’s employees”. The working relationship that I attempted to set up was one where I worked directly with Vivek, and gave Vivek budget to hire other people to work with him.
If memory serves, I did go on a long walk with Vivek where I attempted to enumerate the ways that working with me might suck. As for the others, some relevant recollections:
I was originally not planning to have a working relationship with Vivek’s hires. (If memory serves, there were a few early hires that I didn’t have any working relationship with at any point during their tenure.) (If memory serves further, I explicitly registered pessimism, to Vivek, about me working with some of his hires.)
I was already explicitly relying on Vivek to do vetting and make whatever requests for privacy he wanted to, which my brian implicitly lumped in with “give caveats about what parts of the work might suck”.
The initial work patterns felt to me more like Vivek saying “can one of my hires join the call” than “would you like to also do research with my hires directly”, which didn’t trigger my “give caveats personally” event (in part because I was implicitly expecting Vivek to have given caveats).
I had already had technical-ish conversations with Thomas Kwa in March, and he was the first of Vivek’s employees to join calls with me, and so had him binned as already having a sense for my conversation-style; this coincidence further helped my brain fail the “warn Vivek’s employees personally” check.
“Vivek’s hires are on the call” escalated relatively smoothly to “we’re all in a room and I’m giving feedback on everyone’s work” across the course of months, and so there was no sharp boundary for a trigger.
Looking back, I think my error here was mostly in expecting-but-not-requesting-or-verifying that Vivek was giving appropiate caveats to his hires, which is silly in retrospect.
For clarity: I was not at any point like “oops I was supposed to warn all of Vivek’s hires”, though I was at some point (non-spontaneously; it was kinda obvious and others were noticing too; the primary impetus for this wasn’t stemming from me) like “here’s a Nate!culture communication handbook” (among other attempts, like sharing conversation models with mutual-friends who can communicate easily with both me and people-who-were-having-trouble-communicating-with-me, more at their request than at mine).
Less “hm they’re Vivek’s friends”, more “they are expressly Vivek’s employees”. The working relationship that I attempted to set up was one where I worked directly with Vivek, and gave Vivek budget to hire other people to work with him.
If memory serves, I did go on a long walk with Vivek where I attempted to enumerate the ways that working with me might suck. As for the others, some relevant recollections:
I was originally not planning to have a working relationship with Vivek’s hires. (If memory serves, there were a few early hires that I didn’t have any working relationship with at any point during their tenure.) (If memory serves further, I explicitly registered pessimism, to Vivek, about me working with some of his hires.)
I was already explicitly relying on Vivek to do vetting and make whatever requests for privacy he wanted to, which my brian implicitly lumped in with “give caveats about what parts of the work might suck”.
The initial work patterns felt to me more like Vivek saying “can one of my hires join the call” than “would you like to also do research with my hires directly”, which didn’t trigger my “give caveats personally” event (in part because I was implicitly expecting Vivek to have given caveats).
I had already had technical-ish conversations with Thomas Kwa in March, and he was the first of Vivek’s employees to join calls with me, and so had him binned as already having a sense for my conversation-style; this coincidence further helped my brain fail the “warn Vivek’s employees personally” check.
“Vivek’s hires are on the call” escalated relatively smoothly to “we’re all in a room and I’m giving feedback on everyone’s work” across the course of months, and so there was no sharp boundary for a trigger.
Looking back, I think my error here was mostly in expecting-but-not-requesting-or-verifying that Vivek was giving appropiate caveats to his hires, which is silly in retrospect.
For clarity: I was not at any point like “oops I was supposed to warn all of Vivek’s hires”, though I was at some point (non-spontaneously; it was kinda obvious and others were noticing too; the primary impetus for this wasn’t stemming from me) like “here’s a Nate!culture communication handbook” (among other attempts, like sharing conversation models with mutual-friends who can communicate easily with both me and people-who-were-having-trouble-communicating-with-me, more at their request than at mine).