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Why is the Nicaraguan real estate market so depressed right now?

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@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

@scottalanmiller said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

You are attempting to make me feel badly for wanting to hire and promote based on performance. This isn't a welfare program. We have a fiduciary duty here. Ethics alone say that we have to think this way. Anything else is just stealing from the investors.

No, I’m saying your myopic world view means you’re not going to hire the best candidates. I don’t care how you feel.

In what way is it myopic? The best candidates, those that can grow and provide the best are those that are passionate and doing the job because they love it rather than because it's a job. It's a field and career that they love and they don't really see it as a job at all. Will there be an exception to that? Maybe, but likely, no.

The market is full of amazingly passionate and skilled candidates that get passed over because of hiring practices that favour everything but actual performance (often because it placates middle managers and their egos.) There isn't a shortage of amazing candidates, only a problem finding them or isolating them. So finding ways to identify the best performing candidates is really, really important.

Given the obvious fact that specific skills are irrelevant to any serious hiring, passion and aptitude are far and away the most important things that we need to look at when hiring. They are things we can't teach, specific skills even in IT are pretty easy to teach quite quickly as needed, as long as the passion and aptitude are there.

I'd be very interested in how you approach the hiring process to look for those things.

Anytime we try to identify "what good looks like", someone doesn't make that bar. I'm a great example.

Something I've learned strongly is that university provides heavy negatives for candidates. University training tends to make people slow and rigid, lack the ability to grow on their own and so forth. But it's more than that, going to university reflects a decision to go down that path.

And that sucks, for me, because I went to uni, more than once. I got multiple degrees. And I have to admit that I was a huge idiot, wasted tons of time and money, and the only major benefit I garnered was knowing solidly just how foolish it is (and having gone to top ranked private schools, medium ranked public schools, several states, different programs, doing every level available in the US, etc.) I have this broad exposure that even most normal uni graduates lack - most doing a single program at a single school or so. But in looking for the best candidates yes, I have to acknowledge that in that area I don't shine, at all. I have a blight on my record that I can never expunge. It doesn't mean I can't learn from that and improve, but it shows a lot of gaps in my mental processes at that stage in my life that likely still exist. Maybe I'm more guarded against them now, but logically, they are still there.

But while that makes me feel badly, as an IT person, and a hiring manager, as a representative of a business I can't look the other way. I have to still recognize that a candidate who did the same things as me but faster, on their own, would look like a better candidate all things being equal.

@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

Like I guess most people on this forum, I'm just clinging on and doing my best!

I think that this resonates with how I feel. I feel like people who stringently push for this hard separation between work and personal lives whether it is how they clock in/out, how equipment is selected or otherwise, tend to also have this feeling of being overwhelmed, overworked, and it all being just about as much as they can handle. But I rarely get that same feeling from people who allow themselves to work in a flexible, merged way.

I'm sure employers and work environments that encourage the one over the other are a big factor too. I'm not saying it is all one thing or another.

I work more like 80-100 hours per week, and I agree that getting sleep is really hard for sure (that's more about my dogs than my work, though) but I get tons and tons of time with my kids. We are together many hours every day. And I'm always here when they want me to be around. I couldn't do that if I tried to make this hard line between work and home. I don't know anyone who can. But because I don't do that, because the two bleed into one another I perceive that that is a big component in making the difference in approach.

@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

On top of work, there's the usual life things - raising two teenagers, looking after elderly parents, maintaining the house, physical and mental health issues, exercising, the usual stuff everyone deals with. I'd like to have more time for hobbies but never seem to. I used to be pretty serious about photography but haven't touched my camera in a few years. Heck, I'd like to have more time for sleep!
Keeping a work/life balance is hard. Scott will say work is life, but sometimes I'm spending time with my kids and I'm only giving them 50% because my mind is whirling through all the things I need to do for my clients, which makes me feel terrible.

I do, a bit, but I think people always get it backwards. And for exactly the reason that you say. I bolded where you said, sometimes your brain isn't all there (with your kids.) This is exactly why I say work is life (and life is work.)

When you do the 40 hour by the clock thing, this is a trick employers (and governments sadly now) use to make people work extra. Why? Because when clocked in, they control you. When clocked out, knowledge workers like us have to keep all of that stuff loaded in our brains. We can't just turn that off, even when we are at home trying to hang out with the kids! It's unfair. A factory worker might be able to do that, but we cannot.

That's why I don't believe in that system. Work IS GOING TO INTRUDE in our lives. It is, period. I can't stop that, you can't stop that, our employers can't stop that, the law can't either. Nothing can stop it, because it is intrinsic to doing knowledge based work. So what is the answer?

The only answer I know of is embracing it instead of ignoring it or denying it. Make work and life able to overlap. That doesn't mean working during your off time (more than necessary for your brain to be there), but having family time during work hours or whatever. It's bidirectional.

This is why I push for people to work from home, to comingle equipment and so forth. It takes a LOT of work to do our jobs well. If we doing let our personal lives overlap with work, we either do poorly or we burn out. My kids can hang out with me when I work, I'm home with them all day, they hang out with coworkers. Sometimes work interrupts time with my kids, but just as much my kids can interrupt my work. Sure, they don't pop into meetings, but if I need to unload work stuff at night, I can. And if I need to do family stuff during the day, I can.

Is it perfect? No. But is it way, way better? Yeah, I think so. More family time, more productivity. Everyone wins, especially the kids.

@Carnival-Boy said in SAMIT: Should You Provide Equipment for Work from Home Staff?:

And on top of all that I'm supposed to do more IT learning, just for the sake of it? I often feel I'm barely keeping my head above the water as it is. So you think that makes me a BAD employee? Fine, I don't know why I'm getting into a discussion with someone who posts YouTube videos putting people down. Good luck to your employees, sorry you'd never work with me.

Here is the problem with this statement, you say it is putting people down. But we are talking about selecting people to hire. So if I said "people who have learned more" or "people with more experience" are better, would you say that I'm putting down those with less knowledge or experience?

In the hiring or employment process, the goal (the singular goal) of that process is to identify and select the best candidate(s). In the ongoing employee improvement process, we want the same thing. We want to push people forward, both for our companies and for the employees own personal growth and protection.

If we start to treat "improvement" or "identifying good candidates" as "putting people down", we have a real problem. We have a business problem, a hiring problem, and IT problem. It's unfortunate that some people feel badly when they get identified as falling behind or not meeting a bar or not getting the job. But there is a huge difference between putting people down (that would be saying someone is a bad person for not being a good candidate) and identifying what good employees look like.

You are attempting to make me feel badly for wanting to hire and promote based on performance. This isn't a welfare program. We have a fiduciary duty here. Ethics alone say that we have to think this way. Anything else is just stealing from the investors.

Doing some video editing.

Touring a gated community in Ciudad Sandino, Managua, Nicaragua where two bedroom homes start at $25,000 USD already built with land.

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Doing a lot of explaining of taxes this morning.