Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
I am my own boss (and she’s a piece of work). —Kate
My first job after college was as an intern for a literary agent, and I worked with her and the family’s yellow lab on the top floor of her house in Boston. My next job was in a small WeWork room, shared with the four other New York employees of a women’s media website that was based in California. There was no pretense at these roles, no corporate jargon being tossed around, because it’s hard to seriously ask someone if they “could circle back on the deliverables” when a lab just farted.
Much of my media career has been a mix of these less formal workspaces and freelancing, and because of this, I’m not that familiar with what a “normal” “professional” “workplace” is like. I’m often shocked when I hear from friends in more traditional industries about certain expectations. But there’s one practice I’ve come across that I’m confident isn’t just weird to me, because it should be weird to everyone: “green dot monitoring.”
On whatever system your company uses to communicate, there’s probably some kind of symbol that shows that you’re online. On Slack, it’s a little green dot. You can accompany it with a food emoji when you’re at lunch, or maybe even a big “X” when you’re focusing, but if you’re unlucky enough to be the employee of a green dot monitor—a manager who requires you to be visibly online for the entire workday—you can never, ever let that icon go dark.