partial_accumen

If one product manager gets added to a call, I hear about it from the other PMs. A good day for me is when I have 8 straight hours of coding to do and I don’t speak to a single soul at work.

Unless you’re coding for yourself, you’re not going to escape PMs in any other org you would go to. Your situation is where soft skills come into play. Identify a PM you like, and route all your communication through them. If others want updates, point them to your chosen PM. If others want invites to meetings tell them “no problem, reach out to [favorite PM] to get added”. If Favorite PM doesn’t invite them to the meeting then its an argument between Favorite and the other person and you’re out of the loop.

The best engineers aren’t just good at their technology, but also communicating with others effectively.

I suspect that instances outside the US will simply be too small a factor to bother with.

Aren’t the largest (by user population) Lemmy instances already located outside of the USA? .world is in the Netherlands, I believe. Sopuli.xyz in Finland, etc. Even Midwest.social is not hosted in the USA.