[HN Gopher] Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professi...
___________________________________________________________________
Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study
says
Author : aarghh
Score : 201 points
Date : 2023-04-24 11:16 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| pigeonhole1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| mk81 wrote:
| [dead]
| repeekad wrote:
| I worked really hard in school, and when I got my golden ticket
| to silicon valley I was so excited to leave the corn fields and
| start my new life. I knew zero people in the Bay Area, but my
| coworkers and roommates (and roommates' friends) were enough of a
| social circle for me; I loved my work and my team. One year
| later, CA lockdowns hit and _everyone_ I knew left CA or moved
| back to familys' million dollar homes. I was left adrift, not
| wanting to go back to the cornfields, expecting things to
| reasonably end soon, working remotely, and alone. They did not
| reasonably end: I grew more and more depressed and isolated. I
| tried but zero in-network providers were taking new patients for
| therapy /psychologists, and the (sigh) remote therapy options
| just felt more isolating. I vividly remember having a good
| conversation on betterhelp, only for the call to end and just be
| left there sitting alone in my room, silence.. I talked to
| managers about it, but they told me I should watch more Netflix,
| and likely just furthered the decision to lay me off.
|
| Getting laid off was the best thing to happen to me. The work
| culture that led to it being done over zoom, was the worst.
| juve1996 wrote:
| This is your experience and is valid. But I would think about
| something. Those people left through their personal choice.
|
| Many workplace relationships are like this. I met some great
| people at work. They left, or I left, and I never spoke to them
| again. Work brought us together, but it was just work. After
| one of us would leave, we chose to spend our times with other
| people we'd rather spend time with. I've had maybe a handful of
| friends actually be friends when work changed and we were no
| longer on that same team. It's not personal, it's just life.
|
| My dad was a workaholic and never cultivated his life outside
| of work. When he finally retired he realized he didn't have any
| real friendships aside from a few. I make sure I do things
| outside of my occupation for this very reason.
| Clubber wrote:
| At this point, I'm betting this was a paid for study and article
| by a group interested in keeping corporate real estate values up.
| I'll suspect most articles before this point were too.
| dboreham wrote:
| Likely. Everything you read is in support of someone's business
| model.
| izacus wrote:
| Or maybe you just refuse to accept that certain ways of working
| have downsides because you have a personal vested interest to
| ignore the facts?
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| But one cannot just consider the benefits of office work in
| isolation. If working remotely makes me see my family and
| friends more hours per week (e.g., having breakfast and lunch
| with my partner/kids) then to the hell that x% of
| productivity I could theoretically gain by working from the
| office.
| Clubber wrote:
| Not for me they don't. Most of our team is remote and it's
| great for retention. Nothing makes people want to jump ship
| more than a shitty office culture you have to experience in
| person every day. Guess what, most office cultures are
| shitty, no matter how many ping pong tables you put in there.
|
| What's my personal vested interest do you suppose?
| izacus wrote:
| The fact that you think "most office cultures are shitty"
| and have thus decided to dismiss everything that might
| mention any kind of downsides of WFH as a conspiracy.
|
| That's like... the definition of ignoring facts over
| personal bias.
| Clubber wrote:
| Do you think it's beyond the realm of possibility that a
| group of wealthy commercial real estate owners would get
| articles published and studies paid for, particularly
| when they face significant financial harm due to people
| wanting to work from home? Who do you think paid for that
| study? It's paywalls so I don't know. I doubt it was a
| union.
|
| Do you think it's strange that we've had a deluge of
| negative articles about working from home and almost no
| positive ones? Does this seem statistically normal to
| you?
|
| Serious questions to think about.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It doesn't have to be either/or. Commercial real estate
| could have a vested interest, _and_ there could be real
| downsides with many companies ' implementation of work
| from home.
|
| At that point, if the problems are real, dismissing the
| article, not because of who wrote it, but because of who
| you _suspect_ wrote it, seems rather narrow-minded.
| Clubber wrote:
| I can't read it because it's paywalled, but can you tell
| me the difference between this article and all the other
| articles we've been spammed with about how WFH is somehow
| bad?
|
| >Commercial real estate could have a vested interest, and
| there could be real downsides with many companies'
| implementation of work from home.
|
| You're also moving the goalposts I think. I just bet that
| both the article and the study were funded by said
| interests. Studies don't fund themselves and people who
| do funded studies have incentive to find the results that
| they are paid to find, or at the very least, omit any
| evidence to the contrary.
| amrocha wrote:
| Seems weird to admit you haven't read the article and are
| just commenting on the headline and speculating, while at
| the same time asking another user to summarize it for you
| and compare it to other articles that you also likely
| haven't read.
|
| The burden of being dismissively argumentative is so low,
| and engaging constructively takes so much time, that
| discussions become dominated by comments like yours and
| eventually everyone who wants to engage constructively
| leaves.
| Clubber wrote:
| >Seems weird to admit you haven't read the article and
| are just commenting on the headline and speculating
|
| Why does it seem weird? I'm not trying to deceive anyone.
|
| I didn't ask for discussion, I was just stating an
| opinion. I openly admitted it was completely speculative
| by the wording I used, but I haven't changed my mind.
|
| >At this point, I'm betting this was a paid for study and
| article by a group interested in keeping corporate real
| estate values up. I'll suspect most articles before this
| point were too.
|
| I would also guess that some of the people who were
| arguing with me probably didn't read the article either,
| at least at the time they retorted. Perhaps if they did,
| they could tell he how this article was different from
| all the others recently. I suspect it's just more of the
| same.
|
| FWIW, I have read other articles, and they all seem
| contrived as if they were planted to sway opinion.
| "Office cooler talk is invaluable," is one of the talking
| points. "Communication is invaluable in an open office,"
| also seems pretty suspect. I haven't experienced either
| of these. The most productive environment I've ever
| worked in was when I had an office, or shared an office
| wither another person. I'm certainly not the only person
| with this experience. "WFH makes you more likely to be
| outsourced," is another threatening talking point. The
| newest one is "WFH makes you more likely to be replaced
| from AI." I guess this one is, "for God's sake, think of
| the junior developers!"
|
| I've been around the block and working professionally for
| a while. I've read thousands of articles in my adult
| lifetime over 20+ years. Just based on life experience,
| all these arguments seem contrived to me. You might
| differ in your opinion.
|
| Here's an article about how Google pays for research to
| shield against regulation. Know who has a lot of
| commercial real estate? Google. Just an example.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/paying-professors-inside-
| google...
| gumballindie wrote:
| Agreed, same here. It appears that media workers are
| pushing hard against tech people - be it remote work perks
| or getting replaced by ai and so on.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| I find this to be an ironic response to "real estate has
| vested interest in maintaining real estate value at the
| expense of worker quality of life"
| dnissley wrote:
| Sure they do, but unless you have some evidence this is the
| case it is just conspiratorial thinking. There's a reason
| we joke around about saying something is being pushed by
| "big x" where x = some shadowy group with a vested interest
| in y -- because it's silly to imagine and almost certainly
| not the case in most situations.
| pigeonhole1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| Eumenes wrote:
| I don't even know what half the people do at my company.
| Productivity has no doubt fallen to historic lows. I def feel
| like 5% of the people are doing 75% of the work. I agree with the
| article that junior employees are not setup to succeed in this
| environment which will ultimately result in companies hiring less
| junior people (fine with me, tired of babysitting).
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Honest question: why do you care? Don't you prefer to see your
| family and friends more than working 8h+commute time? If you
| think you are working and others are not, why does that bother
| you? You are getting paid anyway. If you are forced to do extra
| hours because there are people who don't do their job, then
| just say No (if you cannot do that, then you probably want to
| change of company anyway... they will bite you in some way or
| another).
|
| If any, remote work has taught me something: I care way less
| about the companies I work for. I'm a mercenary, I do my job to
| the best of my knowledge 9-5 and I couldn't care less what the
| company does with my work (as long as it's legal and ethical).
| disport wrote:
| As a remote, older professional now, my career nevertheless
| supports the premise of this article: in-office was beneficial
| when I started out.
|
| My first job had a strong lunch culture, providing an environment
| for serendipitous conversations, daily. Over time, I bumped into
| folks I never would have met in the normal scope of my role,
| across finance, legal, SRE, support, sales, data science, etc.
|
| In turn, as a young professional, I was able to develop a mental
| model for how businesses "work", why they're organized how they
| are, and how (good) culture can bind everyone together towards a
| profitable outcome. I made some friends and acquaintances that
| I'm still in touch with to this day.
|
| As a remote, older professional now, I don't necessarily "need"
| these serendipitous conversations anymore, although I miss the
| general socialization. But I do feel like they're an essential
| "ladder" that every subsequent generation of professionals should
| be able to access, and that it's a moral obligation for me to
| "pay it forward".
|
| For remote work to be "fair" to young professionals, its systems
| should facilitate the same career benefits, with the same effort.
| o_nate wrote:
| I'm an older professional now working in a hybrid arrangement,
| but I very much concur with the parent comment. I can't imagine
| how my early career would have gone without being able to put
| in the time in the office. Its a cliche, but work culture
| really does exist, and it's about social cues and rules of
| courtesy. These mores are not taught in school but are
| absolutely essential to working effectively in an office. I
| would suspect this socialization is even more important for
| people who perhaps come from families where no parent was a
| white-collar office worker. I was lucky to start out at places
| where it was common for teams to eat lunch together. These
| unofficial interactions were just as important as regular work
| interactions in helping me to understand the psychology of my
| more experienced colleagues, what was polite, and what was
| taboo.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| But there exists 100% remote companies, even before Covid. In
| such companies this "lunch culture" doesn't exist (never
| existed). We should learn from such companies because I think
| remote work is more about finally putting more emphasis on the
| "life" part of "work-life balance"
| flappyeagle wrote:
| I've worked at many styles of company, including 2 that were
| fully remote pre-Covid.
|
| The secret to success is, we have like a 8-1 senior to junior
| ratio. That's the only way they get enough specific attention
| to stay effective, not get lost in the shuffle, get the
| training they need.
|
| The company that I worked at which transitioned to remote
| during Covid... didn't go so well
| throwaway987655 wrote:
| I work for a (pre-covid) 100% remote company with a decent
| company culture. What worked for us is two whole-company
| meetups per year plus some smaller trips for teams and
| departments. It really boosts the team spirit to spend a week
| somewhere nice with plenty of time to just chat to mates and
| random people that I wouldn't otherwise meet.
|
| We also have some online social activities during the year
| but it doesn't work as well. The participation is low. Teams
| have regular online (paid-for) lunches together which is nice
| but a bit awkward. People generally prefer to focus on
| getting the job done and having a good work-life balance.
| This works as long as we get to see each other in person a
| couple of times a year.
|
| That said, with the recent economic down-turn, the company
| meetups got put on hold. The company grew and it's now very
| expensive to organise transport and accommodation for
| everyone. I can already see the negative effects of the
| decision.
| shmatt wrote:
| I think leadership at many of these companies have their wires
| crossed in terms of messaging but also expectations and ideas
| about what they want to extract out of employees
|
| They always start with return to office = productivity, which
| people push back on, because the office is full of 2 hour lunch
| breaks and water cooler discussions about fantasy football.
| Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the
| "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day. If
| we're talking lines of codes written nothing beats working at
| home for most
|
| But you're right, there is a ton to learn during those 2 hour
| lunches, pulling people in to impromptu meetings, and
| socializing as a whole
|
| The messaging needs to be fixed, expectations adjusted, people
| should be empowered to both work heads down at home, and do
| less head down work at the office
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _The messaging needs to be fixed_
|
| The present messaging accurately reflects how managers are
| seeing the situation (they think employees goof off when they
| aren't being watched, and don't have the metrics necessary to
| tell that's not true), replacing it with "messaging" about
| career development is essentially lying just to get people to
| go along with RTO. If they really cared about young
| professionals that wouldn't be "changing the messaging."
| ok_dad wrote:
| I goof off a lot more working from home through the day,
| but at the same time I get more done at night and on
| weekends. The best part about working from home is that I
| don't have to sit in front of a screen from 9-5 from Mon-
| Fri, I can sit down anytime I get the motivation to do so
| and get my work done. I guarantee that if I were in an
| office, I would have been burnt out and quit my job by now,
| but instead I'm able to just not work much for several days
| if it doesn't suit me, then finish up my work in a 20-hour
| blast on a Saturday. What's it matter to my boss or company
| when I get work done as long as it is complete prior to the
| due date? Probably those managers that hate "goofing off"
| don't realize that's not the same as not doing your work.
| When I was in the Navy, my sailors would goof off all the
| damn time, but I let them because telling sailors not to
| goof off goes against their nature! They still got the work
| done.
| mulmen wrote:
| There's another problem in that the modern office is not
| optimized for the really valuable interactions. There is some
| idea way up in the clouds about free communication and
| sharing ideas that manifests as open floor plans. What we
| really need are small quiet areas to focus and do work and
| separate large areas for socialization and collaboration. The
| modern office doesn't actually facilitate any of this.
|
| When I was a newbie I sat in a cube across the hall from my
| boss' private office and next to the kitchen. It was actually
| really nice. I was in a quiet corner of the office and had
| full height cube walls with bookshelves and a big whiteboard
| all to myself. But I could turn around and ask my boss a
| question or walk less than 30 feet to talk to any of the
| senior engineers, who all had private offices which doubled
| as collaboration spaces. The spontaneous interactions
| happened around the espresso machine. In hindsight it was
| wonderful but if you looked at that building from the outside
| you might think it was an outdated dump. We got bought out by
| a company in silicon valley and they moved us to a new
| building with an open floorplan and sat us next to the sales
| team. It was big and bright but we lost all our collaboration
| space.
| oblio wrote:
| > There is some idea way up in the clouds about free
| communication and sharing ideas that manifests as open
| floor plans.
|
| It's just bullshit covering cost cutting. Same for
| flexible/agile desks.
| mulmen wrote:
| That seems incredibly short-sighted given the price in
| (ironically) lost productivity.
|
| Is there some new school of philosophy among the
| management class that doesn't believe in spending money
| to make money? How exactly do we create value without
| investment? I think there's an enormous opportunity out
| there for a company that actually treats their employees
| with respect and pays attention to their needs. That
| includes saying "we are big enough".
| sefrost wrote:
| I would love a private office. It wouldn't need to be very
| big - and it wouldn't even need a door. Just a door frame
| without a door on it would be fine. I guess it's not even
| private in that sense, I just don't like people standing
| behind me.
|
| Quite often in online discussions I notice people mention
| the move to open plan offices. I'm 31 and I've never known
| anything but open plan offices (apart from WFH).
|
| When did the switch to open plan offices happen? Did people
| have private offices before that or was it only cubicles?
| patrick451 wrote:
| My first job out of undergrad was doing CAD stuff making
| like $12/hour and I had an office. I don't remember if it
| had a door that shut, but it definitely had 4 real walls.
| I didn't know it then, but that was the best work
| environment I've ever had. That was about 20 years ago.
| sokoloff wrote:
| From 1993-1994 and 1997-2002, I had private offices, one
| person [a few doubles] with a real, solid door. I'm class
| of '93, so this was most of my first decade with everyone
| having them.
|
| I then went back to private offices for most of
| 2009-2016, but that was as a Director/plus with devs in
| cubes. After 2016, even VPs went into cubes, which I
| hated.
| oblio wrote:
| Cubes are a luxury. Now all you get is a 1.5m tall panel
| in front of you, if you're lucky, and rows with 4-6
| coworkers next to you and the same number behind you, and
| probably 30+ people in the same open space.
|
| I would have killed for actual cubicles at my past... 5
| jobs.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah. At the beginning of my career I had full height
| cubes. Now I don't even have an assigned desk. It's all
| first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with short
| partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open
| workspace. Strangely we also have lockers for personal
| items, like I am going to pack up and redeploy my pencil
| cup and succulents every day.
| amalcon wrote:
| Those lockers are great for ergonomic keyboards, but I
| don't think I've ever heard of someone using one for
| anything else.
| WWLink wrote:
| > It's all first-come-first-serve "hotel" desks with
| short partitions on the desk itself in an otherwise open
| workspace.
|
| Honestly I hate those 'partitions'. Why bother? They're
| so stupid and pointless. It's ironic because they
| actually hinder collaboration and pair programming since
| they're never removable lol.
|
| If we're going to all sit together at a big table we
| might as well see each other lol.
| midasuni wrote:
| Do you have a dedicated desk? When I stopped office work
| in 2012 that had pretty much gone. First come first serve
| oblio wrote:
| I used to have one up until the last company, in 2020.
|
| But I did have an episode of about 1 year of flex desk
| before that.
| mulmen wrote:
| I would love to know more about this trend. It fascinates
| me that we have settled on something that is so widely
| hated.
|
| It seems correlated with the decline in UI design. 30
| years ago we had ideas of how people interact with
| computers which we had built up over decades. What appear
| to be dated UIs like Windows 3.1 or even XP actually had
| a lot of thought and care put into them, with sound
| reasoning. The modern take seems fixated on minor details
| without any holistic vision or even reason.
|
| How did we get so bad at decision making? It seems like
| we stopped valuing insight in favor of data. But without
| insight we just chase the data we have.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Something which is hated by the not-decision-makers but
| costs 25-40% as much of a big number will be
| overwhelmingly chosen by the are-decision-makers.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is
| that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We
| might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost
| in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?
| mulmen wrote:
| I actually had a private office with walls and a door for
| about a month. We moved to a new building and picked our
| own seats in a pre-determined area in order of seniority.
| Being a former boy scout I oriented myself to the map
| before making my selection. For whatever reason the map
| was oriented with north to the left. None of the people
| in front of me noticed this and picked desks on an
| undesirable side of the building. That left an office
| available to me, a junior engineer. My manager was
| unhappy with his window looking at a brick wall instead
| of the lake and was especially unhappy with me having an
| office and not him. So he put in a maintenance request
| and had my office walls torn down and converted to a open
| cube.
| sefrost wrote:
| Wow, a similar thing happened to me in one of my first
| jobs as a junior. We moved office and could choose our
| seats. Because I hate having people behind me (mentioned
| above) I chose a seat with my back to the wall.
|
| The managers clicked on to what had happened on the first
| day and moved me. Infuriating! I am much more confident
| now but I just accepted it at that time.
| Moissanite wrote:
| > Because I hate having people behind me
|
| Anyone who has read Dune should feel this way - leaving
| your back to the room/door is how the Harkonnens get you!
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Then discourse gets worse when CEOs talk about the
| "overemployed" and people running errands during a work day.
|
| They completely lose credibility when bringing up those
| points. Errands are nothing compared to the ~2h per day of
| commute people save.
| javier2 wrote:
| The 2 hour lunches are actually useful once a week. Sitting
| at your desk is even less a guarantee anyone is working. Its
| a fools errand to try to micromanage that.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I agree that "in office" culture implicitly values informal,
| face-to-face interactions that happen "for free" if you are
| in office. The problem, in an increasingly globalized world,
| is that it's only "free" for the company - the employee
| commutes (and buys lunch, etc).
|
| I _also_ find the casual interactions in-office valuable -
| but I 'm not going to "eat" the cost of enabling them for the
| good of the company. If someone actually offered me an in-
| office position that took the time I spent enabling those
| interactions seriously (i.e. compensated me for them) - I
| would be a lot more receptive to returning!
|
| Instead, companies tend to want it both ways: they want their
| employees to donate the time to get the benefits of working
| in-office, then they want to use the same employees lower raw
| productivity stats to fire them down the line. I'm old enough
| to recognize such an obvious trap.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Managing remote workers is a skill that many managers are
| finding out they don't have right now. I wasn't in the same
| office as my manager when I started out. I was lucky to have
| good managers over time who were able to foster these types of
| discussions you're talking about, without ever being collocated
| with everyone involved.
|
| It's kinda sad, because this isn't a new problem. Whether
| you're remote because you're working from home, or you're
| remote because you're in Belgium and the rest of your team is
| in North Carolina, the managerial issues are roughly the same,
| but we've had multinational companies for a while now...
| iso1631 wrote:
| Managing _any_ workers is a skill that many managers have
| never had, especially in companies where the only way to
| progress (in terms of salary and status) is to become a team
| manager.
| aynyc wrote:
| I'm not here to assign blames, it seems to me the younger
| generation somehow missing a lot of life skills.
|
| I was both a student and TA in college back in the days. My
| experience has been, those who go to Office Hours or TA hours
| usually perform better than those who don't (unless you are one
| of those folks who are just smart and know how to work hard). In
| my junior/senior year, I consistently went to office hours and TA
| hours, my grades got significantly better. This goes for my
| students as well.
|
| Remote problem is like that as well. No one is parenting you
| anymore, your success and failure is based on your action. If you
| are a junior, schedule calls with your senior, two to three hours
| a week, prepare your questions and see what you get out of it.
| Don't wait for your managers or seniors to contact you.
|
| I will say this, there are companies/seniors/managers that are
| shit at helping juniors, just like shitty professors and TAs.
| [deleted]
| tennisflyi wrote:
| Leadership is always busy. No way I'm try to impart anything
| else on them.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| I am totally for remote work but this is absolutely a real
| problem, and I see my junior engineers suffer tremendously from
| it. One asked me what made me so successful at my job, and there
| were many factors but being in the office really did help me.
| Success here doesn't just mean solving chunks of problems from
| jira tickets but creating entirely new products and solutions
| which have then gone on to become important parts of the
| organizations offerings. This was only possible because of my
| initial years where I was constantly absorbing and brainstorming
| with folks in the office on a daily basis. We really need to find
| a way to replicate that magic in the remote environment.
|
| One of the ideas I'm thinking about is to hire only within a
| metropolitan area, but keep remote. Every month we just organize
| a 3 day retreat where everyone's expected to attend it, which
| could be in a resort or a hotel even. This might satisfy the
| interaction and brainstorming itch while still keeping everyone
| happy with their remote arrangements.
| broast wrote:
| Personally, I grew up on the internet, learning from people in
| chatrooms and forums which were strong communities where most
| of my personal adult relationships have come from (many of whom
| I've not met in 20 years of knowing them).
|
| From what I've seen, if your seniors and your juniors are both
| from this era and culture, your remote team will excel without
| missing a beat. I think it's the people used to the "old ways"
| that will suffer, for having expensive requirements like an
| office to capture the same value.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| I also grew up on the internet, most of folks at my workplace
| grew up with the internet and... everyone noticed that during
| covid you miss out on a lot of growth and interesting
| conversations from unplanned meetings, I think it's a bit
| silly to assume there's nothing to gain from having a shared
| space at the office, the same way it's silly to think there's
| no cost in having to go to an office either.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| What you say is true, but on the other hand remote work
| (usually) brings benefits to your "non-work" life. I
| definitely wouldn't like to trade the niceties of the
| office (not many, but not zero either) with the niceties of
| remote work (which are many, from my point of view). So,
| honest question: you wouldn't mind trading them?
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > So, honest question: you wouldn't mind trading them?
|
| Hybrid is obviously the best of both worlds? I'd never
| want to work fully remote, there's a lot of benefits both
| for me and for the company in having in-person time.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| In an ideal world, yes hybrid is the best. But hybrid
| becomes easily non-realistic when 99% of job offers in
| country X come from city Z and you live in town W (which
| is not close to Z).
|
| In an ideal world, I would love to go to the office every
| now and then, just by crossing the street. In the real
| world, it's either moving to the city and paying a high
| price for a tiny apartment so that you can go commute
| once or twice per week to the office, or it's living in a
| big house in a decent town working 100% remotely. There
| middle-point options, of course, but those are rather
| less likely to occur.
| inconceivable wrote:
| hehe - just go ahead and say it... if you grew up on irc,
| this is your natural habitat.
|
| many people who never irc'd have adapted just fine, but those
| who struggle with typing at 100wpm+ are obviously going to
| hate remote work.
| jxramos wrote:
| that is an interesting connection, the habit of chat in
| general. I never considered my days in the chat rooms as
| prepping me for life in chat. I occasionally see various
| critiques and complaints at work with some folks getting
| disoriented and frustrated working in slack and I never
| quite get where they're struggling or coming from. Could it
| be just general inexperience in chats like AOL, IRC, yahoo,
| MSN, hangouts, or whatever the medium was. Keyboard
| chatting is definitely different from mobile chatting for
| sure with the keyboard and speed. Maybe individuals haven't
| spent earlier years in their youth in the chatrooms quite
| possibly.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yeah this is so true. I casually type like 110-130wpm and
| didn't think anything of it... it wasn't until I got into
| the business world that I realized this isn't too common,
| even among other career programmers. Huh, didn't everyone
| stay up until 3am chatting on [IRC/etc.] and then fall
| asleep in class the next day? haha ;)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > Huh, didn't everyone stay up until 3am chatting on
| [IRC/etc.] and then fall asleep in class the next day?
| haha ;)
|
| Chaotic many-users chatrooms (including, but not
| exclusively, IRC) and text chat in video games. You _have
| to_ get fast at typing to use either--in the former, if
| you 're too slow, you'll drop out of the flow of
| conversation, and in the latter, speed is key because
| being slow makes you vulnerable in the game, and if
| you're not pretty damn fast you can't really afford to
| use it at all.
|
| I learned the basic mechanics of typing from Mavis
| Beacon, but I got _fast_ because of those.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I'm somewhere around 30~50* wpm with maybe 80% accuracy and
| I max out around 700 words per hour (12 wpm) when writing
| fiction.
|
| I've never had an issue participating online, including
| IRC.
|
| *: Not for lack of trying. My brain has trouble doing
| language operations in real time. I'm just grateful I can
| touch type!
| timr wrote:
| The internet has existed since before I was in college, so I
| also "grew up" on the internet. But you're vastly
| overestimating what you can learn from randos in chatrooms
| and forums. Most of the best, highly experienced people in
| this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're
| getting a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know.
|
| Will this work for low-value piecework, or learning how to
| use an API? Yes, for a while. But this will only take you
| from absolute noob to moderately competent junior. In order
| to grow in your career, the broader context, business
| knowledge, _connections_ and intangibles you gain from being
| around senior colleagues are invaluable.
|
| I say this from hard experience. At the start of my career, I
| thought I could learn everything I needed to know on the
| internet. I was wrong. Even if most of the technical details
| were there (they weren't) and correct (they aren't), in every
| career, _your accomplishments are based on your personal
| relationships_. Always. I can 't emphasize this enough.
|
| It's hard enough to make those relationships, even when
| you're in the office every day. Trying to do it all by video
| call is just living life on hard mode.
|
| ---
|
| Edit: people seem to keep interpreting this comment as "it's
| impossible to grow in a remote career". That's not what I'm
| saying at all. I'm just going to respond once here:
|
| a) I don't know if it's "impossible" to form strong personal
| relationships remote-only, but _it 's much harder_.
|
| b) Obviously, everyone defines success differently, and maybe
| your definition is different than my own, but
|
| c) In my experience, _all other things being equal_ , the
| more time you spend around other people, the better your
| career will be.
| broast wrote:
| Your take is very dismissive and does not align with my
| experience. We work on complicated technical high value
| things and my juniors are very fast learners. And we learn
| from each other and not necessarily from the internet.
|
| We also don't need video calls. I have never met them, and
| rarely have I seen their faces. Kind of like my life long
| friends on the internet, we didn't have video calls then
| either. We can connect through text just fine. We sometimes
| play games together to blow off the steam, and we
| collaborate on meaningful work problems.
| [deleted]
| timr wrote:
| > Your take is very dismissive and does not align with my
| experience.
|
| It's not "dismissive" to tell you that I think you're
| wrong. I'm trying to explain something that you clearly
| haven't experienced yet. There's no way to do that
| without actually saying that you haven't experienced it.
|
| I understand _why_ you believe what you do. I believed
| _the same things_ , but I was wrong.
| broast wrote:
| I personally have experienced it, but my team has only
| seen greater success since going remote, and filling our
| roles with good remote fits.
|
| I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a
| meaningful text-only relationship over years or haven't
| treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then
| you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it
| timr wrote:
| > I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a
| meaningful text-only relationship over years and treated
| it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can
| not know the effectiveness that comes from it
|
| See, _this_ is dismissive. You 're assuming something
| about me. I'm not assuming anything about you -- I'm just
| saying, you clearly haven't been bitten by this yet. I
| have, and I'm trying to share that experience.
|
| When I was younger, just like you, I thought I had
| discovered a new way of working. To a certain extent,
| that was true. You can do a lot of things remotely. But
| the best things in my own career, without exception, have
| come from in-person relationships.
| broast wrote:
| Well, I am sorry for that.
|
| But just to add - it's a misconception to see remote work
| as a "new way" of working for someone like me. For
| someone like me, who used chatrooms and forums to
| collaborate with people on programming and similar
| projects, remote work is returning back to my natural way
| of doing things. Going to the office for 10 years was
| unnatural. We have now cut out a lot of overhead of
| learning how to manage office life, which is only
| relevant if you have an office, and which was a hard part
| of my life (I'm ugly).
|
| And my experience is simply the opposite of yours. My
| strengths and my teammates strengths have only come to
| shine since going remote. I only became a Team Lead and
| then Engineering Manager since we've gone fully remote,
| and I think it is largely in part thanks to the speed and
| effectiveness my remote teams achieve in on-boarding
| members, collaborating, and delivering valuable work.
| Every retro my team members put "Great teamwork!" on the
| board, and this only started since we've gone remote.
| timr wrote:
| > And my experience is simply the opposite of yours.
|
| We keep talking past each other. This is the last reply
| I'm going to make, but hopefully it will add something:
| please consider that your experience is not _opposite_ of
| mine, but instead, that you haven 't run into the
| _problems_ yet.
|
| Maybe, for all of your success and advancement, you
| haven't yet reached the limits I'm talking about. Just
| consider it.
| broast wrote:
| Fair enough
|
| I'll also ask that you consider the possibility that you
| haven't experienced overcoming this limit yet. After all,
| what do we need to learn about our work that can't be
| represented as text
|
| Or that this limit might be qualitatively different for
| different people, and that some people are better at
| online text-only relationships than face-to-face ones.
| Our teams may have faced limits in real life that only
| got solved by going remote. (For example, I do believe
| that when we were in person, we wrote lower quality
| software, less well-tested, with less communication and
| collaboration, at a much slower pace, than we do now (you
| can imagine why - likely we used to rely on informal
| processes more than we thought or wanted to))
|
| I did mention that I've seen other teams (anecdotally, on
| less technical areas of the product) face problems with
| being fully remote- but that was usually fixed with
| staffing... or a remote leader inheriting the team...
| We've had many people in our org exclusively remote for
| the last 20 years as well - these people became the
| remote leaders on our teams and led by example. It all
| depends on the remote fit.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Been there, done that, both 12 years ago and again during
| the pandemic. I loved it at first and later grew to hate
| and resent it. The advantages are immediate and the
| disadvantages take a little while to manifest.
| frumper wrote:
| Your explanation is not much more than "trust me, I'm
| right". That is quite dismissive. Maybe you if you were
| in person you could give him examples or a better
| explanation of why he's wrong. /s
| timr wrote:
| The irony here is that asserting that nobody else can be
| correct if they don't "validate" you is the _definition_
| of dismissiveness.
|
| I have actually done what OP is proposing, and found it
| to be inadequate. I tried to explain why.
| danaris wrote:
| Others are saying "This thing works for me."
|
| You are claiming "This thing _never_ works (and therefore
| your own experience is wrong). "
|
| The person making a categorical claim has a higher burden
| of proof than the one making an individual one,
| especially when the former is attempting to invalidate
| the lived experience of the latter.
| timr wrote:
| > You are claiming "This thing never works (and therefore
| your own experience is wrong)."
|
| I am literally not doing that. Go back and re-read my
| comment.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| The impression you gave me matches that quote you dismiss
| relatively well.
|
| Perhaps you should also re-read it, you may have carried
| less of the nuance you intended into the actual text.
| What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a
| moderate capability without in-person mentoring from
| experts. If nothing else this heavily insinuates those
| you're conversing with are incapable and inexpert.
| timr wrote:
| > What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a
| moderate capability without in-person mentoring from
| experts.
|
| Like I said, it's hard to frame "you don't have this life
| experience yet" in any other way. I did use these words:
|
| > this will only take you from absolute noob to
| moderately competent junior
|
| ...in reference to learning stuff online. I stand by
| that, because even if you are fully remote for your
| entire career, you're going to need _some_ level of
| mentoring to level up. That 's just a fact. _Reductio ad
| absurdum:_ suggesting that you can become John Carmack or
| Jeff Dean by reading Stack Overflow.
|
| But I also explicitly put an edit on the end of it where
| I disclaim the generalization you're making -- before you
| made your comment.
| danaris wrote:
| You may not feel like that's what you're doing, but lines
| like
|
| > you're vastly overestimating what you can learn
|
| > highly experienced people in this industry never post
| in chatrooms
|
| > don't know what you don't know
|
| ...are all very condescending and attempt to generalize
| your experience to infinity. They absolutely attempt to
| invalidate other people's experience--they're not even
| just saying "what you're saying is impossible"; they're
| outright saying "(unlike me, who's smarter and/or more
| experienced) you don't realize that the learning you
| claim to have gotten was crap."
| timr wrote:
| Well, _you 're misquoting me_. Here is what I actually
| wrote:
|
| > You're vastly overestimating what you can learn from
| randos in chatrooms and forums. Most of the best, highly
| experienced people in this industry never post in
| chatrooms or forums. You're getting a biased sample, and
| don't know what you don't know
|
| These are simple facts. They're not "condescending", and
| more importantly, _you wouldn 't know if you were wrong_,
| because you're getting a biased sample. That's the point.
| You don't see or hear from the people who _don 't_ post.
| danaris wrote:
| But, see, here's the thing: _you also wouldn 't know if
| you're wrong_, because you'd be getting just as biased a
| sample, only from the other side--if you're just in the
| wrong chatrooms and forums.
|
| Furthermore, what you are doing is absolutely,
| unquestionably, telling other people "I don't know what
| you learned from these people, and furthermore, I don't
| _have_ to know, because _my_ experience, which is
| universal and unassailable in all possible ways, tells me
| that it _must_ not be enough. If you think you learned
| enough from these people to be a good mid-to-upper-level
| programmer, you 're _wrong_. _No one_ can learn to be
| that good from this. Again, with the _only evidence
| given_ being that _I_ was unable to do that in this way.
| "
| timr wrote:
| > you also wouldn't know if you're wrong, because you'd
| be getting just as biased a sample, only from the other
| side--if you're just in the wrong chatrooms and forums.
|
| Of everywhere I have ever worked and everyone I have ever
| worked with -- including some big, extremely well-known
| names -- only a tiny percentage of those people were
| active contributors online. Moreover, the most
| experienced, productive, highest-ranking people
| contributed _less_ , for a variety of practical reasons,
| ranging from "PR risk" to "I don't want to get fired from
| my job" to "don't have the time".
|
| This is consistent with an entire career working on the
| web, where the pattern is _always_ that the vast majority
| of people lurk.
|
| Could my sample be horribly misrepresentative? I suppose,
| but it isn't likely.
| danaris wrote:
| And if you were coming into a discussion with people
| saying "I think this thing happens", and you said "No, I
| don't think this thing happens, based on my personal
| experience," that would be one thing.
|
| You're not.
|
| You're coming into a discussion with people saying, "I
| have experienced this thing happening to me," and you're
| saying "I don't think this thing happens, based on my
| experience", which means _you are trying to use your non-
| universal experience to tell other people that their
| experience didn 't happen_.
| paulrpotts wrote:
| I'm 55 years old and I have _never_ been mentored in
| person by a co-worker, despite having spent most of my
| career working on teams, and despite _trying_ in many
| different workplaces to set up mentoring relationships.
| For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk
| of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie
| and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that
| normies experience, but we don't, and it's also a
| minefield of things that can go wrong because the norms
| of social interaction sometimes elude us or we simply
| can't play-act them (I'll never forget being told by my
| boss that it always seemed like I was lying because I
| didn't maintain eye contact well). Remote work levels the
| playing field, and normies hate it because they can't
| bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in
| person.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm a couple of years older than you and I agree with
| most of this. Never had a "mentor" though lip service was
| paid to the concept in a few places, it never really
| happened in the tech positions.
|
| "Team-building" stuff -- outings, retreats, games, that
| all the business folks seemed to love were painfully
| awkward experiences that seemed to be totally contrived.
| I tried to fake that I was enjoying it but pretty sure I
| never pulled it off very well.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'm shocked that people worked in an office together and
| the junior person never got mentored.
|
| It seems like if that was your goal that you'd have to go
| well out of your way to avoid accidentally mentoring
| someone. "Oh, here's the trick I just used in the
| debugger." "I'll sketch the architecture change I'm
| proposing on the whiteboard." "Why don't you shadow me in
| this meeting or interview or presentation?"
|
| I can't imagine how I'd setup an in-person work
| arrangement to avoid mentoring.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| It's easy:
|
| > "Oh, here's the trick I just used in the debugger."
|
| Don't ever talk to one another during debugging sessions.
| Pick up your bug ticket, fix it, close the ticket.
| Everyone else has their own work to do so they are not
| interested in watching you pilot your heavily-customized
| IDE setup, and the boss doesn't make them.
|
| > "I'll sketch the architecture change I'm proposing on
| the whiteboard."
|
| Don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture. If you
| must, definitely don't invite juniors. In fact, nobody
| actually writing code to implement the change will be in
| the meeting at all. We are architects and managers, they
| are merely developers. They'll write what we tell them to
| write. In many organizations, even the people called
| "architects" are left out of these meetings, and probably
| even line managers. These are Director Level Decisions,
| after all.
|
| > "Why don't you shadow me in this meeting or interview
| or presentation?"
|
| Easiest of the three. Just never ever have anybody
| "shadow" anyone for any reason. They have their own work
| to be doing.
|
| I'm not saying these behaviors are good, but they are
| pretty much the default behavior in corporate jobs
| AFAICT.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| > For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the
| bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the
| camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical
| thing that normies experience, but we don't
|
| Please don't speak for all of us. I used to think exactly
| like you, but turns out I was just on bad teams in bad
| companies. My recent teams have mostly been composed of
| and managed by like minded programmers and the
| camaraderie, lunch conversation, and ad hoc collaboration
| that ensue massively help both my happiness and
| productivity. I'm as neurodivergent as you can get and
| still hold a job. Multiple severe diagnosed conditions.
| FredPret wrote:
| Normie here, and I've always thought this was the biggest
| benefit of remote work. No more emphasis on what you look
| and act like. Only the value you add counts.
|
| This has got to be good for racial, gender, etc forms of
| discrimination. In a wheelchair? Black? Female? Ideally
| nobody would care because they wouldn't even know.
| Clubber wrote:
| I've a little younger than the OP and I've never had a
| proper mentor either. I had one guy I argued with a lot
| that I learned some tricks from that I use to this day,
| but that's about it.
|
| I've never worked in a company with any type of formal
| mentoring that everyone talks about. The "let me take you
| under my wing and show you the ropes, kiddo," never
| existing in my world, it was sink or swim. I spent
| countless hours reading books (I'm old) and scouring the
| web for solutions. If I could debug it, I could figure
| out the problem, I just didn't always know what it was
| _supposed_ to do. I did all this because I didn 't want
| to fail. Do junior people still do this, or is it more,
| "I can't figure it out in 5 minutes, do it for me."
| wintogreen74 wrote:
| >> Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate
| it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online
| as they can in person.
|
| I'm not sure how remote somehow replaces social
| interaction in your world, but it sure sounds like you
| might have other factors at play as well, like
| categorizing every who's not in the group with which you
| identify as an abusive bully. I've never worked with you
| remote or in person, and the only conclusion you've let
| me make is you're difficult and unpleasant.
| Tarball10 wrote:
| You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent
| junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring
| huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is
| available online. Not to mention the numerous open-source
| projects you can learn from and contribute to, which are
| essentially "fully remote" distributed teams that have been
| working effectively for years. The larger open-source
| projects can also be great for networking through their
| forums/chat rooms/online discussions. Those "randos" are
| building software that is literally the underlying
| infrastructure of almost all commercial software being
| built today.
|
| And, anecdotally, a lot of software jobs are building
| generic CRUD apps, and a lot of "senior colleagues" are not
| necessarily great teachers, or even great developers. In
| scenarios like those, you can do a lot better teaching
| yourself online with lessons or learning/contributing to
| the aforementioned open-source projects. It's not just
| about in-person vs online, but the quality of the
| team/project you're learning from.
| timr wrote:
| > You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent
| junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring
| huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is
| available online.
|
| I am not, but my definition of junior/senior/whatever is
| likely different than your own. At the risk of a truism:
| can you learn technical things online? Yes, absolutely.
| It's the kind of things you _can 't_ learn from a web
| forum that make the difference between junior and senior.
|
| Just as a simple example, most stuff you'll read about
| conflict resolution (people, not code) online is
| superficial and trite. You can get maybe a bit more from
| books, but to really learn how to do it, you need to
| spend time watching someone who is talented at managing
| interpersonal conflict. I'm not great at it, but I've had
| the good fortune of spending time with people, in person,
| who were truly gifted at the task. It completely re-
| framed my expectations for what is possible.
|
| Maybe there's a way to do this by video call -- but it's
| harder -- and you're definitely not getting the human
| experience by reading or watching a video.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| > Most of the best, highly experienced people in this
| industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're getting
| a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know.
|
| With all due respect, you're just projecting your own
| experience and being dismissive in the process.
|
| A _ton_ of foundational work in modern computing was done
| in a distributed fashion and continues to work that way. In
| fact, open source software development hinges on
| distributed development.
|
| Now, what I _do_ agree on is that interpersonal connections
| with other, more experienced folks, is key. Most engineers
| seem to quickly plateau on their soft skills. I always say
| that coding is the easy part of software engineering. You
| can teach anyone to code. It 's strategic and critical
| thinking and how to present and communicate those ideas
| that make you stand out.
|
| However, it's very much possible to get those connections
| in a remote world. But it means deliberately operating in a
| way conducive to getting that face time. I wouldn't say
| it's much harder. But the company needs to actively focus
| on this.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| I grew up in a small dusty town in the middle of an African
| desert. I taught myself everything I know from the web, IRC
| and forums. I was top of numerous IS and CS classes at
| university. In my professional career, I've learned the
| most from colleagues who happened to be overseas. I almost
| never do video calls.
|
| I make sure to spend a lot of time mentoring via screen
| share and encourage recordings (many times this is way more
| useful than an in-person session where the details are
| forgotten).
|
| High quality learning relationships can be entirely remote
| and text/screen-share based.
| hacoo wrote:
| I agree with this. Screen sharing is a very effective way
| to transfer knowledge -- I have had a lot of success by
| hopping onto a screen share and walking others through
| things. There is lots of room for questions and they can
| record/review the meeting too.
|
| However, this requires a culture where impromptu calls
| are expected and normalized. The more friction there is
| from scheduling, waiting for people to respond, etc the
| less likely these kind of fast information transfer
| sessions are to happen.
|
| Tldr, I think people can learn very effectively in a
| remote environment, it just requires that people put the
| same kind of time into communicating that they would in
| an office.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I'm curious, did you grow up on it? Or was it just there?
|
| Of my good friends, a majority of them were met online and
| very rarely have we met in person - maybe a couple dozen
| times over the past 25 years.
|
| I don't particularly care which way companies go since
| there will always be remote-first options: there were many
| before the pandemic, and there will only be more after.
|
| But from my experience a large problem is companies just
| aren't used to doing what it takes to help relationships
| develop in a remote only environment. They aren't used to
| it because when you co-habitate with people it happens more
| naturally. But it takes more deliberate choices for it to
| happen remotely.
|
| I wouldn't point to this to call remote "harder". Just
| different. There's also all sorts of other difficulties
| with respect to being in an office that you don't have to
| deal with remotely.
|
| And ultimately, some will prefer one or another. Which is
| fine.
| manicennui wrote:
| "Most of the best, highly experienced people in this
| industry never post in chatrooms or forums."
|
| Chatrooms, forums, IRC, and mailing lists are how the vast
| majority of open source software is developed. Usenet used
| to be big for this sort of thing as well. Most of the
| people working on open source are also employed in the
| industry.
|
| Are these people going to spoon feed you everything you
| need to know? Of course not. The vast majority of
| insightful information I've learned about software
| engineering has come from books and people online. My
| current employer briefly employed some well known people in
| the Ruby community, but for the most part, most of us work
| with people who just see this as a job, and these sort of
| people seem determined to relearn every lesson and reinvent
| every wheel.
| oytis wrote:
| In remote work environment you're not learning from randos,
| you're learning from the same experienced colleagues, just
| remotely.
| timr wrote:
| Maybe, but it's _so much harder_. Even now, after many
| years of doing it, I find it much harder to connect with
| people whom I only see online.
| FredPret wrote:
| You know what is so much harder than that?
|
| Putting millions of people within driving distance of one
| another, and then jumping through various hoops to make
| that ridiculous urban plan work, and demanding people
| spend 5-15 hours a week commuting in unhealthy,
| dangerous, dirty, and expensive ways.
| oytis wrote:
| I never was able to make a clean experiment with the same
| people in-person vs remote, but subjectively I didn't
| find it harder. It might even be easier to have a one-to-
| one chat with a person you want to chat to in the remote
| environment than in a chaotic open space office. Not to
| say remote work gives you exposure to people you might
| not have exposure to in your country/city at all.
| danaris wrote:
| This is a you problem. It is not an everybody problem.
|
| Sure, there are other people who struggle in the same
| way, but _your experiences are not universal_ , and you
| are arrogantly preaching at people as if they are--as if
| because _you_ couldn 't do this, _obviously_ no one can.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| amatecha wrote:
| Connections/network are indeed fundamental to career growth
| and learning, accomplishments, etc.. but those don't have
| to be in-person at all. I mean, I have been learning,
| building new things, making connections with new people,
| and I've been 100% remote for the past 3 years. There has
| been no discernible adverse effect on any career-related
| criterion I can think of. The literal only downside for me
| is not being in the super-awesome building I got to work in
| before, and maybe random off-topic chatter with people. I
| have that "off-topic chatter" on chat/videocall now, which
| is just fine anyways. And I don't have to donate 1-2 hours
| a day to my employer by driving to/from an office.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Right? If you can learn how to get good at Elden Ring from a
| fan wiki and a couple YouTube videos, I'm pretty sure you can
| learn how to do most office jobs with basic documentation and
| some video chats...
| uxp100 wrote:
| Video Games are environments that are designed to teach you
| how to master them. That includes very hard video games; I
| don't feel like video games are a good point of reference.
| YouTube is also pretty good at teaching you how to change
| the headlights on your car, but it's not so good at
| teaching you a foreign language. I'm not sure where a basic
| office job like programming falls on that continuum.
| matwood wrote:
| > Video Games are environments that are designed to teach
| you how to master them
|
| Pretty much every workplace?
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| >Video Games are environments that are designed to teach
| you how to master them
|
| ...and any decent workplace should be the same.
|
| >YouTube is also pretty good at teaching you how to
| change the headlights on your car, but it's not so good
| at teaching you a foreign language.
|
| YouTube is fantastic at this and used by language-
| learners all over the world.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Funny thing is, promotions in your career are very rarely
| about your pure skill at something. Hard pill to swallow
| for the Just Log On And Deliver crowd but it's more like
| (skill * how much your boss likes you * social connections
| in the team where others vouch for you).
| broast wrote:
| Which some of us are way better at making online text-
| only relationships than face-to-face ones, which is how
| my career accelerated, and where most of my closest and
| longest lasting relationships in life have come from.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I wonder if there might be some asymmetry in how others
| perceived those online-only relationships? I think it's
| probably true that some manager might feel a person is
| more "the right one for this post" simply because they've
| had in person interactions, for example. Whilst those
| who, perhaps, find online or IRL engagements to have a
| similar worth might not perceive that there is an
| asymmetry for others.
|
| Find you niche and none of that matters, I imagine.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| Would it not be better if promotions were made on the
| basis of skill and accomplishments instead of looks/talks
| like/kisses the ass of the boss? You're essentially
| defending an arcane social hierarchy where you have to
| sycophantically jockey for your position. If remote work
| demolishes even a small part of that, all the better.
|
| But I also got a promotion last year that nearly doubled
| my pay by just logging on and delivering, so I admit to
| being a little biased.
| matwood wrote:
| You're thinking of the worst case. The reality is, in a
| large company, every promotion probably has 2+ people who
| have the skills and accomplishments. The determining
| factor ends up being if your boss likes you/wants to work
| more closely with you.
|
| Yes, there are terrible managers and nepotism type
| environments, but on par most bosses wants to look good
| to higher ups which means promoting skills which helps
| the boss look good. Exactly what happened in your case.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not just promotions, but jobs. After my second job, every
| job I've ever had I got because I knew someone who liked
| working with me and could vouch for my ability. I've
| never taken a coding test as part of a job interview. I
| did have to take one on the job once when a new manager
| came in. I left that job fairly soon after, as I found
| the whole process and attitude around it to be insulting.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| > most bosses wants to look good to higher ups which
| means promoting skills which helps the boss look good.
|
| ...which is how you end up with stagnant cultures like
| Meta and Google, who just sit around and wait for their
| lunch to get ate by their competitors. If you instead
| reward delivering the goods in whatever context, you
| don't run into these problems! The company should
| maximize for being a successful business, not stroking
| its managers egos.
| michaelt wrote:
| On the other hand, plenty of people going through college are
| exposed to a culture that you should work on a problem set
| for a good long time before resorting to the professor's
| office hours (which are probably only once a week anyway) and
| that asking a peer is practically cheating.
|
| And indeed, when filing bugs in open source projects - there
| is often a culture that you should have exhausted every other
| option before bothering the nice volunteers.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I also grew up on the internet, but disagree strongly: the
| challenge of onboarding remotely is real, and more
| challenging the equivalent on-site experience.
|
| And to be very precise: I don't think that remote vs in-
| office onboarding is simply different, or even that it simply
| requires more intentional efforts, but that it is on the
| whole entirely more complex in non-trivial ways (in time,
| effort, and attention by all parties - aka: more cost).
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I agree, although I will add that one of the biggest
| breakthroughs I came up with was when I transitioned to remote
| when most other people still worked at the office (this is long
| before covid). I changed something so that I can use it
| remotely, and that had a profound impact down the line -- it
| coincidentally fixed some licensing/piracy issues we had and
| made the product better in several ways.
|
| I think the moral of the story is that more diversity, in as
| many ways as we can apply that word, is probably a benefit to
| most organizations.
| jollofricepeas wrote:
| Or...
|
| Just have optional office hours, Slack huddles and mob sessions
| every few days.
|
| Some of my engineers...
|
| - have a open huddle for a few hours a day where anyone can
| drop into their project while they work
|
| - others make use of our scheduled themed mob sessions (ie.
| Maintenance Mondays, deployment Thursdays). have a problem,
| idea or just want to hangout then come by?
|
| - ICs & seniors are required to host at least a weekly office
| hour to assist juniors or teach something of their choice.
|
| The default doesn't always have to be return to office for a
| physical meet.
|
| There's lots of other options.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| There is absolutely something that gets lost in virtual
| meets. It's not just for within team discussions. It's also
| about discovering colleagues in other teams across the org.
| Tools like Donut help a bit but the magic is still lost.
| lostcolony wrote:
| It always struck me as strange that corporations rely on
| chance for people to connect and understand what other
| parts of the org are doing, to find synergies* and
| suchlike.
|
| That feels like something that absolutely can and should be
| operationalized* if the success of the company relies on
| it. Build in easy ways for people to join other teams for a
| quarter (or whatever), ensure that areas of effort are
| communicated horizontally and back down in minimally
| invasive, synchronous manners, have clear domain ownership
| such that it's easy to know who to reach out to, etc.
|
| It's absolutely bizarre to me to pin success on "employees
| chatting by the water cooler" or whatever the expectation
| by upper leadership is when they claim stuff around in
| person. Don't get me wrong, I like seeing coworkers in
| person now and again, but I explicitly want to do it just
| to meet them for socializing and team building; not
| working.
|
| *(buzzword) Bingo!
| jxramos wrote:
| lol, those mythical magic moments collaborating in the
| abstract, you never know where they're going to happen.
| It could be at the water cooler, or over that off color
| patch of carpet over there.
| lostcolony wrote:
| Honestly, most of my work experience has been those
| mythical magic moments just led to a decrease in morale.
| As a remote worker I am not as invested in the company,
| and that's a feature, not a bug. I'm doing my job, I'm
| actively looking to do it well, but frustrations I can't
| control feel further from me.
|
| I remember distinctly overhearing our internal devops at
| one place (that was pretty fragmented) talk about how
| their mandate was to get people only 80% of the way
| there, that the teams were responsible for getting 100%,
| and it pissed me off no end, since one of the reasons my
| department was doing our own devops was that there was no
| way to take what the devops department was putting out,
| and leverage it to get to what we wanted (i.e., no path
| to go from the 80% they provided -> 100% of what we
| needed). We had tried numerous times to talk to them
| about it, but they wanted to decide things in isolation
| and tell us what to do, rather than listening to us. I
| tried figuring out who was in charge of that group and
| reaching out to them, and managed a meeting, and they
| heard and acknowledged the need and agreed change was
| necessary, then nothing happened with it. Etc. None of
| that helped my morale, and I ended up leaving that
| company, not because of that, but because of a number of
| places where I simply could not affect change.
|
| As a remote employee though? Don't care. As I said, that
| missing cultural buy in is a feature, not a bug, and it
| benefits everyone involved. I'm still raising concerns,
| still trying to reach out for solutions, but invariably
| when the business prevents me from fixing things I'm not
| stressing, and am so less likely to leave.
| jxramos wrote:
| yah I can see that as a feature. Reminds me of stories I
| heard from people at google who preferred the
| contractor/contingent-worker lifestyle over permanent
| employees for the sake of avoiding all the HR rigmarole
| and office politic drama, perf review busywork, etc etc
| that adds questionable value to ones career.
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| For me it's always been when going up on the elevator
| between floors 2-4. That's why I take the stairs.
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| > Tools like Donut help a bit but the magic is still lost.
|
| You can keep your magic, I'm gonna stay in my home office.
| ahnberg wrote:
| I think the biggest issue is people who claim it can't be
| done and that the only way to accomplish this is to
| physically meet.
|
| I feel like the biggest hinderance to making the most out
| of a remote option are the ones who prefer going to the
| office or explain all kinds of issues with "it's because we
| don't meet in person".
|
| One just have to embrace and apply the mindset that it is
| possible. Different, surely, but still possible!
|
| I'm not saying there is something WRONG with going to the
| office, it is lovely to hang out in person with lots of
| people, but it is very limiting in many ways as well. Just
| limiting in other ways than remote. You learn to deal with
| both, when you need to, though. The issue is mostly that
| people deal with the office-problems but don't care much
| about dealing with the remote-problems.
| jxramos wrote:
| that's an interesting angle, I wonder if this pattern of
| defaulting to "because we don't meet in person" is that a
| giveaway for some lacking of communicating in writing I
| wonder. Just people who can't get an idea out effectively
| in textual form for complex ideas on a repeated basis and
| chalking it up to needing that in person outlet. That's
| curious, does being face to face elicit other modes of
| communication and ability to articulate and connect
| things. Maybe. But I suppose it could also be an
| opportunity to lean on the "see what I mean", "do you
| know what I'm saying" and allow body language and other
| social lubricant type bits and pieces to smooth glossing
| over when another doesn't follow or see what they mean.
| zeku wrote:
| IMO, just make that 3 day retreat during work days so you don't
| require people to work weekends. With that small change I think
| this would be great for software teams. Perhaps too, every
| month is too often for anyone with a family. Consider making
| the interval larger.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Very much agreed on this. One of the key things in me being
| where I am now is spending a few years working for an ISP
| staffed by technology nerds in my early 20s, where I'd spend
| all day surrounded by people who knew what they were doing, and
| then spend several evenings a week in the pub with the same
| people. Its possible to get the same experience remotely - I
| got started in the industry via open source work, where mailing
| lists had a similar atmosphere, but it is so much easier if you
| can just bounce ideas around.
|
| I love the idea of regular 3 day retreats, but being in my late
| 30s with a child now doing them anywhere near that regularly is
| a non-starter for me. Maybe quarterly, but even then you're
| going to have to really sell it for me to commit to all of
| them.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| [dead]
| ramraj07 wrote:
| It's 3 days a month though, and to clarify my thoughts are
| that you still go back home every day. How would that be a
| problem?
| alistairSH wrote:
| I guess it depends where the retreat is held. And how long
| the commute is to get there.
|
| Taking my house as an example - I'm ~1 hour from the city
| center (assuming no major delays). If the retreat ended up
| downtown, I'd hate that. If it was on the far side of the
| city, I'd want to stay overnight. But, if the retreat was
| at the corporate office, I'd love it - as that's one mile
| down the road and I can walk.
| listenallyall wrote:
| This is the exact reason executives favor return-to-
| office. Asking remote employees to assemble just 3 days
| per month becomes a major hassle, see above. If a job is
| work-from-office every day, the employees will either
| figure it out or quit, any other arrangement and the
| logistics of when and where to meet becomes a major
| distraction.
| e44858 wrote:
| Traveling every day to the office sounds like a much
| bigger hassle than traveling three days a month.
| listenallyall wrote:
| That's the whole point. The executives offer remote + 3
| days together, and employees like alistair complain about
| the 3 days as opposed to the benefit of working from home
| the rest of the time. So the execs say fuck it, ok just
| come to the office every day.
| ilaksh wrote:
| Why are you not able to bounce ideas around in a text chat
| room, audio chat room, video chat room, 2d/3d/VR shared
| space? Why is it so hard for you to do it unless you are
| literally in the same physical location?
| moate wrote:
| Imma be honest, if it was not explained to me during hiring
| that mandatory "3-day retreats" were part of my job on a
| quarterly basis, I would be finding a new job before the next
| one.
|
| Some people care about their "careers". Other people care
| about paying their rent and see jobs as the only tangible way
| to meet that need. I will never give a fuck about being good
| at my job, only competent. I am currently at that competent
| level and have had this actively avoidance mindset since I
| got into the tech space. I'm very curious, love learning and
| have a ton of hobbies...that have fuckall to do with
| converting my time on this planet into profits for my
| overlords and financial crumbs for myself.
|
| The Career people seem to think, falsely, that the Job people
| can be coached into changing. Some can, but some of us will
| fight the happy hours and the retreats and the optional
| mentorships.
| CleaveIt2Beaver wrote:
| I can't stress enough how refreshing it is to see this take
| on HN. The usual rise-and-grind crowd always seem to
| dominate the discussions - likely because they have that
| investment (emotional and professional) in the first place;
| I don't want to invalidate anybody by saying this - so it
| at times feels alienating to read these threads.
|
| I don't want to be friends, I don't want to constantly be
| growing and mastering my field, etc; I want to be good at
| what I do, fulfill my objectives for the day, and leave it
| at the desk when I go home.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| The problem with in office work as an IC is that all day is
| spent helping other people and then you have to do your own IC
| work in the evenings.
|
| The problem with remote work is the constant slack
| interruptions to help other people and you have to do your own
| IC work around that.
|
| We have essentially a documentation, coordination, and
| communications problem that nobody has figured out how to solve
| in a remote first world. I'd be interested to hear people's
| solutions to this.
| ilaksh wrote:
| You have to communicate with people that you need a block of
| time without interruptions and that you only have a certain
| amount of the day to dedicate to things that aren't your own
| work. Your manager has to be on board and enforce this.
|
| Otherwise you need to get another job.
|
| To be fair I do get interruptions from Discord for my website
| that aren't related to other projects but I usually
| deliberately prioritize them because it's my business and no
| one else can provide support for it.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| Personally my team does stand up meetings weekly on Mondays.
| This is mostly to allow folks (and force a few) to think about
| their tasks and goals and organize them into "what can I
| accomplish this week" style bullet points.
|
| But then we also have a Teams channel carved out to
| "watercooler" or Daily meets.
|
| These are non-structured and you are free to come and go as
| needed. But its a place for folks to hang out and verbalize
| their tshooting or seek advice/help/opinions on problems etc.
|
| For some, its a good place to listen and be a wallflower. For
| others, its a good place to bounce ideas. If you are trying to
| focus you dont join.
|
| If someone specifically wants to bring someone into the fold
| they are free to ping them and just say "hey im in the daily,
| could really use your help when you get a chance". Sometimes
| that person can join immediately. Sometimes they may sit for a
| bit working on other things until the person they wanted to ask
| has the time. Sometimes that person just says "im busy, lets
| schedule a time or catch tomorrow".
|
| Its worked....okay enough. And was specifically setup because I
| had several FTR guys well before COVID that specifically stated
| they felt distant and out of touch with the pulse or overall
| goals of the department.
|
| Frankly I am in them so much I have a small Amazon Basics
| conference mic with a physical mute button and a blue/red
| indicator light.
|
| The only habit that can be "bad" coming from it is sometimes
| folks will have an affinity to "rally the troops" and engage
| multiple people on something they themselves havent spent much
| or any time chewing on first because it can be perceived as
| easier or quicker to a resolution. This is especially true with
| "fires". But I have seen the same in person as well. Especially
| with teams of weaker IC's.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Is the "being in the office really did help me" because you
| were in the office so figured out how to be successful in the
| office?
|
| I look at GitHub and I see thousands upon thousands of highly
| successful highly complex software written by all levels of
| experience collaboratively without an office environment. I got
| started with open source in the 1990's and it was amazing how
| fast we wrote stuff, and the level of mentoring I got was
| amazing. When I started working in professional office
| environments it was amazing how little could get done in such a
| long period of time with so many people, and mentoring was
| something I had to eek out of people who were too busy meeting
| and jockeying.
|
| I think folks see in office as necessary because it was their
| experience and they don't have a frame of reference for any
| other way of career development. That's simply an emergent
| reality, not necessarily the singular reality.
|
| Investing time in juniors is a conscious decision. It's just as
| easy to ignore a junior developer in person than it is
| remotely. But I firmly believe asynchronous work habits lead to
| the best mentoring possible - juniors can ask their questions
| in slack or whatever, and seniors can answer as they have the
| chance to. Soft skill mentoring happens just fine over zoom,
| and that stuff is better scheduled as a private convo.
| scarface74 wrote:
| > One of the ideas I'm thinking about is to hire only within a
| metropolitan area, but keep remote
|
| How does everyone being in the same metro area help? The idea
| of working remote is being able to choose where you want to
| live?
| digging wrote:
| That's part of it. The main part is working at the physical
| location of your choice, usually home, and not having to
| commute.
| scarface74 wrote:
| The physical location in many people's circumstance is far
| away from the high cost of living area that the company is
| located. "Working remotely" and still having to be in a
| designated city really doesn't help much for most people.
| stetrain wrote:
| I saw similar results when we first started hiring after moving
| full remote.
|
| The group that had worked together in the office handled remote
| work spectacularly. New hires tended to flounder a bit compared
| to what we were used to.
|
| We achieved some better results once we realized this and
| started putting some more specific mentorship time in with new
| hires.
|
| Like in the first week their manager/lead should be meeting
| with them multiple times a day, then ramping down to at least
| once a day with screen sharing / pair programming etc. when
| they have questions. Plus inclusion and involvement in meetings
| that help provide a bigger picture of how the product works,
| customer needs, etc. And making sure they are introduced to
| many team members and know where to ask questions for the best
| feedback.
|
| Of course this depends on the team, the new hire, and how
| things are going. But it seemed like the default case for many
| people was to spend hours silently not progressing when they
| were stuck on a problem, from dev machine setup to their first
| assigned tasks. Getting dumped into a Slack instance with
| dozens of channels and hundreds of people can certainly be
| overwhelming and being guided through these first steps seemed
| to help a lot.
|
| I think it's completely possible to give a new dev the same
| kinds of experience and mentorship, but with remote work that
| has to be done more deliberately. In a close office environment
| a lot of that happened via natural interaction and osmosis
| without anything needing to be scheduled on a calendar.
| lostcolony wrote:
| This is the main thing I've noticed - the people who talk
| about how there is something lost in how work gets done
| _haven 't changed how work gets done_.
|
| You can't just move to being remote without rethinking how
| you do everything. People were forced to be remote with
| COVID, but corporate essentially just tried to port the way
| things were done to remote, and on realizing it didn't work
| as well, want to move back.
|
| A few places are doing things correctly and building
| specifically for remote work.
|
| I honestly believe this is why we have such stark disparity
| in studies.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| We're 100% remote and this is absolutely key. You need to
| be deliberate about designing your operational processes
| around remote work. That means when you onboard someone you
| don't just dump them in a slack account and tell them to
| follow a doc. You pair them with someone until they're
| ramped up.
| pnutjam wrote:
| 100% this. I've been remote since covid. First job was
| transitioned and I mentored and onboarded people. It was
| alot of screen sharing, and messaging back and forth. This
| was no different (but better) then onsite where they would
| cram into my cube and try to take notes. Remote made this
| 100% better. Next company, I was the new guy and there were
| issues getting up to speed. Nobody really owned the
| onboarding process and this "remote first" environment had
| alot of technical debt and poor documentation.
|
| Now I'm at another remote first company, and it's great. I
| know who to ask and I get answers real-time or
| asynchronous, depending on what needs to happen. People are
| responsive and regular meetings keep us on the same page.
| Documentation is stressed and kept up to date.
| Salgat wrote:
| It boils down to work culture. Everything you can do in person,
| you can do remotely, you just need to ensure the company
| enforces a culture that embraces the tools required to make
| that possible. Pair programming? With modern tools it's trivial
| to do. Discussions? Start a call or use a channel. If anything,
| remote work forces you to better document what's going on,
| rather than some poor junior having to hunt down the right guy
| the office to help them figure something out. A junior
| suffering due to remote work is a junior whose company has
| failed them.
| ChancyChance wrote:
| I think the word you are looking for is "osmosis".
|
| People learn faster when they have someone to teach them in a
| multi-modal environment. Videoconferencing is only a shadow of
| this, and everything is scheduled. There is zero chance for
| spontaneity with such a sterile structure.
|
| I'm nearing the end of my career, but I certainly would not
| have learned as fast as I did without many, many mentors. Just
| reading the internet, especially when the technology is cutting
| edge and not even ON the internet, would have left me far
| behind. And if everyone falls behind, the company falls behind.
|
| I think companies that mandate some amount of in-person time
| will have less risk of falling behind than those that are 100%
| remote.
|
| I don't see how all of those junior 100% remote engineers will
| keep up. Maybe they are all just very very very smart.
| walthamstow wrote:
| We basically do your idea at my current company. All the
| engineers have to be within traveling distance of London and we
| are all expected to be in the office together on the the same
| day every month. One day per month, that's it. Some are in more
| frequently but that's the baseline.
|
| You can live wherever you want but you have to travel to London
| once a month and if that takes several hours and costs PS100s,
| that's your problem.
|
| It works really well. We do our retros and other group sessions
| in person, eat lunch together, chat with other functions, go
| for a beer or play a board game after work, etc.
| comfypotato wrote:
| My company has three days in office each month, and it's during
| a week specified by the company so that you synchronize with
| your team. Very similar to what you're talking about.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| How do you feel about it? Any feedback?
| comfypotato wrote:
| Love it. Privately owned company (doesn't have to conform
| to shareholder wants) with good leadership; lots of the
| policies resonate with the employees. I'll admit: I'm
| particularly extroverted, and this makes the in-person days
| more enjoyable. I get much more work done at home, and I
| generally enjoy life better working remotely. I thought I
| would have preferred full remote, but I have no desire to
| leave because everything else about the company is ideal.
|
| My understanding is that they have, before and after the
| pandemic, drawn a connection between remote work and
| attrition. Their hybrid policy is based on this, and they
| have found it solves the attrition issue. We could theorize
| all day as to exactly how/why :) Some combination of
| forcing people to be geographically located, see their
| teammates face to face, and then giving employees the
| majority of the time to themselves seems to work better for
| keeping employees than being fully remote.
|
| My personal theory is that, counterintuitively, just about
| everyone actually ends up feeling/doing better if they have
| a bit of in-person interaction. I was staunchly in the camp
| of full-remote even before the pandemic, yet I don't have
| any desire to change companies. It's just a great place to
| work, and 3 days a month is _extremely_ manageable. I have
| lots of connections at Google, for example (good full-
| remote options) and I could get an interview at the drop of
| a hat. I have no interest in this right now, though, even
| with much lower compensation.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| So, no one in your company lives in a city far away from the
| office? If so, how do they handle it? Imagine having to drive
| 6h to get from home to the office. Suddenly, your
| 3-days/month become 4-days/month plus accommodation.
| comfypotato wrote:
| It's implied and assumed that you live nearby. See the
| response to other comment for more info.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I just don't buy into the idea that it's impossible to
| effectively "absorb" or "brainstorm" over the internet. It
| sounds like a lack of effort and/or knowledge of how to use the
| tools.
| moate wrote:
| Management: You don't want to work remotely Employees: Yes we do
| Management: No you don't, look at all these studies about how bad
| it is for us? Employees: We don't care Management: No you don't,
| look at all these studies about how bad it is for you, sorta, in
| some minor aspects?
|
| Some people want to work remotely, other people don't, and
| management/corpos HATE it because they invested in massive office
| leases/are listening to their rich investor friends who have
| money tied in urban office real estate.
|
| I'm sick of these propaganda pieces, you're not going to convince
| the people who want something that they don't want it this way.
| IDGAF how much my "career" will suffer, I like spending my day
| hugging my wife and gardening when I don't have work on my desk.
| FOH.
| anticensor wrote:
| Management also wants to maximise control over their employees,
| which is easy to lose in a remote environment.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| One has to distinguish between management and upper management.
| I have met plenty of middle managers (e.g., Engineer managers)
| who love working from home, but have to sell the "go back to
| the office " idea because it's coming from upper management.
| crhulls wrote:
| I think your thesis about management wanting in-office is
| accurate, but your rationale for why seems misguided.
|
| I'm the CEO of a 500 person company and our lease cost is
| negligible relative to everything else, and being fully remote
| means lots of travel and expensive all-hands get togethers
| which almost fully negate any office savings.
|
| The overlap between VCs and public market investors and "rich
| investor friends who have money tied to urban office real
| estate" is non-existent from a pressure and influence
| standpoint.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I always feel that discussing remote work in the context of
| software dev (basically, discuss it on HN) is so heavily skewed
| to the point of being meaningless.
|
| We're talking about an industry that has a heavy concentration
| of, for lack of a better word, shut-ins, who don't really like
| socializing and really excel at work when they are alone and not
| being bothered. Most of them self-taught to some degree, or
| entirely. Heavy technical knowledge and strong ability to deal
| with technical hurdle of remote work. Probably have a bad
| internet addiction too, and attribute most of their knowledge to
| it. The nature of the work also _heavily_ lends itself to being
| remote, and why there were even people in the 90 's(!) who were
| doing remote developer work.
|
| But take another field, like say marketing, that has lots of
| extroverted types and lots of meetings with heavy emphasis on
| visual things, that no one was doing remote prior to 2020, and
| suddenly remote work becomes a much more grinding endeavor that
| can really chew up juniors. These people are not shut-in computer
| geeks and their work is not a fit for those types by a long shot.
| As much as they may hate the commute and insist that remote work
| is fine, the fact of the matter is that the type of work really
| doesn't lend itself to remote working.
|
| TL;DR: These articles about remote work failing aren't really
| talking about software jobs, and your experience as someone who
| has worked remote dev work for 15 years isn't really relevant.
| You work a job that is almost tailor made for remote work.
| ncraig wrote:
| I suspect you're correct more broadly, but this article is
| talking about software jobs:
|
| >The economists -- Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda
| Pallais -- studied engineers at a large technology company.
| They found that remote work enhanced the productivity of senior
| engineers, but it also reduced the amount of feedback that
| junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their
| code), and some of the junior engineers were more likely to
| quit the firm.
|
| However, there are major problems with the research. From the
| research article:
|
| >Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a
| Fortune 500 firm be- tween August 2019 and December 2020.
|
| The study period includes the throes of the pandemic and
| ignores long-term adjustments.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Maybe the marketing people can do some market analysis and
| figure out that trying bully software developers back into the
| office so that marketing people can have a captive audience for
| their extroversion isn't a great path forward and instead is
| creating incredible amounts of resentment and even hostility.
| Maybe they should go hang out at the local Starbucks and make
| some real friends instead of trying to impose themselves and
| their preferences on others. Note that the WFH people don't
| give a shit if the extroverts with an addiction to endless
| external validation work in an office, at home, or in a deep
| sea trench but the converse isn't true with the extrovert
| trying with all their might to force their preferences on
| everyone else. You'd think marketers would understand people a
| bit better and realize that the outcome is going to be that
| they're going to get blasted each time they try to use their
| slimy sales tactics to force everyone to conform to their
| personal preferences.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I don't see how the working decisions of a markerting firm
| would have anything to do with software devs.
|
| The world doesn't revolve around software devs, which is kind
| of the whole point of my post. Devs can work from home, these
| articles aren't about them, and hence why its dumb to discuss
| them on HN.
| armatav wrote:
| Bro, you're in-office because of your C-level, not the
| extroversion of an unrelated team.
|
| You don't think they could just socialize amongst their
| immediate peers in-office without you?
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| It's amazing how much better teams are at remote work now than in
| 2018. However... It's still just not as efficient as in-person
| fact-to-face ad-hoc meetings. The "water cooler discussion forum"
| is very real. Informational cross-pollination between teams and
| between levels of the org structure simply aren't happening as
| much with remote work. The siloing has locked companies into
| rigid plans that cannot respond to change.
| balderdash wrote:
| I think I learned more from the fellow juniors in my first couple
| of jobs than I ever did from managers/supervisors/seniors -
| remote work is easy for me now that I'm mostly "baked" but think
| it would have been a huge detriment for me early career.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| The problem isn't remote work. The problem is tradional in-office
| management and leadership that don't understand remote isn't just
| add Slack or add Teams and you're a remote-able team.
|
| There's more to it than that.
|
| But once again leadership blames the proles for getting it wrong.
| crimsontech wrote:
| This really only applies at a company which is "in office first".
| I've gone from being a junior to a lead fully remote. The only
| time I have had an issue is when all other team members were
| office based and the work culture was based on that.
|
| When a company is remote first this issue goes away.
| cracrecry wrote:
| Something relevant here: The New York Times is a Real State
| company now. They manage the real State they had in the center of
| New York that is more valuable that all the printing presses in
| the US.
|
| So this company is highly biased against Remote Work. If people
| can work from home, they don't need the super expensive Offices
| in the center of the city, prices go down and NYT loses money.
| jtc331 wrote:
| https://archive.is/ezB6B
| nprateem wrote:
| After 3 years at home I wouldn't mind being a TWAT (Tuesdays,
| Wednesdays and Thursdays), provided I liked my colleagues and the
| cute account managers were in. But if I went back in and there
| was little social interaction I'd rather stay home.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Dramatic reduction in networking opportunities does have negative
| impacts.
|
| Organizations have to be more intentional about making it happen,
| as it won't happen by itself anymore.
| tivert wrote:
| > Organizations have to be more intentional about making it
| happen, as it won't happen by itself anymore.
|
| Then it _very frequently_ won 't happen anymore. Anything an
| organization has to be intentional about will get neglected or
| half-assed, if it isn't some core function key to short-term
| results.
|
| When I lead a team I try to minimize the number of things that
| require unmonitored "discipline" to do right, and try to set
| things up so as many things as possible so they "happen
| automatically" or "blow up in your face (early) if you don't do
| it, becoming a blocker." That's because a most people are lazy
| and communicating every detail of how to do things right is
| hard, so things tend to decay to some long/medium-term half-ass
| but short-term "easier" level.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| > Anything an organization has to be intentional about will
| get neglected or half-assed, if it isn't some core function
| key to short-term results.
|
| The problem is that they have to be intentional about it no
| mater what, either by making the remote networking happen or
| by intentionally having a policy where most people work in
| the office most of the time (Friday-only WFH or some similar
| arrangement). Nobody gets it for free anymore because non-
| remote office culture is no longer the default.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > "blow up in your face (early) if you don't do it, becoming
| a blocker."
|
| This is something that many places, including my current
| consulting placement, will consider a bad thing and actively
| work to do the opposite. The attitude at these places is that
| "blowing up" is a Bad Thing, and should never happen. This
| causes everyone to suppress useful signals of impending
| problems that can be mitigated in advance. What's left is
| things that _do_ "blow up" because of neglect, and are truly
| Bad, so it's a self-reinforcing policy.
|
| These organizations accept the decay (apt word, btw) and
| really Bad Things happening too frequently over diligence and
| preventing Bad Things from happening in the first place.
| [deleted]
| mihaigalos wrote:
| At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it comes to light that
| such research is funded by hedge funds owning the commercial real
| estate you "absolutely have to have for the poor young
| professionals."
| monero-xmr wrote:
| As a business owner it's just so much more economical to hire
| remote. No office expense, the pool of talent is so much larger,
| no relocation expenses, people are happier with the flexible
| schedules.
|
| Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow in
| this environment because economically it is just so
| overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner. I predict a
| surge in downtown living within the next 5 years as offices are
| converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments and condos.
| Young people will live there and WFH but get their socialization
| from the critical mass of young people living around them,
| learning how to make friends post-college outside of work (which
| is way healthier as well).
|
| It's way easier to figure out new mechanisms of working to mentor
| and grow junior employees in a remote environment than it is to
| fight economics. The economics are just superior and you can't
| fight that.
| tivert wrote:
| > Entry level employees need to learn how to succeed and grow
| in this environment because economically it is just so
| overwhelmingly better for me, the business owner.
|
| As a business owner, you need to teach those entry level
| employees to succeed in the remote environment, or your remote
| hiring is going to get a lot less economical for you in the
| future.
|
| > I predict a surge in downtown living within the next 5 years
| as offices are converted or destroyed and rebuilt as apartments
| and condos. Young people will live there and WFH but get their
| socialization from the critical mass of young people living
| around them, learning how to make friends post-college outside
| of work (which is way healthier as well).
|
| That's probably wishful thinking to a large degree, especially
| the part about making friends. Some people will figure it out,
| but many will founder (which IIRC, is borne out in loneliness
| statistics)
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > As a business owner, you need to teach those entry level
| employees to succeed in the remote environment, or your
| remote hiring is going to get a lot less economical for you
| in the future.
|
| Hum... The GP can't solve this problem, and it is a certainty
| that business owners as a collective won't be competent
| enough to do it even if they try.
|
| IMO, that looks like a job for a government or something
| similar.
| clintonb wrote:
| Huh!? Why can't business owners find a solution to
| increasing collaboration and mentorship? It makes zero
| sense to involve the government in employee training.
| lnsru wrote:
| You're business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle
| managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the
| office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking
| project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build
| offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very
| profitable and can afford that. See it's lots about egos and
| not always about economics.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| tivert wrote:
| > You're business owner. But there is whole cohort of middle
| managers, that need to justify their existence walking in the
| office and watching over the shoulders as well as asking
| project status reports. Corporate world also needs to build
| offices or architectural monuments stating, they are very
| profitable and can afford that. See it's lots about egos and
| not always about economics.
|
| There are also a lot of arrogant American engineers need to
| justify their inflated salaries compared to Indians, Eastern
| Europeans and other offshore workers. With the rise of remote
| work, we should hopefully see those inflated remote salaries
| settle to the international norm.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| > There are also a lot of arrogant American engineers need
| to justify their inflated salaries compared to Indians,
| Eastern Europeans and other offshore workers. With the rise
| of remote work, we should hopefully see those inflated
| remote salaries settle to the international norm.
|
| As much as I support remote work, what you suggests is not
| the norm. Mainly because companies hire much more employees
| than contractors. Companies cannot just hire employees from
| dozens of different countries (unless they have branches on
| such countries or they hire an intermediary company to
| handle the taxes/health insurance stuff). Companies cannot
| just hire people who are +-6h away from their timezone.
|
| Companies usually hire remote employees within the country
| they operate. Which is nice because you can live in a
| modest town around the nature and work for companies who
| have originally emerged in the capital.
| Tade0 wrote:
| As an Eastern European: it went largely the other way and
| I'm happy that it did.
|
| I mean, I don't make American money - just 50-70% of that,
| but I also don't have American expenses - especially not on
| the level seen in SV.
| Aperocky wrote:
| There is an actual difference in quality (though not as
| much as the salary differential).
|
| Not in small part due to a significant percentage of the
| best engineers originating in those regions are already
| here in the United States.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I hire US and Canadian engineers. Canadians working
| remote aren't any cheaper when benefits are included than
| US employees, at least the quality I hire. European
| engineers are good but the time difference is literally
| the problem. 5 to 8 hours makes it impossible for me. All
| in costs are 150k for junior and 280k for top tier
| including benefits. We have equity but it's not liquid.
| If I could hire Indians I would but simply put I have
| found them to be quite poor quality over many
| experiences, I assume the good Indian engineers are
| already employed by solid satellite offices of major US
| companies or have emigrated.
| sinsterizme wrote:
| I think feedback is a minor point, much more important in my mind
| is the morale-boost you get from working in the office alongside
| colleagues that in my experience is completely missing from
| remote-work
| ragnarsson wrote:
| It happened to me when I was junior engineer during covid,
| honestly I came out as a better developer since I learned how to
| get answers from the code, I got much better at navigating
| different codebases. Though it was still a drag sometimes and I
| felt my manager didn't do enough to create an environment where
| junior engineers could thrive in.
|
| I found that there were 2 kind of seniors - genuinely helpful
| ones, total assholes. These assholes will never help you, if you
| ping them they pretend to not see it and the helpful ones are
| always so busy they can't get any time to help you.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| From the paper: Our data include peer code
| reviews of software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm between
| August 2019 and December 2020.
|
| They studied just _one_ company.
|
| I'm guessing that the company doesn't have a remote-first
| culture, and that things may have improved in the last 2+ years,
| as companies have gotten more used to both hybrid and remote-
| only.
| RoyGBivCap wrote:
| Makes the entire article a glorified anecdote, IMHO.
| typicalrunt wrote:
| And their timeframe is pre-COVID and the worst possible time
| during COVID, when people were just trying to figure out how to
| work and live and not catch some deadly virus. 2020 was a
| hectic time and such an abnormality that I wouldn't base any
| long-term human behaviour on it.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Relationships and quick chat get built and done on Slack. My
| professional network is a web of in-work, Signal chats,
| professional Slacks/Discords. I have a massively largely and more
| substantive professional information network that benefits me and
| my employer than I do if I kept all the focus in the office and
| on what Mike my manager fed me during hallway interactions.
|
| Proactivity to the above is worth hiring for, but works fine if
| you do. This all comes down to "since I don't want to DM someone
| and set up zoom calls, and travel to the office once a week a
| quarter, let's make everyone start commuting in."
|
| This article describes people who don't know how to do that well
| or want to leverage alternative routes to achieve. Or, using
| number of GitHub comments as a measure for good feedback is about
| as logical as number of slack comments per day. Engineers know
| these metrics are tracked for performance and compensation.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| Would working totally remote, but paying for quarterly tickets
| and accommodation to gather all staff (from all over the world)
| for a week to meet and brainstorm, be cheaper than hiring locally
| and renting?
|
| I know someone who worked for a danish company, they has a
| similar scheme but every six months... worked really well for the
| most part. The company would hold retreats all over Europe, and
| since it combined both business and employee perks (stay at a
| nice resort), worked like a charm for them.
|
| ____
|
| But it also highlighted an interesting issue, that might act as a
| counterpoint for the whole thing.
|
| The problem was my acquaintance was a Pakistani citizen like
| me... and visa for us is a really big headache.
|
| Not a big deal for an EU company to announce only a week or two
| before where the retreat would be held this time, and most of
| their workforce, who all had relatively strong passports, also
| didn't face major issues.
|
| But the earliest he himself could get any form of schengen visa
| was like 3 months after the retreat, so too late for the first
| one and too early for the second one, whenever and wherever that
| would be decided.
|
| I think it worked out for him after sometime, but remote work is
| not all sunshine and roses.
| kemayo wrote:
| I've seen this with some Nigerian coworkers. The sheer
| difficulty of getting them a visa to attend any sort of
| gathering outside of Africa is _intense_.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > The problem was my acquaintance was a Pakistani citizen like
| me... and visa for us is a really big headache.
|
| Passport travel freedom is caused by security and fraud risk.
|
| This can be fixed by countries simply by making sure fraud and
| security risks can't end-up abroad.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Can't they schedule anything in Dubai?
| izacus wrote:
| I've lead remote teams and gathering the team 1x or 2x per year
| was absolute necessity to have everyone working well together.
|
| Obviously you do this in a sensible manner (a lot of heads up,
| locked down dates so people can plan vacation around it, full
| expenses paid).
| detaro wrote:
| Even if you are in the EU, 1-2 weeks notice for something like
| that is bonkers. And as soon as company has more than a handful
| of employees, this is something you want to have booked with
| hotel and such earlier _anyways_. From what I 've seen in other
| companies, time and location of such things gets announced
| months in advance.
| ryzvonusef wrote:
| Apologies if I am remembering the anecdote incorrectly, it
| might have been more than two weeks. (We were in a chat group
| and he was bemoaning his visa headaches, I forget the exact
| mechanics of his company policy, since that wasn't the crux
| of the issue)
|
| The point was, however earlier they had given their employees
| the notice, his visa was going to arrive much later than
| that.
|
| Visa for us is extremely difficult, someone on twitter shared
| a screenshot, the Canadian website told to expect a wait of
| "580 days" or something absurd like that.
|
| So you can hire remote workers cheaply from other countries
| (and no employment visa headaches), but if you expect to call
| them for a quick visit, plan absurdly early.
| paxys wrote:
| > Our data include peer code reviews of software engineers at a
| Fortune 500 firm between August 2019 and December 2020.
|
| I'm not sure what broad learnings you can derive from such a
| narrow study. Individual firms have seen wildly different WFH
| outcomes based on how they implemented it.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| First, there are the cliches: "face to face meetings are better",
| "spontaneous collaboration", "out of sight, out of mind".
|
| Then, there is the non-sequitur of people quit when the pandemic
| hit, it was because remote. Maybe it was a shit company already
| and remote just made it worse enough, did you control for that?
|
| Last, but no least, what the hell do economists know about human
| behavior to do a study on how remote work affects it? It would be
| like me doing a study on ... Well, anything, I'm a college
| dropout, I'm not qualified to do any scientific research. But I
| still learned enough to spot a weak argument at best.
| ghotli wrote:
| Hm. I started working remotely at age 24 years back. This article
| just doesn't reflect my experiences whatsoever. One data point
| doesn't mean I'm right, just that this article seems written from
| an odd perspective from my perspective.
| sneed_chucker wrote:
| Wow, 24 years. What was it like in the early days, say
| 1999-2005?
| Dragonai wrote:
| I believe the parent commenter meant it as "I started working
| remotely at age 24, [some] years back" :)
| slipswflaps wrote:
| Our plane of reference for our coworkers and interactions with
| them is now confined to the two-dimensional nature of our
| screens, rather than the three-dimensional world we "used" to see
| and interact with them in.
|
| This is another interesting way our cultural changes in work may
| affect our experience because of our biology. The spatial data
| that contribute to declarative, episodic memory in amygdala-
| hippocampal memory formation, for example.
| gbrindisi wrote:
| I feel like this is a management problem that needs to be solved.
| As the context has changed so should management style.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "Hidden Penalty" is less feedback. But mostly the kind of
| feedback allistic people worry about. That not the kind of in-
| depth feedback that can make a real career difference, it's the
| "your pant legs are too short" kind of feedback that is important
| in the shallow sense of being a good corporate drone.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of
| the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career,
| this does not match my experience. Perhaps it's the organizations
| I've been at, or the field I'm in, but I have had no issues
| getting feedback or up to speed on things. Stuff like code
| review, which the article mentions, benefit in no way from in-
| person vs remote work set-ups. Feedback in general doesn't
| benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the
| junior is proactive. The only junior employees that I've seen
| struggle in with remote work are those who
|
| 1) are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee
|
| 2) don't even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If
| something doesn't work their first impulse is to ask someone else
| to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)
|
| 3) Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It's easy
| to ask for feedback, or for problems that you can work on, or if
| you can pair with someone else on a problem they are working on
| so you can get some experience. None of that is really enabled or
| disabled by working from office/remote.
|
| If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people's
| experience in school/college. There are students I knew that were
| successful using resources that aren't handed to them, like the
| internet. Others seemed to exclusively study via study groups,
| study guides, and going to the professor/TA during office hours,
| and without these. Once you enter the work force, the second kind
| of student has those resources pulled out from underneath them
| and very quickly has to learn to be the first kind of student, or
| they will struggle. I think remote vs in office doesn't make much
| of a difference for the first kind, but in office feels more like
| a stop-gap for the second kind until they become more senior and
| acclimate. That's just speculation on my part though, and is
| exclusively based on my limited experience and field.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee
|
| > don't even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If
| something doesn't work their first impulse is to ask someone
| else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing
| problem 1)
|
| > Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
|
| The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need
| to look out for above average communication skills and
| debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new
| grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or
| relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each
| week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who
| themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.
|
| Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's
| simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but
| places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a
| serious program will include challenging work and select for
| people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).
| jayd16 wrote:
| For 3) the difference with in office work is that the manager
| can passively check in on how someone is doing. Just casually
| checking someone's posture from across an office you can tell
| if they're struggling or not.
|
| Forcing a video call is a lot more formal and just doesn't have
| the same effect. People will attempt to present a cool
| demeanor.
|
| Someone who's doing great and is fully self sufficient in
| office can probably crank out code form home just fine... its
| the cases where people are struggling or need to collaborate in
| an non-formal way that I think in office helps the most.
| Extasia785 wrote:
| As a junior that also just started before COVID forced everyone
| into remote, my experience has been that team culture is the
| deciding factor. I've always been extremely vocal in
| communicating ideas, acquiring feedback and asking for help
| digitally, but my experience has been split for the two teams
| I've been yet.
|
| The first team was just set up as the pandemic hit and thus had
| all collaboration happen online. This created structures that
| fit a remote-first approach and even worked after work got
| hybrid again. All important discussion happened online, we had
| ways to spontaneously get help and enough formats to get
| creative. And it worked, I never felt left out, all blockers
| for everyone got cleared as fast as you would expect and
| feedback cycles were good.
|
| I can't say the same about my second team however. While it's
| officially hybrid, I'd say 70% are coming into the office every
| day, while the other 30% (me included) work basically
| exclusively remote. And it isn't working well, the office
| people just have their own bubble. They exchange ideas and
| communicate offline and it's hard to be part of that. I tried
| integrating digital tools, I tried talking about it, but it
| just doesn't work. I can plant seeds for new ideas, I can ask
| for feedback, but the second I communicate it to the office
| bubble, I'm not part of it anymore. This isn't intentional
| obviously, but when they talk about stuff at the coffee machine
| or during lunch, the idea will start developing by itself,
| while I have no way to take part in it. And who can blame them?
| If you have a good idea during lunch, why should they not talk
| about it? And who wants to provide an official protocol for the
| remote workers about lunch discussions? And then when I then
| try to talk about the idea a few days later, I always notice
| that it advanced without any possibility for me to participate.
| This sucks obviously, because it massively diminishes my
| influence to bring in and grow my ideas. And while I do get
| feedback when I ask for it directly, I have noticed that barely
| anyone actively informs you about the small 1% stuff that you
| can improve. Which doesn't sound bad, but if you miss an 1%
| improvement every week, even in a year it will amount to a big
| enough sum to matter.
|
| And I think these 2 things do massively influence a career. You
| need to be the face of a bunch of good ideas if you want any
| kind of soft power. You do need the small informal feedback
| someone gives you when getting a coffee, if you want to be the
| top 10%. And in some hybrid organizations, you will miss out on
| that.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The office people here actually are actively politicking
| against the remote people whether they realize it or not. If
| you were their boss they would have no choice about keeping
| you in the loop on lunch conversations.
|
| This sort of thing is definitely a problem with many "hybrid"
| situations.
| croutonwagon wrote:
| >If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people's
| experience in school/college.
|
| I am not so sure on that. But I have seen similar throughout my
| years. More and more I am coming to the conclusion this is one
| of those "some people are wired a certain way, others are not".
| I have seen plenty of highly "educated" folks lacking terribly
| in skillsets. I have seen the same for those with no education.
|
| As an instructor as well, it skews similar with the students I
| have seen. Some just have a "fire" and work through issues,
| others will just give up at the first sign of issue (I am
| talking "I couldnt figure out key based auth, so i did
| nothing".
|
| I have tried to get folks to take personal ownership in
| products and deliverables, to varying degrees of success. In
| the past I was ardently against "silos" of responsibility but
| ultimately this led to some taking no ownership stake in any
| products. So we have had to transition to "assigning" primary,
| secondary, tertiary responsibility to services/products. This
| helped a little bit but also led to some then just bringing in
| personal excuses.
|
| Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that folks have
| varying capacity for load/projects and how much they are
| simultaneously work/support. As well as varying capacity to be
| able to work indepedantly vs need more guidance/check-ins on
| stuff. I try and cater to whats needed to get the most out of
| them and understand not everyone is a rockstar that can just
| take a challenge and come back with solutions. Even still, it
| can be tricky managing that withing intra-team dynamics.
| alistairSH wrote:
| As a manager, it's not the day-to-day that concerns me the
| most.
|
| It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the
| junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game
| yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or
| "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might
| spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.
|
| Edit - I can't really quantify the above, so maybe it's not
| really a thing. But, personally, I miss those conversations and
| worry that new/young employees aren't able to have them.
| eptcyka wrote:
| Some people flourish anywhere, some do so at home, some need
| closer supervision to do their best. I don't think anyone
| needs watercooler idle chat to get them to do the best they
| can.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the
| junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the
| game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y"
| or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that
| might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected.
|
| I've worked in the tech for more than 2 decades, in different
| countries. I've worked for startups, for FAANG, and for
| companies of different sizes in between. I've built
| successful projects and saw my share of failures.
|
| I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned.
| It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game
| yesterday?" sort.
|
| This "water-cooler effect" myth that is repeated often as if
| it was fact, and that completely puzzles me.
|
| Those important conversation you mentioned, for me, always
| happened online even when I was in the office, normally
| through slack discussions (or email threads in the old days).
| digging wrote:
| Well, I've worked in tech for half a decade, and I
| experienced plenty of it in my first job. It benefited me
| tremendously to be able to get context from other engineers
| and even people outside of engineering.
|
| And I had none of it in my second job before covid. It's
| not a guarantee. But it's weird to me that people are going
| their whole careers without seeing it... maybe I was really
| lucky at my first job.
| lisasays wrote:
| _I 've never saw this water-cooler experience you
| mentioned._
|
| Oh I've seen it, but I'd say it's very rare - I sometimes
| do pick up useful snippets of information (so-and-so is
| working on X) while grabbing from the refrigerator, etc.
|
| Like, 5 percent of the time. The rest of the time it's at
| best definitely tangential -- and sometimes outright
| nonsense (people talking at you for the sake of having
| someone to talk at) that grinds my gears and objectively
| disrupts my flow.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Certain teams thrive off of word-of-mouth data flowing
| across. I've experienced both type of work environments.
|
| Usually, people may casually walk over to the area where
| the office gossip happens to get some info. It doesn't have
| to be a magical hallway or a water cooler.
| tsumnia wrote:
| The water cooler experience extends beyond the actual
| conversations occurring to encompass a general camaraderie
| that gets built being in proximity to others. Schools had
| the same effect happen in over lock down - students weren't
| sitting next to other students and overhearing projects
| they were on, general grievances with school work, or
| miscellaneous "the game last night" stuff. Without that
| sense of community, you can really feel alone and things
| like imposter syndrome have a chance to creep it.
|
| Obviously, I'm in the camp that thinks the water cooler
| myth exists. It can extend to just learning colleague Z has
| 2 kids. Things that can happen online, but also might not
| since small talk and casual conversations might not occur
| as often. It can happen more naturally during periods of
| "waiting" - like waiting for a class/meeting to start vs
| everyone logging into Zoom at exactly the start of the
| meeting.
| spacemadness wrote:
| This isn't what was being argued. What was being argued
| is product development decisions being greatly enhanced
| from water cooler talk.
| WalterSear wrote:
| I've seen it. But, it never seemed to make any difference
| to what I was actually given leeway to implement on the
| job.
|
| It's like sideprojects and github repos during a job search
| - everyone says they are important, everyone thinks they
| are important, but at the end of the day, very few decision
| makers are willing to put in the time and risk of involving
| them in the process of their work.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Just because you haven't observed doesn't mean it's a myth.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I have seen it on more than one place. Interestingly, all
| those places are research-focused universities. (And no,
| mere research institutes don't seem to enable it.)
|
| In retrospect, it is quite obvious why that happens. Just
| for a start, if your place is such that a high-level
| executive announcing a layoff would lead people to believe
| in him, instead of reacting like "what is he talking about?
| is he crazy?", then you have no chance of ever getting
| productive water cooler conversations.
| emptyfile wrote:
| [dead]
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Inevitably when you go out with co-workers or industry
| colleagues at a conference, you will end up talking about
| work. That is the one thing you for sure have in common
| (while someone may not even like sports), and it's an easy
| topic to fall back to.
|
| But FWIW, I also think the small talk and getting-to-know
| your colleagues is valuable. Some of my deepest and
| longest-term friendships have come from former co-workers,
| former classmates, etc. While it's possible to cultivate a
| friendship via remote work, it's a lot harder.
|
| Coworkers often share birthdays, weddings, random trips,
| and enriching experiences together that are not very easy
| at all to replicate over fully remote work.
|
| I've noticed that as my career has gotten more remote, it's
| harder to even count on making new adult friendships into
| my 30s. I'm like a stranger in my own town, unless I really
| intentionally take the time to join clubs/groups outside of
| work. That's not a bad idea on its own, but it does take
| intentional effort and some degree of consistency that just
| sort of came automatically with working in an office. And
| some young people with less overall confidence / social
| experience may not even know how to go about that.
|
| I think all of that def takes a mental toll. We're social
| creatures, even the introverts among us.
| juve1996 wrote:
| I have had some great friendships form at work. But I've
| also had really difficult situations. I've seen friends
| form and then become bitter enemies, transitioning from
| workplace disagreements to personal disputes.
|
| The fact is we aren't in the army. This isn't band of
| brothers. Some people don't want to know anything more
| than how you're helping them finish some task for their
| job. There are going to be varying levels of motivation,
| care, etc.
|
| > I've noticed that as my career has gotten more remote,
| it's harder to even count on making new adult friendships
| into my 30s. I'm like a stranger in my own town, unless I
| really intentionally take the time to join clubs/groups
| outside of work.
|
| I think you should explore finding friends outside of
| work. I've seen many go down the "friends only at work
| path." Then they retired, switched jobs, and moved on,
| and that friendship faded just as quickly. It's amazing
| how many people will be your friend when forced to be
| with you (e.g. gotta go to work) but given the choice
| they aren't choosing you.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep. For me work is work and friends are independent of
| that. In 30+ years I have never had a friendship at work
| that exended to doing stuff outside of work. There were
| people at work who I was friendly/sociable with, of
| course, but at 5:00 we went all went home to our separate
| lives.
| boredtofears wrote:
| Wow, that sounds like a bummer -- I can't imagine
| spending a significant portion of my life working on
| something and never establishing any meaningful
| relationships with the people that I worked with.
| inkcapmushroom wrote:
| The key for me is spontaneously reaching out to coworkers
| who you like. Invite them to parties, or to disc golfing,
| or a brewery, or whatever fun activity you do that needs
| additional friends. I find that if a coworker comes with
| me to these activities regularly when we work together,
| that the activity and the friendship can continue after
| we no longer work together. You need to develop the out-
| of-work relationship early and acknowledge that you like
| each other's company even when you aren't forced to be
| together. YMMV
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Totally opposite of my experience. I do an annual ski
| trip with some of my old coworkers from 5+ years ago
| (from a company not many of us work at any longer). I
| have been invited to weddings from coworkers I worked
| with 10+ years ago. I am still great friends with dozens
| of people I went to community college and university
| with. But since going remote it is far more difficult to
| make the same connections.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm still friends with old roommates from school too.
| That's different in my mind anyway -- I lived with these
| people, saw them naked in the shower, etc. It was a level
| of personal contact that was much closer than anything
| that has ever happened (or I would want to happen) with
| someone at work.
|
| YMMV though, if you make friends at work that's cool,
| just never seemed natural or obligatory to me.
| lisasays wrote:
| Again - yeah sure, there are communication benefits to
| general proximity.
|
| But the idea that this literally happens "at the water
| cooler" (or from bumping into each other in the hallway)
| to a significant degree -- such that it's worth dragging
| people into their cars for a 90 commute each way, on top
| of the obvious productivity-killing effects of the vast
| majority of office spaces, these days, just to benefit
| from these wonderful and sublime interactions -- is just
| nonsense.
|
| Or like another commenter put it: one of these things
| people hear and like to repeat, without checking whether
| it has any grounding in reality.
| IMTDb wrote:
| > I've never saw this water-cooler experience you
| mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the
| game yesterday?" sort
|
| Does not match my experience at all. Depending on how you
| approach the water cooler you will get :
|
| - People going to the water cooler to get water. And go
| back to their desk asap to stay focused (which is fine)
|
| - People who go there and wanna have some chit chat about
| whatever interests them. Sometimes that means the game and
| sometimes not.
|
| But yeah; but if you go in asking "what did you do this
| week end"; I have some colleagues who will happily jump in
| to say "I tried playing with Haskell, but those monads
| thing are are to fully grasp".
|
| Never ever in my life, have I described my week end on
| slack. If I am going to be sitting in front of a screen and
| worsen my carpal tunnel syndrome; it's going to be for work
| related stuff.
| juve1996 wrote:
| I'm sure there was a time where people "never shared
| their weekend through text" either. I remember those
| types "I only use a phone for calling." Most of them are
| long gone now.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Eh? We kind of make sure to discuss all those things on Teams
| too (or only, really, since 80% is still remote).
| [deleted]
| gumballindie wrote:
| All of which can be done online. If you can talk to your
| friends via facebook messenger or whatsapp to stay in the
| loop so can you with your colleagues via teams or slack.
| [deleted]
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Open Google Calendar or Office 365, create a meeting once or
| twice a week for 30 minutes and call it "watercooler chat".
| Make sure staff know it's an open forum, and that anything
| can be discussed safely. People that want to show up will.
| People that don't wont. Modern problems require modern
| solutions.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Bah. That is what hackernews/the internet is for. I learn
| more about new tools and stuff that other companies are using
| from seeing other companies/employees talk about that online
| than I do talking to co workers. Most of the time co workers
| are not talking about new cool tech, we are talking about
| life/bullshit because we are not robots.
| returningfory2 wrote:
| > Feedback in general doesn't benefit from in-office scenarios
| in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive.
|
| In your comment you say you haven't worked in-office much. So,
| genuine question, how do you know feedback doesn't benefit from
| being in-office?
|
| I think this relevant because in my experience (1.5 years
| remote because of COVID), the benefits of being in the office
| often aren't apparent when you're out of the office. For
| example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations
| in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I
| didn't realize existed. If I wasn't in the office I wouldn't
| even know I had missed these conversations.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| I worked in-office for about a year and a half. Then I
| switched fields and companies right before the pandemic hit,
| so I was effectively starting over again. I did not find
| being in-office vs remote to be particularly impactful on my
| ability to be effective, get feedback, and get up to speed.
| Obviously this is a very small sample size based solely on my
| personal experience.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute)
| conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in
| our system that I didn't realize existed
|
| Counterpoint: there are types which _really_ like to insert
| themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point
| it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone
| else. Taken to the extreme, they even create a state of
| helplessness in others, where these individuals become a
| funnel for all others to ask questions and obtain knowledge
| from. This is without accounting for all the noise pollution
| it creates.
|
| Opponents are very eager to pull out these 'what about the
| office talks?' arguments, but whether the benefits even
| outweigh the downsides isn't obvious at all.
|
| Heck, most developer work cultures use Scrum, and they can't
| even work through a single item on their retrospectives.
| Surely a bit of skepticism is warranted.
| tivert wrote:
| >> For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute)
| conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in
| our system that I didn't realize existed
|
| > Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert
| themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the
| point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of
| everyone else.
|
| That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional
| problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more
| difficult, like someone humming at their desk.
|
| It's sort of like someone who writes a bunch of useless
| unit tests. The solution isn't for the team to scrap unit
| testing, it's for that person to be coached to not do that.
|
| One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of
| stuff that can happen organically in an office into
| intentional practices that require discipline, which means
| they're a lot easier to neglect.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| >That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional
| problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes
| more difficult
|
| Yet anecdotally, it has occurred in every open office so
| far. Managers were also eager to applaud this behavior
| rather than berate it, while at the same time looking at
| the actual work performed, scratching their heads why
| nothing was happening and then giving said individuals
| special treatment. I'm not alone in experiencing this,
| either.
|
| >One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot
| of stuff that can happen organically in an office into
| intentional practices that require discipline, which
| means they're a lot easier to neglect.
|
| "That's not really a counterpoint, just coach them not to
| do that." If your argument against my point is 'well just
| teach people differently, also it doesn't happen that
| often at all (despite it being a common complaint on the
| internet)', you'll also have to argue why your point is
| special enough not to deserve the same response.
|
| Companies relying on a lack of documentation and
| individuals using said documentation is a humongous risk
| even outside the remote debate, and that's most of the
| requirements for remote covered. Those 'organic
| intentional practices' don't seem so great when 80% of
| the seniors on the team leave without a paper trail and
| the remainder knows zilch.
| tivert wrote:
| > Yet anecdotally, it has occurred in every open office
| so far.
|
| Open offices are terrible, by the way. They provide few
| benefits, and their main effect is to magnify the
| downsides of in-office work (at least for software
| development). They just happened to be trendy and enable
| lower real-estate costs.
|
| > Managers were also eager to applaud this behavior
| rather than berate it, while at the same time looking at
| the actual work performed, scratching their heads why
| nothing was happening and then giving said individuals
| special treatment.... you'll also have to argue why your
| point is special enough not to deserve the same response.
|
| Many managers are not great.
|
| A busybody is undermining team productivity without
| adding value is a management problem focused on that
| individual. Remote work introduces more systemic
| communication and training problems.
|
| > Those 'organic intentional practices' don't seem so
| great when 80% of the seniors on the team leave without a
| paper trail and the remainder knows zilch.
|
| My experience is remote work isn't leading to any special
| emphasis on documentation. And in any case, any
| _reasonable_ level of documentation isn 't going to make
| up for all the experienced people leaving.
| BlargMcLarg wrote:
| It is culture in about every form. Education isn't actively
| made to teach people to be independent. Work culture for the
| past X decades has been pushing people to be dependent on each
| other directly. Social culture has pushed people to be
| dependent on work to fulfill various needs beyond a paycheck.
|
| And despite us catering towards the open office for multiple
| decades, we are still seeing it is barely on par with an ad-hoc
| WFH call while other things are going awry. Anyone with any
| kind of perspective can tell these comparisons aren't remotely
| fair.
| opportune wrote:
| I've been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it
| matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are
| not self starters or need lots of help are not doing well.
|
| That first group is able to (IMO) progress just as well as they
| would in-office because they know when to reach out for help,
| fix things on their own without help, etc.
|
| The second group may or may not be better served by in-office
| work. In some cases there are language barriers that make
| things challenging and I expect more in-office communication
| would reduce these. But I think a much bigger help would be for
| these people to be able to watch more experienced employees
| work and operate (both in terms of learning specific
| tools/processes for doing things, and the soft skills like when
| those other workers reach out for help, how they do so). Both
| of these assume they want to do better though; I don't think
| WFO would help truly disengaged juniors.
|
| So basically, I completely agree with you and I think the
| distinction is important. FWIW, I think people who progress in
| their career and become valuable employees quickly tend to
| almost always fall in the first group anyway.
| sagebird wrote:
| The idea that you can make up for being remote by being
| proactive proves the counterpoint.
|
| You seem to be a top performer-- the kind of person that
| someone higher up but perhaps not directly related to you
| -would pull to the side and have you work on something more
| important, if you were in the office, because the office is
| where non-organizational-chart-directed-actions take place.
|
| It can even be as simple/stupid as an idiot in a suit asking
| "are you good at computers" while in an elevator. You fix their
| idiotic excel problem that they could have googled, then you
| end up in charge of some thing they want to build.
|
| I understand that this represents a bit of disfunction - but I
| believe this is reality.
| slantedview wrote:
| The study used as the basis for this article looked at one set of
| workers at one company. This is hardly worthy of a writeup in a
| local industry rag, let alone the NYT, but the point of this and
| similar pieces is to empower owners over workers.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| I've been working remotely for about 9 years now, and have
| progressed from "designer who knows jQuery" to senior frontend
| dev. This criticism is true but not insurmountable.
|
| Working remotely requires more active communication and explicit
| processes to make sure you're filling the deficits, but this can
| be done. Do code reviews on your merge requests, talk on Slack,
| do a Live Share in VSCode.
|
| And make the most of your in-person visits: I've had people tell
| me that I seem to know more people in the company then some of
| the people who are in the office regularly because I make it a
| point to make my rounds, introduce myself, and talk to people
| when I'm there.
| ldehaan wrote:
| Dude why do you guys keep reading this trash company's articles?
| These corporatists are pay to print. They'll print anything you
| pay them to.
|
| Stop reading this garbage.
|
| I strongly suggest checking out your weekly media assassination,
| tune in to the best pod in the universe: No Agenda
|
| https://podcastaddict.com/podcast/4175796
| jtc331 wrote:
| Even though I've personally taken the trade off of remote work,
| it's always seemed intuitively obvious to me that there are also
| massive benefits to being in-person because collaboration, chance
| conversations, and feedback are more likely to happen naturally
| and because communication bandwidth is far higher face to face.
|
| The trade-offs are largely around whether those things are
| desirable. Sometimes they aren't. But also sometimes they are.
| And I've never understood why there seems to be such a dogmatic
| insistences that remote is better _on all fronts_ and there can
| be no acknowledged benefits to in-office work.
| manicennui wrote:
| The reason you see so many of us being so insistent is because
| most of us work at highly dysfunctional companies with
| incredibly boring and annoying people and don't want to spend
| 1-3 hours per day commuting to the office and/or spending more
| on staying alive so we can be closer to the office.
|
| I've been remote since the start of the pandemic and will never
| go back. I'm the happiest I've been in my adult life (mid 40s)
| in large part because I'm able to get more sleep, don't have to
| deal with the noise and density of the city, and don't have to
| deal with commuting. My home office is better than any office
| environment I have ever had. I put less than 5k miles on my car
| in the last year. I eat far better and spend less money on
| eating out.
|
| I have also received great raises every year since the pandemic
| started (and before) and have been promoted (for the second
| time since the pandemic started) to what is probably equivalent
| to an L8 at Google (I don't work for a FAANG company).
|
| Some of us are flourishing in this new work environment, and we
| are being tired of being told that we'd be better off if only
| we would spend an hour commuting to hear Fred's mildly
| racist/misogynistic jokes and attend useless meetings in person
| instead of passively listening to video calls while we get
| actual work done.
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| I am burnt out on remote work and have been burnt out on in-
| person work. Now I am just trying to plan a way out from all of
| this via self-employment.
| pradn wrote:
| It's so much easier to take your laptop over to a senior
| colleague and ask them to help you debug something in person.
| There's much more friction to asking for a call, waiting for them
| to respond, sending them the invite, perhaps waiting for them to
| get to a phone room if they happen to be in the office, setting
| up screen sharing (with its minute and fuzzy type), and having to
| type things in yourself.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| It's harder because you (the one asking for help) first need to
| articulate your problem in a way that is understandable via
| text. So, I would say that's an advantage for everyone: think
| first, then ask.
|
| Usually, in the office is: poke first, then ask, then realize
| you actually didn't even read the error message in the display.
| amrocha wrote:
| No, it's hard for a lot of reasons that you're conveniently
| leaving out of your argument because you prefer remote work
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| Writing is harder than talking. In my experience, people
| who don't care spending time writing properly, well, they
| usually don't care about your time. Or perhaps it's just
| me, since I'm a non-native English speaker, at work I re-
| read (and rewrite) what I write many times before hitting
| Send. More often than not, it's in the rewriting of my own
| words where I find the solution to the problem I was about
| to ask (duck rubbing or something like that they call it)
| blastro wrote:
| amen, sibling
| lynx23 wrote:
| Do we have a word/phrase to describe the rather obvious fight
| over remote-work that broke out roughly 2 years ago? I still
| remember the mechanics. Covid-19 forced management to go all-in
| on remote-work, which was a god-sent for those which always
| wanted to have more of it. Now, these people (rightfully so)
| realized that with the end of the pandemic, their newly acquired
| "right to work remote" would be endangered, so we started to see
| dogfights over the concept. The one side emphatically arguing for
| remote-work because they were seeing their new acquisition
| endangered, while the other side trying to get back to work with
| other people. That said, in my opinion, the discussion wouldn't
| have to be so energetically loaded if both sides would realize
| that it all boils down to CHOICE! If people were not forced to go
| one or another way, they could actually choose what fits them
| best, and there would be no need to fight over what is right or
| wrong. This article wouldn't even have to be written. Because if
| WFH is not mandated, people choose what they prefer, and missed
| opportunities are much less relevant as long as you are walking a
| path you actually decided to walk on.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| I work remotely and am a big proponent of remote work but
| onboarding is definitely a huge challenge. Getting young people
| up to speed is doable if you are using a lot of standard
| frameworks about which you can find information about on the
| internet. But it gets really if you need very specialized
| hardware and software and also use processes that are required by
| regulation. I work 8n medical devices and I have noticed a lot of
| our offshore don't really understand things even after years.
| It's probably solvable but you need management that understands
| this and puts resources into onboarding processes.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I love the photographs in this article, of young professionals
| smiling and having a great time in the open plan office. It's
| been a few years, but I seem to recall a different vibe
| prevailing in offices like that. I guess you can't take a picture
| of someone internally fuming because the person they're sharing a
| desk with can't stop drumming his fingers on the table and
| farting. I guess you can't have a photoshoot of someone working
| in the stairwell because it's the only place they can
| concentrate, since all the meeting rooms are already occupied by
| other people who can't get work done at their desks.
| DrBazza wrote:
| There's a couple of reasons I can think of: "young professionals"
| are more likely to be flat sharing or living somewhere that's
| sub-optimal for remote work, and the other is access to grey-
| beards like myself for questions about the system and so on.
|
| 50 yr old me versus 25 yr old me: flat vs house with office, knew
| my way around Solaris and Windows, but not much experience in
| large systems or databases and so on.
|
| And the IT world is so much bigger than 90s. Back then, it was
| Solaris or NT4. Oracle and Sybase. VB and C++.
| _rm wrote:
| No, you just open Zoom and share screen and everything's at least
| as good as in the office days when everyone was so distracted by
| interruptions that they could barely work.
| dhbradshaw wrote:
| For now, jobs that can be performed remotely should also be the
| easiest to automate.
|
| We'll see how long it takes.
| saos wrote:
| This is why every company should adopt hybrid. Its just totally
| unfair on young professionals starting out/
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| How does hybrid fix anything? Seniors at home and juniors in
| the office? 1 day/week everyone at the office (so "no-hire" to
| anyone who doesn't live in the city)?
| lostcolony wrote:
| From the article - "but it also reduced the amount of feedback
| that junior engineers received (in the form of comments on their
| code)"
|
| Sooooo...literally just measuring how many comments are being
| added to the code? That feels like both a really poor measurement
| for feedback, and also really easily addressable (heck, if you
| really want that in person feel, make it so PRs are done
| synchronously; someone hops onto a zoom and the writer presents
| their code, talking through the changes).
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| How was any of this hidden? It was plain a day from the start of
| the pandemic that not being present, not building social
| relationships and just being a name in a chatroom is going to
| have consequences in the velocity of your career.
|
| Anyone claiming otherwise is lying to you because they don't want
| to lose the perk of the flexibility and don't personally care
| about their own trajectory at that point in their lives (nothing
| wrong with that, just wrong to claim its without tradeoffs).
| root_axis wrote:
| There's a lot to say about in-person collaboration and knowledge
| transfer through osmosis, but I think this quote from the article
| highlights the crux of it
|
| > _When you're remote, you're out of sight, out of mind_
|
| The people in the office are having lunch together, they're
| talking and laughing, participating in office birthday
| celebrations and get togethers after work. Even something as
| simple as a warm smile and a "good morning" has a cumulative
| impact on those around you. Your presence is a contribution to
| the cultural mosaic of the company in a visceral way.
|
| It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a lot
| easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're also
| someone you can have lunch or drinks with. The business world is
| just as much about politics as it is about productivity and if
| you find yourself far away from court, you'll inevitably deal
| with the consequences of those who are present to assert their
| influence.
| juve1996 wrote:
| > When you're remote, you're out of sight, out of mind
|
| This simply isn't a state of being. You can be out of sight,
| and out of mind, if you have a shitty manager or a shitty
| company culture, in that case, it's probably a blessing to be
| fired.
|
| > It's a lot easier to lay off someone you've never met and a
| lot easier to trust someone with responsibilities when they're
| also someone you can have lunch or drinks with.
|
| If you're at a company that chooses promotions based on a
| crappy HR pizza party leave immediately. I've never been
| rewarded at work because I pretended to care about coworkers
| personal lives beyond courtesy.
|
| What got me promoted was being courteous but also reliably
| getting shit done. You can do this in the office, remotely, or
| through some hybrid set up. I've done all three. Do good work,
| make sure it's visible. It's not complicated.
| willio58 wrote:
| One thing my remote team does that I think helps massively with
| this is we have a zoom room that's always open and we use it for
| regular meetings like standup, sprint planning, etc. When the
| meeting is over, you can hop (many do) but you can also stay as
| long as you want. Even as a write this, I'm in the zoom meeting.
| You can go camera off, but if you ever have even a small question
| it's encouraged to ask. This has helped massively with keeping an
| open communication channel that feels organic and synchronous. I
| highly recommend this, but the key is it's fully optional, it's
| camera optional, it's mic optional, and there's zero punishment
| for not being there.
| umeshunni wrote:
| how does the zoom channel help over a team slack channel or
| something like that?
| willio58 wrote:
| slack is great, we have that too. But it's asynchronous by
| design. Async communication is great, it's super useful for
| getting work done. Synchronous communication is important for
| things like brainstorming, when ideas are half thought out
| and that's a good thing because it gets gears turning. Slack
| is too easy to sit there and edit your own words out of
| existence when maybe those ideas could have been helpful in a
| group branstorming session.
| mrsuprawsm wrote:
| This is quite transparently FUD. Clearly many people have a
| vested interest in commercial real estate occupancy being high
| and are pushing this narrative to inflate the value of their
| currently declining investments.
| diego_moita wrote:
| I've been working remotely for 4 years and can assure you: no
| it isn't FUD. It is a real issue that can and should be
| addressed. And the good news is that CI/CD, Slack, Dischord and
| Meetup make the solutions possible. All you need is management
| understanding and buy in.
|
| There are a lot of organizations that try remote with the same
| culture/mindset of in office. This is an error. Communication
| and iteration on remote work must be explicit, formalized and
| enforced.
| matwood wrote:
| I'm a huge proponent of WFH, but I do know where there are
| challenges.
|
| New employee onboarding is challenging. It can be done, but it
| has to be very deliberate.
|
| Any large team moves/merges are harder. Again, it can be done
| but there has to be a lot of deliberate work.
|
| Interpersonal relationships are important for working. They are
| the lubricant that helps prevent communication friction. It
| used to be those relationships happened naturally in the
| office, but now they have to be deliberately nurtured. And
| that's part of WFH, not something ignore.
| juve1996 wrote:
| Office relationships can be good and also extremely toxic. I
| doubt there is any statistical evidence that being in the
| office leads to any net benefit of relationships.
| davidgerard wrote:
| Ed Zitron's phrase for this sort of article is "boss erotica".
| https://ez.substack.com/p/techs-elite-hates-labor
| paulcole wrote:
| I mean many people have a vested interest in working from home
| as well and push the narrative of middle manager = bad, office
| = bad as well.
|
| It's not that either narrative is right or wrong, they're just
| different.
|
| WFH isn't the unequivocal One True Way. It's a way.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| I have a slightly different take about this than other folks.
| Perhaps it's because I'm older and when I entered the workforce,
| there were very few jobs that _could_ be remote, and even fewer
| that actually were.
|
| I've worked in-office for most of my career (much of that was as
| a consultant hired for specific projects, and many clients want
| to _see_ you working), but pre-pandemic I was full-time remote
| for more than five years, which was mostly positive, but with a
| few caveats.
|
| One of the biggest caveats was that it was more difficult to
| build strong teams, as your colleagues were just voices (this is
| before ubiquitous video meetings) on the phone and text in chat
| and/or emails.
|
| But that isn't limited to work environments either. More and more
| of our lives are spent online, with less and less human
| interaction. I suppose that might be a plus for the misanthropes
| among us, but it seems like that's fracturing our social cohesion
| (I'm in the US, my experience may not be valid elsewhere).
|
| Please note that I am emphatically _not_ prescribing full-time
| return to the office. Not even close. WFH allowed me to be more
| productive and not waste 700 hours or so a year sitting on a
| train commuting. I shudder to think about how much I hated
| driving to /from client sites as a consultant as that's even
| worse than riding the train.
|
| No, I don't believe that your employer/co-workers are "family"
| (well, unless they actually are but that's not usually the case
| in larger organizations), but humans are social creatures and
| really do need real, physical human interaction (I'm not talking
| about sex which is important, but irrelevant in this context) to
| maintain a healthy outlook on other humans and society in
| general.
|
| An outlier (at least I hope it is) being the recent spate of
| people being shot just for attempting contact (knocking on a
| stranger's door) with other humans.
|
| What makes folks so suspicious and willing to harm their
| neighbors? I think it's a lack of regular human contact and the
| constant drumbeat of evil deeds from the news media (how does the
| old saw go? "If it bleeds, it leads."). And with the ability to
| get news from anywhere in the world in near real-time, we
| constantly hear about the worst of us, but rarely about the
| mundane, pleasant interactions that people have every day.
|
| Perhaps I'm way off base with this take, but it seems to me that
| fostering human interaction with physical proximity with one's
| larger society promotes social cohesion.
|
| That's not to say such interactions _must_ be in the workplace,
| but for many folks (given car /suburban culture), it might the
| only time they might interact with other humans who aren't family
| or close friends.
|
| Which brings to mind Asimov's dichotomy (as he combined his
| 'Robot' and 'Foundation' universes), especially in _Foundation
| and Earth_ [0], where the "Spacers" are so anti-social that they
| loathe any physical, human interaction whatsoever, whereas the
| "Settlers" were comfortable being around other humans. I'm not
| saying that this is what's happening, just that there are some
| interesting parallels.
|
| I don't pretend to have all (or even some/any) the answers, but
| interacting with actual human beings usually enhances my view of
| humanity/society/local community, while online interactions
| mostly degrade that view.[1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_and_Earth
|
| [1] Please note that I'm not being categorical here. There
| absolutely are unpleasant/evil/nasty people in the world who
| should be avoided. But at least in my experience, most humans are
| honest, decent people just trying to live a decent life.
|
| Edit: clarified prose. Fixed typo.
| tkiolp4 wrote:
| I think I agree with what you said. That being said, for me
| when it comes to balance work (as in "working for company X for
| Z money/year) vs non-work, I put all the weight in non-work.
| That means:
|
| - in-person is better for collaboration than Zoom? Of course,
| but if I have to commute 30 min each way to see you, then Zoom
| it is
|
| - being around other office people at lunch time is cool
| sometimes? Yeah, but if I have to rent an expensive and small
| apartment in the city to being able to be at the office at
| lunch time, then Zoom it is
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >That being said, for me when it comes to balance work (as in
| "working for company X for Z money/year) vs non-work, I put
| all the weight in non-work.
|
| Absolutely. Although many folks don't have much physical
| interaction with other humans outside of their jobs. In that
| case, cutting out those interactions without some sort of
| alternative for human interaction is detrimental to most
| humans' mental health IMHO.
|
| Since we're online here, there's a much larger proportion of
| neuro-atypical, introverted and/or misanthropic people than
| in the population at large, so I think the discussion is a
| bit skewed.
|
| Which is why I posted what I did.
|
| All that said, I don't disagree with your assessment at all.
| It's just important to have those interactions _somewhere_.
|
| More directly addressing the topic in TFA, when I was pretty
| junior, personal interactions with more senior folks was
| crucial for me to understand the culture and political
| landscape of a large organization, even as a technical
| resource. And those lessons/mentoring have served me well in
| my career.
|
| For me, those interactions happened over cigarettes (this was
| 30 years ago) and at the bar after work, but the result was
| the same as "water cooler" interactions.
|
| As a more senior resource, those interactions weren't as
| useful, but I can certainly see where juniors could benefit
| greatly from a more senior person taking them under their
| wing.
| xchip wrote:
| Let me guess, and going back to the office is the only solution,
| isn't it?
| IMTDb wrote:
| Creating you own company; hiring junior remotely and having a
| big success going that proves the article wrong and is another
| viable option.
| Beaver117 wrote:
| Why to we "really need to find a way to replicate that magic in
| the remote environment"?
|
| It simply doesn't exist. Remote work, while great for junior
| engineers who enjoy slacking off and playing video games during
| meetings, should only be reserved for senior people
| bbbobbb wrote:
| If they're able to play video games and not pay attention
| during the meeting then it's a waste of their time to be there
| in the first place. Stop wasting people's time with your
| meetings.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| My juniors would like to have a word with you about why you
| think they're not paying attention during my meetings.
| nprateem wrote:
| And I know some seniors who'd like a word about why you think
| they aren't playing computer games during meetings
| 49erfangoniners wrote:
| Video games during meetings should be a best practice
| pxc wrote:
| > Remote work [is] great for junior engineers who enjoy
| slacking off and playing video games during meetings
|
| J/w: how large are these meetings where you notice that level
| of disengagement? How long are they?
| tennisflyi wrote:
| This was stated early on as a downside.
| diego_moita wrote:
| This is big, serious and meaningful. It is tangent to the main
| problem on making remote work to properly work: formalize
| communication and iteration.
|
| Management needs to make a conscious, methodological and
| deliberated effort to stimulate communication.
|
| Dialog channels must be pried open in the remote era. There is a
| proper workplace culture for remote work. An organization doesn't
| just wander into remote with the same practices and culture of
| office work. My suggestions:
|
| * rules for asynchronous communication. This includes a
| development methodology with full support on CI/CD techniques,
| issues tracking, code reviews, clear documentation, etc.
|
| * people should be available on Slack/Dischord on pre defined
| times. You know the "my doors are open", "cubicles are meant to
| stimulate cooperation" slogans? In remote work these informal
| channels must be explicit
|
| * There should be overlapping timezones in the team.
|
| * stimulate frequent meetings with a maximum of five people,
| where people should talk not only about work but also personal
| subjects of their choice. This stimulates camaraderie and
| personal trust.
| desireco42 wrote:
| I can see that they will say anything just to get people to sit
| in the office, commute downtown or wherever and justify
| commercial real-estate.
|
| Reality is that people are much happier when they can work from
| home. Not every profession and position can do this and maybe
| those who need to show up should be paid more tbh.
|
| Economical and ecological impact of working from home is huge,
| positively huge. Companies get to expand without huge fixed costs
| for example.
|
| Articles like this are created to promote world that has been and
| is not coming back.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| [dead]
| garbagecoder wrote:
| I don't have an answer for this, really, and I can see it. Still,
| I think if workers prefer a certain way of working, they aren't
| cattle, or just a number, and they should be allowed to make this
| decision for themselves.
|
| I'm older, financially set, and have a partner with a good job,
| so I can't make that call for others. Part of how I got to this
| place was by leveraging professional relationships along the way.
| I was never more than a couple of phone calls away from something
| if I was starving. If I didn't have that I'd just be a house
| husband I guess. Or maybe a NEET.
|
| 10 years ago, I would have told youngers to get their ass back to
| work and never have lunch alone. Now that I'm rounding the corner
| towards retirement, I can't give that same advice in good faith.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I started my career in my early 20s at a junior-unfriendly
| office. Senior guy next to me literally bought some noise-
| cancelling headphones to avoid talking to people. I hated that
| place.
|
| Getting a 100% remote job is still the best decision I've made in
| my career. It has allowed me to make way above market average
| money and work with incredible professionals from all over the
| world, despite living in a country with a mediocre IT market.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I think there's a valid argument for the premise because office
| and remote environments are very different and people default to
| working like they're in an office, but this piece reads like
| shit.
|
| > _At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales
| development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns
| to her boss with questions. "Did I handle that correctly?" she
| asks. "What could I have done better?"_
|
| All I could think when I read this first paragraph is, "she
| sounds incompetent". Feedback 10x a day makes zero sense once you
| have basic competence. You need much longer feedback loops for
| more complex and important skills.
|
| Feedback is guidance. If you need guidance 10x a day...
|
| 30m once a week is a lot of time for feedback (Perhaps too much)
| if you're smart about using the time, and it's way more useful
| than 10x a day.
| xiaosun wrote:
| Sales and sales development roles are very different,
| especially if you are in an inside sales role. The number of
| feedback touchpoints are much higher for those roles. Sales
| interactions happen very frequently and getting feedback real-
| time increases the quality and relevance of the feedback.
| xwdv wrote:
| If you want to stand out, the traditional way of just showing up
| to an office isn't really enough.
|
| Write company blog posts, hold demos of new tech, have 1 on 1
| talks regularly. You have to think like a content creator.
| flyingfences wrote:
| No, thanks; that's not my job. I'm hired as an engineer, not as
| a rat-race "content creator".
| xwdv wrote:
| Office small talk and interaction is often a form of content
| creation. Office theater.
| armatav wrote:
| I was going to disagree and be like "if you're an engineer
| your only job is engineering" but there's some truth in
| what you're saying.
|
| You've gotta be charismatic even if you are an engineer.
| xwdv wrote:
| Most people think I'm wrong before realizing I'm right.
| mercwear wrote:
| Unpopular opinion based on my personal experience: Remote work is
| broken and we will slowly see a full return to the office in most
| cases.
|
| Why is it broken? This article points out some of the big reasons
| but the ones that stand out to me are: Lack of face to face
| collaboration, Lack of learning via "osmosis", and the biggest
| one I do not hear a lot about is the complete lack of social
| skills that I see from people who have worked from home for the
| past 3+ years. Some people have become totally incapable of
| dealing with others due to the fact they have been holed up for
| so long.
| TheGigaChad wrote:
| [dead]
| mbfg wrote:
| "At least 10 times a day, Erika Becker, who works as a sales
| development manager at a technology company called Verkada, turns
| to her boss with questions. "Did I handle that correctly?" she
| asks. "What could I have done better?"
|
| almost no one does that. Me smells a marketing piece done for
| property owners.
| nprateem wrote:
| I bet her boss wishes he can WFH again
| revlolz wrote:
| Propaganda piece from economists. Hello CBRE. I'm part of the
| demographic they claim and it couldn't be further from the truth
| for me. In remote env, if your seniors (management or peers) opt
| for their productivity 100% over training juniors then you have a
| shitty team and that's hardly unique to remote work. In fact, you
| will likely spend more years wasted commuting into office doing
| nothing as opposed to having more time to experiment,
| hypothesize, and learn. Good teams make it policy and process to
| lift everyone. They have networking events in person and remote.
| They accept the situations that as adults and leaders we don't
| need mom and dad to hold us so we can go down the slide and write
| a pr. Bad teams hyperfixate on metrics like cr revisions, drown
| newbies on complexity impossible, ambiguity black holes projects.
| Again, these things happen in the office too, so why is this
| study focusing on an issue prescribing it unique to remote? I
| don't know.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Certainly what it felt like. A Fortune 500 company (sounds like
| IBM), 1 sales team anecdote, fear mongering over job loss for
| the remote'ers, and a very narrow study getting an op via the
| article to "suggest something broader."
| spacemadness wrote:
| It's fascinating, as well as disheartening, watching the
| massive pushback to labor advances in real-time by corporate
| owned news media and by their helpers on social media. The
| layoffs seem to be a catalyst to claw back power, even if it
| is a side effect and not the sole reason for occuring.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Ya I don't think there's something actively coordinated by
| some central party but definitely seems a bit close to
| manufacturing consent by a group of similarly incentivized
| parties. I never really bought into that mindset until
| seeing the remote work play out. Like NYT of all places,
| historically banging the gong for equality and progressive
| initiatives around the workplace, health , and environment,
| now covering zero of how remote helps all those.
| [deleted]
| TeeMassive wrote:
| > Propaganda piece from economists.
|
| I was under the same impression. The whole article is full of
| "but what about". If you follow the money this is not
| surprising, the managers, who also happen to own real estate in
| New York / California, want their workers occupying their
| expansive office space and living near it so the real estate
| bubble doesn't pop _right now_. So they had the NYT write an
| article about it.
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| It's a bit bad practice to assume all research that promotes
| an opinion you agree with is truth, but anything against what
| you like must be propaganda.
| cratermoon wrote:
| It's not just the part about promoting an opinion that make
| it propaganda, it's the part about promoting an opinion
| that a. there is a problem at all, and b. _advocating for a
| particular solution_ to the problem as defined.
|
| A huge part of propaganda is about setting the terms of the
| debate. Ideally, as George Orwell wisely pointed out, a
| successful propagandist makes certain opinions seem
| obvious, common-sensical, and even inevitable, while making
| other ideas all but _literally_ unthinkable.
|
| So next time you read an opinion you disagree with, ask,
| "what would happen if that opinion were the dominant one in
| society?"
| TeeMassive wrote:
| I'm not assuming anything except my main hypothesis which
| is simply following the corporate money interests. If I was
| a rich corporate owner, what would I do?
|
| Well, I'd own real estate, I'd probably own it in expansive
| places such as NY and California, and I would use the media
| to influence public opinion and policies to advantage me.
| mr_00ff00 wrote:
| Just because rich people might like something, doesn't
| make it not true.
| Clubber wrote:
| If they are losing money as fast as commercial real
| estate is dropping, it's guaranteed they'd do anything in
| their power to reverse it.
| clnq wrote:
| My company provides a 24/7 onboarding voice chat, where
| experienced team members are always accessible for questions.
| This system significantly reduces onboarding time, with most
| questions answered within minutes and team members starting
| regular code contributions in days. While some people may be
| uneasy with this persistent voice channel, participation is
| voluntary. Newcomers can simply join, ask their question, and
| leave. The company culture prescribes an expectation that at
| least some seniors should be available for new people, but
| naturally the extroverted ones participate more often.
|
| In my experience, the "remote work hindering junior employees"
| narrative hasn't held true. Admittedly, there is an initial
| managerial effort required to accommodate remote work. But then
| remote onboarding thrives. So, as you say, it's not a remote
| work issue, it's a cultural one. Or as I would say, it sounds
| like an issue with managers refusing to do their job and manage
| the remote company.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| let's talk about general terms, not the narrow hyper
| specialized sector that is tech.
|
| many companies (I would argue most) would stop working if
| people are not reminded every day what their job is and asked
| what is the ETA for the task they were assigned to.
|
| it's a real problem, people are usually not super smart, they
| are average, and tend to learn nothing on the job unless they
| are required to, trained regularly and their advancement
| measured in some way. They do not think about their work
| outside, they hardly do it while at work, they do not
| experiment, they do not hypothesize, they simply wait for the
| paycheck at the end of the month in exchange for a portion of
| their lifetime.
|
| if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also
| costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would have
| jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one would not
| exist.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also
| costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would
| have jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one
| would not exist.
|
| Perhaps, if it weren't for confounding variables like
| companies trying to justify the big shiny new buildings they
| spent a fortune on prior to the pandemic, middle managers
| working to keep themselves relevant, and forces in the
| commercial real estate market trying to mitigate price
| crashes from reduced demand for offices.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > companies trying to justify the big shiny new buildings
| they spent a fortune on prior to the pandemic
|
| that's another problem entirely.
|
| I am.not from US, I work for a rather large insurance
| company (> 12,000 employees) they invest in building
| because they need to have a capital reserve by the law.
|
| Now if their buildings are worth less due to WFH, they will
| start buying other more valuable kinds of properties,with
| the consequence that prices will rise for everybody else.
|
| you are not fighting the system by simply shifting where
| the money come from.
|
| also: in my country usually people have between 21 and 28
| paid holidays, paid sick leave and paid hourly permits. not
| exactly the worst end of the workers' rights spectrum.
|
| WFH made people ask for less holidays, because they will
| use their absence from the office to fix issues that before
| required a day off or can actually go on holiday while also
| working a bit, if everyone is working from home, nobody
| actually checks if someone is working or not (ape shall not
| kill ape). if we don't use our holidays the company must
| pay for them (effectively paying those days double) so we
| are now required to use all the holidays and permits, no
| exceptions.
|
| Meanwhile I am still fighting to get java 17 supported, we
| are stuck with 11 programmed like it is 8.
|
| My job is exactly to bring people up to speed with modern
| technologies and am very well compensated for it, but with
| WFH the attention span has dropped dramatically.
|
| Not my problem, honestly, but they don't understand the
| damages that are inflicting to their future self.
| tomrod wrote:
| > Propaganda piece from economists
|
| Weird, propaganda doesn't tend to come from economists in my
| mental model. To be fair, the one economist I've seen seriously
| looking into this is Nick Bloom, whose research on the
| descriptive statistics side of things shows WFH Hybrid is here
| to stay.
|
| There are some commercial real estate folks predicting a
| cratering of comm RE values if WFH is continued, but I'd argue
| that's just capitalist creative destruction at its best.
| saghm wrote:
| > Weird, propaganda doesn't tend to come from economists in
| my mental model.
|
| In my mental model, propaganda can come from anyone with a
| political agenda, and that will certainly include economists
| from time to time.
| tomrod wrote:
| > In my mental model, propaganda can come from anyone with
| a political agenda, and that will certainly include
| economists from time to time.
|
| As a central tendency or as an occasional but infrequent
| experience?
| bleuchase wrote:
| > In my mental model, propaganda can come from anyone with
| a political agenda, and that will certainly include
| economists from time to time.
|
| The person/people/groups writing the thing may not even be
| aware they're creating propaganda. Arguably it's more
| effective that way.
| [deleted]
| 88913527 wrote:
| Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to
| mentor while working remotely. It's just tougher to have off-
| the-cuff conversations. With fewer of those opportunities, that
| means what could've been a 5 minute conversation and resolution
| to a technical issue becomes a full day for a junior engineer,
| and they have fewer opportunities to ask seniors since they're
| worried about being a bother. I'm not trying to force people
| back into offices, I'd rather adapt, but I think anyone new to
| the industry is at a disadvantage in the interim.
| oregano wrote:
| > Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the
| skills to mentor while working remotely.
|
| I do not understand why you would choose to generalize to
| such an extreme degree. How could you possibly have the
| confidence to speak in such broad terms?
|
| Reflecting on my last 6 years of experience as an engineer
| (which includes both office-based work and being remote) this
| is not true at all.
| jensensbutton wrote:
| gp is responding to a comment that calls the study
| propaganda based on their individual experience. Since
| everyone seems to be generalizing to an extreme degree it
| feels a bit disingenuous to call out this one just because
| you agree with gp.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I do not understand why you would choose to generalize
| to such an extreme degree. How could you possibly have the
| confidence to speak in such broad terms?_
|
| Not him but it also matches my experience. Many have not
| learned to mentor remotely or just don't like mentoring and
| it's easier to show their contempt online vs face to face.
| hanniabu wrote:
| One of my old bosses would schedule an hour a week between
| him and I with no agenda to help with these more natural
| unplanned convos. We'll probably only do 5min catchup and
| then bullshit the rest of the time about random stuff, but
| something always tends to come up that spurs an idea,
| provides clarity, or helps in some other way.
| lief79 wrote:
| Our company added designated buddies (generally senior
| assigned to junior) to assist with this for new hires. If
| they're stuck on a problem, you have someone set aside to ask
| questions too. If they don't know the answer, they probably
| know who to ask.
| 49531 wrote:
| > Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the
| skills to mentor while working remotely.
|
| I cannot think of a scenario where if I needed help with
| something I couldn't have a 5-minute conversation with
| someone.
|
| Slack conversations I have several times a week: "Hey do you
| have a sec to help me? I can't seem to reproduce X bug" "Yea,
| wanna huddle?" "Sure!"
|
| I don't know what new skills someone would have to learn in
| order to do that.
| now__what wrote:
| If you're one of the "solvers" that gets pinged by random
| people all throughout the day, you need to learn how to use
| "do not disturb" and to balance it out with dedicated open
| time. Otherwise it's easy to get stressed and overwhelmed.
| Totally learnable, but I've seen a few people on my team
| take psychic damage from this.
|
| Once you learn this though, it's actually easier to do
| remotely than in-person.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> I don't know what new skills someone would have to learn
| in order to do that._
|
| The skill to actually want to do that. Some people are
| shellfish and don't want to.
|
| I've had a mentor who outright refused to do any screen
| sharing calls with me. He only wanted to communicate in
| chat. So things that could be cleared up in a 3 minute
| calls took over 30 minutes of back and forth in chats. I
| hated him to the core.
| waboremo wrote:
| Terrible, but some mentors are just like that very
| reluctant. I will say though even if he only wanted to do
| chat, most services offer that asymmetrical ability where
| one is screensharing and both are in chat. Still would
| have taken longer than purely audio but certainly more
| immediate than pure-chat. So it's odd he didn't opt for
| that, it's the method with the least friction.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| He wanted mostly async chat. So screen sharing into a
| void wouldn't not have helped.
| nick__m wrote:
| I am pretty sure that your "mentor" would be still be the
| asshole in an office setting too!
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Actually he was nicer before the pandemic while we were
| in the office. He always came by to show me stuff when I
| called him.
|
| I've noticed the behavior of several other colleagues
| (not everyone) changed while WFH. Many became more
| distant and hesitant to cooperate and lend a hand. Most
| wanted to lock themselves in a "don't bother me for
| anything, let me wrap my work faster, so I can sign out
| for the day early" kind of state.
| nick__m wrote:
| Completely opposite experience to mine but I see how some
| work environment/culture could foster that behavior.
| janalsncm wrote:
| This makes the assumption that people will respond on Slack
| in a timely manner.
| 49531 wrote:
| Sure, there can be cultural hurdles there, but those
| exist in the office as well. "Jane has headphones on,
| she's heads down and will be upset if I bother her now"
| "I want to ask Steve for help, but he rolls his eyes any
| time I approach him" "Sam said they'd give me a hand this
| afternoon, but I can't seem to find them anywhere in the
| building"
| janalsncm wrote:
| Agreed, but the things you've mentioned would all
| clumsily be grouped under the "busy" Slack status even
| though they mean quite different things.
|
| And further, seniors should never be _upset_ that a
| junior is coming to them for advice, mentoring less
| experienced people one of the main responsibilities that
| comes with seniority. (This isn't to excuse help vampires
| of course.) So I disagree with with the framing.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Be available and not appear busy. Frankly speaking, I love
| screensharing instead of sharing a screen/desks. So while
| physical meetings has their places, mentoring is not.
| [deleted]
| dogman144 wrote:
| Yes it is almost just literally learning how to do this, vs
| everyone starts commuting in. Put another way, I get it's a
| change, but Eng Managers make filthy money, and maybe they
| can add Slack comms and related mentorship to the excel and
| cross-functional working group wiki pages. Excel and email
| were new once as well.
| spieswl wrote:
| I have found that is a pretty good signal for how an
| organization's culture is set up in regards to helpfulness
| and camaraderie.
| [deleted]
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > becomes a full day for a junior engineer
|
| A full day of honing his own problem solving skills, which
| pay off quite a bit more over time than watching somebody
| else do it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| paddw wrote:
| A lot of jobs are about being able to network and people-
| manage, not about being able to push PRs. It seems clear to me
| you are at a disadvantage being remote in these types of roles.
| Even for people in technical roles, or whose work naturally
| fits into being remote, these things are probably harder in
| remote environments. Most companies are not perfectly well
| adjusted, so it does not make sense to talk about what the
| ideal remote-first culture is, but what on average working
| remotely is like.
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