4 ms·

This is my #1 challenge at the moment... how to sustain a remote company culture and offer mentoring/onboarding to early career Developers. I support the "craf

This is my #1 challenge at the moment... how to sustain a remote company culture and offer mentoring/onboarding to early career Developers. I support the "craft" of Software; which requires an equal distribution of Apprentice, Journeyman (Journeyperson) and Master level people. But it's difficult to "pass on" the craft to an Apprentice who is remote, so our team tends to be all mid-career folks.

0xFACEFEED 9y ago
I've seen this strategy work: pick a senior engineer with an affinity for leadership and hire a couple junior people in their local area. The senior person would have the final say on hiring the juniors and co-work with them occasionally. The company would pay for coffee/food if it's a coffee shop, space/food if it's a co-working space, etc.
- matchagaucho 9y ago
  That's an excellent suggestion. Thx.
afarrell 9y ago
One thing to focus on is teaching the skill to onboarding yourself into a new project. As an example, one part of that skill that I've learned from my current employer: It is actually socially acceptable to say "Hi, I've been working on $ticket recently and don't have a specific question but I feel rather lost. Could I grab 30 minutes on your calendar and you walk me through how SaltStack actually gets data values and turns them into resources and I take notes and ask questions?". For a long time, I would instead either: A) Try to learn this by doing, which usually involved being very frustrated, taking 3x as long, and writing really quite poor-quality code. I only had the cognitive space to think about making the bare minimum change to accomplish the immediate goal, so I couldn't practice the habit of "do a small refactor to make the change easy, then make the easy change." B) Ask for good tutorial documentation on the subject matter, which might not exist, especially if the code lives outside of a popular framework. C) Ask differently-phrased questions that led me to get feedback from a previous employer that I was "trying to understand the universe", which led me to focus on strategy A. Knowing that I can get walkthroughs, especially of business logic or code that lives outside a framework, is really hugely impactful. (side note: if you've wondered why people reach for frameworks while you think they are overcomplicated, this one reason why) There's probably a whole blog post I would write with the goal of expanding a new-project-joiner's vocabulary of questions that is socially reasonable to ask.
- matchagaucho 9y ago
  During our interview process we attempt to quantify "Communication" as a trait; which includes "Ability to ask questions and clarify requirements." It really is an essential must have skill for remote workers. The ability to communicate visually and exhibit spatial intelligence through sharing screenshots and diagrams also goes a long way to being successful remotely. An open office has the benefit of whiteboards and pen/paper to do visual knowledge transfer.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >An open office has the benefit of whiteboards and pen/paper to do visual knowledge transfer. Any face-to-face setting really. I'm not sure why we haven't done a better job of cracking the "like a whiteboard (or flipchart or whatever) but for people who aren't in the same room" thing. I know it's partly a surface area thing but you'd think we could do better when it's such an obvious, at least to me, missing piece in remote interactions.
    - afarrell 9y ago
      Part of it is finding a good drawing tablet and good software for it. A $40 wacom tablet and whats out there for free/cheap on OSX currently doesn't work -- it takes too much frustration compared to compared to the intuitive interface of pen+paper. You'd need something with the intuitiveness of MS Paint, which is hard. MS Paint's intuitive program model is world class.

0xFACEFEED 9y ago

I've seen this strategy work: pick a senior engineer with an affinity for leadership and hire a couple junior people in their local area. The senior person would have the final say on hiring the juniors and co-work with them occasionally. The company would pay for coffee/food if it's a coffee shop, space/food if it's a co-working space, etc.

matchagaucho 9y ago
That's an excellent suggestion. Thx.

afarrell 9y ago

One thing to focus on is teaching the skill to onboarding yourself into a new project. As an example, one part of that skill that I've learned from my current employer: It is actually socially acceptable to say "Hi, I've been working on $ticket recently and don't have a specific question but I feel rather lost. Could I grab 30 minutes on your calendar and you walk me through how SaltStack actually gets data values and turns them into resources and I take notes and ask questions?". For a long time, I would instead either: A) Try to learn this by doing, which usually involved being very frustrated, taking 3x as long, and writing really quite poor-quality code. I only had the cognitive space to think about making the bare minimum change to accomplish the immediate goal, so I couldn't practice the habit of "do a small refactor to make the change easy, then make the easy change." B) Ask for good tutorial documentation on the subject matter, which might not exist, especially if the code lives outside of a popular framework. C) Ask differently-phrased questions that led me to get feedback from a previous employer that I was "trying to understand the universe", which led me to focus on strategy A. Knowing that I can get walkthroughs, especially of business logic or code that lives outside a framework, is really hugely impactful. (side note: if you've wondered why people reach for frameworks while you think they are overcomplicated, this one reason why) There's probably a whole blog post I would write with the goal of expanding a new-project-joiner's vocabulary of questions that is socially reasonable to ask.

matchagaucho 9y ago
During our interview process we attempt to quantify "Communication" as a trait; which includes "Ability to ask questions and clarify requirements." It really is an essential must have skill for remote workers. The ability to communicate visually and exhibit spatial intelligence through sharing screenshots and diagrams also goes a long way to being successful remotely. An open office has the benefit of whiteboards and pen/paper to do visual knowledge transfer.
- ghaff 9y ago
  >An open office has the benefit of whiteboards and pen/paper to do visual knowledge transfer. Any face-to-face setting really. I'm not sure why we haven't done a better job of cracking the "like a whiteboard (or flipchart or whatever) but for people who aren't in the same room" thing. I know it's partly a surface area thing but you'd think we could do better when it's such an obvious, at least to me, missing piece in remote interactions.
  - afarrell 9y ago
    Part of it is finding a good drawing tablet and good software for it. A $40 wacom tablet and whats out there for free/cheap on OSX currently doesn't work -- it takes too much frustration compared to compared to the intuitive interface of pen+paper. You'd need something with the intuitiveness of MS Paint, which is hard. MS Paint's intuitive program model is world class.