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I see this a lot "onboarding is difficult remotely", but I don't know why. It hasn't been difficult at my last few jobs including the current one where many/mo

I see this a lot "onboarding is difficult remotely", but I don't know why. It hasn't been difficult at my last few jobs including the current one where many/most of us have been remote for years. You get added to the email lists, the slack channels, the documentation wiki, and the issue tracker. Daily meetings at 10am. You pair up with one person for a couple weeks and then somebody else and so on for the first few months. You regularly have voice and/or video chats. You get, or create, a list of who to contact with different questions or problems. If somehow all of those communication methods fail, I doubt that just being able to add a physical touch component would help much. Other than touch, the only senses that require physical proximity are smell and taste. If you're relying on touch, smell, and taste to communicate while on-boarding people, then maybe then it might be difficult, but that also seems a bit unusual. Mostly I think companies that have trouble with on-boarding remotely have bigger problems with their communications in general.

rmk 6y ago
As an example, being able to talk to the people who handle the coding, commit, build, and deployment, all in one place, is quite valuable and saves time. In many large and established companies, there is formal training that puts all these people in one room with the trainees, either because the company is already so distributed as to make this impossible otherwise, or because it's more cost-efficient to disseminate this info to a large number of incoming engineers. In smaller startups and growing companies, where these things are changing at a high rate, it becomes even more valuable. It's not that these things are not doable virtually, but it's something that will require deliberate rearranging of how people work. In larger companies, this type of stuff already happens, but not so much in smaller ones. Engineering organizations can learn a lot from Sales departments in this area. Sales in companies that sell in various geographies (which includes even small companies that have gained traction and are beginning to grow) already functions perfectly fine with very distributed teams, and highly technical sales motions (think enterprise products). Small, growing companies have big problems with communications and coordination in general. That's what makes the scaling stage challenging and full of pitfalls: many companies fail at this stage!
throwaway3699 6y ago
You're mistaking watching somebody on your computer as actually looking at that person. It's not and your brain knows this. It's very obvious that talking with somebody in person makes a huge, huge difference with the circuitry in our monkey brains. Listening to people on zoom calls is fatiguing and makes me feel like I have permanent brain fog.

rmk 6y ago

As an example, being able to talk to the people who handle the coding, commit, build, and deployment, all in one place, is quite valuable and saves time. In many large and established companies, there is formal training that puts all these people in one room with the trainees, either because the company is already so distributed as to make this impossible otherwise, or because it's more cost-efficient to disseminate this info to a large number of incoming engineers. In smaller startups and growing companies, where these things are changing at a high rate, it becomes even more valuable. It's not that these things are not doable virtually, but it's something that will require deliberate rearranging of how people work. In larger companies, this type of stuff already happens, but not so much in smaller ones. Engineering organizations can learn a lot from Sales departments in this area. Sales in companies that sell in various geographies (which includes even small companies that have gained traction and are beginning to grow) already functions perfectly fine with very distributed teams, and highly technical sales motions (think enterprise products). Small, growing companies have big problems with communications and coordination in general. That's what makes the scaling stage challenging and full of pitfalls: many companies fail at this stage!

throwaway3699 6y ago

You're mistaking watching somebody on your computer as actually looking at that person. It's not and your brain knows this. It's very obvious that talking with somebody in person makes a huge, huge difference with the circuitry in our monkey brains. Listening to people on zoom calls is fatiguing and makes me feel like I have permanent brain fog.