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The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely. If you

The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely. If you're Netflix or Google and can afford to only hire senior engineers it's fine to let everyone work from home. Most organizations need to organically level up talent via mentorship and in house training. Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity. People may spend fewer days in the office but in the end, most of us will be back in offices at least a few times a week.

abakker 5y ago
As a consultant, I have to say that this is true of our industry as well. Our company has always been full remote due to the "on site" nature of our work. Given that, it has always been a pain point to spend time mentoring and training. many hours of zoom calls for training just doesn't foment the kind of quick Q&A than in person does. For us, the net effect has been that the people who do well tend to be autodidactic to at least some degree.
nine_k 5y ago
FWIW, Google hires a lot of bright graduates straight from universities, who cannot yet work as senior engineers, even after 2-3 years of being interns before that. Mentoring plays a huge part here.
samkater 5y ago
> The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely. Absolutely this. I love working remotely and will probably not go back to an office until at least the kids are out of school. But both being new and training new people are skills that are just _different_ from being in the office. Open offices were not a good fit for me, but one valuable thing from a past job was sitting close to both my manager and their manager. That was a way to learn "Oh, that's how you talk to <client A, department B, etc>" without having to be told "this is how you talk to these people." Training a remote new person requires so much more intentionality that most people are not accustomed to.
- bsder 5y ago
  > Open offices were not a good fit for me Open offices are not a good fit for anybody. IBM studied this back in the Dinosaur Age. Bell studied this back in the Dinosaur Age. Dedicated offices with a door are the most productive. Period. What open offices are is "cheap".
lowbloodsugar 5y ago
I haven't met many engineers who can mentor well, period. My guess is your perception is biased. I know SDEs who prefer conversations remotely. An extreme example would be that there's no chance of physical harassment on Zoom. Another would be the "raise a hand" button seems to be more acceptable to use than actually raising a hand in a meeting, with the result that voices are heard that would otherwise not be. And just fundamentally, think of the site you're on. How unimaginative. How big is your data set? Why can't your sample mentor well remotely? Are there bigger data sets or published analyses? What can you do to improve your model? Or is it just that you prefer to work in an office, or you don't trust your employees? Your argument is the "Think of the children^H^H^H interns" argument from the Cathy Merrill's Washingtonian op ed. [1] It doesn't hold water with anyone seriously trying to improve the productivity and happiness of a diverse workforce comprised of people who have different preferences for home or office; in person or zoom. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/07/cathy-merrill-washingtonian-strike/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/07/cathy-merril...
mapgrep 5y ago
>I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely Aren't there engineers who grow and evolve through the sort of "mentoring" (ad-hoc or otherwise) they get through remote open source contributions? To the extent that a github presence is increasingly a prerequisite for certain engineering jobs I wonder if this shift isn't already under way. I'm not saying it's a direct or even desirable replacement for IRL mentoring, but it does seem like there is at least a rough framework in place for helping people grow as engineers outside of a workplace. It's a little more self directed and rough and tumble, but then work in general seems to be going in that direction over the last few decades.
tayo42 5y ago
No one hires junior engineers anyway, getting that first job is miserable. Everyone only wants armies of experienced workers.
okareaman 5y ago
I worked at home for a small startup that was saving money on an office. It worked out so well that we kept doing it for many years later after we became successful. We would find a spot to spend the day together once every two weeks. I started as a junior programmer and felt I was mentored effectively. One of my favorite programming memories occured when my mentor, a senior, introduced me to exceptions, which he had implemented in assembly language. I learned a lot from him, and never felt that not being in an office everyday, all day, with him was a detriment to my learning.
chrisweekly 5y ago
Good mentors are rare, but I don't think being remote is much of a hindrance. IME, the world-class tooling for frictionless remote pair-programming built into VSCode is actually an improvement over peering over someone's shoulder in a shared office. And most mentoring is naturally more async than that.
throwawayboise 5y ago
IDK maybe I've never had good mentors, but I honestly can't think of much that I've learned to "level up my talent" from the people I work with. I do learn from reading code and from books by experts in whatever areas I'm involved in. Sure I learn where the bathroom is, what the specific local dev workflow is, etc. but in terms of fundamentally improving my skills as a developer that has always been to a very large degree due to my own efforts at seeking out knowledge.
- aeoleonn 5y ago
  I agree. I don't know that skill growth can be provided by "mentorship". At most, I think mentorship can provide (or is perhaps conflated with providing) direction & guidance. I've never been in the situation where someone can magically grow my skills for me, or download information into my brain for me. Sure, there's exposure to ideas regarding programming frameworks, ways of doing things, system design ideas to receive from colleagues & supervisors. And communication & leadership knowledge & experience gained as well.
- specialist 5y ago
  Agreed. The mentoring I benefitted from was never from other programmers. Most of my colleagues have been antagonists. Elders to learn from were few. I started a book club just to have some peeps to geek with. Maybe it's a cohort thing. I've definitely coached, mentored a lot of other people.
- patrick451 5y ago
  I agree. I'd say the vast majority of any mentoring I've gotten hasn't been technical. It's been more along the lines of "this how to manage your work in Jira." Or softer skills like learning how to prioritize tasks given the org goals. But covid hit when I was maybe 6 months into my tech career, and I honestly don't feel like it had any negative impact. All of these things were transmitted just as effectively in a zoom call as they were in person.
nucleardog 5y ago
> Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity. I still find this assumption baked in to a lot of the criticisms of remote work. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here that you don't thing remote = never talking to people, so the assumption would seem then to be that video conferencing and text chat is not "interacting" with people. It very much is, and a lot of people have made it work in a lot of different contexts for a long time. Most of the drawbacks that still exist in certain situations are things that, given time, we'll solve. Already in the past year, we've seen at least one report showing WFH productivity increasing 46% relative to the productivity in offices.[0] I can't think of any reason why this trend wouldn't continue--we're still at a stage where there's a _lot_ of low hanging fruit. [0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28461/w28461.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28461/w284...
dboreham 5y ago
I don't understand how mentoring via slack and zoom is any different than mentoring leaning over tha back of an aeron. Actually I do: I think the slack/zoom way is significantly better.

abakker 5y ago

As a consultant, I have to say that this is true of our industry as well. Our company has always been full remote due to the "on site" nature of our work. Given that, it has always been a pain point to spend time mentoring and training. many hours of zoom calls for training just doesn't foment the kind of quick Q&A than in person does. For us, the net effect has been that the people who do well tend to be autodidactic to at least some degree.

nine_k 5y ago

FWIW, Google hires a lot of bright graduates straight from universities, who cannot yet work as senior engineers, even after 2-3 years of being interns before that. Mentoring plays a huge part here.

samkater 5y ago

> The rise of remote work is 100% misunderstood. Good software engineers can work anymore but I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely. Absolutely this. I love working remotely and will probably not go back to an office until at least the kids are out of school. But both being new and training new people are skills that are just _different_ from being in the office. Open offices were not a good fit for me, but one valuable thing from a past job was sitting close to both my manager and their manager. That was a way to learn "Oh, that's how you talk to <client A, department B, etc>" without having to be told "this is how you talk to these people." Training a remote new person requires so much more intentionality that most people are not accustomed to.

bsder 5y ago
> Open offices were not a good fit for me Open offices are not a good fit for anybody. IBM studied this back in the Dinosaur Age. Bell studied this back in the Dinosaur Age. Dedicated offices with a door are the most productive. Period. What open offices are is "cheap".

lowbloodsugar 5y ago

I haven't met many engineers who can mentor well, period. My guess is your perception is biased. I know SDEs who prefer conversations remotely. An extreme example would be that there's no chance of physical harassment on Zoom. Another would be the "raise a hand" button seems to be more acceptable to use than actually raising a hand in a meeting, with the result that voices are heard that would otherwise not be. And just fundamentally, think of the site you're on. How unimaginative. How big is your data set? Why can't your sample mentor well remotely? Are there bigger data sets or published analyses? What can you do to improve your model? Or is it just that you prefer to work in an office, or you don't trust your employees? Your argument is the "Think of the children^H^H^H interns" argument from the Cathy Merrill's Washingtonian op ed. [1] It doesn't hold water with anyone seriously trying to improve the productivity and happiness of a diverse workforce comprised of people who have different preferences for home or office; in person or zoom. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/07/cathy-merrill-washingtonian-strike/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/05/07/cathy-merril...

mapgrep 5y ago

>I haven't met many engineers that can mentor well remotely Aren't there engineers who grow and evolve through the sort of "mentoring" (ad-hoc or otherwise) they get through remote open source contributions? To the extent that a github presence is increasingly a prerequisite for certain engineering jobs I wonder if this shift isn't already under way. I'm not saying it's a direct or even desirable replacement for IRL mentoring, but it does seem like there is at least a rough framework in place for helping people grow as engineers outside of a workplace. It's a little more self directed and rough and tumble, but then work in general seems to be going in that direction over the last few decades.

tayo42 5y ago

No one hires junior engineers anyway, getting that first job is miserable. Everyone only wants armies of experienced workers.

okareaman 5y ago

I worked at home for a small startup that was saving money on an office. It worked out so well that we kept doing it for many years later after we became successful. We would find a spot to spend the day together once every two weeks. I started as a junior programmer and felt I was mentored effectively. One of my favorite programming memories occured when my mentor, a senior, introduced me to exceptions, which he had implemented in assembly language. I learned a lot from him, and never felt that not being in an office everyday, all day, with him was a detriment to my learning.

chrisweekly 5y ago

Good mentors are rare, but I don't think being remote is much of a hindrance. IME, the world-class tooling for frictionless remote pair-programming built into VSCode is actually an improvement over peering over someone's shoulder in a shared office. And most mentoring is naturally more async than that.

throwawayboise 5y ago

IDK maybe I've never had good mentors, but I honestly can't think of much that I've learned to "level up my talent" from the people I work with. I do learn from reading code and from books by experts in whatever areas I'm involved in. Sure I learn where the bathroom is, what the specific local dev workflow is, etc. but in terms of fundamentally improving my skills as a developer that has always been to a very large degree due to my own efforts at seeking out knowledge.

aeoleonn 5y ago
I agree. I don't know that skill growth can be provided by "mentorship". At most, I think mentorship can provide (or is perhaps conflated with providing) direction & guidance. I've never been in the situation where someone can magically grow my skills for me, or download information into my brain for me. Sure, there's exposure to ideas regarding programming frameworks, ways of doing things, system design ideas to receive from colleagues & supervisors. And communication & leadership knowledge & experience gained as well.
specialist 5y ago
Agreed. The mentoring I benefitted from was never from other programmers. Most of my colleagues have been antagonists. Elders to learn from were few. I started a book club just to have some peeps to geek with. Maybe it's a cohort thing. I've definitely coached, mentored a lot of other people.
patrick451 5y ago
I agree. I'd say the vast majority of any mentoring I've gotten hasn't been technical. It's been more along the lines of "this how to manage your work in Jira." Or softer skills like learning how to prioritize tasks given the org goals. But covid hit when I was maybe 6 months into my tech career, and I honestly don't feel like it had any negative impact. All of these things were transmitted just as effectively in a zoom call as they were in person.

nucleardog 5y ago

> Basically, work is going to get more flexible but the idea that nobody ever needs to interact with humans in real life again is insanity. I still find this assumption baked in to a lot of the criticisms of remote work. I'll give the benefit of the doubt here that you don't thing remote = never talking to people, so the assumption would seem then to be that video conferencing and text chat is not "interacting" with people. It very much is, and a lot of people have made it work in a lot of different contexts for a long time. Most of the drawbacks that still exist in certain situations are things that, given time, we'll solve. Already in the past year, we've seen at least one report showing WFH productivity increasing 46% relative to the productivity in offices.[0] I can't think of any reason why this trend wouldn't continue--we're still at a stage where there's a _lot_ of low hanging fruit. [0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28461/w28461.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28461/w284...

dboreham 5y ago

I don't understand how mentoring via slack and zoom is any different than mentoring leaning over tha back of an aeron. Actually I do: I think the slack/zoom way is significantly better.