8 ms·

One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home elimi

by vinni2 5y ago

One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home eliminates learning through osmosis. If anyone has a work around this let me know. I am surprised no one else has mentioned it here.

benrbray 5y ago
I graduated into this mess and feel like I've been cut off at the knees.
- caffeine 5y ago
  Hey I really feel for you. Please don’t disengage, fight hard to get mentored. Not sure what your org is like but ask to pair remotely if you can, ask to do code reviews over video call so you can talk through questions, ask your manager regularly to talk you through the trade offs involved in the decisions they are making, etc. If you hear about a weekly status call happening on some project, ask if you can be included “to learn.” Your goal is to first increase your situational awareness and understanding of the domain, because that is upstream of the technical trade offs. I think people graduating into this have to fight really hard for the mentorship and learning that would happen naturally 10 years ago. People like me who graduated 10-15 years ago and would now naturally be your mentors don’t realise this because we never faced it.
jasondclinton 5y ago
The solution is obvious: structured training and mentoring. When the pandemic hit, I was hiring a team of 5 new engineers. What was I going to do? Throw up my hands? I implemented a weekly technical training program that morphed into the 250 person org official onboarding. Weekly, I literally just get someone on a VC for 30 minutes and record having a conversation about a technical topic at a noobie level. 16 months later we have 50+ training videos on every topic. We implement mentors and formal onboarding processes with screen sharing and remote whiteboating sessions, too. It's not hard.
- caffeine 5y ago
  Actually it sounds like it is hard, but you pulled off something of great value by thinking about it, taking ownership, and iterating towards solving a problem.
- code_biologist 5y ago
  What remote whiteboarding tools do you like? I do a lot less whiteboarding these days and it kills me.
  - jasondclinton 5y ago
    Lucidchart has been my go to. Allows multiple users in the same whiteboard at once. Legible text as opposed to whiteboard scribble. Easily rearrange block diagrams. Permanent record of a diagram session that can be thrown in a design doc.
  - Derbasti 5y ago
    I have a second webcam pointed straight down at my desk, and scribble with a pen on paper. Frankly, this works better than any of the digital tools I tried, despite not being collaborative. (I tried a number of them, and have both a drawing tablet and a tablet pc)
  - konschubert 5y ago
    Miro.com is a game changer.
  - nicolashahn 5y ago
    Excalidraw is killer. We use it extensively at work
- bariswheel 5y ago
  Amen. Nicely done.
- chhxxhh 5y ago
  You can't replace human contact with technology, it will never be an adequate substitute. We are social animals and I think the increased push to doing everything online will damage peoples mental wellbeing in the long term
KingOfCoders 5y ago
Years ago a junior employee gave in notice for a new remote job. I told him I didn't this was best for him because it would make learning much more difficult. When I've met him years later he agreed that it wasn't a good move for him.
Smaug123 5y ago
I'd been at my company for two years when the pandemic hit, and I continued learning loads by osmosis through a daily 30min team Webex "turn your mic and camera on, and just chat or work silently or whatever ends up happening". Have you tried that? I haven't yet had the chance to mentor a new starter in remote mode, but from my own experiences and on general principles I would personally be trying a "leave my Webex room open all day and have a few of us working in there" approach. Of course, even better would presumably be to actively note what questions get asked during that time, and to update documentation accordingly.
meheleventyone 5y ago
Better documentation, learning by osmosis suggests you don’t have a lot written down so people can’t solve their own problems. Better mentorship, not “here’s your mentor” and it’s some disinterested person who can fob you off to soak it in. The good news is that if people can “learn by osmosis” you probably have some strong informal mentors already. You need to identify who they were. Better follow up and expectations setting, if there’s obvious stuff you expect people will just get because of team culture make that explicit and check in about it as you would other aspects of work. The big thing IMO in any on boarding situation is to get the new person asking lots of questions ASAP. All of these will make your on boarding better back at the office as well. On boarding by Brownian motion isn’t really a plan after all.
terhechte 5y ago
The lead / manager (or whatever it is called in your case) on your team should try to encourage pairing or mob programming as much as possible. It is difficult to pull off, but nothing speaks against an experienced person sharing their screen while working on a particular topic. Whenever somebody starts working on something they can ping it in a channel, and then interested engineers could join. We try to work that way and it doesn't always work but sometimes it works well.
slgeorge 5y ago
Absolutely. Remote working is absolutely devastating to the development of junior team members and people just getting started in the world of work. If you're just getting started in your area (whether development, sales, marketing, devops) having immediate help and guidance from your peers and manager is really helpful - documentation helps, structured training helps but they're not the full solution. Those momentary 'quick' bits of guidance help, and whether we like it or not "face-to-face conversation" is the highest form of bandwidth we have. The other element people don't talk about enough is that getting used to "working" is a journey in and of itself. There are lots of elements of being productive in the world of work - not just churning out code - and it's not obvious how it all works. In some areas I see a lot of "hollowing out" where we don't have as many entry roles.
- chhxxhh 5y ago
  This 100%, I am happy to sacrifice some personal comfort for the greater good of the team.
habosa 5y ago
It's also the same for new teams or even new large projects. I have worked at {Big Tech Company} for 7 years and WFH has barely been a speed bump for me. Last week I decided to switch teams. My onboarding rate is glacial so far. Naturally I don't have a big workload, because I am new. However between tasks I can't just try and learn by osmosis, because there's nobody around. I have to go out of my way to schedule meetings with people and say "what are you working on? explain it to me." Luckily I am in a fairly senior role so I am confident scheduling those meetings and asking those questions. If I was a new grad I'd be terrified to do that and instead probably just sit here and twiddle my thumbs half the day.
Leszek 5y ago
I'm a reasonably experienced person and I've found myself much _less_ productive at home, because despite my experience I still get value from being able to easily and quickly bounce ideas off people or get help in components that I'm less familiar with.

by vinni2 5y ago

benrbray 5y ago

I graduated into this mess and feel like I've been cut off at the knees.

caffeine 5y ago
Hey I really feel for you. Please don’t disengage, fight hard to get mentored. Not sure what your org is like but ask to pair remotely if you can, ask to do code reviews over video call so you can talk through questions, ask your manager regularly to talk you through the trade offs involved in the decisions they are making, etc. If you hear about a weekly status call happening on some project, ask if you can be included “to learn.” Your goal is to first increase your situational awareness and understanding of the domain, because that is upstream of the technical trade offs. I think people graduating into this have to fight really hard for the mentorship and learning that would happen naturally 10 years ago. People like me who graduated 10-15 years ago and would now naturally be your mentors don’t realise this because we never faced it.

jasondclinton 5y ago

The solution is obvious: structured training and mentoring. When the pandemic hit, I was hiring a team of 5 new engineers. What was I going to do? Throw up my hands? I implemented a weekly technical training program that morphed into the 250 person org official onboarding. Weekly, I literally just get someone on a VC for 30 minutes and record having a conversation about a technical topic at a noobie level. 16 months later we have 50+ training videos on every topic. We implement mentors and formal onboarding processes with screen sharing and remote whiteboating sessions, too. It's not hard.

caffeine 5y ago
Actually it sounds like it is hard, but you pulled off something of great value by thinking about it, taking ownership, and iterating towards solving a problem.
code_biologist 5y ago
What remote whiteboarding tools do you like? I do a lot less whiteboarding these days and it kills me.
- jasondclinton 5y ago
  Lucidchart has been my go to. Allows multiple users in the same whiteboard at once. Legible text as opposed to whiteboard scribble. Easily rearrange block diagrams. Permanent record of a diagram session that can be thrown in a design doc.
- Derbasti 5y ago
  I have a second webcam pointed straight down at my desk, and scribble with a pen on paper. Frankly, this works better than any of the digital tools I tried, despite not being collaborative. (I tried a number of them, and have both a drawing tablet and a tablet pc)
- konschubert 5y ago
  Miro.com is a game changer.
- nicolashahn 5y ago
  Excalidraw is killer. We use it extensively at work
bariswheel 5y ago
Amen. Nicely done.
chhxxhh 5y ago
You can't replace human contact with technology, it will never be an adequate substitute. We are social animals and I think the increased push to doing everything online will damage peoples mental wellbeing in the long term

KingOfCoders 5y ago

Years ago a junior employee gave in notice for a new remote job. I told him I didn't this was best for him because it would make learning much more difficult. When I've met him years later he agreed that it wasn't a good move for him.

Smaug123 5y ago

I'd been at my company for two years when the pandemic hit, and I continued learning loads by osmosis through a daily 30min team Webex "turn your mic and camera on, and just chat or work silently or whatever ends up happening". Have you tried that? I haven't yet had the chance to mentor a new starter in remote mode, but from my own experiences and on general principles I would personally be trying a "leave my Webex room open all day and have a few of us working in there" approach. Of course, even better would presumably be to actively note what questions get asked during that time, and to update documentation accordingly.

meheleventyone 5y ago

Better documentation, learning by osmosis suggests you don’t have a lot written down so people can’t solve their own problems. Better mentorship, not “here’s your mentor” and it’s some disinterested person who can fob you off to soak it in. The good news is that if people can “learn by osmosis” you probably have some strong informal mentors already. You need to identify who they were. Better follow up and expectations setting, if there’s obvious stuff you expect people will just get because of team culture make that explicit and check in about it as you would other aspects of work. The big thing IMO in any on boarding situation is to get the new person asking lots of questions ASAP. All of these will make your on boarding better back at the office as well. On boarding by Brownian motion isn’t really a plan after all.

terhechte 5y ago

The lead / manager (or whatever it is called in your case) on your team should try to encourage pairing or mob programming as much as possible. It is difficult to pull off, but nothing speaks against an experienced person sharing their screen while working on a particular topic. Whenever somebody starts working on something they can ping it in a channel, and then interested engineers could join. We try to work that way and it doesn't always work but sometimes it works well.

slgeorge 5y ago

Absolutely. Remote working is absolutely devastating to the development of junior team members and people just getting started in the world of work. If you're just getting started in your area (whether development, sales, marketing, devops) having immediate help and guidance from your peers and manager is really helpful - documentation helps, structured training helps but they're not the full solution. Those momentary 'quick' bits of guidance help, and whether we like it or not "face-to-face conversation" is the highest form of bandwidth we have. The other element people don't talk about enough is that getting used to "working" is a journey in and of itself. There are lots of elements of being productive in the world of work - not just churning out code - and it's not obvious how it all works. In some areas I see a lot of "hollowing out" where we don't have as many entry roles.

chhxxhh 5y ago
This 100%, I am happy to sacrifice some personal comfort for the greater good of the team.

habosa 5y ago

It's also the same for new teams or even new large projects. I have worked at {Big Tech Company} for 7 years and WFH has barely been a speed bump for me. Last week I decided to switch teams. My onboarding rate is glacial so far. Naturally I don't have a big workload, because I am new. However between tasks I can't just try and learn by osmosis, because there's nobody around. I have to go out of my way to schedule meetings with people and say "what are you working on? explain it to me." Luckily I am in a fairly senior role so I am confident scheduling those meetings and asking those questions. If I was a new grad I'd be terrified to do that and instead probably just sit here and twiddle my thumbs half the day.

Leszek 5y ago

I'm a reasonably experienced person and I've found myself much _less_ productive at home, because despite my experience I still get value from being able to easily and quickly bounce ideas off people or get help in components that I'm less familiar with.