4 ms·

As a new grad, onboarding during covid sucked so extremely hard. It started off with a lack of productivity, a lack of understanding, and an extreme amount of a

As a new grad, onboarding during covid sucked so extremely hard. It started off with a lack of productivity, a lack of understanding, and an extreme amount of anxiety from being unable to tell what is expected of me and how to achieve that. Going to office has been the best possible thing for me. I can see my coworkers, understand the expectations set for me, get instant help from coworkers (and often provide instant help). My anxiety is better and my health is better. I'm not distracted by the 10,000 things around my house that I either want to do or need to do. That being said, that's only my experience. I think the research shows that remote work is just as productive, if not better. It's better for people who really need to take care of personal things during work hours. The opposition to remote work is far too forceful, especially when companies don't even intend to back up their threats (like in your case). Leadership in many companies seems against the idea for WFH for all the wrong reasons. They need to understand it's a real risk trying to force employees to come back to the office, and you can certainly lose some very important talent by doing that.

ghaff 5y ago
I can absolutely empathize why graduating into this could be a really bad experience for people. Was just talking with someone about this earlier in the week. I admittedly started work in a very different time with very different and more limited tools but it's hard for me to imagine.
dcolkitt 5y ago
I mean, here's the thing. Most new grads are drastically overestimating the importance that they're onboarded quickly. The median productivity of a new grad is approximately zero for the first year. Maybe even negative. Nobody really expects much of you anyway. So just, chill and focus on improving at a slow and steady rate. The whole reason FANG companies hire new grades is because a small fraction will become superstars in a few years. And a small handful of those superstars will stay out of loyalty/comfort/inertia. New grads are basically deep out of the money, long-dated call options. Companies aren't going to care whether it takes them 3 months or 6 months to get acclimated to the org's culture.
- macintux 5y ago
  That's easy to say as an experienced employee, but when you're a new hire and you have no clue what's going on around you because there are no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of, and no way to interpret your boss's apathy about your existence... Plus reading here about certain companies' interest in pruning people ruthlessly... I could see why morale among new hires would be problematic in this rather chaotic time.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    >> no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of That's all done in chat now. Which on a personal level, that's how I've done it for a quarter of a century, but it's like that at work now too.
    - la6471 5y ago
      Exactly .
    - macintux 5y ago
      I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats, or in specialized channels that particularly newcomers won't be a part of. Additionally, someone who's new is much easier to spot and thus be reminded of when they're physically proximate. Someone new on chat who doesn't have much to contribute yet can very easily vanish, so while they may be able to pull information from others, much less information will be deliberately pushed their way. I'm not saying it's impossible, but we have millennia of culture and evolution built around in-person interactions.
      - rufus_foreman 5y ago
        >> I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats I haven't seen that. What type of conversations that used to be public are you seeing being moved to private now that things are done through chat?
KittenInABox 5y ago
IMO this is an institutional problem at your workplace. I know my company's grown a ton and I've actually put in more hours ensuring one-on-one, high-touch onboarding time with all our new engineers so that they never feel unsupported and unknowing what the expectations are. It's absolutely vital to recreate the same onboarding experience (seeing someone all day, being there whenever a question is asked, etc) virtually, and that means putting in the extra effort in making onesself available, checking in, and being proactive.
mackmgg 5y ago
I'm no longer a new grad, and was onboarded long before COVID. I think those same problems, lack of productivity, understanding unable to tell expectations all applied even in-person. It seems to be more of a supervisor problem than a remote work problem. And as dcolkitt said, unrealistic expectations on how fast that's supposed to take. A lot of new grads are used to an internship which is only ~10 weeks, or a 16 week semester as a timeframe when you should be able to get entirely up to speed and done producing what's needed. But that's not necessarily long enough to truly learn how a team works and what the expectations are at a lot of companies.
brsaunders 5y ago
Hmm ... I hear what you're saying. At the same time, I recognize some of the new-kid-on-the-block problems you describe here. I was a new grad in the analog world. The same kind of uncertainty existed for me. Sometimes a coworker who was supposed to help me just didn't talk to me. Many managers were just as poor then as they are now, in person or online, at setting and communicating expectations. And there were additional problems in person that don't exist in the same way online. Particularly for women ... bullying and inappropriate attention from the men; envy and criticism from the women. Also, early on in this pandemic, people and companies were scrambling in general. So, the chaos of onboarding may not have been a problem with onboarding per se, or even with companies not handling it "well" but just a shared difficulty.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
> get instant help from coworkers You helped your company by saving senior engineers' precious time.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Unless maybe the primary value of a lot of senior engineers is onboarding and coaching.
zumu 5y ago
My first SE gig did remote days, and I used to dread those when just starting out. Nurturing early career engineers in a remote setting is definitely something companies need to get better at.

ghaff 5y ago

I can absolutely empathize why graduating into this could be a really bad experience for people. Was just talking with someone about this earlier in the week. I admittedly started work in a very different time with very different and more limited tools but it's hard for me to imagine.

dcolkitt 5y ago

I mean, here's the thing. Most new grads are drastically overestimating the importance that they're onboarded quickly. The median productivity of a new grad is approximately zero for the first year. Maybe even negative. Nobody really expects much of you anyway. So just, chill and focus on improving at a slow and steady rate. The whole reason FANG companies hire new grades is because a small fraction will become superstars in a few years. And a small handful of those superstars will stay out of loyalty/comfort/inertia. New grads are basically deep out of the money, long-dated call options. Companies aren't going to care whether it takes them 3 months or 6 months to get acclimated to the org's culture.

macintux 5y ago
That's easy to say as an experienced employee, but when you're a new hire and you have no clue what's going on around you because there are no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of, and no way to interpret your boss's apathy about your existence... Plus reading here about certain companies' interest in pruning people ruthlessly... I could see why morale among new hires would be problematic in this rather chaotic time.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  >> no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of That's all done in chat now. Which on a personal level, that's how I've done it for a quarter of a century, but it's like that at work now too.
  - la6471 5y ago
    Exactly .
  - macintux 5y ago
    I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats, or in specialized channels that particularly newcomers won't be a part of. Additionally, someone who's new is much easier to spot and thus be reminded of when they're physically proximate. Someone new on chat who doesn't have much to contribute yet can very easily vanish, so while they may be able to pull information from others, much less information will be deliberately pushed their way. I'm not saying it's impossible, but we have millennia of culture and evolution built around in-person interactions.
    - rufus_foreman 5y ago
      >> I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats I haven't seen that. What type of conversations that used to be public are you seeing being moved to private now that things are done through chat?

KittenInABox 5y ago

IMO this is an institutional problem at your workplace. I know my company's grown a ton and I've actually put in more hours ensuring one-on-one, high-touch onboarding time with all our new engineers so that they never feel unsupported and unknowing what the expectations are. It's absolutely vital to recreate the same onboarding experience (seeing someone all day, being there whenever a question is asked, etc) virtually, and that means putting in the extra effort in making onesself available, checking in, and being proactive.

mackmgg 5y ago

I'm no longer a new grad, and was onboarded long before COVID. I think those same problems, lack of productivity, understanding unable to tell expectations all applied even in-person. It seems to be more of a supervisor problem than a remote work problem. And as dcolkitt said, unrealistic expectations on how fast that's supposed to take. A lot of new grads are used to an internship which is only ~10 weeks, or a 16 week semester as a timeframe when you should be able to get entirely up to speed and done producing what's needed. But that's not necessarily long enough to truly learn how a team works and what the expectations are at a lot of companies.

brsaunders 5y ago

Hmm ... I hear what you're saying. At the same time, I recognize some of the new-kid-on-the-block problems you describe here. I was a new grad in the analog world. The same kind of uncertainty existed for me. Sometimes a coworker who was supposed to help me just didn't talk to me. Many managers were just as poor then as they are now, in person or online, at setting and communicating expectations. And there were additional problems in person that don't exist in the same way online. Particularly for women ... bullying and inappropriate attention from the men; envy and criticism from the women. Also, early on in this pandemic, people and companies were scrambling in general. So, the chaos of onboarding may not have been a problem with onboarding per se, or even with companies not handling it "well" but just a shared difficulty.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

> get instant help from coworkers You helped your company by saving senior engineers' precious time.

ghaff 5y ago
Unless maybe the primary value of a lot of senior engineers is onboarding and coaching.

zumu 5y ago

My first SE gig did remote days, and I used to dread those when just starting out. Nurturing early career engineers in a remote setting is definitely something companies need to get better at.