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How to set junior employees up for success in remote

• Icathian 4y ago
  While I can understand some of the arguments made about juniors getting some extra benefit from having everything close to hand, the sheer pace of the hit pieces against remote the last month or so is hilarious and very telling.
  • pluc 4y ago
    It's very obvious too... of course junior employees don't do as well as veterans when you take out the entire physical support system. Like.. duh? What you need to solve this is merely competent managers/mentoring culture.
    • kevinmchugh 4y ago
      Can you provide some links on how to support junior employees while totally remote? I've struggled mightily with it and a lot of the most pro-remote teams I'm familiar with most don't hire juniors
      • PuppyTailWags 4y ago
        Maybe I should make a blog post... but here are my suggestions: 1. It is now vitally important to have a clear, mutually agreed upon 30/60/90 program the junior is aware of. These need to be measurable, achievable goals, with specific seniors to reach out to to accomplish. The seniors should also be aware and consenting to play as mentor. 2. Senior engineers should proactively pair program, review, or otherwise attend to the junior as much as the junior is comfortable with. (If the junior's discomfort with mentorship gets in the way of their growth, we need to manage the junior. This shouldn't be mistaken for a junior that doesn't need the mentorship and would understandably find this intense attention to be smothering.) 3. The entire team needs to be aware of onboarding the junior. Expect velocity to slow noticeably for a little bit, until the junior is able to do minor bugfixes and tool building, then slow again when the junior takes meatier projects like features.
    • chadash 4y ago
      > What you need to solve this is merely competent managers/mentoring culture. I see this claim thrown around frequently as if finding great managers or building a great management culture is an easy thing to do. A great manager in engineering needs to be good at engineering and good at management. It's hard enough to hire for one or the other, let alone both.
      • pluc 4y ago
        Absolutely. And giving managerial duties to your best developers is a double-edged sword that needs to be wielded carefully.
    • II2II 4y ago
      It takes more than competent managers and a traditional mentoring culture. Everybody has to be as receptive to new employees in remote as they are to new employees on site. That is remarkably difficult to do when, at best, you see the new employees during meetings. When people do make a point of reaching out to remote employees, it also tends to be more artificial than organic.
    • staticassertion 4y ago
      You say "duh" but this is pretty controversial and there's a big push for remote work right now. I'm "pro remote" - my company is full remote, for example. I also think I'd have a much worse career if my first job hadn't been in an office, especially such a cool office with great coworkers to chat with. Being in an office was incredibly motivating and exciting as a junior developer. Being in an office also made it clear how much I worked. I was there on most weekends and people noticed. I'm not saying that that's more important than the benefits of remote, but people absolutely do act like it's a black and white scenario.
      • bigDinosaur 4y ago
        Conversely, I despise my first in-office experience and it completely turned me off ever going into an office ever again. It was incredibly demotivating to go there when I didn't actually need to - and the idea of 'watercooler creativity' is something I found to be a lie in an office environment. I've developed a real hatred for in-office work as a result of seeing how unnecessary it was when I went remote for two years and was just as productive.
        • staticassertion 4y ago
          Of course, I'm sure many people have had similar experiences to both of us. I'm only saying that there's a lot of grey area here.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • closewith 4y ago
      My experience is that any comment on this site that includes the words merely, trivially, obviously, or simply is best ignored, including mine.
    • unethical_ban 4y ago
      It's very obvious that people do better getting introduced to new environments and cultures when they're physically present. Imagine thinking that a Zoom meeting with a few french people is the same as moving to Paris.
  • Darkstryder 4y ago
    Slite is a SaaS company providing tooling for remote work and is a fully remote company itself, all of that since well before the pandemic. So I think calling the article a "hit piece against remote" is unwarranted in this case. Disclaimer: I have an acquaintance who works there.
    • christophepas 4y ago
      Founder of Slite here, your reply is spot on, we try to be as honest on the pros and cons of remote when we think internally of the future of this market, and when we share our research or insights outside. It's not all pink, and our mission is very much to remove the roadblocks, so we need to acknowledge the issues that prevent remote from being seen as a no brainer by some teams today.
      • zeroego 4y ago
        Hey there, just wanted to say as a remote junior dev who has been at it for about 10 months now, that I appreciate the article a lot. These 10 months have been the most difficult of my life, professionally speaking. I was assigned a mentor, but there were no training exercises, or "easy bug fixes / small wording changes to make, so they can focus on learning the workflows" quite the opposite actually, and no processes explained or documented anywhere. I'm a bit older and I couldn't imagine going through this as a fresh grad out of college. I would have loved to have had my hand held in my first days as a dev. I was constantly demoralized by not having the domain knowledge (and not having any comprehensive documentation to learn it), being assigned complicated stories (that even the mid/senior devs had trouble with), and by not having anyone just regularly check in with me and make sure I was doing ok. I would like to continue working remote indefinitely, but man it was really tough starting out as a dev remotely. I say all this to say I do think it's possible to successfully onboard a new dev remotely, but there has to be a plan and resources available to do it and I think your article is a good template.
        • christophepas 4y ago
          Absolutely, we onboarded multiple junior folks over the year, but always put special care there, it needs a very different approach to any new remote teammate.
  • benjaminwootton 4y ago
    A few people have commented on the hit pieces in the UK media. The Telegraph have had an anti WFH article every day for the last month. Definetly feels coordinated!
  • ryanSrich 4y ago
    Now go back 10 years and imagine trying to raise money for a startup that was entirely remote. Or being an employee that refuses to work under forced-commute conditions. The tech industry and VCs have always been extremely anti-remote, and still are. I have a working theory for why this is, which also explains why tech companies hire unsustainably. But that’s a much longer post.
  • dzonga 4y ago
    if majority of the people above you exist to ensure a butt in the seats policy. then yeah you ain't wrong. remote work is just about workers doing their jobs remotely. it signifies worker empowerment - right now the workers are in control. and the corps hate that. PR firms and middle managers are working over-time to ensure that we go back to the previous model where we all commuted in daily. But the labor market is dictating things atm. Junior workers will always struggle at a place that doesn't support Juniors to find their own way. some people picture juniors as half seniors. forgetting those roles are completely different in their own way. It's the same reason mid level developers are so much in demand
    • josephd79 4y ago
      Yep, they are trying to manage remote workers the same way they used to 'manage' in person workers. Clearly they are not the same. We really need to shake this "if you can't see them, they're not working" and "Collaboration is best done in person" mindset.
    • tomtheelder 4y ago
      I think it's an extreme stretch to suggest that remote work is some sort of worker empowerment. It's literally just different. The idea that it somehow invalidates the job of middle managers is a little absurd. If anything it makes them more important and valued in an environment where communication is more sparse and man management more difficult. More likely articles like these are just a response to the immense swell of pro-remote sentiment that's been growing over the last few years. This article was published by a remote-only org whose product is tooling for remote teams. It's not some anti-remote hit piece.
  • slowmotiony 4y ago
    My guess is now that BlackRock and other funds already bought out all the empty office buildings at a bargain, they'd really like the demand to come back so they can sell them off for twice the price.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    Good. I'm tired of having the presumed wonders of WFH shoved down my throat. It's great if you don't want to work and instead slack off at home but I don't believe this productivity increase myth a single bit.
    • l30n4da5 4y ago
      > It's great if you don't want to work and instead slack off at home what? do you think those of us in remote roles just....dont work?
  • vlunkr 4y ago
    Maybe there are “hit pieces” because there actually are downsides to working remote? For the average HN user it’s probably great, but there are plenty of reasons why it could suck. Personality type, job type, living conditions, internet options, etc.
  • pyb 4y ago
    Perhaps because people are starting to draw their own conclusions after working remotely for 24 months?
  • dang 4y ago
    It's just a popular topic that people have lots of different views about and are eager to discuss all the time. Randomness frequently generates uniform subsequences that feel like they can't possibly be random.
• rcgs 4y ago
  Surprising no one who has been paying attention.
• geraldwhen 4y ago
  Before remote, the office was already increasingly hostile. Open floor plans, some groups having shared seating, and offices for roughly no one. Now, it’s worse. Everything is “reservable equipment” of garbage monitors, windows keyboards, and 400 dpi mice. I suspect it’s harder for a junior to succeed anywhere today vs 2012. The office is not built to foster development or innovation. It’s an exec’s idea of what a software factory looks like, and it’s a bad one.
  • ZetaZero 4y ago
    IMO, an expensive keyboard/mouse/monitor isn't necessary for a junior to succeed. Plenty of coders learned on much worse.
    • _dain_ 4y ago
      That's penny wise, pound foolish thinking. A good keyboard and mouse and monitor for your developers (who directly earn you revenue) is not going to break the bank. But the lack of them will reduce productivity and morale, possibly even causing (on the margin) some talented people to leave. RSI and posture problems are no joke! In other industries you need immense capital investment in equipment for workers to be productive; no serious software company should care about the comparative pittance that office hardware costs.
      • calvinmorrison 4y ago
        the amount of times i see critical business users getting slowed down because their laptop is a piece of crap astounds me. The value of the laptop is negligible amortized over it's lifespan so give people good stuff to work with.
      • micromacrofoot 4y ago
        It's a raindrop in a hurricane though, the best keyboard, mouse, and monitor in the world aren't going to make someone productive in an unproductive environment.
• mcv 4y ago
  I agreed with the claim before I read the article, but as I read the article, it convinced me of the opposite, as the article's arguments are really not that good. That table of differences between in office and remote, for example, is ridiculously simplistic; much of the items listed on the right side are also important in the office. And not all of them are necessarily an issue remote (like timezones).
• slackfan 4y ago
  For junior engineers it's really easy to fall into the trap of trying to solve everything themselves instead of asking for help when they are remote. I say this as somebody who has spent the last five years working remote team-based gigs.
  • mcv 4y ago
    That trap also exists in the office, though. Even in the office, you need to give juniors active guidance. It's just that the way you give that guidance is different online and in the office.
    • zwkrt 4y ago
      The difference is it in the office you can just actively see that somebody is anxious and you can ask them what’s up.
      • mcv 4y ago
        True, but there have been plenty of cases where juniors languishing in an office with little guidance. And remote you can still ask them how they're doing by chat. It's true that the barrier is a bit higher remote, but it's not unsurpassable.
        • fendy3002 4y ago
          In office, there's watercooler chat that can lead to debugging session. In remote there isn't. That being said, with the former culture, it's harder to ask question online and asynchronously, since usually they prefer and wait to have in face session instead.
          • toshaga 4y ago
            The equivalent in remote is a chat/thread turn into a call with a screen share. Managers and seniors encourage juniors to ask questions or just “speak” their minds. There are multiple touchpoints for that to happen, dailies, 1:1’s, spontaneous check-ins b/c people care. In a culture where remote work habits are good, these will be imparted on new-joiners, especially less experienced ones.
• throwaway1092 4y ago
  Our company's new CTO held an all-hands meeting Friday where he stated something to the effect that he agreed with Elon (Musk) and that if it were up to him we'd all be huddled in the same office..."but times have changed". What I heard was "I really don't like that we can't keep an eye on you, but since the labor market is still so tight in tech, we have to deal with remote (for now)."
  • spaetzleesser 4y ago
    When I listen to my company's upper management I get the impression they genuinely believe that everybody spends mopst of their time in meetings and discussions and then sometimes does some deep work. They seem to have forgotten that the lower ranks spend most of their time on doing actual work and that distractions and interruptions there are quite expensive and unproductive. What's often weird is that they also set up the workspace in a way that collaboration is hard because when you talk to each you might bother the people in the next row.
  • mathverse 4y ago
    Labor market is tight and yet i am waiting weeks if not months for a result of my interview process. Companies just suck.
  • ryanSrich 4y ago
    Sounds like you need a new job.
  • heretogetout 4y ago
    "I will, begrudgingly, acquiesce to your demands. But know this: I hold you all in contempt." Good way to generate business for resume reviewers, I guess.
• TheGigaChad 4y ago
• donatj 4y ago
  It’s certainly been a very long time since I was a junior, but I don’t think I would have succeeded at WFH as one. I learned so much from the people in the cubes around me just via osmosis. Working from home the last couple years I have barely spoken to anyone without a reason to. Random chitchatting with people outside your bubble is how real growth happens, especially early on.
• CodeSgt 4y ago
  Question for anyone who's had to onboard/train Jr's in a 100% remote environment, what's worked for you? How do you maximize their chances of success? What are some common pain points? This has been an issue at my org and we're having a hard time improving it.
  • foobarian 4y ago
    When I started, my direct manager took me on a walk. We visited about 20 different desks and had introductions and impromptu chats with various developers and product managers, putting the names to faces and expertises. Not all on the same team either, some were just people he knew well from various projects. This was a huge jumpstart for an introvert like me. In an online-only Slack environment there is the private team channel, and the big scary common channel where you are afraid to ask questions unless you tried to solve the problem by yourself first. Maybe a better online solution would help, a-la some magical VR space that Meta comes up with.
    • verve_rat 4y ago
      Or documentation. Just a list of slack channels and what they are used for is a big help. Remote working requires effort too.
  • Inversechi 4y ago
    For me it was a lot of pairing/mobbing on tasks leveraging the tools available. e.g having the driving person sharing their screen and using tools like Jetbrains Code With Me or VSCode LiveShare for the coding aspects. Biggest pain point was the flexibility that was required with lockdowns meant sometimes the senior members were occupied with parenting responsibilities but we tried to ensure that the junior member had someone to pair with most of the time.
  • _wldu 4y ago
    Be clear on what is expected. Have weekly deliverables and weekly team meetings. Don't micromanage them or have them meet each day. Get them off to a good start (give them all the gear and info they need to do the job) and be very explicit in what is expected. Give them a few weeks to get acclimated, then hold them accountable. Whether they are remote or in the office, they can be successful. If they are getting their deliverables in on time and do things the way they are asked to do them (follow these simple rules)... that's all that matters. And when I say follow the rules, I mean that I don't care if they use vim, emacs, nano, Wordpad, Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc. But I do care about how they submit a merge request and whether or not they PGP sign their commits.
• mempko 4y ago
  I don't agree with this article about "micro-tasks". You don't learn accountability and how to break down problems into small tasks if someone does it for you. What junior developers need (actually all workers) is ownership of what they are making. And I don't mean "they own part of a code base". I mean literal ownership of the company. The best way to learn how to make decisions is to own a piece of the pie and participate in decision making process. This is true for remote and not remote workers.
• zero_shift 4y ago
  I fear that WFH is becoming one of those hot topics divided down cultural lines: workers who enjoy a life without commuting, bosses and older employees who are suspicious of it. I'm happy to work from home and it's a big benefit to me, but I won't deny it sometimes has its drawbacks. I just think the balance lies more in favour of remote work than colocation. Hopefully there's a way to express that, yes, junior employees might benefit from some face to face support, but in such a way that doesn't imply everyone else must be chained to a desk forty hours a week.
• rattlesnakedave 4y ago
  Good article, bad HN title. Of COURSE any new employee, especially someone with less experience, will flounder if not given proper support. The prescriptive advice here is also key. Give small bite size tasks, check in often!
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    How is it a good article when the data is garbage?
• api 4y ago
  I've speculated for a while that remote-first will reverse the traditional ageism of the industry, giving older developers a distinct advantage and making it harder for younger developers to get their footing. (I am not saying that's good, just observing.)
• saagarjha 4y ago
  Not a counterpoint, but something to keep in mind: if a junior employee requests to work remotely, please don't force them to come in-person anyways. People need varying levels and types of mentorship. Signed, a junior employee :)
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  This is not a surprise to me. I think it also applies to some people who are senior and new on a project or team. Or people with a more synchronous working style. I think remote has been toxic to productivity in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of people. I think there's in general a "personality type" that does really well with remote in a certain kind of job and thrives with fairly asynchronous disconnected tasks, and on HN I think there's a bias towards seeing our whole industry that way. But some of my best jobs were not like that. They were sitting down with people in very up close conversations and working out ambiguities and tasks. And mentoring juniors and working things through with them. All that said, I won't be going back to in person. I'll be hunting for places that know how to make remote work, even though I don't prefer it. Because remote is still better than the 1.5 hours a day I was spending driving and the toll that was taking on my health and sanity. And most of the local employers are crappy. So it's a real mix of stuff, we're in a transition period. It's going to take a few years for this stuff to shake out.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    Yep, I used to be more productive WFH when I was already acclimated on a team. When I joined a new team and it turned fully remote, my productivity dropped and it took me longer to come up to speed than if I were in the office.
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      Honestly, I was on a team @ Google that was doing consumer hardware. It had problems before WFH started, but it got 5X worse once we got sent home. The whole situation was highly unproductive, a combination of bad politics, but also a degraded tech stack with a pile of technical debt and a build system that took forever to finish, and then because of Google's "no source code on your laptop" policies (which they stubbornly wouldn't loosen during COVID) an additional 10 minutes to copy the binary to local and then push to device, and poor debugging tool support so the round trip was agony to test and prototype. It was just awful. And managers seemed to have no idea how to make it work. So I decided to switch teams, to something that was friendlier for remote, more cloud-based backend stuff. A team that was doing daily standups. And it was sort of better. But acculturating into a new team while remote was painful. And the work unstimulating. And the depression and tedium from being stuck at home and dealing with kids in educational and emotional crisis too much. So I just quit. Walked away from a 10 year high paying "high status" job. And I'm not the only one, friends of mine did the same thing. I suspect much of the "great resignation" was driven by the frankly irresponsible way that employers just didn't manage remote well. I wasn't happy with $work before remote, but remote + a job with some bad aspects was like pouring naptha on a fire. Getting a new (remote) job now after a few months off. I think it will be better.
• Overtonwindow 4y ago
  I had the unfortunate experience of working at a cubicle farm in Atlanta, and what really got me were the chairs. Crappy monitors, crappy equipment, par for the course, but the chairs hurt. Chairs that have been sitting around for a decade, and management could not care less. Gotta sit in a chair for four hours at a time, got back pain, too bad. That’s the only job in my life I’ve ever just walked out on. It was absolutely awful.
  • bluedino 4y ago
    Every company I've worked at will quickly bring you a special ergonomic keyboard/mouse, chair, standing desk, monitor stands, etc once you start complaining about carpal tunnel or back pain.
• M0r13n 4y ago
  I can not relate to this. I found my first real job after university in a medium sized company (100-200 employees). This company is a truly in-office company by heart. Before covid everybody had to go to the office. Working from home was not an option. Not even for one day. The whole culture was built around the in-person work experience. But due to covid everybody worked remote. So did I. I actually never met most of colleagues up until recently. But working remote was never an issue for me. On the contrary, my colleagues struggled with working remotely. I think thats because they are relatively old and never used messengers, mail, social media and co. to an extend as my generation (age <=25). I think that people that grew up in digital spheres are going to feel quite comfortable in a remote environment.
  • teraku 4y ago
    I think it's just how the environment is set up. If the company sets you up for success in remote work, there might be some sub-optimal things, but it will work out. (Remember, not everything is perfect in the office as well). If the company does not accommodate for this properly, then you will fail. Experience will help you compensate for some of these shortcomings, but that will also only go so far.
  • koonsolo 4y ago
    Let me make a bet here: You are self-taught in a lot of ways, and in your spare time also like to fool around with software development stuff. That's why you don't need hand holding. A lot of your peers do need hand holding to get stuff done. I'm a 43 year old developer, and I can work remotely without any issues. Partly because my development experience was always broader than my job alone.
    • JCharante 4y ago
      > Partly because my development experience was always broader than my job alone. I think for some of us (and me) it's really hard to fully understand this. When I was in 10th grade I was going to local meetups where I first found out about Elm (they had beer too, I guess no one expects kids to show up to a meeting held in an office building at 7pm). I still can't understand the mindset of someone whose dev experience only being limited to their jobs, but I think you did a really great job at summarizing it.
• seper8 4y ago
  The only reason I got hired at MAGMA is because I was able to apply & work remote. I am pretty introverted + slightly autistic (not self diagnosed). I do a lot of customer facing work too, which I would never endure when not working remotely. But working remote means I can just turn off when I'm not feeling so great. Presenting is a lot easier... Approaching people, also, a lot easier. Just send them a message on slack/teams/discord. Before that I would have had to muster the courage to talk to certain people. It's a lot easier to onboard as well, given the change in environment is much smaller. I feel SO lucky that I just happened to apply for this job when COVID and remote work started. I think this remote work has equalized the playing field in terms of attractiveness & height aswell, as those qualities are far less visible when interviewing remotely. Wouldn't be surprised if we see the average height of high paid workers decline due to this.
  • Hammershaft 4y ago
    > I am pretty introverted + slightly autistic (not self diagnosed). I do a lot of customer facing work too, which I would never endure when not working remotely. > I think this remote work has equalized the playing field in terms of attractiveness & height aswell, as those qualities are far less visible when interviewing remotely. Wouldn't be surprised if we see the average height of high paid workers decline due to this. This is a great point and shines a light on all kinds of equitable advantages of remote that are possible in the long term.
  • nonameiguess 4y ago
    It isn't just this, either. So many more employment possibilities opened up for me when it no longer became mandatory to relocate to work for all the biggest software companies, none of which seem to have offices near me. So instead of having to ask my wife to find a new job, uproot my family, and sell my house, I could just start a new job. Conversely, the companies doing the hiring no longer have to restrict themselves to anyone who was able to move to San Francisco or Seattle before they turned 25 or people with no families.
• thisismyaccoun7 4y ago
  Working in government, we're seeing a larger amount of folks leave within a few months of hire. I had never heard of that before COVID. When I started here years ago and not remote except a one day a month telework option, it took weeks to get involved in a project. Everyone is laid back and wants to give time to acclimate and understand the place and the project first. My PM told me basically, "Hey I hired you for algorithm development, but just look around and see what's needed, what's interesting to you, and from there pick what you want to do." That might sound awesome, and to me now with experience it is the reason why I stay here. However, as a new employee, it made me super neurotic to not have any sort of direct tasking. It felt like I didn't have work and wasn't being assigned any. I think if I had been remote it would have made things even worse; at the time, one of my saving thoughts was I could be there on time and be seen looking around Confluence or reading to learn about the research topic. I would definitely be interested to hear how folks onboard freshly hired junior devs onto a project or team, how much direct tasking they give, how much time or how they allow for adapting, etc.
  • slipperlobster 4y ago
    I work in (state) government as well, and I'm noticing the same. Our institution is definitely like what you mention - "find your own work" kind of deal. It _sounds_ good until you are basically expected to find your own billable hours in Month 1. My wife actually works in the same institute as I do, but in a different wing - my experience vastly differs from hers. I am basically full-time on one project with consistent billable codes, and she's expected to shop around to try to find projects with open hours, so she can get her 40 hours in every week. She comes from the private sector, so she's admittedly put off by that idea, especially not really knowing anyone and not being well-versed in academic research as a career. I couldn't imagine being put in that position as my first position out of college.
• Nowado 4y ago
  Very convincing methodology. Ask people on subreddit and LinkedIn a question. Then write another article based on 'I swear, dude'. Link it as a source for this 'article'. Write the rest of the 'article' by imagining what the world has to be like, given your poll is a source of truth. Follows my favourite format of 'journalism', where there is some arbitrarily chosen data source, followed up by series of 'interviews' mixed into one single 'story'. I'd expect nothing less from a management and HR expert in marketing. Hopefully we can see some ornithomancy next!
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jakey_bakey 4y ago
    The absolute worst ones are the "here's a crowdsourced treasure trove of information from 20 million users on Reddit" and it's literally a listicle of the top-10 all time posts in a sub
• colesantiago 4y ago
  Are seniors who are hired remotely in a company productive almost immediately from day 1 with no orientation?
• dubswithus 4y ago
  Work at a company that's not going to PIP you doesn't regularly PIP people. Opt out of the rat race and work at a smaller company.
• guender 4y ago
• curiousllama 4y ago
  This is definitely something I've observed, even with young-senior people, since COVID. If you're set in your ways, remote work is a blessing - the office was just a hindrance to the optimal workflow. But if you're adapting your workflow, then remote work is an extra barrier. There's a lot of reasons someone may need to adapt their workflow: maybe they're junior, maybe they're new, maybe they're just a good PM/salesperson/manager who's trying to clear the way. Remote work is a distribution shift in the difficulty of their work.
• talkinghead 4y ago
  today is the first time i've seen 'remote' used like this in a sentence
• rvz 4y ago
  Judging by the comments here, most of the comments posted here are not even by those that are 'senior' themselves or are self declared 'senior' and are certainly on someone else's payroll.
• azangru 4y ago
  Perhaps companies are doing remote wrong? Has this been the experience of companies that are historically all-remote (Basecamp, Gitlab, etc.)?
• Ecstatify 4y ago
  SEO Spam. Junk article based on a reddit poll and conversations with colleagues. "junior remote employees are doing almost 2x the upskilling they're doing in the office" based on what?
• ineedasername 4y ago
  This idea feels intuitively true but it would be useful to see some actual measurement, especially because "fail" is a strong word. The article neither defines it nor does it provide results that would demonstrate it. In short the article is much more speculative opinion than demonstrable outcomes. This isn't just nitpicking. If the intuition here is true then it's important to understand the extent of the problem in more quantifiable detail. The general up skill table doesn't do that, and their simple survey shows a pretty even split, so nothing conclusive there. As a suggestion, the article lists benchmark developments where new hires progress from up skill to simple changes to regular work. This seems like a good starting places to measure how long it takes new hires, remote vs. onsite, to progress through that process.
• fartcannon 4y ago
  Isn't this an editorialised headline? The actual headline is "Micromanagement vs. micro-tasks: how to set junior employees up for success in remote"
• cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  "I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway." Ah, there it is, the bountiful blind arrogance I have come to expect from threads like this on HN. It's like you didn't even read my post, just looked for the hook to drop in and proclaim your superiority.
  • l30n4da5 4y ago
    > It's like you didn't even read my post, just looked for the hook to drop in and proclaim your superiority. Seemed to me it was just a counter-point to your post. If you don't have anything productive to add, that's fine, but resorting to personal attacks doesn't really make your argument/viewpoint look better. From my own personal experience, I'd mirror what the previous poster said. Most of the top performers in a remote setting (at least with software engineering) are usually also a top performer in an office setting. Does that mean there are not outliers? No.
    • cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      • l30n4da5 4y ago
        no it isn't.
        • fileeditview 4y ago
          It is a claim without proof which discredits people failing in a remote job. Comes pretty close to an insult TBH. Considering that success and failure in remote jobs does depend a lot on the team, the organization, the planning etc.. not only the person itself. Also e.g. this sentence by GP raised red flags for me: > Most software engineers produce more effort than they’re worth and skate by with meetings, “pair programming”, etc Let's leave meetings out because I agree that too many meetings are bad but pair programming can be a useful tool, especially to transfer knowledge. And that MOST SWEs produce more effort than they're worth.. lol.. what a blanket statement.
• Decabytes 4y ago
  I don’t necessarily think that working remote is the end all be all for jobs that can do it. But the benefits of remote is just too good to give up. No commute, cheaper cost of living, less stress, etc. Don’t get me wrong there are cons, but the freedom is just too hard to give up. Even if you are struggling at it work wise. I am able to work remote and live in a state that allowed me to buy a house. If my company wanted me to go into the office I would be fine with that but I would need to be compensated in such a way as to offset the huge jump in cost of living that would cause me. I calculated it and it would take a net increase in my salary of about 30-40K to get me to come back.
• lkrubner 4y ago
  (quoting book) Amanda Nock, a tech leader and devops expert who posts frequently to Twitter, offered this in response when I posted on Twitter about how to hire good people remotely, “When I hire remotely, I ask about their online friends.” Nock doesn’t need the details of anyone’s online friendships, but she needs to know that the person has developed a serious friendship online; otherwise that person probably doesn’t communicate easily and naturally online, so working with them remotely is going to be difficult. Nock says, “I often hire remotely, and I make a point to ask about what people's online lives are like. No details. If someone, for instance, has good relationships on Twitter or they're active in a Discord server, that tells me they're good at asynchronous remote communication. I don't care if the Discord server they're active in is a furry community or whatever, the details don't matter — the skill for forming relationships and communicating in a personable way over asynchronous text is there.” (end quote) But I think the opposite is also true: a lot of people do not easily form friendships online, and they lack online social skills, so they are not going work well remotely. These people are more productive in a traditional office. From what I've seen, many people struggle to truly express themselves in written form. This includes well educated people. And those who are extroverted need to talk. Remote work tends to put an emphasis on written communication, and that is only partly offset by having a lot of Zoom meetings.
  • openg4525 4y ago
    Lol if she supports using people's social media accounts in the hiring process... Does she support using arrest records with the FBI for domestic terrorism? Because Amanda Nock has one... Idk, perhaps we should all be careful who we take advice from.
  • MivLives 4y ago
    This an interesting approach to this that I wouldn't have thought of. You can clearly see who the people who are used to existing in a text space vs not. In my team for example, one of my coworkers just hates written communication. He started after me and had to ask a lot of questions. To do so he'd send me a hangouts link and expect me to join so he could ask his question. Most of the time they were questions that then involved him sitting and staring as I had to go look up the answer and link him to it anyway. He was ignoring channels set up to ask for help and ones that would have gotten our entire area of the company to help him. But I think the most insidious part of people who don't communicate well in written form is that it makes other people not want to do so. I was stuck as the only other engineer with this guy for 6 months. During this time I stopped updating, then stopped writing out ticket bodies. I stopped posting helpful things to our team channel and didn't update documentation. What was the point? Who was going to read it? I've been slowly getting back in the habit now that we have people on my team who actually... use things I spend the time to write. And I get that he's twenty years older then me, has fifteen years of experience on me, and has not been living his life in a chat client since the age of 12, but he's a fully remote worker even without the pandemic and I feel like it's one of his opportunity areas.
• madmax108 4y ago
  I've been saying this for over 2 years now, and especially seen this in action with teams in my own company which are a good mix of junior and senior folks. - Junior folks on average spend longer being stuck before reaching out. We organized a few physical offsites where the whole team got together in-person and that helped reduce the friction quite a bit because folks interacted with each other outside of just "We need to get X done" which naturally happens because we never really got to know folks outside of "planned" onboarding/weekly/standup etc. Zoom calls. - I learnt A LOT of Dev setup looking over shoulders of devs much better than me, be it interesting keyboard shortcuts, learning how to use tmux for split screen, ssh tricks, vim/emacs setups etc. which in the long term made me a better dev. A lot of this is not "mandatory" to know but every dev builds his/her own style of working by absorbing from those around them. - Lot more friendships/mentorships/team-spirit were created in in-person settings than in remote where everyone feels a lot more "replaceable". Sure, some folks probably prefer it this way, but I'm certain I'm not the only person who wants to look at work as "just something I do to make money" but also a place where I build meaningful relationships and work with smart folks to build something great together while also having fun (which have also helped me when switching between companies and having folks I know already there). Personally, as someone with enough experience building software, I'm at a place where working remote is the "best case scenario" for me because it gives me complete control of my time, but I absolutely see the tradeoff on the other hand for the folks on the other end.
• sylens 4y ago
  I think there is something to this - as a junior you can learn a lot through osmosis just by being around seniors and more experienced people. This doesn't just apply to software or tech - I have a friend that works for a bank that says just having new members of his team be within earshot so they can hear how he talks to clients and partners on the phone is a useful learning experience for them. However, my experience pre-Covid was that the office was where I was the least productive. My team was already spread out across many office locations, so virtual meetings over Teams were already a thing. The company I worked for at the time had shifted to an open floor plan but without an adequate amount of conference rooms, so often for these virtual meetings we would all be dialed in at our desk, despite 4-6 of us on the call sitting right next to each other. Of course this created echo so meetings were a constant game of muting/unmuting and minimizing how much you talked to avoid feedback. Working remotely did not require a shift in tools at all, but instead has made these calls much more pleasant to attend and easier to engage in.
• ubermonkey 4y ago
  Yeah, this tracks. The casual interaction you get in a traditional office can be formative. Mentoring is easier. You can absorb norms better, and integrate better, especially as a brand new worker. We are a 100% remote team, and we've been very aware of this in hiring - which is to say, we haven't hired any "baby devs" at all.
• vjust 4y ago
  Supporting jr engineers comes with some specific needs IMO, regardless of remote or onsite : 1. Senior engineer time is the main constraint, in the sense, more experienced engineers need to be available to mentor them and break down tasks, concepts etc 2. clarity of purpose / problem being solved (related to #1) 3. feeling safe, and ready to ask questions - have some kind of 'office hours' on a daily basis In an office environment , there are opportunities for hallway chats, in addition to physical meetings (where there is increased incentive/pressure for the jr. engineer to bring up questions). The remote jr. engineer also feels left alone, since seniors are busy. Seniors usually have tenure, so know the background, and are empowered with lots of info.. they can plough ahead, the breakdown of tasks is relatively tractable.. but not for Jrs. An Org needs to create a daily 'win' potential for them to take them forward .. instead it becomes for each his/her his own (shell).
• supergeek133 4y ago
  This argument has really become "what will a workplace do to accommodate/help people one way or the other". For instance, I personally prefer going to the office at least sometimes. My job satisfaction went down considerably staying at home for nearly 2 years. The fact my job had travel pre-COVID also likely had something to do with that. I enjoyed being around people, getting out of the house, etc. I'm also a huge gamer, and am constantly on Discord or some type of in-game chat. So it's not like I didn't have people to talk to or wasn't getting any interaction. My company is currently "Hybrid", so most who are near an office go 2-3 days a week. We're also pretty nationally and internationally distributed, so we're going to the office to be on a bunch of phone calls. The people I see at the office are my direct manager and a few cross functional co-workers. It's nice to be able to talk to them in person. Now recently on a company town hall, the question came up, and our President said basically "We're going with the times/job market, but at the same time if I got everyone involved in Problem X in a room together it would get solved in days not weeks". From experience, he's not wrong, but that sent me down another line of thinking: - Are we willing to fly these people around to be in that room? - If no, we should make it easier to do that. - What resources do we provide to make at-home lives easier (monitors, webcams, better headset/speakerphone). - What learning and/or help do we give to make people "better" at WFH or Office? The last unique thing I'll say about me, I live 10 minutes or less from my office. That's a HUGE privilege, and one that has probably kept me here longer simply because I don't get stressed out over commute changes from weather, etc. I can't imagine what it would be like if I lived 45 minutes or an hour or more from work.
  • strgcmc 4y ago
    > "We're going with the times/job market, but at the same time if I got everyone involved in Problem X in a room together it would get solved in days not weeks". I know you probably know this, but I hope your company leadership isn't falling victim to bias here, because a singular take like this implies that they think it's always better to get folks into a room... what if there is a person that, regardless of room, that your company never would've been able to hire in the first place, because you didn't support remote work? Even if I accept a hypothetical ding to their effectiveness, I'd rather have a stellar hire working at 90% impact in a remote environment, vs not being able to hire that person at all... and of course, maybe that stellar hire actually creates 110% impact while remote, and 90% in-person, who knows? Of course the obvious assumption is, that there are fewer stellar hires who are actively turned off by remote work, vs those that would be turned off/rejected by mandating RTO or banning remote work. That's a bet I'm willing to take, "going with the times."
• seydor 4y ago
  So more discrimination in favor of seasoned employees to come
• dcchambers 4y ago
  I didn't read the article, but the title alone is obvious. I am in favor of flexibility in the work place. Some people work better remotely, others work better in an office. We should let people do what's best for them. I like working remotely, but I can't imagine being fully remote with my first professional job out of college. The foundational knowledge transfer that happens in person is invaluable. Not only that, but I find even now, as a more senior engineer with many responsibilities, at times it is hard to feel motivated when I'm fully remote. That would only be amplified as a junior engineers when you aren't a stakeholder in any projects. How can you feel inspired to want to build great things if everything is so disconnected and impersonal? I suspect this is much better at companies that are permanently remote - they hopefully have the infrastructure in place to properly ramp up and train junior engineers. But for companies that have transitioned to remote recently, the old way of onboarding a junior employee won't work any more.
• steviedotboston 4y ago
  I work remote now and love it, but I can't imagine doing this straight out of college.
• kypro 4y ago
  I don't know if they're more likely to fail in a company that understands how to work remotely. Although the article does seem to suggest this. My guess is that this is more a product of companies recently going remote and not understanding how to do it right. I've been working mostly remotely for the last decade, both as a junior and now as a senior and this hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, I'd argue the opposite is perhaps true. I tend to define a junior dev as a dev who needs a decent amount of handholding where as senior devs are expected to be self-sufficient after a brief onboarding period. If you're a senior dev and you're not self-sufficient then remote can be really hard because you have to constantly pester other devs for help over Slack and Teams, where as in the office asking someone for advise can be done less formally. What I've found is that it's really obvious when a senior dev isn't quite as senior as they probably should be when working remotely. Junior devs on the other hand should be expected to need support and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to get that support if they're working for a company that has a good remote working culture. Ideally every junior should have a senior dev mentor assigned to them and they should have Slack channels in place where they can request help. Code needs to be reviewed by senior devs and ideally you should be working with them to solutionise before they even begin to write their first line of code. Still, I think most junior devs would probably benefit from some office experience early in their career. I'm not sure your first dev job should be remote, but I don't think junior devs should feel they're any more likely to fail working remotely as they would in the office. As a junior dev you can probably improve your chances by asking what support you'll be given as a junior dev during the interview process. You should also feel confident to ask for help. At the end of the day if you're not given the support you need as a junior dev, that's not your failure, but your employers.
• whatever1 4y ago
  What companies want to avoid is to admit that commuting is work. These are hours dedicated to my employer but I am not compensated for them, and even worse they are not accounted in the total work hours of my day. My 9-5 job is really a 7 - 7 job.
• fedeb95 4y ago
  The insights could be valuable if they were introduced as an opinion rather than facts validated by a quick poll online
• 96rbevm7 4y ago
  Junior employees working remotely needs some guidance.
• Ultimatt 4y ago
  Its worse than this. Companies going fully remote are less likely to even engage with the idea of having juniors because of this gap.
• k__ 4y ago
  I don't think being junior is the issue here. Many people start their dev career with OSS and that was remote before it was cool. They have a asynchronous remote first culture from the ground up. This can't be said for the average company. Those have mostly no processes and getting up to speed at the water cooler mentality. No shit that people with little experience fail there.
• icedchai 4y ago
  I knew a company that would make junior employees keep a permanent zoom window open with their manager. Sounded terrible for both sides.
• jmyeet 4y ago
  The worst mistake I think you can make with people is believing in an objective reality. Take onboarding a team member. You see a bunch of different approaches to this. Some people like to simply throw someone in the deep end. Sink or Swim. This is an easy trap to fall into because it requires less effort. It becomes incredibly easy to write people off with no investment. This is often couched in language of like "top performers will thrive". Another approach is more hands-on. Small tasks to begin with. Tasks with a theme built to acumulate knowledge and experience so someone can ultimately take ownership of something. This requires more effort but (IME) works way more than the "sink or swim" approach. The problem with remote work is that it becomes easier to fall into the "sink or swim" trap. Remote employees more easily become abandonware. You can write this off and say it's a failing of remote work but really it's a failure in leadership.
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  Very hard to mentor these days when average turnover is 24 months. I don't know the solution.
• FunnyBadger 4y ago
  Site is down - did we kill it?
• tristor 4y ago
  I’ve been permanently remote for almost a decade. I will never go back to working in an office. Despite all this, I actually prefer working in an office because it creates team camaraderie you don’t get remotely, but commuting is so horrid that it’s not worth it. Commuting, more than anything else, makes me a hardliner for remote work. I think you can absolutely onboard people and develop juniors remotely, but you have to be intentional about it. So many companies I’ve been at in my career did onboarding or OJT by giving out tasks and letting the employee organically learn from those around them. This process fails horribly with remote work, especially for juniors. But if you intentionally onboard people, focus on remote first, have a reading list, assign an onboarding buddy, and are up front about expectations and timelines, it’s completely workable and I’ve been at companies successfully doing this for years before WFH was commonplace.
• _8j50 4y ago
  The trick here is to have a senior person pester them constantly for voice calls and screen sharing sessions (both ways).
• AndrewKemendo 4y ago
  Overall great advice, however if it only works under the following conditions then it's not really usable advice: >New hires need to join a stable squad, where senior team members can take time to onboard and support them >Limit the number of junior employees to a certain % of your workforce: sounds harsh, but in a remote team, especially a startup, resources are limited. Don't stretch managers too thin. These points makes this advice not-actionable because by and large, these two items are usually out of the control of their managers. Yes, ideally a team would be well formed and competent prior to even posting a job requirement, but we know that's just not the way the world works. "Don't hire unless you have everything in order" is great in theory but I've seen only a handful of teams in my near 20 years of experience that can claim to be in such a state.
• davewritescode 4y ago
  This is just fairly obvious and I've probably posted something about it before in HN. It's the same reason in-person school works much better than remote, students and junior employees need fast feedback while still giving them the room to work independently. Real world example, I gave a junior engineer a bug that should take a day to research and 3 lines of code to fix. If I'm sitting a few desks away and I hear them furiously banging away at the keyboard, I might come by and ask how it's going. Today in the remote world I have 2 options, needlessly badger the junior engineer or wait for a big PR that I'm going to have to reject or ask for significant rework, both of which are going to make that person feel a lot worse than if I had just walked by, asked to grab a coffee and talked about it.
  • lamroger 4y ago
    You could also preface with "I think this should take a few lines of code to fix - I'll let you look into it but if you're feeling stuck by 3pm, feel free to Slack me with what you got so far and we can pair"
• PeterStuer 4y ago
  I'll restrict myself to the software/IT sector as that is where my expertise is most prominent. Oboarding and successfully integrating juniors is fully dependent on having real seniors (not juniors that you sell as seniors) in the company and budgeting them substantial time (>25% minimum per trainee supervised) to support this process. This further assumes that you had a decent selective hiring process, as no training/onboarding will compensate for the senior's productive time for complete misses.