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> But full time remote is a disaster for junior engineers. Nonsense. If you have a good boss, you’ll be mentored to success in person or remotely. Source: I’m

> But full time remote is a disaster for junior engineers. Nonsense. If you have a good boss, you’ll be mentored to success in person or remotely. Source: I’m the boss who’s done that! Before you say “but but but”, all the buts will point back to a bad boss, who isn’t fixed by in-person presence.

vidarh 4y ago
There is a severe problem of promoting engineers into management positions and providing no or insufficient training in line management or mentoring, though. A lot of companies with poor training and mentoring culture will get caught out by remote work and struggle to adapt fast enough.
mym1990 4y ago
Caveat being that not many people get to pick who their boss is, and quite frankly I don't know that I've met too many good bosses that toot their own horn. At the end of the day, people should have full accountability for their career and actions, but at a junior level there is a poor baseline for what a good trajectory and a bad trajectory looks like, so room for mistakes is bigger...which should allow people to learn faster.
- AuthorizedCust 4y ago
  > Caveat being that not many people get to pick who their boss is… Orthogonal to my premise. Being in person doesn’t entitle you to pick your boss, either.
  - _vertigo 4y ago
    No, but at least in person it's easier and much more natural to facilitate mentorship opportunities for yourself if your boss isn't so good.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    I am specifically zeroing in on that because there just aren't that many good "bosses" out there, and even fewer great leaders...as much as most bosses think they may be good. If you do have a great boss that takes the time and energy to do mentorship, wonderful! But that leaves us with the rest of the workforce that has average and bad managers...I would bet that remote outcomes for that part of the workforce are not great.
_vertigo 4y ago
> all the buts will point back to a bad boss, who isn’t fixed by in-person presence. This reasoning is faulty and nearly circular. "Remote work can't be bad, because if it were, it'd be the fault of the boss, and a bad boss is going to be bad regardless of whether or not you're remote." That's a neat rhetorical trick for making almost any argument. You're sidestepping the fact that remote work makes mentorship harder and less likely to work. A good boss can make up for that, but not all bosses are good. Most are just average, and it's certainly not the case that managing a fully remote team is easier than managing a fully in-person one. Mentorship, knowledge transfer, and values transfer happen automatically more often than not in person, but they have to be intentionally fostered in a remote setting. That's harder for a manager to pull off. Remote work just makes this kind of stuff harder. When I worked in person, I could seek out mentorship myself in a natural way by making connections on my own, at lunch for example. Now, I guess what you're saying is that it's my boss's responsibility to schedule those opportunities for me, and if he doesn't, he's a bad boss. Okay -- how does that help me? Should I leave my job if I can't find a way to improve it? What if the next job has the same problem? Working remotely as a junior or intermediate engineer is basically stacking the deck against yourself. Sure, there are ways to make it work, but on average it works less well, and it's also more likely to just not work at all. Sweeping it under the rug by saying it's the boss's job to make it work does not absolve it of its problems.

vidarh 4y ago

There is a severe problem of promoting engineers into management positions and providing no or insufficient training in line management or mentoring, though. A lot of companies with poor training and mentoring culture will get caught out by remote work and struggle to adapt fast enough.

mym1990 4y ago

Caveat being that not many people get to pick who their boss is, and quite frankly I don't know that I've met too many good bosses that toot their own horn. At the end of the day, people should have full accountability for their career and actions, but at a junior level there is a poor baseline for what a good trajectory and a bad trajectory looks like, so room for mistakes is bigger...which should allow people to learn faster.

AuthorizedCust 4y ago
> Caveat being that not many people get to pick who their boss is… Orthogonal to my premise. Being in person doesn’t entitle you to pick your boss, either.
- _vertigo 4y ago
  No, but at least in person it's easier and much more natural to facilitate mentorship opportunities for yourself if your boss isn't so good.
- mym1990 4y ago
  I am specifically zeroing in on that because there just aren't that many good "bosses" out there, and even fewer great leaders...as much as most bosses think they may be good. If you do have a great boss that takes the time and energy to do mentorship, wonderful! But that leaves us with the rest of the workforce that has average and bad managers...I would bet that remote outcomes for that part of the workforce are not great.

_vertigo 4y ago

> all the buts will point back to a bad boss, who isn’t fixed by in-person presence. This reasoning is faulty and nearly circular. "Remote work can't be bad, because if it were, it'd be the fault of the boss, and a bad boss is going to be bad regardless of whether or not you're remote." That's a neat rhetorical trick for making almost any argument. You're sidestepping the fact that remote work makes mentorship harder and less likely to work. A good boss can make up for that, but not all bosses are good. Most are just average, and it's certainly not the case that managing a fully remote team is easier than managing a fully in-person one. Mentorship, knowledge transfer, and values transfer happen automatically more often than not in person, but they have to be intentionally fostered in a remote setting. That's harder for a manager to pull off. Remote work just makes this kind of stuff harder. When I worked in person, I could seek out mentorship myself in a natural way by making connections on my own, at lunch for example. Now, I guess what you're saying is that it's my boss's responsibility to schedule those opportunities for me, and if he doesn't, he's a bad boss. Okay -- how does that help me? Should I leave my job if I can't find a way to improve it? What if the next job has the same problem? Working remotely as a junior or intermediate engineer is basically stacking the deck against yourself. Sure, there are ways to make it work, but on average it works less well, and it's also more likely to just not work at all. Sweeping it under the rug by saying it's the boss's job to make it work does not absolve it of its problems.