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Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment. Since Meta was hiring mostly new grads or junior leetcoders it makes sense that remote work culture

Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment. Since Meta was hiring mostly new grads or junior leetcoders it makes sense that remote work culture at Meta hit some bumps.

lopkeny12ko 4y ago
You cannot blame company policies for the poor performance or low motivation of individual junior developers. My team has hired multiple junior developers in the last 2 years, all of whom are 100% remote, and they've been doing excellent.
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  Right, and it's up to the team to go above and beyond to help them. Managers and senior devs need to step up and get involved more with mentoring and helping.In the office you can gage stress levels of someone who is stuck,lost and not asking for help. In remote they will just hunker down and work nights to try to push through, it happens more to junior than to senior (usually).
- bproven 4y ago
  yep - it is the culture that determines this. Ive worked at full remote companies that took time to mentor juniors and it worked fine
- karmelapple 4y ago
  +1 to this. Our small company hired our first full-time junior dev last year. They’ve been a fantastic addition to the team. We have also been doing 100% remote for over a decade, so our existing processes helped I imagine, too. But I’ve got another data point that a junior dev can certainly thrive doing 100% remote work.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I’m going to trust Meta’s sample size of probably thousands over your sample size of “multiple”. I had six juniors join my team remotely and three are amazing, two are ok (do useful work but need handholding), but one is pretty bad. However I don’t know how that compares to non-remote hires so it could be that it’s worse.
  - november84 4y ago
    I totally get that, but it’s important to look who’s providing the information. I highly doubt the analysis was independent of bias. We know many companies want to push for back to office work and commercial landlords are bag-holding hard… Some food for thought.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    This is really not a matter of sample size. If you want a real assessment of the problem, you will need to think about sampling, be careful about what you test, have a good amount of respect for the factors you don't know. Nobody on this thread has done any of this, but one is a huge company messing with the lives of many people and claiming they know exactly what they are doing.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  It's easy to assume other companies are incompetent, and your company is amazing. But it's harder to onboard at a company like Facebook than at a startup. Every company could have better processes - but when it takes months for even top-tier talent to be able to do basically anything - it can be extremely helpful to be in person during that time... And, sure, everyone is different. I'm sure some special snowflake will reply - but it isn't for me!! I'm speaking in general - as Facebook is...
  - noisenotsignal 4y ago
    Can we assume that Facebook did a good job onboarding remotely? I guess maybe the argument is that given poor onboarding, in-person is better than remote, and going back to in-person saves having to invest in better onboarding. But that’s just an argument that the status quo is easier - of course it’s easier to keep doing what you’re used to, and of course traditional onboarding is geared towards in-person! And that’s quite unfortunate because you do have companies onboarding remotely quite successfully so there’s possibly nothing inherent to remote onboarding that makes it strictly worse.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  I think they are not blaming individual junior devs, they are saying across their hires, they noticed a trend. You said your team hired multiple junior devs, I am gonna assume its less than 10 hope that is fair assumption. Meta has hired almost 40,000 people since 2019. Even a conservative estimate of how many were engineers, and distribution of junior and senior roles. I think it is fair to say they probably had enough people to draw meaningful conclusions. Perhaps individual teams, with careful hiring practices and team fit interviews can make sure juniors thrive even in a remote position. But on average, larger companies cannot be only staffed by super teams, and sometimes that means some people suffer to make sure the median employee has the best chance to succeed. Its not too far from having junior limited to some staging environments instead of production. Some juniors might be ready for the big leagues, but giving the keys of prod to any junior will probably cause some headaches on companies with 80,000 employees like Meta.
parzivalm 4y ago
> Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment. Blanket statements like this are trying to make a multifaceted problem into a single problem. I don't understand why we are always so quick to say underperforming remote junior engineers are underperforming because of remote work. Maybe the problem was Meta went half in on supporting remote as an onboarding ramp and teams did not put the work in to make sure Juniors thrived in a remote environment. Speaking from experience, If you are truly trying to be a remote company, you adjust as needed to support new employees, junior or not.
- krona 4y ago
  If that means only hiring at half the rate because of the longer onboarding ritual then that's a good a reason as any not to do remote onboarding for some companies.
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  But Meta is famous for its "Sink or Swim" cut-throat culture.
- papito 4y ago
  How many people out there randomly zoom with their former coworkers that they never met in real life, after leaving their job? Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment. Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"? Do companies take a productivity hit when people are in the office? Probably. And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery.
  - parzivalm 4y ago
    > Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment. No one is saying you don't need to be around people, but a job can be just a job. I don't need to make a ton of friends at work to do my job, and the idea that that should be a requirement/expectation needs to stop. It enables the chance for too many unhealthy boundaries to be created young workers that don't know any better. If you start in your early 20's and are made to see everyone as friends, family, etc. Then when someone tries to push you into a 12 hour day, it doesn't seem that bad. You can forge working/professional relationships virtually just as well, if you put the effort in. Now sure it doesn't work for everyone, but again my argument isn't that one is worse than the other, it is just that we make too many blanket statements. What works for you might not work for me, and these organizations trying to force one or the other is harmful in the end. You can have co-existence, especially in a company the size of Meta, you can have a plenty successful office presence and remote presence. > Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"? I don't think anyone said that in this thread... That being said, it shouldn't be a surprising fact that people in US cities dislike public transportation. In a previous job of mine, it was quicker to sit in 45 minutes of traffic outside of Washington DC then take the metro, and I was in an area with supposedly great access to public transit. Maybe if all these companies were serious about their workers' best interests they would do more to help invest in and lobby local governments to support public transportation. > And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery. If you were hired with the expectation to come into the office x number of days, that is fine. A lot of people were hired with the promise of being able to work remote, so changing that is where it tends to be a bit of a bad situation. In general this animosity between office work and remote work advocates has gotten out of hand. These can co-exist.

Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment. Since Meta was hiring mostly new grads or junior leetcoders it makes sense that remote work culture at Meta hit some bumps.

lopkeny12ko 4y ago

You cannot blame company policies for the poor performance or low motivation of individual junior developers. My team has hired multiple junior developers in the last 2 years, all of whom are 100% remote, and they've been doing excellent.

myth_drannon 4y ago
Right, and it's up to the team to go above and beyond to help them. Managers and senior devs need to step up and get involved more with mentoring and helping.In the office you can gage stress levels of someone who is stuck,lost and not asking for help. In remote they will just hunker down and work nights to try to push through, it happens more to junior than to senior (usually).
bproven 4y ago
yep - it is the culture that determines this. Ive worked at full remote companies that took time to mentor juniors and it worked fine
karmelapple 4y ago
+1 to this. Our small company hired our first full-time junior dev last year. They’ve been a fantastic addition to the team. We have also been doing 100% remote for over a decade, so our existing processes helped I imagine, too. But I’ve got another data point that a junior dev can certainly thrive doing 100% remote work.
zeroonetwothree 4y ago
I’m going to trust Meta’s sample size of probably thousands over your sample size of “multiple”. I had six juniors join my team remotely and three are amazing, two are ok (do useful work but need handholding), but one is pretty bad. However I don’t know how that compares to non-remote hires so it could be that it’s worse.
- november84 4y ago
  I totally get that, but it’s important to look who’s providing the information. I highly doubt the analysis was independent of bias. We know many companies want to push for back to office work and commercial landlords are bag-holding hard… Some food for thought.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  This is really not a matter of sample size. If you want a real assessment of the problem, you will need to think about sampling, be careful about what you test, have a good amount of respect for the factors you don't know. Nobody on this thread has done any of this, but one is a huge company messing with the lives of many people and claiming they know exactly what they are doing.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
It's easy to assume other companies are incompetent, and your company is amazing. But it's harder to onboard at a company like Facebook than at a startup. Every company could have better processes - but when it takes months for even top-tier talent to be able to do basically anything - it can be extremely helpful to be in person during that time... And, sure, everyone is different. I'm sure some special snowflake will reply - but it isn't for me!! I'm speaking in general - as Facebook is...
- noisenotsignal 4y ago
  Can we assume that Facebook did a good job onboarding remotely? I guess maybe the argument is that given poor onboarding, in-person is better than remote, and going back to in-person saves having to invest in better onboarding. But that’s just an argument that the status quo is easier - of course it’s easier to keep doing what you’re used to, and of course traditional onboarding is geared towards in-person! And that’s quite unfortunate because you do have companies onboarding remotely quite successfully so there’s possibly nothing inherent to remote onboarding that makes it strictly worse.
Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
I think they are not blaming individual junior devs, they are saying across their hires, they noticed a trend. You said your team hired multiple junior devs, I am gonna assume its less than 10 hope that is fair assumption. Meta has hired almost 40,000 people since 2019. Even a conservative estimate of how many were engineers, and distribution of junior and senior roles. I think it is fair to say they probably had enough people to draw meaningful conclusions. Perhaps individual teams, with careful hiring practices and team fit interviews can make sure juniors thrive even in a remote position. But on average, larger companies cannot be only staffed by super teams, and sometimes that means some people suffer to make sure the median employee has the best chance to succeed. Its not too far from having junior limited to some staging environments instead of production. Some juniors might be ready for the big leagues, but giving the keys of prod to any junior will probably cause some headaches on companies with 80,000 employees like Meta.

parzivalm 4y ago

> Juniors and interns really strugle in a remote environment. Blanket statements like this are trying to make a multifaceted problem into a single problem. I don't understand why we are always so quick to say underperforming remote junior engineers are underperforming because of remote work. Maybe the problem was Meta went half in on supporting remote as an onboarding ramp and teams did not put the work in to make sure Juniors thrived in a remote environment. Speaking from experience, If you are truly trying to be a remote company, you adjust as needed to support new employees, junior or not.

krona 4y ago
If that means only hiring at half the rate because of the longer onboarding ritual then that's a good a reason as any not to do remote onboarding for some companies.
myth_drannon 4y ago
But Meta is famous for its "Sink or Swim" cut-throat culture.
papito 4y ago
How many people out there randomly zoom with their former coworkers that they never met in real life, after leaving their job? Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment. Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"? Do companies take a productivity hit when people are in the office? Probably. And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery.
- parzivalm 4y ago
  > Your 20s are a critical time for your career to make connections and friendships - in person. You need to be around people, making friends over beers and community lunches, and learning social skills in a professional environment. No one is saying you don't need to be around people, but a job can be just a job. I don't need to make a ton of friends at work to do my job, and the idea that that should be a requirement/expectation needs to stop. It enables the chance for too many unhealthy boundaries to be created young workers that don't know any better. If you start in your early 20's and are made to see everyone as friends, family, etc. Then when someone tries to push you into a 12 hour day, it doesn't seem that bad. You can forge working/professional relationships virtually just as well, if you put the effort in. Now sure it doesn't work for everyone, but again my argument isn't that one is worse than the other, it is just that we make too many blanket statements. What works for you might not work for me, and these organizations trying to force one or the other is harmful in the end. You can have co-existence, especially in a company the size of Meta, you can have a plenty successful office presence and remote presence. > Are we that spoiled that the excuse is "I don't like public transportation"? I don't think anyone said that in this thread... That being said, it shouldn't be a surprising fact that people in US cities dislike public transportation. In a previous job of mine, it was quicker to sit in 45 minutes of traffic outside of Washington DC then take the metro, and I was in an area with supposedly great access to public transit. Maybe if all these companies were serious about their workers' best interests they would do more to help invest in and lobby local governments to support public transportation. > And many openly acknowledge that, but asking people to come to the office two times a week is not some sort of wage slavery. If you were hired with the expectation to come into the office x number of days, that is fine. A lot of people were hired with the promise of being able to work remote, so changing that is where it tends to be a bit of a bad situation. In general this animosity between office work and remote work advocates has gotten out of hand. These can co-exist.