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As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career, this does not match my experienc

As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career, this does not match my experience. Perhaps it’s the organizations I’ve been at, or the field I’m in, but I have had no issues getting feedback or up to speed on things. Stuff like code review, which the article mentions, benefit in no way from in-person vs remote work set-ups. Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. The only junior employees that I’ve seen struggle in with remote work are those who 1) are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee 2) don’t even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn’t work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1) 3) Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It’s easy to ask for feedback, or for problems that you can work on, or if you can pair with someone else on a problem they are working on so you can get some experience. None of that is really enabled or disabled by working from office/remote. If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college. There are students I knew that were successful using resources that aren’t handed to them, like the internet. Others seemed to exclusively study via study groups, study guides, and going to the professor/TA during office hours, and without these. Once you enter the work force, the second kind of student has those resources pulled out from underneath them and very quickly has to learn to be the first kind of student, or they will struggle. I think remote vs in office doesn’t make much of a difference for the first kind, but in office feels more like a stop-gap for the second kind until they become more senior and acclimate. That’s just speculation on my part though, and is exclusively based on my limited experience and field.

croutonwagon 3y ago
>If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college. I am not so sure on that. But I have seen similar throughout my years. More and more I am coming to the conclusion this is one of those "some people are wired a certain way, others are not". I have seen plenty of highly "educated" folks lacking terribly in skillsets. I have seen the same for those with no education. As an instructor as well, it skews similar with the students I have seen. Some just have a "fire" and work through issues, others will just give up at the first sign of issue (I am talking "I couldnt figure out key based auth, so i did nothing". I have tried to get folks to take personal ownership in products and deliverables, to varying degrees of success. In the past I was ardently against "silos" of responsibility but ultimately this led to some taking no ownership stake in any products. So we have had to transition to "assigning" primary, secondary, tertiary responsibility to services/products. This helped a little bit but also led to some then just bringing in personal excuses. Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that folks have varying capacity for load/projects and how much they are simultaneously work/support. As well as varying capacity to be able to work indepedantly vs need more guidance/check-ins on stuff. I try and cater to whats needed to get the most out of them and understand not everyone is a rockstar that can just take a challenge and come back with solutions. Even still, it can be tricky managing that withing intra-team dynamics.
alistairSH 3y ago
As a manager, it's not the day-to-day that concerns me the most. It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected. Edit - I can't really quantify the above, so maybe it's not really a thing. But, personally, I miss those conversations and worry that new/young employees aren't able to have them.
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  > It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected. I've worked in the tech for more than 2 decades, in different countries. I've worked for startups, for FAANG, and for companies of different sizes in between. I've built successful projects and saw my share of failures. I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game yesterday?" sort. This "water-cooler effect" myth that is repeated often as if it was fact, and that completely puzzles me. Those important conversation you mentioned, for me, always happened online even when I was in the office, normally through slack discussions (or email threads in the old days).
  - 1-6 3y ago
    Certain teams thrive off of word-of-mouth data flowing across. I've experienced both type of work environments. Usually, people may casually walk over to the area where the office gossip happens to get some info. It doesn't have to be a magical hallway or a water cooler.
  - WalterSear 3y ago
    I've seen it. But, it never seemed to make any difference to what I was actually given leeway to implement on the job. It's like sideprojects and github repos during a job search - everyone says they are important, everyone thinks they are important, but at the end of the day, very few decision makers are willing to put in the time and risk of involving them in the process of their work.
BlargMcLarg 3y ago
It is culture in about every form. Education isn't actively made to teach people to be independent. Work culture for the past X decades has been pushing people to be dependent on each other directly. Social culture has pushed people to be dependent on work to fulfill various needs beyond a paycheck. And despite us catering towards the open office for multiple decades, we are still seeing it is barely on par with an ad-hoc WFH call while other things are going awry. Anyone with any kind of perspective can tell these comparisons aren't remotely fair.
sagebird 3y ago
The idea that you can make up for being remote by being proactive proves the counterpoint. You seem to be a top performer— the kind of person that someone higher up but perhaps not directly related to you -would pull to the side and have you work on something more important, if you were in the office, because the office is where non-organizational-chart-directed-actions take place. It can even be as simple/stupid as an idiot in a suit asking “are you good at computers” while in an elevator. You fix their idiotic excel problem that they could have googled, then you end up in charge of some thing they want to build. I understand that this represents a bit of disfunction - but I believe this is reality.
returningfory2 3y ago
> Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. In your comment you say you haven't worked in-office much. So, genuine question, how do you know feedback doesn't benefit from being in-office? I think this relevant because in my experience (1.5 years remote because of COVID), the benefits of being in the office often aren't apparent when you're out of the office. For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed. If I wasn't in the office I wouldn't even know I had missed these conversations.
- BlargMcLarg 3y ago
  >For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. Taken to the extreme, they even create a state of helplessness in others, where these individuals become a funnel for all others to ask questions and obtain knowledge from. This is without accounting for all the noise pollution it creates. Opponents are very eager to pull out these 'what about the office talks?' arguments, but whether the benefits even outweigh the downsides isn't obvious at all. Heck, most developer work cultures use Scrum, and they can't even work through a single item on their retrospectives. Surely a bit of skepticism is warranted.
  - tivert 3y ago
    >> For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed > Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more difficult, like someone humming at their desk. It's sort of like someone who writes a bunch of useless unit tests. The solution isn't for the team to scrap unit testing, it's for that person to be coached to not do that. One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of stuff that can happen organically in an office into intentional practices that require discipline, which means they're a lot easier to neglect.
908B64B197 3y ago
> are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee > don't even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn't work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1) > Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job. Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).
Extasia785 3y ago
As a junior that also just started before COVID forced everyone into remote, my experience has been that team culture is the deciding factor. I've always been extremely vocal in communicating ideas, acquiring feedback and asking for help digitally, but my experience has been split for the two teams I've been yet. The first team was just set up as the pandemic hit and thus had all collaboration happen online. This created structures that fit a remote-first approach and even worked after work got hybrid again. All important discussion happened online, we had ways to spontaneously get help and enough formats to get creative. And it worked, I never felt left out, all blockers for everyone got cleared as fast as you would expect and feedback cycles were good. I can't say the same about my second team however. While it's officially hybrid, I'd say 70% are coming into the office every day, while the other 30% (me included) work basically exclusively remote. And it isn't working well, the office people just have their own bubble. They exchange ideas and communicate offline and it's hard to be part of that. I tried integrating digital tools, I tried talking about it, but it just doesn't work. I can plant seeds for new ideas, I can ask for feedback, but the second I communicate it to the office bubble, I'm not part of it anymore. This isn't intentional obviously, but when they talk about stuff at the coffee machine or during lunch, the idea will start developing by itself, while I have no way to take part in it. And who can blame them? If you have a good idea during lunch, why should they not talk about it? And who wants to provide an official protocol for the remote workers about lunch discussions? And then when I then try to talk about the idea a few days later, I always notice that it advanced without any possibility for me to participate. This sucks obviously, because it massively diminishes my influence to bring in and grow my ideas. And while I do get feedback when I ask for it directly, I have noticed that barely anyone actively informs you about the small 1% stuff that you can improve. Which doesn't sound bad, but if you miss an 1% improvement every week, even in a year it will amount to a big enough sum to matter. And I think these 2 things do massively influence a career. You need to be the face of a bunch of good ideas if you want any kind of soft power. You do need the small informal feedback someone gives you when getting a coffee, if you want to be the top 10%. And in some hybrid organizations, you will miss out on that.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  The office people here actually are actively politicking against the remote people whether they realize it or not. If you were their boss they would have no choice about keeping you in the loop on lunch conversations. This sort of thing is definitely a problem with many "hybrid" situations.
jayd16 3y ago
For 3) the difference with in office work is that the manager can passively check in on how someone is doing. Just casually checking someone's posture from across an office you can tell if they're struggling or not. Forcing a video call is a lot more formal and just doesn't have the same effect. People will attempt to present a cool demeanor. Someone who's doing great and is fully self sufficient in office can probably crank out code form home just fine... its the cases where people are struggling or need to collaborate in an non-formal way that I think in office helps the most.
opportune 3y ago
I’ve been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are not self starters or need lots of help are not doing well. That first group is able to (IMO) progress just as well as they would in-office because they know when to reach out for help, fix things on their own without help, etc. The second group may or may not be better served by in-office work. In some cases there are language barriers that make things challenging and I expect more in-office communication would reduce these. But I think a much bigger help would be for these people to be able to watch more experienced employees work and operate (both in terms of learning specific tools/processes for doing things, and the soft skills like when those other workers reach out for help, how they do so). Both of these assume they want to do better though; I don’t think WFO would help truly disengaged juniors. So basically, I completely agree with you and I think the distinction is important. FWIW, I think people who progress in their career and become valuable employees quickly tend to almost always fall in the first group anyway.

croutonwagon 3y ago

>If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school/college. I am not so sure on that. But I have seen similar throughout my years. More and more I am coming to the conclusion this is one of those "some people are wired a certain way, others are not". I have seen plenty of highly "educated" folks lacking terribly in skillsets. I have seen the same for those with no education. As an instructor as well, it skews similar with the students I have seen. Some just have a "fire" and work through issues, others will just give up at the first sign of issue (I am talking "I couldnt figure out key based auth, so i did nothing". I have tried to get folks to take personal ownership in products and deliverables, to varying degrees of success. In the past I was ardently against "silos" of responsibility but ultimately this led to some taking no ownership stake in any products. So we have had to transition to "assigning" primary, secondary, tertiary responsibility to services/products. This helped a little bit but also led to some then just bringing in personal excuses. Ultimately I have come to the conclusion that folks have varying capacity for load/projects and how much they are simultaneously work/support. As well as varying capacity to be able to work indepedantly vs need more guidance/check-ins on stuff. I try and cater to whats needed to get the most out of them and understand not everyone is a rockstar that can just take a challenge and come back with solutions. Even still, it can be tricky managing that withing intra-team dynamics.

alistairSH 3y ago

As a manager, it's not the day-to-day that concerns me the most. It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected. Edit - I can't really quantify the above, so maybe it's not really a thing. But, personally, I miss those conversations and worry that new/young employees aren't able to have them.

surgical_fire 3y ago
> It's the loss of water-cooler chat with people not on the junior employee's team. Not the random "did you catch the game yesterday" stuff. But, the "team x started using tool Y" or "we're using ML to solve for Z" - the little tidbits that might spur a curious employee to go do something unexpected. I've worked in the tech for more than 2 decades, in different countries. I've worked for startups, for FAANG, and for companies of different sizes in between. I've built successful projects and saw my share of failures. I've never saw this water-cooler experience you mentioned. It's always small talk of the "Did you see the game yesterday?" sort. This "water-cooler effect" myth that is repeated often as if it was fact, and that completely puzzles me. Those important conversation you mentioned, for me, always happened online even when I was in the office, normally through slack discussions (or email threads in the old days).
- 1-6 3y ago
  Certain teams thrive off of word-of-mouth data flowing across. I've experienced both type of work environments. Usually, people may casually walk over to the area where the office gossip happens to get some info. It doesn't have to be a magical hallway or a water cooler.
- WalterSear 3y ago
  I've seen it. But, it never seemed to make any difference to what I was actually given leeway to implement on the job. It's like sideprojects and github repos during a job search - everyone says they are important, everyone thinks they are important, but at the end of the day, very few decision makers are willing to put in the time and risk of involving them in the process of their work.

BlargMcLarg 3y ago

It is culture in about every form. Education isn't actively made to teach people to be independent. Work culture for the past X decades has been pushing people to be dependent on each other directly. Social culture has pushed people to be dependent on work to fulfill various needs beyond a paycheck. And despite us catering towards the open office for multiple decades, we are still seeing it is barely on par with an ad-hoc WFH call while other things are going awry. Anyone with any kind of perspective can tell these comparisons aren't remotely fair.

sagebird 3y ago

The idea that you can make up for being remote by being proactive proves the counterpoint. You seem to be a top performer— the kind of person that someone higher up but perhaps not directly related to you -would pull to the side and have you work on something more important, if you were in the office, because the office is where non-organizational-chart-directed-actions take place. It can even be as simple/stupid as an idiot in a suit asking “are you good at computers” while in an elevator. You fix their idiotic excel problem that they could have googled, then you end up in charge of some thing they want to build. I understand that this represents a bit of disfunction - but I believe this is reality.

returningfory2 3y ago

> Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. In your comment you say you haven't worked in-office much. So, genuine question, how do you know feedback doesn't benefit from being in-office? I think this relevant because in my experience (1.5 years remote because of COVID), the benefits of being in the office often aren't apparent when you're out of the office. For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed. If I wasn't in the office I wouldn't even know I had missed these conversations.

BlargMcLarg 3y ago
>For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. Taken to the extreme, they even create a state of helplessness in others, where these individuals become a funnel for all others to ask questions and obtain knowledge from. This is without accounting for all the noise pollution it creates. Opponents are very eager to pull out these 'what about the office talks?' arguments, but whether the benefits even outweigh the downsides isn't obvious at all. Heck, most developer work cultures use Scrum, and they can't even work through a single item on their retrospectives. Surely a bit of skepticism is warranted.
- tivert 3y ago
  >> For example, in work I regularly overhear O(2 minute) conversations in which co-workers talk about edge cases in our system that I didn't realize existed > Counterpoint: there are types which really like to insert themselves in every conversation or discussion. To the point it hampers not just their own work, but the work of everyone else. That's not really counterpoint, it's just a occasional problem behavior of some individuals that remote makes more difficult, like someone humming at their desk. It's sort of like someone who writes a bunch of useless unit tests. The solution isn't for the team to scrap unit testing, it's for that person to be coached to not do that. One big problem with remote is that it makes a whole lot of stuff that can happen organically in an office into intentional practices that require discipline, which means they're a lot easier to neglect.

908B64B197 3y ago

> are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee > don't even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn't work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1) > Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job. Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).

Extasia785 3y ago

As a junior that also just started before COVID forced everyone into remote, my experience has been that team culture is the deciding factor. I've always been extremely vocal in communicating ideas, acquiring feedback and asking for help digitally, but my experience has been split for the two teams I've been yet. The first team was just set up as the pandemic hit and thus had all collaboration happen online. This created structures that fit a remote-first approach and even worked after work got hybrid again. All important discussion happened online, we had ways to spontaneously get help and enough formats to get creative. And it worked, I never felt left out, all blockers for everyone got cleared as fast as you would expect and feedback cycles were good. I can't say the same about my second team however. While it's officially hybrid, I'd say 70% are coming into the office every day, while the other 30% (me included) work basically exclusively remote. And it isn't working well, the office people just have their own bubble. They exchange ideas and communicate offline and it's hard to be part of that. I tried integrating digital tools, I tried talking about it, but it just doesn't work. I can plant seeds for new ideas, I can ask for feedback, but the second I communicate it to the office bubble, I'm not part of it anymore. This isn't intentional obviously, but when they talk about stuff at the coffee machine or during lunch, the idea will start developing by itself, while I have no way to take part in it. And who can blame them? If you have a good idea during lunch, why should they not talk about it? And who wants to provide an official protocol for the remote workers about lunch discussions? And then when I then try to talk about the idea a few days later, I always notice that it advanced without any possibility for me to participate. This sucks obviously, because it massively diminishes my influence to bring in and grow my ideas. And while I do get feedback when I ask for it directly, I have noticed that barely anyone actively informs you about the small 1% stuff that you can improve. Which doesn't sound bad, but if you miss an 1% improvement every week, even in a year it will amount to a big enough sum to matter. And I think these 2 things do massively influence a career. You need to be the face of a bunch of good ideas if you want any kind of soft power. You do need the small informal feedback someone gives you when getting a coffee, if you want to be the top 10%. And in some hybrid organizations, you will miss out on that.

ilaksh 3y ago
The office people here actually are actively politicking against the remote people whether they realize it or not. If you were their boss they would have no choice about keeping you in the loop on lunch conversations. This sort of thing is definitely a problem with many "hybrid" situations.

jayd16 3y ago

For 3) the difference with in office work is that the manager can passively check in on how someone is doing. Just casually checking someone's posture from across an office you can tell if they're struggling or not. Forcing a video call is a lot more formal and just doesn't have the same effect. People will attempt to present a cool demeanor. Someone who's doing great and is fully self sufficient in office can probably crank out code form home just fine... its the cases where people are struggling or need to collaborate in an non-formal way that I think in office helps the most.

opportune 3y ago

I’ve been mentoring and TLing junior employees remotely and it matches your experience. Self starters are fine, people who are not self starters or need lots of help are not doing well. That first group is able to (IMO) progress just as well as they would in-office because they know when to reach out for help, fix things on their own without help, etc. The second group may or may not be better served by in-office work. In some cases there are language barriers that make things challenging and I expect more in-office communication would reduce these. But I think a much bigger help would be for these people to be able to watch more experienced employees work and operate (both in terms of learning specific tools/processes for doing things, and the soft skills like when those other workers reach out for help, how they do so). Both of these assume they want to do better though; I don’t think WFO would help truly disengaged juniors. So basically, I completely agree with you and I think the distinction is important. FWIW, I think people who progress in their career and become valuable employees quickly tend to almost always fall in the first group anyway.