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The internet has existed since before I was in college, so I also "grew up" on the internet. But you're vastly overestimating what you can learn from randos in

• broast 4y ago
  Your take is very dismissive and does not align with my experience. We work on complicated technical high value things and my juniors are very fast learners. And we learn from each other and not necessarily from the internet. We also don't need video calls. I have never met them, and rarely have I seen their faces. Kind of like my life long friends on the internet, we didn't have video calls then either. We can connect through text just fine. We sometimes play games together to blow off the steam, and we collaborate on meaningful work problems.
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • timr 4y ago
    > Your take is very dismissive and does not align with my experience. It's not "dismissive" to tell you that I think you're wrong. I'm trying to explain something that you clearly haven't experienced yet. There's no way to do that without actually saying that you haven't experienced it. I understand why you believe what you do. I believed the same things, but I was wrong.
    • frumper 4y ago
      Your explanation is not much more than "trust me, I'm right". That is quite dismissive. Maybe you if you were in person you could give him examples or a better explanation of why he's wrong. /s
      • timr 4y ago
        The irony here is that asserting that nobody else can be correct if they don't "validate" you is the definition of dismissiveness. I have actually done what OP is proposing, and found it to be inadequate. I tried to explain why.
        • danaris 4y ago
          Others are saying "This thing works for me." You are claiming "This thing never works (and therefore your own experience is wrong)." The person making a categorical claim has a higher burden of proof than the one making an individual one, especially when the former is attempting to invalidate the lived experience of the latter.
          • timr 4y ago
            > You are claiming "This thing never works (and therefore your own experience is wrong)." I am literally not doing that. Go back and re-read my comment.
• oytis 4y ago
  In remote work environment you're not learning from randos, you're learning from the same experienced colleagues, just remotely.
  • timr 4y ago
    Maybe, but it's so much harder. Even now, after many years of doing it, I find it much harder to connect with people whom I only see online.
    • oytis 4y ago
      I never was able to make a clean experiment with the same people in-person vs remote, but subjectively I didn't find it harder. It might even be easier to have a one-to-one chat with a person you want to chat to in the remote environment than in a chaotic open space office. Not to say remote work gives you exposure to people you might not have exposure to in your country/city at all.
    • danaris 4y ago
      This is a you problem. It is not an everybody problem. Sure, there are other people who struggle in the same way, but your experiences are not universal, and you are arrogantly preaching at people as if they are—as if because you couldn't do this, obviously no one can.
      • deleted 4y ago
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    • FredPret 4y ago
      You know what is so much harder than that? Putting millions of people within driving distance of one another, and then jumping through various hoops to make that ridiculous urban plan work, and demanding people spend 5-15 hours a week commuting in unhealthy, dangerous, dirty, and expensive ways.
    • throwaway675309 4y ago
      "Maybe, but it's so much harder... for me". Fixed that for you. For people who lean towards an autodidactic approach, this might not be as universally applicable as you make it out to be. In my experience, remote code pairing sessions can be even more productive because each dev has their own dedicated screens and don't have to look over one's shoulder.
• ryanjshaw 4y ago
  I grew up in a small dusty town in the middle of an African desert. I taught myself everything I know from the web, IRC and forums. I was top of numerous IS and CS classes at university. In my professional career, I've learned the most from colleagues who happened to be overseas. I almost never do video calls. I make sure to spend a lot of time mentoring via screen share and encourage recordings (many times this is way more useful than an in-person session where the details are forgotten). High quality learning relationships can be entirely remote and text/screen-share based.
  • hacoo 4y ago
    I agree with this. Screen sharing is a very effective way to transfer knowledge — I have had a lot of success by hopping onto a screen share and walking others through things. There is lots of room for questions and they can record/review the meeting too. However, this requires a culture where impromptu calls are expected and normalized. The more friction there is from scheduling, waiting for people to respond, etc the less likely these kind of fast information transfer sessions are to happen. Tldr, I think people can learn very effectively in a remote environment, it just requires that people put the same kind of time into communicating that they would in an office.
• amatecha 4y ago
  Connections/network are indeed fundamental to career growth and learning, accomplishments, etc.. but those don't have to be in-person at all. I mean, I have been learning, building new things, making connections with new people, and I've been 100% remote for the past 3 years. There has been no discernible adverse effect on any career-related criterion I can think of. The literal only downside for me is not being in the super-awesome building I got to work in before, and maybe random off-topic chatter with people. I have that "off-topic chatter" on chat/videocall now, which is just fine anyways. And I don't have to donate 1-2 hours a day to my employer by driving to/from an office.
• Tarball10 4y ago
  You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is available online. Not to mention the numerous open-source projects you can learn from and contribute to, which are essentially "fully remote" distributed teams that have been working effectively for years. The larger open-source projects can also be great for networking through their forums/chat rooms/online discussions. Those "randos" are building software that is literally the underlying infrastructure of almost all commercial software being built today. And, anecdotally, a lot of software jobs are building generic CRUD apps, and a lot of "senior colleagues" are not necessarily great teachers, or even great developers. In scenarios like those, you can do a lot better teaching yourself online with lessons or learning/contributing to the aforementioned open-source projects. It's not just about in-person vs online, but the quality of the team/project you're learning from.
  • timr 4y ago
    > You can absolutely do better than "moderately competent junior" from online learning. I feel like you're ignoring huge swaths of high-quality technical education that is available online. I am not, but my definition of junior/senior/whatever is likely different than your own. At the risk of a truism: can you learn technical things online? Yes, absolutely. It's the kind of things you can't learn from a web forum that make the difference between junior and senior. Just as a simple example, most stuff you'll read about conflict resolution (people, not code) online is superficial and trite. You can get maybe a bit more from books, but to really learn how to do it, you need to spend time watching someone who is talented at managing interpersonal conflict. I'm not great at it, but I've had the good fortune of spending time with people, in person, who were truly gifted at the task. It completely re-framed my expectations for what is possible. Maybe there's a way to do this by video call -- but it's harder -- and you're definitely not getting the human experience by reading or watching a video.
    • ipaddr 4y ago
      If you read Oracle's "Ask Tom" entire comment section history you will pick up more senior tips than you ever would working in person.
• deleted 4y ago
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• bcrosby95 4y ago
  I'm curious, did you grow up on it? Or was it just there? Of my good friends, a majority of them were met online and very rarely have we met in person - maybe a couple dozen times over the past 25 years. I don't particularly care which way companies go since there will always be remote-first options: there were many before the pandemic, and there will only be more after. But from my experience a large problem is companies just aren't used to doing what it takes to help relationships develop in a remote only environment. They aren't used to it because when you co-habitate with people it happens more naturally. But it takes more deliberate choices for it to happen remotely. I wouldn't point to this to call remote "harder". Just different. There's also all sorts of other difficulties with respect to being in an office that you don't have to deal with remotely. And ultimately, some will prefer one or another. Which is fine.
• alfalfasprout 4y ago
  > Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. You're getting a biased sample, and don't know what you don't know. With all due respect, you're just projecting your own experience and being dismissive in the process. A ton of foundational work in modern computing was done in a distributed fashion and continues to work that way. In fact, open source software development hinges on distributed development. Now, what I do agree on is that interpersonal connections with other, more experienced folks, is key. Most engineers seem to quickly plateau on their soft skills. I always say that coding is the easy part of software engineering. You can teach anyone to code. It's strategic and critical thinking and how to present and communicate those ideas that make you stand out. However, it's very much possible to get those connections in a remote world. But it means deliberately operating in a way conducive to getting that face time. I wouldn't say it's much harder. But the company needs to actively focus on this.
  • timr 4y ago
    > With all due respect, you're just projecting your own experience and being dismissive in the process. A ton of foundational work in modern computing was done in a distributed fashion and continues to work that way This has nothing to do with what I wrote. Whether or not people work "in a distributed fashion" is unrelated to whether or not those people have a team they see in person on a regular basis, contribute to public forums and chatrooms, or advance in their careers via collaboration with colleagues. For what it's worth, most professional developers don't contribute to open-source on any regular basis. The ones that do often work in big companies, which then choose to open-source their work. Regardless, working in "a distributed fashion" is not the same thing is posting to forums that other people can see. And it's a rare company where everything you need to know is captured in public code. Usually that's just the table stakes -- the most valuable engineers are walking around with encyclopedic business knowledge in their heads. The core fallacy I am rebutting here is that everything you need to know is just out there, freely available on the internet. Even in the open-source world, that isn't true.
    • broast 4y ago
      This actually has nothing to do with public forums. That was your insertion. The point is that the way we interacted with public or private niche communities on the internet informs how we interact with our private always-online work-chat. We're learning from and working with highly qualified coworkers aligned on the same problems, not randos.
• manicennui 4y ago
  "Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums." Chatrooms, forums, IRC, and mailing lists are how the vast majority of open source software is developed. Usenet used to be big for this sort of thing as well. Most of the people working on open source are also employed in the industry. Are these people going to spoon feed you everything you need to know? Of course not. The vast majority of insightful information I've learned about software engineering has come from books and people online. My current employer briefly employed some well known people in the Ruby community, but for the most part, most of us work with people who just see this as a job, and these sort of people seem determined to relearn every lesson and reinvent every wheel.
• tough 4y ago
  > Most of the best, highly experienced people in this industry never post in chatrooms or forums. And yet here we are on a public forum where the brightest minds on our industry regularly post.
• dang 4y ago
  Can you please edit personal swipes out of your comments here? You triggered a bunch of people unnecessarily by failing to do that with this one. I appreciate that you do this less than you used to (thank you!) but it's still a problem. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  • timr 4y ago
    I didn't make a "personal swipe". I assume you're speaking about this? > But this will only take you from absolute noob to moderately competent junior. I was referring to myself here, which I elaborated in the third paragraph. > I say this from hard experience. At the start of my career, I thought I could learn everything I needed to know on the internet. I was wrong. Even if most of the technical details were there (they weren't) and correct (they aren't), in every career, your accomplishments are based on your personal relationships. Always. I can't emphasize this enough. My comment was made in good faith.
    • dang 4y ago
      I was referring to "[you] don't know what you don't know." It's patronizing and comes across as dismissive to tell someone what they don't know. Re-reading your comment I think you perhaps didn't mean the "you" as specifically the person you were talking to. So I can see how it wasn't intended as personal attack. Unfortunately it ended up coming across that way both to the GP and to me when I first read it, so probably to others as well. On the plus side, I appreciate that you were simply trying to share your personal experience and the conclusions it has led you to. That's totally valid. On the minus side, you reacted to people objecting to what they felt was dismissive in your comment by getting into a flamewar-style spat about what you did and didn't say. That kind of thread just slowly degrades. As you know, I've been asking you to adjust to HN more in the intended spirit of curious conversation for years now. I genuinely appreciate how much better your comments have gotten at that. You contribute a lot of good things when you do. But if you could calibrate say 10% further in the same direction, that would be helpful.