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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. An

by broast 3y 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 3y ago
[deleted]
timr 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
        pbhjpbhj 3y ago
        The impression you gave me matches that quote you dismiss relatively well. Perhaps you should also re-read it, you may have carried less of the nuance you intended into the actual text. What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a moderate capability without in-person mentoring from experts. If nothing else this heavily insinuates those you're conversing with are incapable and inexpert.
        timr 3y ago
        > What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a moderate capability without in-person mentoring from experts. Like I said, it's hard to frame "you don't have this life experience yet" in any other way. I did use these words: > this will only take you from absolute noob to moderately competent junior ...in reference to learning stuff online. I stand by that, because even if you are fully remote for your entire career, you're going to need some level of mentoring to level up. That's just a fact. Reductio ad absurdum: suggesting that you can become John Carmack or Jeff Dean by reading Stack Overflow. But I also explicitly put an edit on the end of it where I disclaim the generalization you're making -- before you made your comment.
        ipaddr 3y ago
        You can become better than Jeff Dean or John Carmack without mentoring in fact mentoring is negatively associated with self learning which you will need to blaze a new trail.
- broast 3y ago
  I personally have experienced it, but my team has only seen greater success since going remote, and filling our roles with good remote fits. I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a meaningful text-only relationship over years or haven't treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it
  - timr 3y ago
    > I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a meaningful text-only relationship over years and treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it See, this is dismissive. You're assuming something about me. I'm not assuming anything about you -- I'm just saying, you clearly haven't been bitten by this yet. I have, and I'm trying to share that experience. When I was younger, just like you, I thought I had discovered a new way of working. To a certain extent, that was true. You can do a lot of things remotely. But the best things in my own career, without exception, have come from in-person relationships.
    - broast 3y ago
      Well, I am sorry for that. But just to add - it's a misconception to see remote work as a "new way" of working for someone like me. For someone like me, who used chatrooms and forums to collaborate with people on programming and similar projects, remote work is returning back to my natural way of doing things. Going to the office for 10 years was unnatural. We have now cut out a lot of overhead of learning how to manage office life, which is only relevant if you have an office, and which was a hard part of my life (I'm ugly). And my experience is simply the opposite of yours. My strengths and my teammates strengths have only come to shine since going remote. I only became a Team Lead and then Engineering Manager since we've gone fully remote, and I think it is largely in part thanks to the speed and effectiveness my remote teams achieve in on-boarding members, collaborating, and delivering valuable work. Every retro my team members put "Great teamwork!" on the board, and this only started since we've gone remote.
      - timr 3y ago
- paulrpotts 3y ago
  I'm 55 years old and I have _never_ been mentored in person by a co-worker, despite having spent most of my career working on teams, and despite _trying_ in many different workplaces to set up mentoring relationships. For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that normies experience, but we don't, and it's also a minefield of things that can go wrong because the norms of social interaction sometimes elude us or we simply can't play-act them (I'll never forget being told by my boss that it always seemed like I was lying because I didn't maintain eye contact well). Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in person.
  - FredPret 3y ago
    Normie here, and I've always thought this was the biggest benefit of remote work. No more emphasis on what you look and act like. Only the value you add counts. This has got to be good for racial, gender, etc forms of discrimination. In a wheelchair? Black? Female? Ideally nobody would care because they wouldn't even know.
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    I'm a couple of years older than you and I agree with most of this. Never had a "mentor" though lip service was paid to the concept in a few places, it never really happened in the tech positions. "Team-building" stuff -- outings, retreats, games, that all the business folks seemed to love were painfully awkward experiences that seemed to be totally contrived. I tried to fake that I was enjoying it but pretty sure I never pulled it off very well.
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      I’m shocked that people worked in an office together and the junior person never got mentored. It seems like if that was your goal that you’d have to go well out of your way to avoid accidentally mentoring someone. “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.” “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.” “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?” I can’t imagine how I’d setup an in-person work arrangement to avoid mentoring.

by broast 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

timr 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
      - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
        The impression you gave me matches that quote you dismiss relatively well. Perhaps you should also re-read it, you may have carried less of the nuance you intended into the actual text. What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a moderate capability without in-person mentoring from experts. If nothing else this heavily insinuates those you're conversing with are incapable and inexpert.
        timr 3y ago
        > What you wrote suggested that one can only attain a moderate capability without in-person mentoring from experts. Like I said, it's hard to frame "you don't have this life experience yet" in any other way. I did use these words: > this will only take you from absolute noob to moderately competent junior ...in reference to learning stuff online. I stand by that, because even if you are fully remote for your entire career, you're going to need some level of mentoring to level up. That's just a fact. Reductio ad absurdum: suggesting that you can become John Carmack or Jeff Dean by reading Stack Overflow. But I also explicitly put an edit on the end of it where I disclaim the generalization you're making -- before you made your comment.
        ipaddr 3y ago
        You can become better than Jeff Dean or John Carmack without mentoring in fact mentoring is negatively associated with self learning which you will need to blaze a new trail.
broast 3y ago
I personally have experienced it, but my team has only seen greater success since going remote, and filling our roles with good remote fits. I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a meaningful text-only relationship over years or haven't treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it
- timr 3y ago
  > I might say if you haven't experienced carrying a meaningful text-only relationship over years and treated it equal to your "real life" relationships, then you can not know the effectiveness that comes from it See, this is dismissive. You're assuming something about me. I'm not assuming anything about you -- I'm just saying, you clearly haven't been bitten by this yet. I have, and I'm trying to share that experience. When I was younger, just like you, I thought I had discovered a new way of working. To a certain extent, that was true. You can do a lot of things remotely. But the best things in my own career, without exception, have come from in-person relationships.
  - broast 3y ago
    Well, I am sorry for that. But just to add - it's a misconception to see remote work as a "new way" of working for someone like me. For someone like me, who used chatrooms and forums to collaborate with people on programming and similar projects, remote work is returning back to my natural way of doing things. Going to the office for 10 years was unnatural. We have now cut out a lot of overhead of learning how to manage office life, which is only relevant if you have an office, and which was a hard part of my life (I'm ugly). And my experience is simply the opposite of yours. My strengths and my teammates strengths have only come to shine since going remote. I only became a Team Lead and then Engineering Manager since we've gone fully remote, and I think it is largely in part thanks to the speed and effectiveness my remote teams achieve in on-boarding members, collaborating, and delivering valuable work. Every retro my team members put "Great teamwork!" on the board, and this only started since we've gone remote.
    - timr 3y ago
paulrpotts 3y ago
I'm 55 years old and I have _never_ been mentored in person by a co-worker, despite having spent most of my career working on teams, and despite _trying_ in many different workplaces to set up mentoring relationships. For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that normies experience, but we don't, and it's also a minefield of things that can go wrong because the norms of social interaction sometimes elude us or we simply can't play-act them (I'll never forget being told by my boss that it always seemed like I was lying because I didn't maintain eye contact well). Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in person.
- FredPret 3y ago
  Normie here, and I've always thought this was the biggest benefit of remote work. No more emphasis on what you look and act like. Only the value you add counts. This has got to be good for racial, gender, etc forms of discrimination. In a wheelchair? Black? Female? Ideally nobody would care because they wouldn't even know.
- SoftTalker 3y ago
  I'm a couple of years older than you and I agree with most of this. Never had a "mentor" though lip service was paid to the concept in a few places, it never really happened in the tech positions. "Team-building" stuff -- outings, retreats, games, that all the business folks seemed to love were painfully awkward experiences that seemed to be totally contrived. I tried to fake that I was enjoying it but pretty sure I never pulled it off very well.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    I’m shocked that people worked in an office together and the junior person never got mentored. It seems like if that was your goal that you’d have to go well out of your way to avoid accidentally mentoring someone. “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.” “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.” “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?” I can’t imagine how I’d setup an in-person work arrangement to avoid mentoring.