6 ms·

I keep saying this — as a fairly senior engineer, remote has basically blocked me from actually doing many of the things that made me good at my job. I don't h

by pdpi 3y ago

I keep saying this — as a fairly senior engineer, remote has basically blocked me from actually doing many of the things that made me good at my job. I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people. Fundamentally, information is the biggest asset you can have on the job, and I lost access to all the information that came from organic, unstructured, ad-hoc, and often passive interactions. Unfortunately, the more structured, proactive alternatives cost a lot more of my time and effort, so it's all around less effective.

hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
That's perfectly fine and you can be 100% sure you will find an employer who will be happy to have an employee like you. Many other senior engineers, however, are different and prefer to work in a more structured way. For example, I regularly have scheduled meetings with juniors where we discuss their current work. I make sure they feel at ease and speak their mind so I instantly see when they go wrong. And I make sure everybody in my time has time aside in our calendars for the main work - and that time is the same for all team. We are regularly praised by the management and our teams for how effective we are. And we meet in person every 3 months or so.
- mm007emko 3y ago
  Same here.
Nurw 3y ago
Have you tried having an always on video meeting for your team? Our team was fairly similar, and for a time felt like we lost a lot during the lockdown. But an always on team-video meeting really saved us. It has its drawbacks, interruptions become a lot more disruptive and emoting is harder with a smaller face, but there are advantages that more than weigh up for this, instantly sharing the screen with the entire team is really useful, and not having to travel several floors to help people lowers the barrier for helping people in other parts of the organization. And with the always on video meeting people can even drop by to say hello. It also helps focus the team on one thing, which is often a good thing. People can still do their thing on the side, but working as a team on one focused task is a lot easier.
kypro 3y ago
I'm working a job at the moment that's fully remote and where everyone technical on the project is a senior dev. It's a completely different experience to pervious projects I've worked where we had junior devs and where I can relate to what you're saying here. For me this is the first time I've ever felt far more productive working remotely since I can trust other team members are doing a good job, and when there are blockers or things to discuss it's easy for us to jump on a call and work it out. I'm not saying there are no drawbacks, but I think for this particular project the pros far outweigh any cons of remote working. I was very much in the hybrid camp a year ago, but now I think it really depends more on the team and the project you're working on. Some projects I've worked on before I can't even imagine working on from home since they've required a lot of collaboration with non-technical teams. But for projects where the technical work needed is well scoped and where you have strong developers, you might as well just let them work however they please. I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work.
- offices 3y ago
  >I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work. It's worth jumping into the HN Looking For Work threads from time to time to get a general picture of the people who use this site. I find it enlightening to realise that dogma about programming that seems foreign to me is mainly coming from people with massively different technical backgrounds. It also explains the webdev defaultism.
  - mattgreenrocks 3y ago
    Yep. Peek into a thread about web frameworks and you’d think that software architecture never existed, and that very few are actually capable of working without them. Tech’s skill requirements create a bimodal distribution of jobs, seemingly. Some places manage to break away sufficiently to spend less time dealing with poor code.
chronofar 3y ago
> I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people. There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc). You may simply have a preference for being around people and using the methodologies you listed here, which is fine enough, but remote doesn’t fundamentally block any of the outcomes you mentioned.
- laserlight 3y ago
  I've never understood why people think that remote should just work magically, without any effort on their part.
  - pdpi 3y ago
    I don't expect it to work magically without effort on my part. What I'm saying is that it's a tradeoff, and that the tradeoff doesn't really work that well for me. I'm simultaneously pretty gregarious and pretty introverted. Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me, but being a mostly passive observer and tactically jumping in is much more manageable, and all around a more efficient use of my resources. Work better in a pull- rather than push-based setup, if you will.
    - laserlight 3y ago
      Thanks for clarifying. > Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me This is definitely the case for me as well. I've set up regular meetings once, to avoid all kinds of discomfort that arise when doing so every time. Though, I understand that such arrangements may not flow as easy as in-person ones for everyone.
ubercore 3y ago
You can't work remote as if you were in-office but just have conference calls now. You need to restructure communication and norms a bit, but if you do it can completely address all the thing you brought up.
sumedh 3y ago
> so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. Why cant you use standups to give updates and then take it offline if anyone is struggling? You seem to be having some kind of Messiah complex where people always need you for help. If you leave the company tomorrow, the company will do just fine without you.
_cenw 3y ago
I used to do this "intercepting bad ideas" out of habit, but often the people who had the bad ideas had more senior job titles and salaries than me. It got me in a lot of trouble, mostly because I gained a reputation for being very knowledgeable (invited to everything) and for making supposed seniors look bad. They were not actually senior, the place just didn't pay enough and any actual experienced people were incidental and often didn't hold the title. I eventually had to leave because I turned into a human Confluence replacement and architect on top of my existing work and still was one of the worst paid people (with little to do about that, management hates "mercenaries"). So I'm very happy I no longer feel compelled to do this working remote anymore, except when people abuse our platform.
asnyder 3y ago
There's some rules one can add when working in a remote setting to address these sorts of issues, for example set a time limit for when an Engineer needs to engage with their team and ask a question, 30 mins/1 hour/2 hours (depending on your culture and allowance for investigation) max. This ensures they're not spinning their wheels and allows them time to investigate/learn while ensuring they reach out to their team and share the situation to get the necessary feedback/discussions to move forward. This has the additional benefit of not having every minor issue be answered by colleagues, increasing the amount of learning and work of the individual Engineer versus offloading to their peers unnecessarily.
JSavageOne 3y ago
None of these issues couldn't be addressed in remote teams. It's not as if you can just take an office culture, make everyone be remote overnight, and have everything continue to chug along exactly the same as if nothing happened. Remote does require some adaptations. But in my experience, ultimately remote work is a drastic increase of quality of life without any decrease in productivity.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  My company has worked pretty hard imo to reduce silo-ization caused by WFH. It has not worked. Everyone complains that about the stuff the parent did. Maybe our management is incompetent, but management isn't changing at this point. Some companies just don't have what it takes to transition to wfh, and I'd say the bigger the company the more likely that is.
lowercased 3y ago
I've still hit some of these same issues during 'co-location' periods. I'm somewhat comparing apples/oranges, but I've been at some large-ish orgs (1000s of employees colocated) and my experience was info-hoarding was pretty string outside a small network of the 'inner-circle'. Each dept had a few of these, and you'd routinely get hit with stuff out of left-field that apparently had "been in the works" for "some time", but the requests/items/issues were fundamentally flawed (logic, whatever). 30 minutes of talking with someone outside the inner circle would have helped, but... info is power. Hoarding it helps some people more than others. I saw it happening in a 'remote' setup a few years back, except, it wasn't as intentional as it was in co-located work environments. It was more a natural consequence of people being remote. Issues/delays that might have been more naturally noticed in f2f settings lingered for months before surfacing. And... the more I dug, the more I was noticing this. More teams separated and working independently with few 'info hoarders' acting as informal intermediaries. There wasn't actual info hoarding with a political motivation behind it, but it happened all the same. Some aspects of working in that team were far better than '9-5 @ office' of 20 years ago, others were worse. I'm not a "remote work at all costs" person, but also not a "return to shared office at all costs". Flexibility/choices I think are the optimal setup. Not everyone has a great home to work from. Many people work better with routine and physical space between 'home' and 'work'. We do, indeed, often get new info/ideas from the proverbial water cooler chats. There's no one 'best' way for people to get work done, and not one 'best way' for people to work together. My 'best' working style even changes depending on the skills and personalities of the other folks I'm working with.
yread 3y ago
Good point. I haven't even considered that overhearing "fuck this stupid bulllshit" and helping them out is much less friction than a junior clumsily writing out the issue they are facing (and overcoming the urge not to ask for help in the first place)
- foogazi 3y ago
  > I haven't even considered that overhearing "fuck this stupid bulllshit" Why can’t this happen over IM ? You still only overhear those within earshot What if you were in a meeting at that time ?
silverlake 3y ago
I managed several dozen people scattered across Hong Kong, NYC, London and Bangalore. I couldn't even overhear the team at my location because I was often in meetings. Nearly everything was done async, with weekly video calls. The main cultural challenge was getting people to IM frequently and casually like gamers on discord. From a CS angle, we know async is more efficient than synchronous code, but requires very careful implementation. Same for people. It works for OSS volunteers, it can certainly work for full-time employees.
curiousllama 3y ago
I feel like there's a mid-level sweet spot of independence where remote work is just 100x better than in office - you don't need consistent support, and you don't need to consistently influence/help lots of other people. But if you need consistent support (juniors) or you need to influence/help others (seniors, managers), then it's such a huge hindrance to getting traction.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rvba 3y ago
You think you are good, while you sound like a shitty micromanager. Your job at the office is to sit and listen to conversations like KGB? Seriously, it sounds like you dont know how to structue work, nor manage people.
surajrmal 3y ago
Our cultural norm is to have 90% of 1:1 communication in team specific chatrooms to let other team members chime in. This works best if everyone is remote or in separate offices. People in the same office obviously prefer direct communication, but I find this harmful if done extensively. My team has always been geographically diverse so strangely going more remote helped overall team communication.
lowbloodsugar 3y ago
>so it's all around less effective. Organizing and growing teams is a challenge no matter what the environment, especially for a group that trends introvert. It is hard, whether in office, hybrid, remote, or mixed. It is hard enough that it seems to me that people pick a side and then stop thinking about how to make the other options work - because why would you? If you picked iOS, why would you waste your precious time thinking about how you'd do it on Android? But if you're not thinking about how to solve the problems you perceive in remote work, it's not useful to announce your problems with it as if that is any kind of conclusive argument. You haven't solved the problem, but that doesn't mean the problem can't be solved. Another problem is that many companies are doing hybrid, and that means 40% of the time spent remote. Do the juniors just not get help on those days? Do they just "talk themselves into trouble" without the talking? If we can answer these questions for the two remote days, we can answer them for five remote days. >I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people. Great. You're one of these talky people. Lucky you! We're not all like that. Let's see if we can be friends rather than competitors/enemies.

by pdpi 3y ago

hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago

That's perfectly fine and you can be 100% sure you will find an employer who will be happy to have an employee like you. Many other senior engineers, however, are different and prefer to work in a more structured way. For example, I regularly have scheduled meetings with juniors where we discuss their current work. I make sure they feel at ease and speak their mind so I instantly see when they go wrong. And I make sure everybody in my time has time aside in our calendars for the main work - and that time is the same for all team. We are regularly praised by the management and our teams for how effective we are. And we meet in person every 3 months or so.

mm007emko 3y ago
Same here.

Nurw 3y ago

Have you tried having an always on video meeting for your team? Our team was fairly similar, and for a time felt like we lost a lot during the lockdown. But an always on team-video meeting really saved us. It has its drawbacks, interruptions become a lot more disruptive and emoting is harder with a smaller face, but there are advantages that more than weigh up for this, instantly sharing the screen with the entire team is really useful, and not having to travel several floors to help people lowers the barrier for helping people in other parts of the organization. And with the always on video meeting people can even drop by to say hello. It also helps focus the team on one thing, which is often a good thing. People can still do their thing on the side, but working as a team on one focused task is a lot easier.

kypro 3y ago

I'm working a job at the moment that's fully remote and where everyone technical on the project is a senior dev. It's a completely different experience to pervious projects I've worked where we had junior devs and where I can relate to what you're saying here. For me this is the first time I've ever felt far more productive working remotely since I can trust other team members are doing a good job, and when there are blockers or things to discuss it's easy for us to jump on a call and work it out. I'm not saying there are no drawbacks, but I think for this particular project the pros far outweigh any cons of remote working. I was very much in the hybrid camp a year ago, but now I think it really depends more on the team and the project you're working on. Some projects I've worked on before I can't even imagine working on from home since they've required a lot of collaboration with non-technical teams. But for projects where the technical work needed is well scoped and where you have strong developers, you might as well just let them work however they please. I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work.

offices 3y ago
>I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work. It's worth jumping into the HN Looking For Work threads from time to time to get a general picture of the people who use this site. I find it enlightening to realise that dogma about programming that seems foreign to me is mainly coming from people with massively different technical backgrounds. It also explains the webdev defaultism.
- mattgreenrocks 3y ago
  Yep. Peek into a thread about web frameworks and you’d think that software architecture never existed, and that very few are actually capable of working without them. Tech’s skill requirements create a bimodal distribution of jobs, seemingly. Some places manage to break away sufficiently to spend less time dealing with poor code.

chronofar 3y ago

> I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people. There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc). You may simply have a preference for being around people and using the methodologies you listed here, which is fine enough, but remote doesn’t fundamentally block any of the outcomes you mentioned.

laserlight 3y ago
I've never understood why people think that remote should just work magically, without any effort on their part.
- pdpi 3y ago
  I don't expect it to work magically without effort on my part. What I'm saying is that it's a tradeoff, and that the tradeoff doesn't really work that well for me. I'm simultaneously pretty gregarious and pretty introverted. Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me, but being a mostly passive observer and tactically jumping in is much more manageable, and all around a more efficient use of my resources. Work better in a pull- rather than push-based setup, if you will.
  - laserlight 3y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. > Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me This is definitely the case for me as well. I've set up regular meetings once, to avoid all kinds of discomfort that arise when doing so every time. Though, I understand that such arrangements may not flow as easy as in-person ones for everyone.

ubercore 3y ago

You can't work remote as if you were in-office but just have conference calls now. You need to restructure communication and norms a bit, but if you do it can completely address all the thing you brought up.

sumedh 3y ago

> so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. Why cant you use standups to give updates and then take it offline if anyone is struggling? You seem to be having some kind of Messiah complex where people always need you for help. If you leave the company tomorrow, the company will do just fine without you.

_cenw 3y ago

I used to do this "intercepting bad ideas" out of habit, but often the people who had the bad ideas had more senior job titles and salaries than me. It got me in a lot of trouble, mostly because I gained a reputation for being very knowledgeable (invited to everything) and for making supposed seniors look bad. They were not actually senior, the place just didn't pay enough and any actual experienced people were incidental and often didn't hold the title. I eventually had to leave because I turned into a human Confluence replacement and architect on top of my existing work and still was one of the worst paid people (with little to do about that, management hates "mercenaries"). So I'm very happy I no longer feel compelled to do this working remote anymore, except when people abuse our platform.

asnyder 3y ago

There's some rules one can add when working in a remote setting to address these sorts of issues, for example set a time limit for when an Engineer needs to engage with their team and ask a question, 30 mins/1 hour/2 hours (depending on your culture and allowance for investigation) max. This ensures they're not spinning their wheels and allows them time to investigate/learn while ensuring they reach out to their team and share the situation to get the necessary feedback/discussions to move forward. This has the additional benefit of not having every minor issue be answered by colleagues, increasing the amount of learning and work of the individual Engineer versus offloading to their peers unnecessarily.

JSavageOne 3y ago

None of these issues couldn't be addressed in remote teams. It's not as if you can just take an office culture, make everyone be remote overnight, and have everything continue to chug along exactly the same as if nothing happened. Remote does require some adaptations. But in my experience, ultimately remote work is a drastic increase of quality of life without any decrease in productivity.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
My company has worked pretty hard imo to reduce silo-ization caused by WFH. It has not worked. Everyone complains that about the stuff the parent did. Maybe our management is incompetent, but management isn't changing at this point. Some companies just don't have what it takes to transition to wfh, and I'd say the bigger the company the more likely that is.

lowercased 3y ago

I've still hit some of these same issues during 'co-location' periods. I'm somewhat comparing apples/oranges, but I've been at some large-ish orgs (1000s of employees colocated) and my experience was info-hoarding was pretty string outside a small network of the 'inner-circle'. Each dept had a few of these, and you'd routinely get hit with stuff out of left-field that apparently had "been in the works" for "some time", but the requests/items/issues were fundamentally flawed (logic, whatever). 30 minutes of talking with someone outside the inner circle would have helped, but... info is power. Hoarding it helps some people more than others. I saw it happening in a 'remote' setup a few years back, except, it wasn't as intentional as it was in co-located work environments. It was more a natural consequence of people being remote. Issues/delays that might have been more naturally noticed in f2f settings lingered for months before surfacing. And... the more I dug, the more I was noticing this. More teams separated and working independently with few 'info hoarders' acting as informal intermediaries. There wasn't actual info hoarding with a political motivation behind it, but it happened all the same. Some aspects of working in that team were far better than '9-5 @ office' of 20 years ago, others were worse. I'm not a "remote work at all costs" person, but also not a "return to shared office at all costs". Flexibility/choices I think are the optimal setup. Not everyone has a great home to work from. Many people work better with routine and physical space between 'home' and 'work'. We do, indeed, often get new info/ideas from the proverbial water cooler chats. There's no one 'best' way for people to get work done, and not one 'best way' for people to work together. My 'best' working style even changes depending on the skills and personalities of the other folks I'm working with.

yread 3y ago

Good point. I haven't even considered that overhearing "fuck this stupid bulllshit" and helping them out is much less friction than a junior clumsily writing out the issue they are facing (and overcoming the urge not to ask for help in the first place)

foogazi 3y ago
> I haven't even considered that overhearing "fuck this stupid bulllshit" Why can’t this happen over IM ? You still only overhear those within earshot What if you were in a meeting at that time ?

silverlake 3y ago

I managed several dozen people scattered across Hong Kong, NYC, London and Bangalore. I couldn't even overhear the team at my location because I was often in meetings. Nearly everything was done async, with weekly video calls. The main cultural challenge was getting people to IM frequently and casually like gamers on discord. From a CS angle, we know async is more efficient than synchronous code, but requires very careful implementation. Same for people. It works for OSS volunteers, it can certainly work for full-time employees.

curiousllama 3y ago

I feel like there's a mid-level sweet spot of independence where remote work is just 100x better than in office - you don't need consistent support, and you don't need to consistently influence/help lots of other people. But if you need consistent support (juniors) or you need to influence/help others (seniors, managers), then it's such a huge hindrance to getting traction.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

rvba 3y ago

You think you are good, while you sound like a shitty micromanager. Your job at the office is to sit and listen to conversations like KGB? Seriously, it sounds like you dont know how to structue work, nor manage people.

surajrmal 3y ago

Our cultural norm is to have 90% of 1:1 communication in team specific chatrooms to let other team members chime in. This works best if everyone is remote or in separate offices. People in the same office obviously prefer direct communication, but I find this harmful if done extensively. My team has always been geographically diverse so strangely going more remote helped overall team communication.

lowbloodsugar 3y ago

>so it's all around less effective. Organizing and growing teams is a challenge no matter what the environment, especially for a group that trends introvert. It is hard, whether in office, hybrid, remote, or mixed. It is hard enough that it seems to me that people pick a side and then stop thinking about how to make the other options work - because why would you? If you picked iOS, why would you waste your precious time thinking about how you'd do it on Android? But if you're not thinking about how to solve the problems you perceive in remote work, it's not useful to announce your problems with it as if that is any kind of conclusive argument. You haven't solved the problem, but that doesn't mean the problem can't be solved. Another problem is that many companies are doing hybrid, and that means 40% of the time spent remote. Do the juniors just not get help on those days? Do they just "talk themselves into trouble" without the talking? If we can answer these questions for the two remote days, we can answer them for five remote days. >I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people. Great. You're one of these talky people. Lucky you! We're not all like that. Let's see if we can be friends rather than competitors/enemies.