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A lot of that struggle has to do with what others point out already: the onboarding processes and documentation being of shoddy quality and relying on word-of-m

A lot of that struggle has to do with what others point out already: the onboarding processes and documentation being of shoddy quality and relying on word-of-mouth to transfer knowledge and repeatedly check in. If you start raising future generations to be, you know, adults, instead of mentally stunting them into being eternal teens well into their 30s, and companies make an effort not to have a horrible onboarding and rely on 3 year tenures (and paradoxically do nothing to keep said employees that long), the problem is far less prevalent. Heck, most CS students are expected to do far more complex things at school without any assistance these days.

ghaff 3y ago
It's hard to argue with better documentation and process. However, if I think back to my early time in the computer industry (admittedly with much more limited electronic communications and other tools), it's just really hard for me to visualize taking away the in-person face-to-face--including a lot of social and quasi-social activities. And with many travel budgets so squeezed at the moment (and COVID of course), you have teams with people who have never met anyone else on their team in-person in their whole multiyear tenure with the company. And to your point about short tenures, maybe they never will. If I'm honest, even though I've been around for ages, I'm less connected with co-workers than I've been in the past.
- danaris 3y ago
  From where I sit, needing the in-person face-to-face as your social activity for the day is a symptom of something that widespread remote work should at least help to fix: the splintering and atomization of communities that once existed outside of the workplace. Once upon a time, it was considered the norm to find a job where you were, because you lived in a community that was part of your support system. Over the course of the last century, this norm eroded and was replaced with the norm of moving to wherever you got a job. More recently, the situation deteriorated even further, with the disappearance of the "job for life" assumptions that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century, in favor of an expectation of changing jobs every 2-5 years—with a high chance every single time that you'd have to move. One inevitable result of all this is the aforementioned splintering of local communities. Changing the employment norms so that a much higher percentage of people never need to move to work in person at a job would make it much easier to begin to restore local communities, and provide a much better chance of good socialization outside of work. Now, there are caveats. This still relies on people not working too many hours, and while it would still help for the people who do work in person, and move in order to do so (those communities existing and being more prominent, and sustained by the people who stick around, makes it much easier for others to find them, too, even if they'll have to keep finding new ones every few years), it doesn't help them quite as much as the ones who can stay and grow their place in the community over many years.

ghaff 3y ago

It's hard to argue with better documentation and process. However, if I think back to my early time in the computer industry (admittedly with much more limited electronic communications and other tools), it's just really hard for me to visualize taking away the in-person face-to-face--including a lot of social and quasi-social activities. And with many travel budgets so squeezed at the moment (and COVID of course), you have teams with people who have never met anyone else on their team in-person in their whole multiyear tenure with the company. And to your point about short tenures, maybe they never will. If I'm honest, even though I've been around for ages, I'm less connected with co-workers than I've been in the past.

danaris 3y ago
From where I sit, needing the in-person face-to-face as your social activity for the day is a symptom of something that widespread remote work should at least help to fix: the splintering and atomization of communities that once existed outside of the workplace. Once upon a time, it was considered the norm to find a job where you were, because you lived in a community that was part of your support system. Over the course of the last century, this norm eroded and was replaced with the norm of moving to wherever you got a job. More recently, the situation deteriorated even further, with the disappearance of the "job for life" assumptions that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century, in favor of an expectation of changing jobs every 2-5 years—with a high chance every single time that you'd have to move. One inevitable result of all this is the aforementioned splintering of local communities. Changing the employment norms so that a much higher percentage of people never need to move to work in person at a job would make it much easier to begin to restore local communities, and provide a much better chance of good socialization outside of work. Now, there are caveats. This still relies on people not working too many hours, and while it would still help for the people who do work in person, and move in order to do so (those communities existing and being more prominent, and sustained by the people who stick around, makes it much easier for others to find them, too, even if they'll have to keep finding new ones every few years), it doesn't help them quite as much as the ones who can stay and grow their place in the community over many years.