Amanda Nock, a tech leader and devops expert who posts frequently to Twitter, offered this in response when I posted on Twitter about how to hire good people remotely, “When I hire remotely, I ask about their online friends.” Nock doesn’t need the details of anyone’s online friendships, but she needs to know that the person has developed a serious friendship online; otherwise that person probably doesn’t communicate easily and naturally online, so working with them remotely is going to be difficult.
Nock says, “I often hire remotely, and I make a point to ask about what people's online lives are like. No details. If someone, for instance, has good relationships on Twitter or they're active in a Discord server, that tells me they're good at asynchronous remote communication. I don't care if the Discord server they're active in is a furry community or whatever, the details don't matter — the skill for forming relationships and communicating in a personable way over asynchronous text is there.”
(end quote)
But I think the opposite is also true: a lot of people do not easily form friendships online, and they lack online social skills, so they are not going work well remotely. These people are more productive in a traditional office.
From what I've seen, many people struggle to truly express themselves in written form. This includes well educated people. And those who are extroverted need to talk. Remote work tends to put an emphasis on written communication, and that is only partly offset by having a lot of Zoom meetings.
I can communicate remotely in a business setting (and have done) for many years. I don’t make friends online because it’s a personal preference.
It’s the same as “show me your GitHub profile” but maybe after 8 hours on a computer asynchronously communicating and coding. I don’t want to code or make friends on discord.
Couldn't one draw parallels with the concept of networking here? As in, certain people might get a job because of being extroverted, seizing the opportunities that present themselves, as well as seeking those out on their own volition?
All qualities that might be preferred in certain roles, almost like a sort of self-selection.
Not saying that it's something that should always be selected for, but I suspect that it might be a bit like coding tests: vaguely useful despite the fact that they're not exactly the best method.
> It’s the same as “show me your GitHub profile” but maybe after 8 hours on a computer asynchronously communicating and coding. I don’t want to code or make friends on discord.
What if they want you to be the kind of person who does? I mean, you might want to avoid companies that expect you to live and breathe code (which might coincide with being available 24/7), but one can definitely imagine that such qualities would also be factors that companies would look for.
In my team for example, one of my coworkers just hates written communication. He started after me and had to ask a lot of questions. To do so he'd send me a hangouts link and expect me to join so he could ask his question. Most of the time they were questions that then involved him sitting and staring as I had to go look up the answer and link him to it anyway. He was ignoring channels set up to ask for help and ones that would have gotten our entire area of the company to help him.
But I think the most insidious part of people who don't communicate well in written form is that it makes other people not want to do so. I was stuck as the only other engineer with this guy for 6 months. During this time I stopped updating, then stopped writing out ticket bodies. I stopped posting helpful things to our team channel and didn't update documentation. What was the point? Who was going to read it? I've been slowly getting back in the habit now that we have people on my team who actually... use things I spend the time to write.
And I get that he's twenty years older then me, has fifteen years of experience on me, and has not been living his life in a chat client since the age of 12, but he's a fully remote worker even without the pandemic and I feel like it's one of his opportunity areas.
I guess he's right, after 3 months I can easily separate those who can follow conversation on slack and don't need other briefing, and those who need other session of briefing even though there's already many conversation and documentation.
The former will be better remote worker.
What does a "good" relationship on Twitter even look like? Is the author looking at specific metrics like number of posts per day, no of replies per post?
While I overall agree that hiring remote requires a new perspective and new set of questions, but ...their social media engagement? Some of the best engineers I've ever worked with had ZERO social media presence.
It would never occur to me ask them personal questions about the number and nature of their online friends ... very strange and invasive.
As an aside, many recruiters like to control the conversation with the candidate and have all messages/emails go through them ... this is a great way for the recruiter to hide a candidates communication weaknesses.
"Only people who have online friends can communicate in the written form."
which can then be extrapolated to:
"I have online only friends, therefore this is the thing to look for"
Which is remote-ese for "we can't hire them because they don't look/sound/act like us and won't like the same things as us, therefore is a bad cultural fit."
If you want to test someone's asynchronous remote communication skills then communicate with them remotely and asynchronously. How much trolling they do on Reddit in their free time is completely irrelevant.
I suppose many don’t feel satisfied by such restricted relationships and will only bother with the real thing. I know I’m like that.
Zero connection between that and WFH ability. It’s all about communication and emotional intelligence. A great communicator will be able to apply their skills even in the stunted context of video and text chat.
As for asking about friends, if it’s not outright illegal to ask about friends, it’s certainly in poor taste. Another half-asses innovation from the SV-like mindset.
I can expect that older managements are lacking in this aspect.
That being said, there's synchronous remote (similar timezone and same work hours) that can help to alleviate the remote work issue.
Senior folks do this. All the time.
Despite having 10+ years of experience and leading engineers at AWS, my default is to "spin my wheels". Now that I understand myself a little better, anytime I find myself laser focused on a problem, but making 0% progress, then I either:
1) distance myself from the problem or 2) ask for help 3) both
Junior or not. Asking for help can be difficult
I think a bit part of this is how you see yourself on the team. I gave myself the personal title: "Specialist and Support Person". On any given day I really only have two tasks:
* Work on "specialist" stuff within the app, stuff that is way over the heads of any of the Jr's or Mid level devs.
* Provide Support on everything else. Since my engineers are the ones pumping out most of the code, the biggest part is making sure they are supported in every way imaginable.
There are other responsibilities obviously, but within the context of "day to day" on the team, I found aligning myself with those responsibilities really helped my team.
* If you go through the process of figuring it out, you gain a durable understanding of the subject matter which you can use to solve other problems.
* If either you (after your investigation) or the subject matter expert (on request) produces documentation of the subject, other people in the future can use this artifact to unblock themselves.
* If you ask in a public Slack channel, at least those who are channel-surfing or searching during the retention period might see it and learn something.
Getting an answer 1:1 is empty calories. It gives quick satisfaction in the moment, but only leads to more and more communication down the line. Communication kills productivity.
It's totally conceivable for a new/junior employee to spend hours or days solving a problem that's already been solved in your codebase, and someone with experience could fix the issue in literally 5 minutes or less.
Yes, it's good to learn things on your own. But especially in a small environment, sometimes you gotta move faster than that.
Sometimes getting an answer 1:1 is "empty calories", and you're not learning how to solve the problem.
But that might be because the problem doesn't need to be solved, and you were wasting hours or days trying to solve it.
Which is fine for some things. But also really really bad for virtually everything else. It's exceedingly hostile, especially for places where there is no written documentation, and lots of old timers who have tribal knowledge and are "far too productive" to answer messages.
Juniors aren't born knowing any of those things.
That being said I think it can probably be improved while still remaining WFH, for instance by more actively chaperoning newbies.
I am pretty introverted + slightly autistic (not self diagnosed). I do a lot of customer facing work too, which I would never endure when not working remotely. But working remote means I can just turn off when I'm not feeling so great. Presenting is a lot easier... Approaching people, also, a lot easier. Just send them a message on slack/teams/discord. Before that I would have had to muster the courage to talk to certain people. It's a lot easier to onboard as well, given the change in environment is much smaller.
I feel SO lucky that I just happened to apply for this job when COVID and remote work started.
I think this remote work has equalized the playing field in terms of attractiveness & height aswell, as those qualities are far less visible when interviewing remotely. Wouldn't be surprised if we see the average height of high paid workers decline due to this.
> I think this remote work has equalized the playing field in terms of attractiveness & height aswell, as those qualities are far less visible when interviewing remotely. Wouldn't be surprised if we see the average height of high paid workers decline due to this.
This is a great point and shines a light on all kinds of equitable advantages of remote that are possible in the long term.
Conversely, the companies doing the hiring no longer have to restrict themselves to anyone who was able to move to San Francisco or Seattle before they turned 25 or people with no families.
But some of my best jobs were not like that. They were sitting down with people in very up close conversations and working out ambiguities and tasks. And mentoring juniors and working things through with them.
All that said, I won't be going back to in person. I'll be hunting for places that know how to make remote work, even though I don't prefer it. Because remote is still better than the 1.5 hours a day I was spending driving and the toll that was taking on my health and sanity. And most of the local employers are crappy.
So it's a real mix of stuff, we're in a transition period. It's going to take a few years for this stuff to shake out.
What I mean by that — as a manager and one of the senior engineers, I had insight across our organization to projects and employee performance.
Those who thrived being remote were those who already were the top performers. Those who were followers; who lacked discipline, failed faster and more obviously. Most software engineers produce more effort than they’re worth and skate by with meetings, “pair programming”, etc
When the lockdowns started, my team at the time were some of the top performers. I had already had a remote team and we knew how to screen for it and manage it.
Some things we employed - weekly syncs across team members, an always open video chat, daily stand ups amongst projects, fun days where we’d play games online, etc. The most effective thing we implemented was holding people accountable to their deliverables. People commit to their work and tell us when it’ll be done, if they fail we talk about it as a team. Team members quickly learn they must deliver and if they need help ask. We don’t delay timelines and I expected a clear “I think this will take days” if they need to delay, that’s fine, but they explain publicly and ask for help.
That quickly led to discipline and we’d pair senior engineers with junior engineers to improve.
Take someone who points out flaws in a system, things that need to be addressed before they become a problem. The exact same words from two different people can be interpreted differently. For example:
- "X is a top performer who anticipates problems with their deep understanding of the system"; and
- "Y is negative and simply points out problems rather than offering solutions."
The difference? Whether or not that person is liked, which really comes down to them being like me. That's literally all it is.
Take your example of "fun" days. Personally I hate that kind of faux team bonding. I mean if it works for you and your team then great. But don't be fooled. You haven't found the formula for "top performers". You've just found people like you.
I don’t think that’s the case at all. One could say a similar thing in that it enables the worst employees who can drag down so-called top performers. But I don’t like any of these framings.
I personally prefer working in the office. I’m more productive, focused, and able to check in with someone or go grab them and show them an issue I’m having. I’m able to attend talks, have discussions, etc., which get me going on certain ideas. I am a person that doesn’t work well in ambiguity. I like to have a plan discussed and agreed upon. I find this is much harder remotely, for reasons both known and unknown.
Very few deep conversations happen over Slack. I miss some of the deep conversations I used to have with fellow coworkers on slower days. You are also very limited to the type of work you can do. Basically any job requiring hardware interaction requires you to be in office, either by natural constraints or policies.
But I am also like the commenter above. It will be really hard to give up remote work. The convenience of not having to commute, dress a certain way, have my own food in my own kitchen, etc. are all massive perks. At some point, I may choose to go back into the office, but I’m going to do the remote thing for a while. Especially now that gas is insane.
This sort of overgeneralization just tells me we'll have people in 5-10 years "realize" that many of the benefits of remote work were just built on relationships and processes created in the days before. It's like the "open office" floor planning all over again, but with higher stakes.
In the office the culture for accessing these guys was: Ping with slack DM/skype, if they don't answer in 15 minutes walk over to their desk and bend their ear, unless they were clearly working something more important at the moment. Sometimes there would even be short lines of people outside of their cube waiting for attention.
There was an organic interrupt-driven workflow for these experts because they were in so much demand (with occasional pauses in access if they were working on something time-critical). That whole workflow collapsed under WFH, and as these veterans were used to operating on their own/managing their own time roughly half of them failed to be readily available online. This led to issues for people like myself where we needed some piece of their knowledge but just got radio silence for hours, sometimes days. So you pick up some other work to fill in the gap while you wait for a response, but that leads to inefficiencies of its own once they actually do get back to you. Once I had a cascade of about 6 stories going in parallel because I kept picking up alternate work to fill gaps, only to get to a point in THAT work where I needed some tribal knowledge, so I pinged the appropriate SME, waited several hours, picked up another task in the meantime... etc
And leadership lacks any carrots/sticks to make these guys accessible aside from asking nicely. They're largely where they want to be for their careers, value their time, and have all the truly vital knowledge so they can't really be punished lest they leave the program.
Sadly I suspect my company's organization is closer to the average than yours, so lots of other companies fall into this boat. It's not always a matter of discipline :)
I hold myself to high standards and have been described as a top performer by every manager I've ever had.
I am disciplined and work extra hours as needed to ship. I am constantly thinking about the product and the engineering challenges we face outside of working hours. But sometimes things take longer than expected, sometimes complexity estimates are off, every so often I have a bad week due to personal reasons. Having to conduct a team-wide postmortem every time a ticket rolls over into the next sprint sounds exhausting and I'd start looking for a new job stat. At a minimum it's a huge amount of communication overhead when you should trust me to get my job done, especially considering my track record.
We have exactly the same strategy and it works very well.
> Those who were followers; who lacked discipline, failed faster and more obviously. Most software engineers produce more effort than they’re worth and skate by with meetings, “pair programming”, etc
This is so common and I am glad that remote work has been an effective extra filter. I mean, I don't mind mentoring junior devs, but also I am not a teacher and many of them seemed lacking total basics. Like they memorised algorithms but had no idea why they work or common issue was them just pasting code from Stackoverflow and then asking for help when it didn't work.
That sounds horrible. Software estimation is not a science and some say is impossible. To hold people to their estimates or else they've "failed" is toxic.
Just a personal opinion, but I hate daily standups. It's agile theatre. Nobody listens to what others are saying; they're too busy trying to make up good sounding stuff to say when it's their turn. I'm being a bit hyperbolic, but the general principle applies.
But sounds like it's working for your company so more power to you.
...but it's also true that all-superstar teams rarely win vs teams composed on superstars and supporting staff [1], and thus you can't afford to hose the supporting staff.
[1] sorry I don't have a better reference - https://www.google.com/search?q=all-superstar+teams+vs+super...
I would bet the CS graduate is having a much easier time self-learning at home than the no-degree person who usually stops peoples work 12-15 times a day to get them to explain concepts or show them around the code, again...
Sites like HN are popular with people who prefer to socialize online and have chosen online communities to be a part of. Remote work is a natural extension of how they’ve built their online lives, which leads a lot of people to assume remote work is just natural for everyone.
But it’s not. Like you said, there are a lot of personality types that do not do well at all when working remote. Discussing those people has become difficult in online spaces where people like remote work and resist any suggestion that it’s not good for everyone. This has done more harm than good to the cause, IMO, because a lot of companies and teams went head-first into remote assuming it’d be an easy win. Yet on a company-wide scale, it’s not. It requires work, and training, and mentoring, and more resources just to get back to baseline in many cases. Companies that have deluded themselves into thinking it would be easy are then caught off guard and disappointed, leading to sudden reversals of remote work policies or slow depreciation of remote teams.
If we want remote to continue to grow, we need to shift the narrative away from “Its just better, period” to a more nuanced acknowledgement that it’s not for everyone and that it requires training and effort to unlock and maintain the benefits.
The pendulum may have swung too far, on that I'll agree.
But that's not how $work went, when it went remote. All the open sores just festered and got worse. I know for a fact multiple projects delayed or faltered because of the remote move and the impact it had on productivity. And I'm sure it wasn't restricted to Google, but industry wide.
Personally, I can attest that in person has some advantages over remote ( training comes to mind ), but I agree with the gist of the article that a lot depends on the audience ( some people don't need constant hand-holding ). And that is just two facets without touching the fact that not all jobs can be remote ( although a lot could be ) and some industries are ran by, well, old people who only know of one way to do things.
Is it harder? It can be. My team was fine, but some of us were already fighting for off-site schedule pre-pandemic.
After pandemic started, I made an obvious prediction that we will see some differentiation in companies ( full remote, hybrid, in person ). Workforce already voted for what they want ( remote jobs see 3-4 times the applicants ), but it is a larger cultural shift and companies would love to keep remote as a carrot for 'top performers'.
Working from home wasn't all roses either even though I got more work done. I was already doing a balance of WFH as a contractor before covid and that was working well for me, but when covid restrictions happened and I was WFH months on end, I really started to feel the lack of human contact and socialisation. That story about the weekend was something I suddenly craved to hear. My mental state would suffer because I had no life other than sleep, screen, sleep, screen, and then my productivity would start to decline as a result of declining perspective. I think I need some social contact just to stay calibrated.
Now I have a balance, a couple of days in the office, a couple of days at home, it works out well for me. I use the days in the office to catch up with the team, do any serious whiteboarding we need to do, and help out the juniors on the team with any questions they might have. I use my days at home to just crush out code with whatever music I want on in the background.
As you say I think it will shake out. I know some say that people have forgotten the value of hard work and there is a push to get people back in the office full time, but I think having people in the environment that suits their productivity the best is the way forward (edit - and to circle back to the point - taking care of mental states is important to maintaining productivity).
Was work the only place you got this? I'm so glad I don't have these extended socializations and don't miss them the slightest. In my experience, they were all just useless banters and people trying to form hierarchies/comparisons/political interest groups.
Any company that tries to move away from full WFH are holding themselves back. Given the option of working from home, most people will choose WFH.
Maybe its different for a single person who doesnt have much human interaction outside of work. Even so I feel like those interactions don't necessarily degrade significantly via video chats. You cant smell them through the screen and that might be a good thing.
I've been working remotely for nearly a decade, and something I've been saying over and over for the past 2 years is pandemic remote is not normal remote. The first half of your sentence here is doing a lot of work.
So I decided to switch teams, to something that was friendlier for remote, more cloud-based backend stuff. A team that was doing daily standups. And it was sort of better. But acculturating into a new team while remote was painful. And the work unstimulating. And the depression and tedium from being stuck at home and dealing with kids in educational and emotional crisis too much.
So I just quit. Walked away from a 10 year high paying "high status" job. And I'm not the only one, friends of mine did the same thing. I suspect much of the "great resignation" was driven by the frankly irresponsible way that employers just didn't manage remote well.
I wasn't happy with $work before remote, but remote + a job with some bad aspects was like pouring naptha on a fire.
Getting a new (remote) job now after a few months off. I think it will be better.
When I'm remote, every email I type, message I send, Jira update, commit comment, etc. are etched in stone for reference in all of perpetuity, time stamped and all. There's an unspoken expectation to be informed and expert in all things in many work environnments to avoid looking "incompetent" (which is absurd, everyone is ignorant about some things). Remote work creates a hostile environment that makes this even worse. It makes people think about if they really want to email or call this person to ask about something because they worry that not being aware or not knowing about something may come off to others as being incompetent (people are aware that certain questions and statements can show your hand of expertise). So if I happened to be half paying attention during a meeting with a client or executive, if some change in an effort occurred I happened to miss or be too busy to see, or if I'm dealing with new tech I'm not quite familiar with... I have to tread lightly.
In person, you meet people, you get body language, everyone is forced to speak on demand so competency and lack thereof become very clear in conversations. Expectations relax because if the head has no idea and no one else does and everyone has to reference it, well then, I'm not doing so bad. I'm not relying on looking at their cherry picked correspondence choices. Not only that, people are then more willing to communicate with people because they become more comfortable. They build relationships and they know it's OK to show their ignorance about some specific topic and that person is going to help them out a bit, mostly off the books. Not only that, communication in general becomes less formal. If I'm at the coffee machine and see Alice there and I had some question, I can just drop it in a friendly way. My intentions are more clear from body language, am I trying to assess her or am I really just trying to get the information I need to do my part. If it's trivial it's more natural just just say hey, I don't know how to do this thing, do you? Imagine sending that in an email or scheduling a conference call.
This means for teams that have already built that level of trust are at an advantage in remote. They're comfortably sending those messages to one another. They've met the person and can gauge their personality. For juniors it's probably petrifying in some cases because they want to look more skilled and knowledgable than they are because they often don't have a general understanding of the level of expectations people have of them so they want to do better and often want to make an impression.
The issue is that office culture often has a whole lot of competitive elements and people are more hesitant to communicate, it brings everything to a crawl. If work environments weren't always pressuring their labor force, people would be more willing to admit ignorance and or make informal communications necessary to speed things along in a more formal and recorded context, at least that's my opinion.
But now in theory, at least, I don't have to make that compromise.
It's weird that this experience, which I know was very widespread in tech, is completely missing these days in discussions of remote vs in-office. People urging a return a to office are even explicitly bringing up the ability to come up and tap someone on the shoulder as a selling point of being in-office, ignoring the fact that most people have always hated this.
As far as sitting down and working together collaboratively, I have found in the past 2 years that video calls work perfectly well for this. We've made an explicit effort to reduce the number of recurring, scheduled meetings but also to encourage more ad-hoc, collaborative meetings to work on things together synchronously.
I think being an extrovert and missing the social aspect of working together in an office, is a perfectly legitimate reason to want to go back to an in-office job. In an ideal world I think every remote team should have an in-person off-site event for a couple of days every few months for purely social and team-building reasons. But I'm very skeptical about claims that you can't collaborate to get work done as well remotely because my own experience has been so different.
Namely, github copilot, which removed a lot of "hey junior can you write a class to talk to this CRUD api" to "hey github generate snippets of boilerplate code that I can tweak to my exact needs"
Lot of companies are realizing that their existing senior developers are now armed with this amazing tool and that its leading to faster turnarounds. The door appears to be closing for entry positions that used to take in high school drop outs, code bootcamp grads or single moms.
In fact, I think it will allow juniors to contribute faster and for high-school drop outs, code bootcamp grads or single moms to get hired more easily since instead of a steep learning curve, copilot allows them to quickly produce.
I'd agree with the argument if there was no such thing as entropy and senior developers were a static resource that didn't depreciate but every company is going to need new blood just because the seniors are eventually going to retire or move to different companies for their own growth.
The big appeal of juniors is usually low salary and willingness to work long hours and so juniors will often be attractive to companies.
I have a hunch that as more work shifts remote, new ways of working will evolve.
It takes time and effort as an individual, and more time and effort as an organization.
If you don't put in that time and effort, you won't be good at it, like any other skill.
What's old will be new again.
Ask people on subreddit and LinkedIn a question. Then write another article based on 'I swear, dude'. Link it as a source for this 'article'. Write the rest of the 'article' by imagining what the world has to be like, given your poll is a source of truth.
Follows my favourite format of 'journalism', where there is some arbitrarily chosen data source, followed up by series of 'interviews' mixed into one single 'story'. I'd expect nothing less from a management and HR expert in marketing.
Hopefully we can see some ornithomancy next!
If you're set in your ways, remote work is a blessing - the office was just a hindrance to the optimal workflow. But if you're adapting your workflow, then remote work is an extra barrier.
There's a lot of reasons someone may need to adapt their workflow: maybe they're junior, maybe they're new, maybe they're just a good PM/salesperson/manager who's trying to clear the way. Remote work is a distribution shift in the difficulty of their work.
But due to covid everybody worked remote. So did I. I actually never met most of colleagues up until recently. But working remote was never an issue for me. On the contrary, my colleagues struggled with working remotely. I think thats because they are relatively old and never used messengers, mail, social media and co. to an extend as my generation (age <=25). I think that people that grew up in digital spheres are going to feel quite comfortable in a remote environment.
That's why you don't need hand holding. A lot of your peers do need hand holding to get stuff done.
I'm a 43 year old developer, and I can work remotely without any issues. Partly because my development experience was always broader than my job alone.
I think for some of us (and me) it's really hard to fully understand this. When I was in 10th grade I was going to local meetups where I first found out about Elm (they had beer too, I guess no one expects kids to show up to a meeting held in an office building at 7pm). I still can't understand the mindset of someone whose dev experience only being limited to their jobs, but I think you did a really great job at summarizing it.
I don't know the age distribution at your company and their educational background, but a lot of people under 50 have been using such systems at least all of their adult life (esp. if they work in tech). Around 1995, internet started to become mainstream. And long before that, people were using BBS.
Smartphone are newer though but I don't think they brought much to the equation. If anything, people became less tech-savvy after the emergence of smartphones.
If the company does not accommodate for this properly, then you will fail. Experience will help you compensate for some of these shortcomings, but that will also only go so far.
When I started here years ago and not remote except a one day a month telework option, it took weeks to get involved in a project. Everyone is laid back and wants to give time to acclimate and understand the place and the project first. My PM told me basically, "Hey I hired you for algorithm development, but just look around and see what's needed, what's interesting to you, and from there pick what you want to do."
That might sound awesome, and to me now with experience it is the reason why I stay here. However, as a new employee, it made me super neurotic to not have any sort of direct tasking. It felt like I didn't have work and wasn't being assigned any. I think if I had been remote it would have made things even worse; at the time, one of my saving thoughts was I could be there on time and be seen looking around Confluence or reading to learn about the research topic.
I would definitely be interested to hear how folks onboard freshly hired junior devs onto a project or team, how much direct tasking they give, how much time or how they allow for adapting, etc.
My wife actually works in the same institute as I do, but in a different wing - my experience vastly differs from hers. I am basically full-time on one project with consistent billable codes, and she's expected to shop around to try to find projects with open hours, so she can get her 40 hours in every week.
She comes from the private sector, so she's admittedly put off by that idea, especially not really knowing anyone and not being well-versed in academic research as a career. I couldn't imagine being put in that position as my first position out of college.
However, my experience pre-Covid was that the office was where I was the least productive. My team was already spread out across many office locations, so virtual meetings over Teams were already a thing. The company I worked for at the time had shifted to an open floor plan but without an adequate amount of conference rooms, so often for these virtual meetings we would all be dialed in at our desk, despite 4-6 of us on the call sitting right next to each other. Of course this created echo so meetings were a constant game of muting/unmuting and minimizing how much you talked to avoid feedback.
Working remotely did not require a shift in tools at all, but instead has made these calls much more pleasant to attend and easier to engage in.
I learned so much from the people in the cubes around me just via osmosis. Working from home the last couple years I have barely spoken to anyone without a reason to. Random chitchatting with people outside your bubble is how real growth happens, especially early on.
Open floor plans, some groups having shared seating, and offices for roughly no one.
Now, it’s worse. Everything is “reservable equipment” of garbage monitors, windows keyboards, and 400 dpi mice.
I suspect it’s harder for a junior to succeed anywhere today vs 2012. The office is not built to foster development or innovation. It’s an exec’s idea of what a software factory looks like, and it’s a bad one.
When I was a jr engineer I was paired with some senior people who showed me the ropes. They expected it would take some time to come up to speed and intentionally worked to help me get there. They took my college degree as "proof I could learn" and then taught me what I needed to know.
Over the last decade, I've seen less and less mentoring. Even before COVID and in office environments. The productivity expectations are just so high so often. It's hard to succeed in that environment.
I agree, and for this reason, I don't like the framing of the editorialized headline, which lays blame only the Junior employee. We also have to consider this a failing among management, whether that be a direct supervisor who isn't taking an active enough role in the junior's development, or a higher manager who is giving out too much work so as to leave no one time for development.
ETA: the submitted headline has since changed.
I've seen a lack of willingness be mentored / coached. Not directly of folks I have worked with but as a bystander. There's not one clear reason but there is an overtone of entitlement.
Most questions I could only get an answer from was about business requirements because they were either too busy or didn't knew much more about the part I was working on.
Not sure if my situation is usual though, even for interns after COVID started.
In other industries you need immense capital investment in equipment for workers to be productive; no serious software company should care about the comparative pittance that office hardware costs.
This is true, but the learning process is much more enjoyable when you are correctly equipped.
A related note is that I loathe garbage keyboards. If you make me type on some garbage rubber-dome with unbalanced and scratchy keys, I will not be happy.
i think its just about being an environment where you're comfortable to ask questions - and some candidates also, maybe through insecurity are also unwilling to seek guidance.
>New hires need to join a stable squad, where senior team members can take time to onboard and support them
>Limit the number of junior employees to a certain % of your workforce: sounds harsh, but in a remote team, especially a startup, resources are limited. Don't stretch managers too thin.
These points makes this advice not-actionable because by and large, these two items are usually out of the control of their managers.
Yes, ideally a team would be well formed and competent prior to even posting a job requirement, but we know that's just not the way the world works.
"Don't hire unless you have everything in order" is great in theory but I've seen only a handful of teams in my near 20 years of experience that can claim to be in such a state.
For instance, I personally prefer going to the office at least sometimes. My job satisfaction went down considerably staying at home for nearly 2 years. The fact my job had travel pre-COVID also likely had something to do with that. I enjoyed being around people, getting out of the house, etc.
I'm also a huge gamer, and am constantly on Discord or some type of in-game chat. So it's not like I didn't have people to talk to or wasn't getting any interaction.
My company is currently "Hybrid", so most who are near an office go 2-3 days a week. We're also pretty nationally and internationally distributed, so we're going to the office to be on a bunch of phone calls. The people I see at the office are my direct manager and a few cross functional co-workers. It's nice to be able to talk to them in person.
Now recently on a company town hall, the question came up, and our President said basically "We're going with the times/job market, but at the same time if I got everyone involved in Problem X in a room together it would get solved in days not weeks".
From experience, he's not wrong, but that sent me down another line of thinking:
- Are we willing to fly these people around to be in that room?
- If no, we should make it easier to do that.
- What resources do we provide to make at-home lives easier (monitors, webcams, better headset/speakerphone).
- What learning and/or help do we give to make people "better" at WFH or Office?
The last unique thing I'll say about me, I live 10 minutes or less from my office. That's a HUGE privilege, and one that has probably kept me here longer simply because I don't get stressed out over commute changes from weather, etc. I can't imagine what it would be like if I lived 45 minutes or an hour or more from work.
I know you probably know this, but I hope your company leadership isn't falling victim to bias here, because a singular take like this implies that they think it's always better to get folks into a room... what if there is a person that, regardless of room, that your company never would've been able to hire in the first place, because you didn't support remote work?
Even if I accept a hypothetical ding to their effectiveness, I'd rather have a stellar hire working at 90% impact in a remote environment, vs not being able to hire that person at all... and of course, maybe that stellar hire actually creates 110% impact while remote, and 90% in-person, who knows?
Of course the obvious assumption is, that there are fewer stellar hires who are actively turned off by remote work, vs those that would be turned off/rejected by mandating RTO or banning remote work. That's a bet I'm willing to take, "going with the times."
Have you tried getting those people in a virtual room together?
We did a lot of getting people in a room together at my work. We changed into virtual rooms during the pandemic and they showed themselves superior in almost every way. People have decent IO devices on virtual room, as an opposition to a random laptop on the real meeting; there is no software misconfiguration stopping the work; we can do the meetings on a shorter notice (no need to travel or even book rooms); people get less tired and zoom-out less, because they are in a familiar comfortable environment, instead of shoved into an improper room without sufficient ventilation.
There is a large downside in that only one conversation line is possible for each room. That is a serious tooling drawback, but AFAIK every tool has it.
I am able to work remote and live in a state that allowed me to buy a house. If my company wanted me to go into the office I would be fine with that but I would need to be compensated in such a way as to offset the huge jump in cost of living that would cause me. I calculated it and it would take a net increase in my salary of about 30-40K to get me to come back.
I'm happy to work from home and it's a big benefit to me, but I won't deny it sometimes has its drawbacks. I just think the balance lies more in favour of remote work than colocation.
Hopefully there's a way to express that, yes, junior employees might benefit from some face to face support, but in such a way that doesn't imply everyone else must be chained to a desk forty hours a week.
- Junior folks on average spend longer being stuck before reaching out. We organized a few physical offsites where the whole team got together in-person and that helped reduce the friction quite a bit because folks interacted with each other outside of just "We need to get X done" which naturally happens because we never really got to know folks outside of "planned" onboarding/weekly/standup etc. Zoom calls.
- I learnt A LOT of Dev setup looking over shoulders of devs much better than me, be it interesting keyboard shortcuts, learning how to use tmux for split screen, ssh tricks, vim/emacs setups etc. which in the long term made me a better dev. A lot of this is not "mandatory" to know but every dev builds his/her own style of working by absorbing from those around them.
- Lot more friendships/mentorships/team-spirit were created in in-person settings than in remote where everyone feels a lot more "replaceable". Sure, some folks probably prefer it this way, but I'm certain I'm not the only person who wants to look at work as "just something I do to make money" but also a place where I build meaningful relationships and work with smart folks to build something great together while also having fun (which have also helped me when switching between companies and having folks I know already there).
Personally, as someone with enough experience building software, I'm at a place where working remote is the "best case scenario" for me because it gives me complete control of my time, but I absolutely see the tradeoff on the other hand for the folks on the other end.
That table of differences between in office and remote, for example, is ridiculously simplistic; much of the items listed on the right side are also important in the office. And not all of them are necessarily an issue remote (like timezones).
I am in favor of flexibility in the work place. Some people work better remotely, others work better in an office. We should let people do what's best for them.
I like working remotely, but I can't imagine being fully remote with my first professional job out of college. The foundational knowledge transfer that happens in person is invaluable. Not only that, but I find even now, as a more senior engineer with many responsibilities, at times it is hard to feel motivated when I'm fully remote. That would only be amplified as a junior engineers when you aren't a stakeholder in any projects. How can you feel inspired to want to build great things if everything is so disconnected and impersonal?
I suspect this is much better at companies that are permanently remote - they hopefully have the infrastructure in place to properly ramp up and train junior engineers. But for companies that have transitioned to remote recently, the old way of onboarding a junior employee won't work any more.
1. Senior engineer time is the main constraint, in the sense, more experienced engineers need to be available to mentor them and break down tasks, concepts etc 2. clarity of purpose / problem being solved (related to #1) 3. feeling safe, and ready to ask questions - have some kind of 'office hours' on a daily basis
In an office environment , there are opportunities for hallway chats, in addition to physical meetings (where there is increased incentive/pressure for the jr. engineer to bring up questions).
The remote jr. engineer also feels left alone, since seniors are busy. Seniors usually have tenure, so know the background, and are empowered with lots of info.. they can plough ahead, the breakdown of tasks is relatively tractable.. but not for Jrs.
An Org needs to create a daily 'win' potential for them to take them forward .. instead it becomes for each his/her his own (shell).
I think you can absolutely onboard people and develop juniors remotely, but you have to be intentional about it. So many companies I’ve been at in my career did onboarding or OJT by giving out tasks and letting the employee organically learn from those around them. This process fails horribly with remote work, especially for juniors. But if you intentionally onboard people, focus on remote first, have a reading list, assign an onboarding buddy, and are up front about expectations and timelines, it’s completely workable and I’ve been at companies successfully doing this for years before WFH was commonplace.
Take onboarding a team member. You see a bunch of different approaches to this. Some people like to simply throw someone in the deep end. Sink or Swim. This is an easy trap to fall into because it requires less effort. It becomes incredibly easy to write people off with no investment. This is often couched in language of like "top performers will thrive".
Another approach is more hands-on. Small tasks to begin with. Tasks with a theme built to acumulate knowledge and experience so someone can ultimately take ownership of something. This requires more effort but (IME) works way more than the "sink or swim" approach.
The problem with remote work is that it becomes easier to fall into the "sink or swim" trap. Remote employees more easily become abandonware.
You can write this off and say it's a failing of remote work but really it's a failure in leadership.
The casual interaction you get in a traditional office can be formative. Mentoring is easier. You can absorb norms better, and integrate better, especially as a brand new worker.
We are a 100% remote team, and we've been very aware of this in hiring - which is to say, we haven't hired any "baby devs" at all.
This isn't just nitpicking. If the intuition here is true then it's important to understand the extent of the problem in more quantifiable detail. The general up skill table doesn't do that, and their simple survey shows a pretty even split, so nothing conclusive there.
As a suggestion, the article lists benchmark developments where new hires progress from up skill to simple changes to regular work. This seems like a good starting places to measure how long it takes new hires, remote vs. onsite, to progress through that process.
Real world example, I gave a junior engineer a bug that should take a day to research and 3 lines of code to fix. If I'm sitting a few desks away and I hear them furiously banging away at the keyboard, I might come by and ask how it's going.
Today in the remote world I have 2 options, needlessly badger the junior engineer or wait for a big PR that I'm going to have to reject or ask for significant rework, both of which are going to make that person feel a lot worse than if I had just walked by, asked to grab a coffee and talked about it.
This has been an issue at my org and we're having a hard time improving it.
Maybe a better online solution would help, a-la some magical VR space that Meta comes up with.
Remote working requires effort too.
Whether they are remote or in the office, they can be successful. If they are getting their deliverables in on time and do things the way they are asked to do them (follow these simple rules)... that's all that matters.
And when I say follow the rules, I mean that I don't care if they use vim, emacs, nano, Wordpad, Windows, MacOS, Linux, etc. But I do care about how they submit a merge request and whether or not they PGP sign their commits.
Biggest pain point was the flexibility that was required with lockdowns meant sometimes the senior members were occupied with parenting responsibilities but we tried to ensure that the junior member had someone to pair with most of the time.
I've been working mostly remotely for the last decade, both as a junior and now as a senior and this hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, I'd argue the opposite is perhaps true.
I tend to define a junior dev as a dev who needs a decent amount of handholding where as senior devs are expected to be self-sufficient after a brief onboarding period.
If you're a senior dev and you're not self-sufficient then remote can be really hard because you have to constantly pester other devs for help over Slack and Teams, where as in the office asking someone for advise can be done less formally. What I've found is that it's really obvious when a senior dev isn't quite as senior as they probably should be when working remotely.
Junior devs on the other hand should be expected to need support and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to get that support if they're working for a company that has a good remote working culture. Ideally every junior should have a senior dev mentor assigned to them and they should have Slack channels in place where they can request help. Code needs to be reviewed by senior devs and ideally you should be working with them to solutionise before they even begin to write their first line of code.
Still, I think most junior devs would probably benefit from some office experience early in their career. I'm not sure your first dev job should be remote, but I don't think junior devs should feel they're any more likely to fail working remotely as they would in the office. As a junior dev you can probably improve your chances by asking what support you'll be given as a junior dev during the interview process. You should also feel confident to ask for help. At the end of the day if you're not given the support you need as a junior dev, that's not your failure, but your employers.
(I am not saying that's good, just observing.)
Oboarding and successfully integrating juniors is fully dependent on having real seniors (not juniors that you sell as seniors) in the company and budgeting them substantial time (>25% minimum per trainee supervised) to support this process. This further assumes that you had a decent selective hiring process, as no training/onboarding will compensate for the senior's productive time for complete misses.
Many people start their dev career with OSS and that was remote before it was cool.
They have a asynchronous remote first culture from the ground up.
This can't be said for the average company. Those have mostly no processes and getting up to speed at the water cooler mentality. No shit that people with little experience fail there.
Disclaimer: I have an acquaintance who works there.
It's not all pink, and our mission is very much to remove the roadblocks, so we need to acknowledge the issues that prevent remote from being seen as a no brainer by some teams today.
I agree this isn't a hit piece, but it is definitely lacking substance to arrive at a controversial conclusion.
Being in an office also made it clear how much I worked. I was there on most weekends and people noticed.
I'm not saying that that's more important than the benefits of remote, but people absolutely do act like it's a black and white scenario.
I see this claim thrown around frequently as if finding great managers or building a great management culture is an easy thing to do. A great manager in engineering needs to be good at engineering and good at management. It's hard enough to hire for one or the other, let alone both.
Imagine thinking that a Zoom meeting with a few french people is the same as moving to Paris.
Randomness frequently generates uniform subsequences that feel like they can't possibly be random.
PR firms and middle managers are working over-time to ensure that we go back to the previous model where we all commuted in daily. But the labor market is dictating things atm.
Junior workers will always struggle at a place that doesn't support Juniors to find their own way. some people picture juniors as half seniors. forgetting those roles are completely different in their own way. It's the same reason mid level developers are so much in demand
More likely articles like these are just a response to the immense swell of pro-remote sentiment that's been growing over the last few years.
This article was published by a remote-only org whose product is tooling for remote teams. It's not some anti-remote hit piece.
I have a working theory for why this is, which also explains why tech companies hire unsustainably. But that’s a much longer post.
what? do you think those of us in remote roles just....dont work?
Ah, there it is, the bountiful blind arrogance I have come to expect from threads like this on HN. It's like you didn't even read my post, just looked for the hook to drop in and proclaim your superiority.
Instances like this are where the following guideline comes in handy – if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it:
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
The strongest plausible interpretation is obviously that the GP was making their own point about remote work based on their own experiences and not proclaiming personal superiority over you.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31894409.
Seemed to me it was just a counter-point to your post. If you don't have anything productive to add, that's fine, but resorting to personal attacks doesn't really make your argument/viewpoint look better.
From my own personal experience, I'd mirror what the previous poster said. Most of the top performers in a remote setting (at least with software engineering) are usually also a top performer in an office setting. Does that mean there are not outliers? No.
Your follow-up seems to have disregarded their entire response, resorting to ad hominems rather than providing any justification of why you disagree. From my perspective, your response is an example of the exact opposite of what was written, that being "bountiful blind arrogance".
For what it's worth, I largely agreed with their assessment that a top performer in a remote setting is highly-likely to be a top-performer in-office as well.
The set containing top-performing engineers that are effective in-office is a subset of top-performing engineers that are effective remotely. While there are certainly exceptions to this, the article seems to support this assessment when it enumerates the list of things that new-hires would need to learn for both in-office and remote scenarios:
> As you can see, junior remote employees are doing almost 2x the upskilling they're doing in the office. It's not their fault they are struggling to get up to speed as quickly.
I think it’s arrogant to dismiss others experiences, particularly someone who’s managed / lived this experience for a decade (and helped setup multiple remote offices and teams). I never claimed superiority, I did point out a skill that’s often lacking in those with poor remote performance.
There are a variety of possible reasons why a person can thrive more in an office environment compared to a remote environment (and vice versa) such as maybe they have a poor remote environment due to a lack of funds. Some people might have comfy homes and a good support system at home while others may have cramped apartments and a poor home environment.
Also, the blanket statement can also be used inversely such as "generally people who do poorly in an office setting lack discipline" when maybe the person doesn't just do well in an open office or lives far away from the office with a difficult commute.
I think it's simpler to state the some people thrive in an office environment and other people thrive in remote environment for a variety of factors such as their personality and personal environment rather than to condemn those who don't thrive in either set-ups as "lacking discipline".
>I think there's in general a "personality type" that does really well with remote in a certain kind of job and thrives with fairly asynchronous disconnected tasks
and they say that in general those people are already the top performers.
When you think about it, that shouldn't be surprising. People who know how to succeed in one environment also know how to adapt and succeed in another. That's to be expected.
1. Defined goals
2. Available help over Slack and chat (which we have group and private channels)
3. Weekly or bi-weekly standups to get more of a sense of where everyone stands and have a lay of the land and understand your team.
4. The lead needs to do the leg work with the managers to let them know their team is doing the work and get the recognition they deserve.
It is harder in someways, but easier in a lot of ways and WAY more efficient where it counts in many ways. It is a shift and requires effort.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I don't think a personal attack is most generous interpretation of their post.
I would add some nuance. I've increasingly come to the conclusion that initiative is one of the best qualities in an employee. It's natural to see how having initiative will lend itself well to both in-person and remote work, but I suspect the effect is even more prominent in asynchronous work where there's less oversight and less opportunities for someone to spell things out.
Relating to the article, junior employees are often at a disadvantage regarding taking initiative because they simply lack the tacit organizational knowledge to run with a task. They may not know who to contact or the full context of problem areas. This makes them more reliant on mentorship, which can be more difficult in remote work.
I didn't read it that way at all. The commenter was simply relating their observation of how remote works well for some co-workers, but not for others -- as they see it.
That's all. It seems you're reading way too much into that observation.
"junior remote employees are doing almost 2x the upskilling they're doing in the office" based on what?
