201–210 of 265 posts
There is only one reason to have people in the office, that is so that you can observe them (and own their soul). If certain people have a need for face to face interaction, that is an exception not the rule.
Forgive me for this digression and for sounding selfish, but as a junior, I’ve really struggled for the last 2+ years to fully adapt to remote / hybrid working. I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, ho…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Yes, three things: - Learn to write detailed yet succinct prose, and practice this often. - Learn to unblock yourself, so that asynchronous communication does not become a barrier. Be prepared to dig in at least 1-2 layers of abstraction below where you typically work and spend lots of time researching unfamiliar topics. - Decid…
When you say "make sure you are getting n years of experience and not one year of experience n times", do you mean to try and work on something different each year? Or did you mean something else?
The failure mode of taking this advice is to constantly churn technologies and spend all your time learning superficialities about the new shiny.
This is exactly the case for my company. Since the pandemic started the majority of our engineering hiring has been remote, because why pay Bay Area salaries when you have perfectly great developers willing to work out of Toronto, Vancouver, Philadelphia, Portland or really anywhere else in the same-ish timezones. Now that our HQ has fully opened up and local employees are being asked to come back, how do you deal wi…
> What would have been a 1:1 over coffee or a corridor huddle now needs a meeting room reservation, and there aren't nearly enough of them to go around. Genuinely curious because I’ve yet to encounter this myself - but why would you need a meeting for something like this? Can you not just ask your colleague via slack, teams, etc? Or better yet, can either of you write up a proposal and put out a RFC on it? That way t…
One of my frustrations with working remotely is things that used to be a two-way discussion on a whiteboard or a live demo become a one-way broadcast of something prepared in advance.
There are 'virtual whiteboards', certainly, but none of them are any good.
Forgive me for this digression and for sounding selfish, but as a junior, I’ve really struggled for the last 2+ years to fully adapt to remote / hybrid working. I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, ho…
In my experience, this is not correlated with remote or office work in any way. For the most part of my career, spent in the office, I have not received any form of mentorship, even though I would have liked it. Most people I've met don't have the "mentorship gene", so to speak. They don't really care enough to stop what they're doing and share this knowledge with you.
The company I'm currently with is an exception to the general rule I've seen in the industry. Specifically, they put a lot of effort into actively sharing knowledge (as in, you don't have to ask for it, it will be given to you even if you're too shy to say anything). And they're fully remote.
So, to put it another way - if a company doesn't put any effort into training while remote, I find it difficult to believe things are any different in an office. Maybe what you miss is those interactions that are inevitable when you're physically working next to others; maybe it was a way to get "training" by accident. But there's no reason why you can't do the same remotely. You could try pair programming, for example, or you could all be in a Discord channel and just work in the same virtual place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the opportunity this presents is getting lunch with people that aren't ephemeral and transactional. you can experience something OTHER than work on your lunch hour, expand your horizons, and build meaningful relationships. of course you will on occasion get one of those relationships from the office, but they're the exception to the rule imo.
How are you going to build more meaningful relationships with a collection of people that’s essentially random (neighbors) vs. one with a lot of built in common ground (coworkers)?
As someone who has worked on startups, side gigs, and only around 6 months at a “real” company. I’m always blown away at how many meetings there are in corporate America. What are you even meeting about? Why aren’t you doing hands on keyboard work? Why does a decision need to be made in a room, with everyone pretending to listen? Why are you presenting something to me when I’ll comprehend it far better if I read it,…
As someone who has worked on startups, side gigs, and only around 6 months at a “real” company. I’m always blown away at how many meetings there are in corporate America. What are you even meeting about? Why aren’t you doing hands on keyboard work? Why does a decision need to be made in a room, with everyone pretending to listen? Why are you presenting something to me when I’ll comprehend it far better if I read it,…
Wait till you see government organisations. There are meetings to decide who needs to turn up to a meeting. I thought that was a sick joke until I attended such a thing myself. On one project we had dozens(!) of meetings involving 5-10 people to decide what to call an API endpoint that no human being will ever see again after the initial implementation. A nearly cried. I told them that they could literally mash the k…
Forgive me for this digression and for sounding selfish, but as a junior, I’ve really struggled for the last 2+ years to fully adapt to remote / hybrid working. I’m wondering if anyone has advice on how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Based on my experience so far, it’s very difficult to both onboard and mentor a junior from a remote setting. It’s not impossible, ho…
During COVID, as a CTO, I tell my team to DM me after stand-ups if they aren't sure about their tasks or work, or even how to get started. I'm more than happy to spend 2-3 hours on a separate remote call with an individual, where we go through a socratic'ish discovery, using things like draw.io or mermaid to quickly sketch out concepts and architecture. Often this then sparks them to go through their own discovery, a…
Bingo. I've been doing the same with new remote hires (especially jr). I try to block off a couple hours every other day that are 'open'. When they send their first few PRs, I'll call them and go over it which inevitable leads to lots of random questions about the code base.
Finally, I make it clear this time is open to them as long as it's needed.
My goal is to replicate the ability for someone to stop by my office. I think so far it's been ok.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> how I can continue to grow and become a top-class engineer within a remote environment? Yes, three things: - Learn to write detailed yet succinct prose, and practice this often. - Learn to unblock yourself, so that asynchronous communication does not become a barrier. Be prepared to dig in at least 1-2 layers of abstraction below where you typically work and spend lots of time researching unfamiliar topics. - Decid…
When you say "make sure you are getting n years of experience and not one year of experience n times", do you mean to try and work on something different each year? Or did you mean something else?
An example of getting deeper if you're a Java programmer would be to really learn all the collections available (beyond ArrayList and HashMap) and when to use them. Wider would be to learn and improve on your SQL.