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How to set junior employees up for success in remote

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Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#241

Post by travisgriggs »

ospzfmbbzr wrote: post #197
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Not personal unless you take it that way -- instead take it as a challenge and show him he was wrong about you. Programming well is difficult and takes time and effort to get good at, but it's worth it. Being junior and learning while remote is not ideal at all. I work very well remotely but only because everything is second nature to me now after so many years. If that makes me a 'top performer' then it's only becau…

> Programming well is difficult and takes time and effort to get good at, but it's worth it.

I agree very much with parts 1 and 2 of your assertion. At 51, with a decent brag list of successes, I think I’ve even achieved some measure of it.

The part I’m not sure about is the “worth it.” I used to think that, I’ve become less sure of late.

What makes it worth to you? I’m honestly curious. I used to have various things that made it worth it to me, and of late they’ve become less valued.

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#242

Post by wizofaus »

treis wrote: post #84
mfer wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect it’s harder for a junior to succeed anywhere today vs 2012 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…

IMHO it's turnover that's the problem. Companies get engineers for an average of like 24 months and it might be even less for junior employees. Taking the time to train someone up doesn't make as much sense when you're not going to get return on your investment.

Chicken vs Egg? Maybe the turnover is high because juniors aren't getting the support and mentoring they need to feel like it's worth sticking around. Is there evidence turnover has increased in the last decade or so? It's always been pretty high in the IT world anyway.

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#243

Post by MattGaiser »

holoduke wrote: post #117
lettergram wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway. 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 engin…

Utterly nonsense. How about children learning from home via a laptop? Doesn't work. Same for people who need to be trained in a new work environment. You want real interaction. You need to experience more than only sound and video in order to learn efficient. It's extremely wrong to think that good performers can always do these things from home. Not right.

I learned largely via laptop until Grade 8 (am 25 currently). I wasn't behind when I transitioned to regular school.

I suspect it works for readers, not audio consumers.

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#244

Post by kevinmchugh »

mcv wrote: post #61
kevinmchugh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a lot easier for me to observe a junior struggling, spinning their wheels, and give corrective feedback in the office. I don't know the remote equivalent of glancing at their screen and body language while I get up for a bathroom break.

Listen to what they say during the daily team meeting, and occasionally ask by chat how they're doing. It's true that it has to be a bit more explicit, and it may be a bit slower, but it's far from impossible.

That's one point of contact per day. I was able to continuously be aware of anyone struggling before. I can't continuously ping them throughout the day. Even 4 times a day seems much too high contact to not be patronizing, and that still leaves them to stew for up to two hours at a time

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#245

Post by sebzim4500 »

holoduke wrote: post #117
lettergram wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway. 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 engin…

Utterly nonsense. How about children learning from home via a laptop? Doesn't work. Same for people who need to be trained in a new work environment. You want real interaction. You need to experience more than only sound and video in order to learn efficient. It's extremely wrong to think that good performers can always do these things from home. Not right.

Have you considered not hiring children?

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#246

Post by KaiserPro »

upupandup wrote: post #226
parksy wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a senior developer, if working just in the office as was expected in the past I was distracted by things like a story about the weekend two colleagues are having in the background that sounds amusing, or the junior developer constantly spinning around on his chair to ask a question about something because "you're there". I always had time for that kind of thing but my productivity suffered and I was always frustra…

> I really started to feel the lack of human contact and socialisation. 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 o…

> Given the option of working from home, most people will choose WFH.

most people who think like you will choose WFH. As the post clearly describes, they found the lack of human contact during the day hard to cope with.

The key thing here is that people need choice.

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#247

Post by jmyeet »

The worst mistake I think you can make with people is believing in an objective reality.

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.

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#248

Post by travisgriggs »

jmyeet wrote: post #234
lettergram wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway. 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 engin…

It's so easy to conflate "top performers" with "people like me". 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…

+50

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#249

Post by barrysteve »

scottLobster wrote: post #173
lettergram wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway. 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 engin…

In defense of remote work underperformers in general, I work for a company with a lot of tribal knowledge. It shouldn't be that way, but that's how the company operates and our pleas for time/money to write adequate internal documentation fall on deaf ears (doesn't help that it's legacy software so there's not many people capable of writing said documentation). Result is there are a few wise old (as in 15-20+ years e…

I've seen this pattern recently outside of software. This kind of "tribal capture" lead to mediocrity and nepotism. The untouchable tribal leaders fostered an environment where unpleasant roles were left understaffed until 'lower people' were subtly manipulated into taking them, who then left. It created a revolving door of staff that otherwise would have made good contributions. Management in response to the turn over, shut down critical thinking about the staff and just committed to the problematic structure.

Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote

#250

Post by giantg2 »

prepend wrote: post #215
giantg2 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main concern is theft of the laptop. They do trust you. They don't want someone to have your drive with proprietary source, even if the drive is encrypted.

Sounds like they should fix this with better laptop encryption. There’s many cheap methods to make source code on a stolen laptop useless. Using this as an excuse may mean that the org is stupid or lies to employees. Since this is Google, I think this just means that they don’t trust employees. And that’s a bad situation. If you can’t trust employees to not do bad things with the tools required for their jobs, then i…

"Sounds like they should fix this with better laptop encryption."

I'm not aware of any security experts that share this reasoning, if the information is truly sensitive and high value.

"There’s many cheap methods to make source code on a stolen laptop useless."

Such as?

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