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Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

ben.balter.com

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Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#101

Post by x86x87 »

whateverman23 wrote: post #53
malfist wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who suggested checking in with juniors every 30-60 minutes? GP certainly didn't. You're arguing against a strawman.

Sorry I edited to include my point there. If you don't have 30-60 minute check-ins with juniors, they're not going to have the same rapid feedback that they'd get from in person mentoring. And very importantly, I'm saying 30-60 minute remote check-ins are an absolutely insane idea that should never be implemented. I don't know any kind of remote system that provides for anything even close to the power of in-person m…

Lol. Are those juniors in the room with us right now?

How about letting them figure it out and provide opportunities to chat and ask questions from time to time. Everyone wants superdevelopers but everyone expects that you're going to put a complete noob in a room with a senior developer, they're gonna rub hand and in 2-4 days you're going to have another senior developer. That's not how it works.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#102

Post by donpark »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #4

This sounds great for experienced engineers, but in my experience junior workers often require bite-sized guidance in order to avoid going down rabbit holes. A 10 second conversation could easily save hours of head-banging-into-wall type work for a junior SWE (not even exaggerating). Accordingly, during the pandemic I think it was mostly the less experienced engineers suffering from low productivity and lack of confi…

Pair junior developer with a senior, starting with an hour every other day.

I had more problems with junior developers who think they're senior developers (some experience, high-confidence) bc they don't ask for help when they should.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#103

Post by [deleted] »

x86x87 wrote: post #92
repeekad wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was one of those juniors, the rapid shift to remote work ruined me. I had just moved to a new city where I knew no one to start a life doing the work I loved, and all at once I got told leaving my house was dangerous and to stay home alone all day staring at a screen to keep people safe, for 2+ years… It’s great you value work life balance, but junior engineers suffered a lot (to different degrees), and you being o…

You need social in person interaction as a human being. Nobody is disputing that. Should you rely on your work to get that interaction and can you make the claim that it helps your work?

[deleted]

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#105

Post by grumpy_coder »

slily wrote: post #76
x86x87 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh.. The poor juniors. Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring to the remote setting let's romanticize the good old ways that imho sucked. Let's cherrypick and pretend everything is fine. We went from offices to cubicles to open space and nobody stopped to think if it was a good idea. Wr transformed the office from a place where work actually is done to a placr where we "socialize". Work? Do that on…

I've worked in cubicles and open space plans as well as remotely as a junior. It seems self-evident to me but maybe those who haven't experienced the various environments do not realize that in person it is much easier to ask a random question to a senior. You can poke them and have a small discussion that would flood a chatroom and take much longer to develop remotely, without feeling like you may be inconveniencing…

As the person you kept interrupting and following to the coffee pot, I much prefer this new way of working.

To be clear, labelled as an 'IC' I have zero interest in training you. You will job hop at the first opportunity, and never lift a finger to help me in the future.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#106

Post by x86x87 »

slily wrote: post #76
x86x87 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh.. The poor juniors. Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring to the remote setting let's romanticize the good old ways that imho sucked. Let's cherrypick and pretend everything is fine. We went from offices to cubicles to open space and nobody stopped to think if it was a good idea. Wr transformed the office from a place where work actually is done to a placr where we "socialize". Work? Do that on…

I've worked in cubicles and open space plans as well as remotely as a junior. It seems self-evident to me but maybe those who haven't experienced the various environments do not realize that in person it is much easier to ask a random question to a senior. You can poke them and have a small discussion that would flood a chatroom and take much longer to develop remotely, without feeling like you may be inconveniencing…

Hard disagree with random questions. If it's easy to ask a random question you're just going to keep asking random questions. How about you write down that question and try to formulate the answer or a strategy for finding the answer?

Here is a workflow I made all people I mentor go through: 1) what is the problem? 2) why is this a problem? 3) what are you actually seeing? 4) what have you tried to solve it? What are the results?

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#107

Post by saurik »

repeekad wrote: post #75
x86x87 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh.. The poor juniors. Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring to the remote setting let's romanticize the good old ways that imho sucked. Let's cherrypick and pretend everything is fine. We went from offices to cubicles to open space and nobody stopped to think if it was a good idea. Wr transformed the office from a place where work actually is done to a placr where we "socialize". Work? Do that on…

I was one of those juniors, the rapid shift to remote work ruined me. I had just moved to a new city where I knew no one to start a life doing the work I loved, and all at once I got told leaving my house was dangerous and to stay home alone all day staring at a screen to keep people safe, for 2+ years… It’s great you value work life balance, but junior engineers suffered a lot (to different degrees), and you being o…

Look: except for a few months in high school, I have never worked for a stereotypical company where I would go into an office and do work with other people; I have always worked by myself or remote. I relish working alone and have never had an issue with it; I've even been quite fanatical about it, trying to make sure everyone knew how great this lifestyle was (one which I learned from my father, who worked for a company half a world away from him, from a home office where he was always accessible to his son: me).

But... the pandemic also broke me. Bad. I wasn't at all prepared for life trapped inside where my only interaction with human beings I knew was via video. There were like four months in early 2021 where I only had about four interactions with flesh and blood humans whose name I knew (like, not some entirely random person)... one of them was the guy who lived in a nearby park whom I normally avoid as it is so difficult to end conversations. I gained a ton of weight and at one point--end of 2020--I had given myself some kind of weird anemia (I think from lack of B12 in my stupid closed-in diet).

Like: I am someone for whom his entire life normalized remote work and who thrived in such an environment and yet the pandemic was so hard I still haven't really recovered... thinking about it makes me cry. (And like, yes: I could have better managed my lifestyle or better handled the loneliness. Whatever. That is also true for you, and I at least am not judging you for that.) It is one thing to not work in an office--you can work from anywhere! and there are a ton of people who you can get to spend time with--and it is entirely another thing to work explicitly from a small room in your home day in and day out for a year without human contact.

I thereby want to posit that maybe--just maybe--the issue isn't working remotely but being forced to stay at home and at times even fear going to the supermarket. There were periods during this thing when people were even afraid to meet up outside, and so human contact for white collar professionals outside of relationships was pretty much just verboten. The world was in a shitty place, and you shouldn't judge working remote based on the experiences you had during a pandemic without even trying to control for the existence of a pandemic as part of your analysis.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#108

Post by [deleted] »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #86
repeekad wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was one of those juniors, the rapid shift to remote work ruined me. I had just moved to a new city where I knew no one to start a life doing the work I loved, and all at once I got told leaving my house was dangerous and to stay home alone all day staring at a screen to keep people safe, for 2+ years… It’s great you value work life balance, but junior engineers suffered a lot (to different degrees), and you being o…

I had the same timeline as you, but it was fine for me. Granted, I've never known anyone anywhere I've lived and barely leave home anyway. :p I'm grateful I seem optimized for the fully atomized cyberpunk existence which may only become more intense and universal in the future.

[deleted]

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#109

Post by tpmoney »

malfist wrote: post #57
senttoschool wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a difference between the population that worked remotely before and after Covid. The population before Covid were often highly experienced, disciplined, and proven workers. The population after Covid, was well, everyone who worked with a laptop. Not everyone is cut for working remotely. In addition, there’s a difference between 1 out 20 people working remotely full time and 20 out of 20.

I've worked remotely for about 9 years now. At the start of the pandemic I'd argue there's a wide gulf between those who knew how to work remotely because they've done it for years, and those forced into it and still figuring it out. We spent 3 years in pandemic mode working from home for everyone. We've all figured it out by now. Go into the office if you'd like, but don't force everyone back to it.

The problem is we haven’t all figured it out. I have some coworkers who absolutely need to be in the office. Unfortunately they don’t have the self awareness to realize that, and they heavily believe the only benefit to in office work is making middle management happy. They’re good developers, but they have a bad habit of getting sucked into rabbit holes. Left to their own devices, they’re highly likely to disappear for hours and come back with an architecture astronauts dream that technically does what they’ve been assigned but also does it in ${newest language or framework} with ${unsupported dependency} and insufficient tooling to actually deploy it into production.

When they’re in the office 3 things work to prevent that:

1) yes they are supervised. More senior devs and also management can keep an eye on them

2) They’re more likely to just randomly ask a question or ponder aloud than they are to write something in slack, so it’s more likely someone can catch them going off the rails and re-direct

3) They’re more plugged into what everyone else is doing, so more likely to keep “coming up for air” and keeping their mind focused on the main goal and not the rabbit hole.

Again, these are perfectly fine junior devs with perfectly fine skills, and even their tendency to get enthusiastically lost is just more junior dev stuff.

But they don’t know how to work remotely, they’re not self aware enough to know they need to learn, they don’t take the feedback on it very well either (again see “it’s only because management wants butts in seats”)

So the options for this are mandate them to the office or eventually fire them for being more dead weight remotely than they’re worth.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#110

Post by civilized »

I think the most efficient way of communicating is about the same whether you're in an office or remote:

- If you have a deep technical problem that you already understand a lot of the context for, and you can explain it like an expert Stack Overflow user, then use writing to ask someone who might be able to help you.

- If you're a newbie to this context, don't know what you're dealing with, and there's no documentation that you can understand, write a much shorter message focusing on the immediate issue and ask if it might be most efficient jump on a call, ideally with screen share.

- If you're somewhere in between, do your best to set up the problem in writing, but don't overthink it or assume too much about what your helper needs to know. Again ask if a call with screen share might be more efficient.

Basically, always use writing to start, but adjust the length of the message based on your ability to set up the problem for your helper. And if it's urgent, hopefully there's some way you can ping or notify the person.

More generally, the more you can predict about how the conversation should go, what details are needed by the other person, the better it is to use writing. The less you can predict, the better it is to use a synchronous medium, such as in-person conversation or a call with screen share.

And if you find yourself always needing synchronous media, I would suggest that you try to do more to retain and document knowledge in writing, so that you're not always going back to square one every time you need to solve a problem. After a few months working in some area, it should be increasingly possible to ask expert questions in writing.

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