Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

ben.balter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 326 posts

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#111

Post by slily »

grumpy_coder wrote: post #105
slily wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With that attitude yes I'm not surprised that people would be tempted to jump ship.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#112

Post by biomcgary »

repeekad wrote: post #68
katbyte wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite for me, wfh means healthier lunches, more time and flexibility to be active . The short walk to transit (of not driving) doesn’t come close

It’s not for everyone, but people who don’t already have an entire life outside of work struggle to start one when the majority of your day is spent alone staring at a screen. The idea that socializing at work is a bad thing I think isolated a huge number of people who used to thrive on work relations and didn’t need a huge number of close friends outside of work to be happy.

My company is 90% remote in practice even though almost everyone lives is in the greater Boston area. It has a Monday meeting over Zoom that starts with socializing, typically discussing personal events from the weekend. This kind of conversation might help people (particularly junior employees) realize that it is possible to have a life outside of work and give some ideas about how to start it (e.g., organized bike rides).

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#113

Post by slily »

x86x87 wrote: post #106
slily wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Random questions" doesn't mean questions without any thought put into them. It just means anything helpful from workflow or environment related questions to code style or processes that are not documented or easy to find. vs. wasting time trying to find things that don't exist or reinventing the wheel, which is more tempting to do when you can't see what your coworkers are doing and don't want to risk offending people who have no interest in passing on knowledge, like a sibling of your comment.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#114

Post by bloopernova »

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…

If your team penalizes you for "asking questions and looking like an idiot" then the team culture is poor.

Nobody knows everything. Everyone makes mistakes. The team should help those people but they need to ask.

Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a token value. Because we've worked hard making our team a safe place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable asking what I was missing. Heck it's give and take, I know way more DevOps and Linux-y stuff, the devs know more about their job.

Because we try to think as a team, we do better and have less interpersonal clashes. I still complain about things each dev does, that's natural, but our team does pretty well together.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#115

Post by repeekad »

saurik wrote: post #107
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…

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 com…

I vividly remember trying to meet up with the few people who stayed behind and didn’t move to their parent’s lake house during covid, one person in the group being concerned about even meeting up outside and everyone else not wanting them to be left behind, so we did virtual on zoom. Laughs and fun, then with a button press the screen flicks black and you’re alone again in your tiny apartment you signed when the plan was to spend almost no time there.

You’re right, I do still think there is value working in person, but remote work by itself isn’t what caused this, even if it’s still what happened.

Hindsight has made all this more clear, but imo loneliness is a silent killer around the world today, and covid threw jet fuel on the fire.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#116

Post by jewayne »

x86x87 wrote: post #106
slily wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Allowing a noob to spin their wheels for too long isn't just wasteful, it sets the exact wrong tone. The goal is not to "figure everything out for yourself". It's to GET THINGS DONE.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#117

Post by biomcgary »

fsociety wrote: post #15
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…

I think the experience of banging your head against the wall (for a bit) can be valuable. As long as the culture of the team encourages this and offers an escape hatch after a few hours (or whatever timeframe is appropriate for the problem).

It is particularly helpful if the team answers using a text format that is easily searchable (e.g., Slack). Long-term written communication is better for building a team's institutional knowledge than verbal communication. I have saved hours of work just finding URLs and documents that I had posted, let alone others.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#118

Post by sokoloff »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #45
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…

That's true, but I don't see how this relates to pandemic or being remote? Also not reaching out when getting totally stuck is a bad thing, but again unrelated?

There is a higher hurdle to setting up a zoom call than there was to waking up to a colleague who was at their desk and didn’t look obviously busy. Solve that, and you probably solve a lot of low-grade communication challenges that are made worse by being remote as compared to in-same-office.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#119

Post by slily »

bloopernova wrote: post #114
slily wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If your team penalizes you for "asking questions and looking like an idiot" then the team culture is poor. Nobody knows everything. Everyone makes mistakes. The team should help those people but they need to ask. Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a token value. Because we've worked hard making our team a safe place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable asking what I was missing. Heck it's give…

> Today I was looking in the wrong devtools tab for a token value. Because we've worked hard making our team a safe place in which to ask questions, I felt comfortable asking what I was missing. Heck it's give and take, I know way more DevOps and Linux-y stuff, the devs know more about their job.

That's easier to do when you're more or less on "equal footing", but if you're a junior, it can take months to years to develop knowledge that seniors don't (depending on several factors). That's the problem, it takes much longer to reach a point where you have knowledge that is equivalent to that of seniors if the culture doesn't lend itself to frequent and high-quality communication and you have to learn about internal tools, processes, code bases and such largely solo. If you share a physical space with seniors you'll at least have some common downtime like a coffee or water break to "bother" them and it can save minutes to hours of tedium each time.

So either you end up being "that guy always asking stupid questions in the chat and interrupting my work" or you spend a lot of time spinning your wheels pointlessly for months/years on end. The first approach leads to unhelpful and delayed responses and the latter makes you so inefficient that you favor lower quality work so that you can actually deliver something.

Re: Remote work requires communicating more, but less frequently

#120

Post by lambersley »

whateverman23 wrote: post #44
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…

> Instead of properly adapting the onboarding and mentoring But... how? Remote check-ins with juniors every 30-60 minutes? That's crazy. But that's basically the only way to replicate the in person experience. The best mentoring results for me as the mentee and for me as a mentor have been when we're sitting next to each other. The mentor can visually tell when the mentee is stuck, and mentee can tell when the mentor…

Agile environments are much better at this. Its inherent frequent touchpoints and "fail fast" mindset can help to ensure the juniors are getting as much information and direction as required.
Post reply on HN