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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

#111
post #84
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.

I'll add to that, the motivation to mentor someone really goes away the third or fourth time you see them hit the inflection point of the usefulness curve... just to be hired by someone else because $current_employer can't find an extra few grand to keep them.

I don't like training and mentoring people. I'm pretty good at it, but I try my damnest to avoid it now.

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

#112
I don’t necessarily think that working remote is the end all be all for jobs that can do it. But the benefits of remote is just too good to give up. No commute, cheaper cost of living, less stress, etc. Don’t get me wrong there are cons, but the freedom is just too hard to give up. Even if you are struggling at it work wise.

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.

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

#113
post #84
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.

Yes, but maybe it's time for companies to ask themselves why they have such high turnover

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

#114
post #29
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's penny wise, pound foolish thinking. A good keyboard and mouse and monitor for your developers (who directly earn you revenue) is not going to break the bank. But the lack of them will reduce productivity and morale, possibly even causing (on the margin) some talented people to leave. RSI and posture problems are no joke! In other industries you need immense capital investment in equipment for workers to be pro…

I wouldn't expect my employer to provide anything but a decent quality membrane keyboard and a middle of the range logitech mouse by default. Then people who prefer higher end hardware can ask for an upgrade. I'm typing on a 300 euro keyboard right now but I would consider it a gross waste of money if a company decided to give them to every single employee regardless of need or preference. For instance for most peopl…

> membrane keyboard

I can't type on these things to save my life. I need full keys with at least some click in order to type well. When I'm forced to use the keyboard and trackpad on my mac, I am an order of magnitude slower than I am on a cheap external keyboard and mouse.

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

#115

This is not a surprise to me. I think it also applies to some people who are senior and new on a project or team. Or people with a more synchronous working style. I think remote has been toxic to productivity in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of people. 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…

> 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 on HN I think there's a bias towards seeing our whole industry that way.

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.

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

#116
post #66

This is not a surprise to me. I think it also applies to some people who are senior and new on a project or team. Or people with a more synchronous working style. I think remote has been toxic to productivity in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of people. 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…

Yep, I used to be more productive WFH when I was already acclimated on a team. When I joined a new team and it turned fully remote, my productivity dropped and it took me longer to come up to speed than if I were in the office.

My opinion is that the issue arises because of expectations and formalities that occur in remote environments over in person.

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.

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

#117

This is not a surprise to me. I think it also applies to some people who are senior and new on a project or team. Or people with a more synchronous working style. I think remote has been toxic to productivity in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of people. 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…

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.

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

#118
post #84
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.

The question is why are they leaving after 24 months? Perhaps the company is lacking a clear path for development in terms of responsibility, impact, and renumeration. Not adequately training because they are expected to leave after 24 months is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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

#119

I had the unfortunate experience of working at a cubicle farm in Atlanta, and what really got me were the chairs. Crappy monitors, crappy equipment, par for the course, but the chairs hurt. Chairs that have been sitting around for a decade, and management could not care less. Gotta sit in a chair for four hours at a time, got back pain, too bad. That’s the only job in my life I’ve ever just walked out on. It was abso…

Every company I've worked at will quickly bring you a special ergonomic keyboard/mouse, chair, standing desk, monitor stands, etc once you start complaining about carpal tunnel or back pain.

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

#120

This is not a surprise to me. I think it also applies to some people who are senior and new on a project or team. Or people with a more synchronous working style. I think remote has been toxic to productivity in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of people. 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…

> 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 on HN I think there's a bias towards seeing our whole industry that way. 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…

The funny thing is that I got my "start" in programming doing things remote. Open source development, and in the 90s, IRC, MUDs/MOOs, etc. I have all sorts of collaborators and friends I've actually never met in person. And we were pretty productive.

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.

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