How to set junior employees up for success in remote • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by bmitc » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

lettergram wrote: post #101

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #46

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…

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

I don’t think that’s the case at all. One could say a similar thing in that it enables the worst employees who can drag down so-called top performers. But I don’t like any of these framings.

I personally prefer working in the office. I’m more productive, focused, and able to check in with someone or go grab them and show them an issue I’m having. I’m able to attend talks, have discussions, etc., which get me going on certain ideas. I am a person that doesn’t work well in ambiguity. I like to have a plan discussed and agreed upon. I find this is much harder remotely, for reasons both known and unknown.

Very few deep conversations happen over Slack. I miss some of the deep conversations I used to have with fellow coworkers on slower days. You are also very limited to the type of work you can do. Basically any job requiring hardware interaction requires you to be in office, either by natural constraints or policies.

But I am also like the commenter above. It will be really hard to give up remote work. The convenience of not having to commute, dress a certain way, have my own food in my own kitchen, etc. are all massive perks. At some point, I may choose to go back into the office, but I’m going to do the remote thing for a while. Especially now that gas is insane.

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

#152

Post by heretogetout » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #115

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #46

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…

I think the same arguments could be made if you swapped in-person for remote (nearly) throughout. There are those of us who prefer remote work and have been told that we must spend dozens to hundreds of hours a year just commuting in order to be more productive. "Finally", more companies are acknowledging our POV and optimal work style after years/decades of talking about it -- I think that's why there is so much enthusiasm around remote work these days.

The pendulum may have swung too far, on that I'll agree.

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

#153

Post by formercoder » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 1:59 PM UTC

urthor wrote: post #148

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I was on a team @ Google that was doing consumer hardware. It had problems before WFH started, but it got 5X worse once we got sent home. The whole situation was highly unproductive, a combination of bad politics, but also a degraded tech stack with a pile of technical debt and a build system that took forever to finish, and then because of Google's "no source code on your laptop" policies (which they stubb…

> no source code on your laptop Cybersecurity policies and work from home has always been extraordinarily strange to me. Optical character recognition exists. Big Corp, trust me, if I wanted to steal your stuff, I'd have it already. Stop locking my laptop down, we both know that's mostly a scare tactic.

The definition of “on laptop” is pretty ambiguous also

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

#154

Post by civilized » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #120

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

I mostly agree with you, but we should remember that the shift to remote happened abruptly due to an unprecedented, immensely disruptive pandemic. This was not a controlled experiment where we can automatically attribute any issues that emerged after the shift to inherent flaws in remote work.

That said, I think your experiences with the limitations of remote are valid and shouldn't be dismissed, although I personally am extremely committed to remote.

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

#155

Post by l30n4da5 » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #132

Icathian wrote: post #2

While I can understand some of the arguments made about juniors getting some extra benefit from having everything close to hand, the sheer pace of the hit pieces against remote the last month or so is hilarious and very telling.

Good. I'm tired of having the presumed wonders of WFH shoved down my throat. It's great if you don't want to work and instead slack off at home but I don't believe this productivity increase myth a single bit.

> It's great if you don't want to work and instead slack off at home

what? do you think those of us in remote roles just....dont work?

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

#156

Post by Rychard » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #106

"I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway." Ah, there it is, the bountiful blind arrogance I have come to expect from threads like this on HN. It's like you didn't even read my post, just looked for the hook to drop in and proclaim your superiority.

But they did read your post, as shown by their provided reasoning.

Your follow-up seems to have disregarded their entire response, resorting to ad hominems rather than providing any justification of why you disagree. From my perspective, your response is an example of the exact opposite of what was written, that being "bountiful blind arrogance".

For what it's worth, I largely agreed with their assessment that a top performer in a remote setting is highly-likely to be a top-performer in-office as well.

The set containing top-performing engineers that are effective in-office is a subset of top-performing engineers that are effective remotely. While there are certainly exceptions to this, the article seems to support this assessment when it enumerates the list of things that new-hires would need to learn for both in-office and remote scenarios:

> As you can see, junior remote employees are doing almost 2x the upskilling they're doing in the office. It's not their fault they are struggling to get up to speed as quickly.

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

#157

Post by Macha » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

shmatt wrote: post #140

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…

I agree, and have to wonder what would happen if pre-remote some researcher tried to break it down to 'Computer Science Graduate' and 'Taught themselves on CodeAcademy' I would bet the CS graduate is having a much easier time self-learning at home than the no-degree person who usually stops peoples work 12-15 times a day to get them to explain concepts or show them around the code, again...

Huh, I'd expect the self taught person to be more capable of teaching themselves the codebase than the CS grad, especially once you get into companies doing bog standard CRUD API + SPA webapp for a SaaS.

It's the new grads from courses that are theory heavy and practice light that expect a lecturer or tutor to guide them through the whole process in my experience.

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

#158

Post by DoingIsLearning » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 2:01 PM UTC

dev_tty01 wrote: post #118

treis wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's mostly because it is taboo to give a pay rise above 15% to retain someone (unless promoting) but most companies are willing to spend more than that difference on new hires to match the market rate.

I am sure there is some sort of game psychology explanation on HR's behaviour and equally, from an employee perspective, the cost/inertia of following through with a job change will probably weight in HR's favor.

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

#159

Post by supergeek133 » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

This argument has really become "what will a workplace do to accommodate/help people one way or the other".

For instance, I personally prefer going to the office at least sometimes. My job satisfaction went down considerably staying at home for nearly 2 years. The fact my job had travel pre-COVID also likely had something to do with that. I enjoyed being around people, getting out of the house, etc.

I'm also a huge gamer, and am constantly on Discord or some type of in-game chat. So it's not like I didn't have people to talk to or wasn't getting any interaction.

My company is currently "Hybrid", so most who are near an office go 2-3 days a week. We're also pretty nationally and internationally distributed, so we're going to the office to be on a bunch of phone calls. The people I see at the office are my direct manager and a few cross functional co-workers. It's nice to be able to talk to them in person.

Now recently on a company town hall, the question came up, and our President said basically "We're going with the times/job market, but at the same time if I got everyone involved in Problem X in a room together it would get solved in days not weeks".

From experience, he's not wrong, but that sent me down another line of thinking:

- Are we willing to fly these people around to be in that room?

- If no, we should make it easier to do that.

- What resources do we provide to make at-home lives easier (monitors, webcams, better headset/speakerphone).

- What learning and/or help do we give to make people "better" at WFH or Office?

The last unique thing I'll say about me, I live 10 minutes or less from my office. That's a HUGE privilege, and one that has probably kept me here longer simply because I don't get stressed out over commute changes from weather, etc. I can't imagine what it would be like if I lived 45 minutes or an hour or more from work.

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

#160

Post by MivLives » Mon, Jun 27, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

lkrubner wrote: post #125

(quoting book) Amanda Nock, a tech leader and devops expert who posts frequently to Twitter, offered this in response when I posted on Twitter about how to hire good people remotely, “When I hire remotely, I ask about their online friends.” Nock doesn’t need the details of anyone’s online friendships, but she needs to know that the person has developed a serious friendship online; otherwise that person probably doesn…

This an interesting approach to this that I wouldn't have thought of. You can clearly see who the people who are used to existing in a text space vs not.

In my team for example, one of my coworkers just hates written communication. He started after me and had to ask a lot of questions. To do so he'd send me a hangouts link and expect me to join so he could ask his question. Most of the time they were questions that then involved him sitting and staring as I had to go look up the answer and link him to it anyway. He was ignoring channels set up to ask for help and ones that would have gotten our entire area of the company to help him.

But I think the most insidious part of people who don't communicate well in written form is that it makes other people not want to do so. I was stuck as the only other engineer with this guy for 6 months. During this time I stopped updating, then stopped writing out ticket bodies. I stopped posting helpful things to our team channel and didn't update documentation. What was the point? Who was going to read it? I've been slowly getting back in the habit now that we have people on my team who actually... use things I spend the time to write.

And I get that he's twenty years older then me, has fifteen years of experience on me, and has not been living his life in a chat client since the age of 12, but he's a fully remote worker even without the pandemic and I feel like it's one of his opportunity areas.