I work remote now and love it, but I can't imagine doing this straight out of college.
How to set junior employees up for success in remote
171–180 of 370 posts
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#172Earlier 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 just want to note that my experience is the exact opposite of this in every regard.
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#173This 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…
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 experience) veterans who know the "deep magic" of how the software works, but they also tended to be the least available online during our year of WFH (with some exceptions).
In the office the culture for accessing these guys was: Ping with slack DM/skype, if they don't answer in 15 minutes walk over to their desk and bend their ear, unless they were clearly working something more important at the moment. Sometimes there would even be short lines of people outside of their cube waiting for attention.
There was an organic interrupt-driven workflow for these experts because they were in so much demand (with occasional pauses in access if they were working on something time-critical). That whole workflow collapsed under WFH, and as these veterans were used to operating on their own/managing their own time roughly half of them failed to be readily available online. This led to issues for people like myself where we needed some piece of their knowledge but just got radio silence for hours, sometimes days. So you pick up some other work to fill in the gap while you wait for a response, but that leads to inefficiencies of its own once they actually do get back to you. Once I had a cascade of about 6 stories going in parallel because I kept picking up alternate work to fill gaps, only to get to a point in THAT work where I needed some tribal knowledge, so I pinged the appropriate SME, waited several hours, picked up another task in the meantime... etc
And leadership lacks any carrots/sticks to make these guys accessible aside from asking nicely. They're largely where they want to be for their careers, value their time, and have all the truly vital knowledge so they can't really be punished lest they leave the program.
Sadly I suspect my company's organization is closer to the average than yours, so lots of other companies fall into this boat. It's not always a matter of discipline :)
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#174This 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…
Some people need more authority and external motivation generally in order to realize their potential.
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Founder of Slite here, your reply is spot on, we try to be as honest on the pros and cons of remote when we think internally of the future of this market, and when we share our research or insights outside. It's not all pink, and our mission is very much to remove the roadblocks, so we need to acknowledge the issues that prevent remote from being seen as a no brainer by some teams today.
Hey there, just wanted to say as a remote junior dev who has been at it for about 10 months now, that I appreciate the article a lot. These 10 months have been the most difficult of my life, professionally speaking. I was assigned a mentor, but there were no training exercises, or "easy bug fixes / small wording changes to make, so they can focus on learning the workflows" quite the opposite actually, and no processe…
Absolutely, we onboarded multiple junior folks over the year, but always put special care there, it needs a very different approach to any new remote teammate.
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's like you didn't even read my post, just looked for the hook to drop in and proclaim your superiority. Seemed to me it was just a counter-point to your post. If you don't have anything productive to add, that's fine, but resorting to personal attacks doesn't really make your argument/viewpoint look better. From my own personal experience, I'd mirror what the previous poster said. Most of the top performers in a…
Quoted post unavailable.
no it isn't.
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#177Before remote, the office was already increasingly hostile. Open floor plans, some groups having shared seating, and offices for roughly no one. Now, it’s worse. Everything is “reservable equipment” of garbage monitors, windows keyboards, and 400 dpi mice. I suspect it’s harder for a junior to succeed anywhere today vs 2012. The office is not built to foster development or innovation. It’s an exec’s idea of what a so…
yeah, i would have preferred to be remote as a junior.
i think its just about being an environment where you're comfortable to ask questions - and some candidates also, maybe through insecurity are also unwilling to seek guidance.
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#178I don't know if they're more likely to fail in a company that understands how to work remotely. Although the article does seem to suggest this. My guess is that this is more a product of companies recently going remote and not understanding how to do it right.
I've been working mostly remotely for the last decade, both as a junior and now as a senior and this hasn't been my experience at all. In fact, I'd argue the opposite is perhaps true.
I tend to define a junior dev as a dev who needs a decent amount of handholding where as senior devs are expected to be self-sufficient after a brief onboarding period.
If you're a senior dev and you're not self-sufficient then remote can be really hard because you have to constantly pester other devs for help over Slack and Teams, where as in the office asking someone for advise can be done less formally. What I've found is that it's really obvious when a senior dev isn't quite as senior as they probably should be when working remotely.
Junior devs on the other hand should be expected to need support and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to get that support if they're working for a company that has a good remote working culture. Ideally every junior should have a senior dev mentor assigned to them and they should have Slack channels in place where they can request help. Code needs to be reviewed by senior devs and ideally you should be working with them to solutionise before they even begin to write their first line of code.
Still, I think most junior devs would probably benefit from some office experience early in their career. I'm not sure your first dev job should be remote, but I don't think junior devs should feel they're any more likely to fail working remotely as they would in the office. As a junior dev you can probably improve your chances by asking what support you'll be given as a junior dev during the interview process. You should also feel confident to ask for help. At the end of the day if you're not given the support you need as a junior dev, that's not your failure, but your employers.
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#179Question for anyone who's had to onboard/train Jr's in a 100% remote environment, what's worked for you? How do you maximize their chances of success? What are some common pain points? This has been an issue at my org and we're having a hard time improving it.
When I started, my direct manager took me on a walk. We visited about 20 different desks and had introductions and impromptu chats with various developers and product managers, putting the names to faces and expertises. Not all on the same team either, some were just people he knew well from various projects. This was a huge jumpstart for an introvert like me. In an online-only Slack environment there is the private…
Or documentation. Just a list of slack channels and what they are used for is a big help.
Remote working requires effort too.
Re: How to set junior employees up for success in remote
#180"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.
I pointed out what I’ve seen. It’s not a personal attack to say “generally people who do poorly in a remote setting lack discipline” I then provided several methods we used to increase discipline (we developed over years of trial and error).
I think it’s arrogant to dismiss others experiences, particularly someone who’s managed / lived this experience for a decade (and helped setup multiple remote offices and teams). I never claimed superiority, I did point out a skill that’s often lacking in those with poor remote performance.