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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

#181

Post by fendy3002 »

MivLives wrote: post #160
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 t…

My current supervisor said that posting questions and helps in public chat space is valuable since there's a chance that others will see and learn from the same question.

I guess he's right, after 3 months I can easily separate those who can follow conversation on slack and don't need other briefing, and those who need other session of briefing even though there's already many conversation and documentation.

The former will be better remote worker.

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

#182

Post by anchochilis »

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…

Your management style sounds like it would rapidly kill creativity and innovation, psych safety, and codebase quality.

I hold myself to high standards and have been described as a top performer by every manager I've ever had.

I am disciplined and work extra hours as needed to ship. I am constantly thinking about the product and the engineering challenges we face outside of working hours. But sometimes things take longer than expected, sometimes complexity estimates are off, every so often I have a bad week due to personal reasons. Having to conduct a team-wide postmortem every time a ticket rolls over into the next sprint sounds exhausting and I'd start looking for a new job stat. At a minimum it's a huge amount of communication overhead when you should trust me to get my job done, especially considering my track record.

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

#183

Post by _fat_santa »

slackfan wrote: post #7

For junior engineers it's really easy to fall into the trap of trying to solve everything themselves instead of asking for help when they are remote. I say this as somebody who has spent the last five years working remote team-based gigs.

One thing I started as a team lead is telling all my Jr and Mid level engineers to reach out to me for help if they need it, and that I would always be happy to get on a call with them. I had a pretty small team so this was easily manageable. At first I wouldn't get any folks reaching out for help, but eventually they all got comfortable with calling/messaging me if they had an issue.

I think a bit part of this is how you see yourself on the team. I gave myself the personal title: "Specialist and Support Person". On any given day I really only have two tasks:

* Work on "specialist" stuff within the app, stuff that is way over the heads of any of the Jr's or Mid level devs.

* Provide Support on everything else. Since my engineers are the ones pumping out most of the code, the biggest part is making sure they are supported in every way imaginable.

There are other responsibilities obviously, but within the context of "day to day" on the team, I found aligning myself with those responsibilities really helped my team.

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

#185

Post by shmatt »

Macha wrote: post #157
shmatt wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

From personal experience only:

Self taught people (Bootcamps are included here) are self taught to perform in the very specific tool-heavy world. Think Create React App + AWS. It's harder for them to independently understand bigger decisions/system design/building something from the ground up

CS grads know how to study, know when they are really stuck, and know what the good questions to ask when stuck are. They were thrown into this impossible course work and survived, they're better at studying complex systems, and to clearly define what exactly they do and dont understand

Bootcamp grads? they just need you to share a code snippet of exactly what you asked them to do in a different place in the codebase

You could explain 10 times why you chose to build the new microservices in Clojure and they still won't get it

People mistake self taught with understands complex software problems. Usually from what i've worked with, self taught is self taught to copy paste some commands into npm

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

#186

Post by jmercan »

mfer wrote: post #26
geraldwhen wrote: post #5

Before 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…

> 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…

I had to do my first two internships in office (started before the vaccine rollout reached my age group, eek) and my experience was pretty similar to what you said. I was given some time in the beginning to get familiar with the codebase but not much mentorship.

Most questions I could only get an answer from was about business requirements because they were either too busy or didn't knew much more about the part I was working on.

Not sure if my situation is usual though, even for interns after COVID started.

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

#187

Post by heretogetout »

throwaway1092 wrote: post #10

Our company's new CTO held an all-hands meeting Friday where he stated something to the effect that he agreed with Elon (Musk) and that if it were up to him we'd all be huddled in the same office..."but times have changed". What I heard was "I really don't like that we can't keep an eye on you, but since the labor market is still so tight in tech, we have to deal with remote (for now)."

"I will, begrudgingly, acquiesce to your demands. But know this: I hold you all in contempt." Good way to generate business for resume reviewers, I guess.

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

#188

Post by aftergibson »

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…

What nonsense, so are we expected to ask how many friends you have IRL to gauge someone’s ability at synchronous communication?

I can communicate remotely in a business setting (and have done) for many years. I don’t make friends online because it’s a personal preference.

It’s the same as “show me your GitHub profile” but maybe after 8 hours on a computer asynchronously communicating and coding. I don’t want to code or make friends on discord.

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

#190

Post by fendy3002 »

mcv wrote: post #51
zwkrt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is it in the office you can just actively see that somebody is anxious and you can ask them what’s up.

True, but there have been plenty of cases where juniors languishing in an office with little guidance. And remote you can still ask them how they're doing by chat. It's true that the barrier is a bit higher remote, but it's not unsurpassable.

In office, there's watercooler chat that can lead to debugging session. In remote there isn't.

That being said, with the former culture, it's harder to ask question online and asynchronously, since usually they prefer and wait to have in face session instead.

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