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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

#191

Post by giantg2 »

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.

I think the main concern is theft of the laptop. They do trust you. They don't want someone to have your drive with proprietary source, even if the drive is encrypted.

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

#193

Post by guitarbill »

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...

Sure, or more likely having a CS degree or not does not strongly correlate with programming skill or software development skill.

Some people are good at programming, and do a CS degree to expand their capabilities. Some people do a CS degree solely for the career options (which to be clear is not necessarily bad). Some people didn't do CS degrees for whatever reason, but have thousands of hours in codebases, and know when to look up an algorithm or data structure.

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

#194

Post by bragr »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #130
l30n4da5 wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

I think you should read that post again with more dispassion. It does NOT say that top performer's are not suffering from remote work. It says who the top performers are has not really changed. The top performers could be getting 50% less work done and that person's post still holds for me.

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

#195

Post by 533474 »

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…

Spot on

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

#196

Post by ratww »

sweetheart wrote: post #168
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…

Pair programming is a fantastic tool. Why the snark?

GP isn't talking about Pair programming in general. Pair programming is great. But quote-unquote "Pair Programming", where only one person does the work... not really. Been there done that.

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

#197

Post by ospzfmbbzr »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #130
l30n4da5 wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

Not personal unless you take it that way -- instead take it as a challenge and show him he was wrong about you.

Programming well is difficult and takes time and effort to get good at, but it's worth it.

Being junior and learning while remote is not ideal at all. I work very well remotely but only because everything is second nature to me now after so many years. If that makes me a 'top performer' then it's only because I worked my way up to that.

Do you believe you are at your top performance already? Or can you get better still?

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

#198

Post by leetrout »

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…

> Over the last decade, I've seen less and less mentoring.

I've seen a lack of willingness be mentored / coached. Not directly of folks I have worked with but as a bystander. There's not one clear reason but there is an overtone of entitlement.

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

#199

Post by TigeriusKirk »

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.

You say that

>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 they say that in general those people are already the top performers.

When you think about it, that shouldn't be surprising. People who know how to succeed in one environment also know how to adapt and succeed in another. That's to be expected.

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

#200

Post by fromwhence »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #130
l30n4da5 wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

That is not a personal insult. It couldn't even be so by implication, unless the alleged insulter here knows something about you personally that the rest of us don't know. They simply made an assertion. You can disagree with it, but that's their general assertion and that's not the same thing as a personal insult.
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