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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

#261

Post by MattGaiser »

leetrout wrote: post #198
mfer wrote: 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…

> 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.

>I've seen a lack of willingness be mentored / coached.

What do you mean by this? They were arrogant?

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

#262

Post by zeroego »

christophepas wrote: post #175
zeroego wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Out of curiosity do you foresee Slite hiring more junior devs in the near future? Sounds like an awesome place to work that's more aligned with my goals than my current place of employment.

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

#263

Post by MattGaiser »

macspoofing wrote: post #98
lozenge wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feeling valued is necessary for a junior. They deserve the same three monitors everybody else gets.

>They deserve the same three monitors everybody else gets. I wouldn't make a strong statement like that. As a junior, you're just excited to be there, and gain experience. If the company policy is that you don't get the top-of-the-line hardware until you reach a certain professional milestone and this policy is applied equally then it's not the end of the world.

> As a junior, you're just excited to be there, and gain experience.

For the first few months perhaps. Then a friend sends a pic of his setup and tells you that he will split a referral bonus with you if you apply. It took me 4 months to find my first dev job, once I hit the 6 month mark, jobs came to me in abundance.

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

#264

Post by tomtheelder »

ensignavenger wrote: post #94
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 wonder if it is really so much down to just personality, or if training, process changes, and better tools could largely ameliorate the differences? I have a hunch that as more work shifts remote, new ways of working will evolve.

I do think a lot of it is driven by personality types, but I would attribute that more to personal need for close contact and socialization. I will never thrive in a remote environment- not because I can't manage focus or work asynchronously or anything, but because it makes me extremely depressed. It's impossible to keep my productivity up as my mental state degrades.

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

#265

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jmyeet wrote: post #234
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…

It's so easy to conflate "top performers" with "people like me". Take someone who points out flaws in a system, things that need to be addressed before they become a problem. The exact same words from two different people can be interpreted differently. For example: - "X is a top performer who anticipates problems with their deep understanding of the system"; and - "Y is negative and simply points out problems rather…

Totally agree, and it's the kind of language that rings alarm bells for me especially when coming from a person with a manager role.

"Those who were followers; who lacked discipline, failed faster and more obviously."

Classifying one's reports into "top performers" and people who "lacked discipline" or "followers" betrays a categorical mindset very eager to bucket people rather than see the contradictions and subtleties of people's individual situations and work towards helping to resolve the difficulties, which is what leadership / management should be about.

EDIT to put it another way: good parenting (which I don't always practice, BTW) doesn't say "You're a bad boy", they say "You did a bad thing." Likewise when talking to oneself, it's really shitty to say "I'm a crappy X [engineer/painter/swimmer]".. it's far better to say "I did X poorly last time." A good engineering manager should help frame things this way, and shouldn't be saying "top performers" and "followers" but, instead: "people who performed well" and "people who tended to be behind or 'follow' in the last quarter" and help the latter identify how they can do the former (note: not be, but do).

We were in a global crisis. People were at home with their young kids, spouses, dogs, whatever distractions. Empathy and flexibility were required to make this work. "Failing" at work was probably the least of concerns for many people, given everything that was going on. I personally quit my job rather than deal with the guilt of having spent time getting my son to do his school work rather than triaging bug tickets. Others could not afford to do so.

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

#266

Post by macspoofing »

JCharante wrote: post #143
macspoofing wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I will NOT be productive at a desk if you put me in front of a single monitor, period. Give me a break. Software development has been going on for decades now on all kinds of hardware (how did all those Software developers survive all these years??). You can be productive and get your work done on a single monitor, you just prefer dual monitors.

It's something where once you try it you can't go back. If my company only gave me dirty river water, sure water is good and technically I'll probably survive if it's free of parasites, but once you have high quality filtered water you don't want to go back to drinking from streams.

>If my company only gave me dirty river water, sure water is good and technically I'll probably survive if it's free of parasites

A single monitor is not a health hazard.

For some reason people here are purposely confusing "I can't" with "I prefer not to"

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

#267

Post by bcrosby95 »

KaiserPro wrote: post #236
Agamus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to note that my experience is the exact opposite of this in every regard.

I suspect it depends on age and class. My 5 year old struggled and needed a whole bunch of support. my 8 year old was able to work on her own, but still didn't get anywhere near as good learning outcome as being in class. Now, the reason why my kids didn't fail utterly, was because my wife wasn't working and could, just about support their learning. Until it sapped her will to live. This is roughly analogous to junio…

Yeah, we did remote kindergarten and it was basically a disaster. We were lucky that my wife could help, otherwise our kid would have learned nothing.

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

#269

Post by cmrdporcupine »

daniel-cussen wrote: post #137
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…

Driving is dangerous. It's no joke, you can get killed if you slip every time you go on a highway. Insanely dangerous. And more work than work itself, the commute is the worst part of people's days.

It was destroying my health. But in my case it was honestly partially driven by personal choice to live rural rather than live in the town where our office was. But having made that choice at the start, 10 years in it started to become untenable.

But now in theory, at least, I don't have to make that compromise.

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

#270

Post by tomtheelder »

dzonga wrote: post #68
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.

if majority of the people above you exist to ensure a butt in the seats policy. then yeah you ain't wrong. remote work is just about workers doing their jobs remotely. it signifies worker empowerment - right now the workers are in control. and the corps hate that. PR firms and middle managers are working over-time to ensure that we go back to the previous model where we all commuted in daily. But the labor market is…

I think it's an extreme stretch to suggest that remote work is some sort of worker empowerment. It's literally just different. The idea that it somehow invalidates the job of middle managers is a little absurd. If anything it makes them more important and valued in an environment where communication is more sparse and man management more difficult.

More likely articles like these are just a response to the immense swell of pro-remote sentiment that's been growing over the last few years.

This article was published by a remote-only org whose product is tooling for remote teams. It's not some anti-remote hit piece.

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