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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

#301

Post by marcosdumay »

mfer wrote: post #165
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.

> IMHO it's turnover that's the problem. In software I've seen this to be a huge problem. In other disciplines my observations are that it's not as bad. The turnover issues is something that could use a lot more exploration. Nothing is going to change until it impacts those who are distant from the front line engineers. The managers of the engineers know about the problems. The executives over them are distant from t…

> Nothing is going to change until it impacts those who are distant from the front line engineers.

What do you mean? Because companies are leaving a lot of money on the table, unable to complete software projects, and unable to solve the problems they care about just because of it.

You mean it in some way other than monetary impact?

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

#302

Post by selfhoster11 »

macspoofing wrote: post #266
JCharante wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

It's not a health hazard, but it is a bottleneck in a very real sense if you want to keep more than one thing open (whether for reading, writing, running commands, or a combination thereof). It's not just a matter of preference.

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

#303

Post by nonameiguess »

seper8 wrote: post #62

The only reason I got hired at MAGMA is because I was able to apply & work remote. I am pretty introverted + slightly autistic (not self diagnosed). I do a lot of customer facing work too, which I would never endure when not working remotely. But working remote means I can just turn off when I'm not feeling so great. Presenting is a lot easier... Approaching people, also, a lot easier. Just send them a message on sla…

It isn't just this, either. So many more employment possibilities opened up for me when it no longer became mandatory to relocate to work for all the biggest software companies, none of which seem to have offices near me. So instead of having to ask my wife to find a new job, uproot my family, and sell my house, I could just start a new job.

Conversely, the companies doing the hiring no longer have to restrict themselves to anyone who was able to move to San Francisco or Seattle before they turned 25 or people with no families.

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

#304

Post by varispeed »

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…

> People commit to their work and tell us when it’ll be done, if they fail we talk about it as a team. Team members quickly learn they must deliver and if they need help ask. We don’t delay timelines and I expected a clear “I think this will take days” if they need to delay, that’s fine, but they explain publicly and ask for help.

We have exactly the same strategy and it works very well.

> Those who were followers; who lacked discipline, failed faster and more obviously. Most software engineers produce more effort than they’re worth and skate by with meetings, “pair programming”, etc

This is so common and I am glad that remote work has been an effective extra filter. I mean, I don't mind mentoring junior devs, but also I am not a teacher and many of them seemed lacking total basics. Like they memorised algorithms but had no idea why they work or common issue was them just pasting code from Stackoverflow and then asking for help when it didn't work.

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

#305

Post by ktzar »

posed wrote: post #145
holoduke wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 joined my company straight out of college and it was during covid peak, it was totally remote and guess what, last week my manager called me and told me that I've been promoted with a salary hike(within less than a year). If you've discipline and commitment you can make anything work. :)

Agreed. I've line managed people who have grown immensely during covid. I think the key is understanding the new medium... A remote office where conversations are encouraged to happen in the open and not by DM, is a better environment for juniors to learn than an office where there's closed rooms and knowledge moves in a more hierarchical way.

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

#306

Post by mgfist »

Agamus wrote: post #238
zeroonetwothree wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your experience as a child learning from a laptop?

On that topic, no, I am referring to observing my own children learning from a laptop. I could not have been more skeptical of this approach at first. I was wrong - the approach has worked well so far. EDIT: I definitely should have mentioned that my children are learning from a laptop WITH very close guidance from my wife who is raising them full-time and with intense dedication!

> EDIT: I definitely should have mentioned that my children are learning from a laptop WITH very close guidance from my wife who is raising them full-time and with intense dedication!

lol Pretty big caveat

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

#307

Post by alexashka »

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…

Nobody is conflating Steph Curry with 'someone like me'.

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

#308

Post by xxpor »

bumby wrote: post #284
greatpostman wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds terrible and I would leave this team fast. I work in a high performing FAANG team. Deadlines get pushed all the time

Does one ever question why deadlines constantly get pushed? At best, it means those high performers are bad at setting initial deadlines. Or is it that meeting deadlines isn't considered a performance metric? Now if deadlines are important, maybe it's just relative performance that you're speaking to. So if everyone misses deadlines you can still be high-performing, but it's like saying you're the skinniest kid at fa…

Because setting precise deadlines is nearly impossible without a massive investment up front, that companies aren't willing to make. Software engineering projects aren't run like a civil engineering project where you have precise blueprints done before you set construction timelines.

There's also a big difference between being a month late and a year late. It's also a lot easier to explain you're going to miss a deadline 3 months in advance than a week before.

You don't get high performing teams by forcing crunch time because the deadline is the deadline. This is also why I'm grateful not to work in video games; you can't reschedule Christmas.

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

#309

Post by marcosdumay »

closeparen wrote: post #252
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.

I think successful remote work has to take the position that asking for help 1:1 is bad, actually. * If you go through the process of figuring it out, you gain a durable understanding of the subject matter which you can use to solve other problems. * If either you (after your investigation) or the subject matter expert (on request) produces documentation of the subject, other people in the future can use this artifac…

People can't go into the process of figuring it out if they have no direction of what to figure out, what they are expected to accomplish, where the documentation is, how it's organized, who are they expected to report to, and a lot of other things.

Juniors aren't born knowing any of those things.

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

#310

Post by ChadNauseam »

zeroego wrote: post #164
christophepas wrote: post #74

Earlier 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…

I’m a fellow remote juniorish dev (I just passed one year of working in the industry since graduating college). I relate to everything you wrote here.
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