I frequently hear the notion that remote work makes it impossible to train juniors/next generation.
Where I struggle to fully accept that without data, is that even my own leadership frequently espouses that line... but I've been largely remote for 20 years and so have all majority of my colleagues. We've built relationships and mentorship and coaching and shared knowledge and friendships while being various kinds of remote for two decades. It's not rocket science. It's doable.
Now, an argument can be definitely made that some people don't learn or motivate well in remote scenario, and I will BUY that... as long as we in the same breath/sentence also acknowledge that some people don't learn or motivate well in busy in-person open offices.
Remote working makes it easier for Seniors to avoid Juniors, whereas in the office it would reflect poorly on the Senior if they just pretended the Junior didn't exist while in the physical presence of the rest of the team.
Note that this only applies to bad Seniors who don't believe in mentoring, and there are ways to mitigate this while maintaining remote working for all.
This is nonsense. There is no paradox. Some people don't do good with remote, some people do good with it. I was a junior engineer when open office work was the norm. I can tell you right now nothing was harder on my ability to learn to engineer than being interrupted by loud people having calls, or being interrupted by coworkers, or being interrupted by other distractions. Now that I am a staff level engineer WFH (and have been WFH for many years now) I have NEVER been more productive.
It's like all of these astroturfed posters and article writers have been trying to get us to have collective amnesia over just how bad pre-WFH tech offices were.
Some talking points are repeated ad exhaustion as if they were absolute truths, when they are largely relative:
- People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text. Code Reviews, code snippets on Slack, quick screen shares, diagrams. In fact, verbal communication is very inefficient, prone to inaccuracy and misunderstandings.
- Junior developers don't get mentoring: Bullshit. Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway). Plenty of great material online, from tutorials, to stack overflow, to Indian dudes doing videos on YouTube. Mentoring is largely overblown, and can still happen through text,
- Humans are social beings and need human interaction: Bullshit. Many developers are introverts. And if you are not, find ways to socialize outside of work. Find a hobby with a community or a meetup close to whwre you live. Anything, from tabletop games, running, playing soccer, magic the gathering. Do a language class on your free time, go to a music concert, anything. When you are remote, the world is your oyster.
For the record I'd prefer a work environment that's closer to maybe 1-2 times a month in the office.
> Most developers are self learners (that's how most people learn to code anyway)
I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
There's also stats comparing before WFH and after of how long long it takes someone to onboard properly/be productive (forget the exact stat/KPI, mix of survey/commit stats?) and it's extended by a few months. Now that might be due to bad on-boarding since it wasn't a remote-first, but if that still exists years later it is interesting
> People collaborate better in person: Bullshit, a lot of developers collaborate better through text
Agree with that. I really wish we would write better docs and have more of an async setup
I do genuinely think there's aspect/learning that is lost/slower in the last few years, but that might be because we haven't really thought about accepting "remote-first" and trying to shoehorn what we already had into WFH model.
> I don't think that's true. If you poll the vast majority of people in intro to CS class, most people never coded before. I recall it being a small minority at least back when I was in school (> 10 years ago).
I remember my time in college. From my experience, many of my peers there also didn't know how to code after taking classes. The ones that learned were the ones that invested the time to learn. The classes were there to speed it up things only.
This was true 15 years ago and is still true now in the top talent areas, but it's false in the larger world.
Most of this vast sea of mediocre factory produced developers haven't done any coding outside of school and work.
> Many developers are introverts.
Another thing that was more true a decade ago. Most developers I've seen in person need social interaction and half get little of it apart from their office.
It's not astro turfing, some of us just have different experiences. E.g. a good friend of mine got horribly depressed and unproductive by the forced remote working and now says she'll never do remote again.
Edit: it looks like you don't have a habit of doing this. That's good—and I understand that everyone gets activated sometimes. But when that happens, please try to avoid posting like this, or at least make a habit of editing them after the fact until they no longer break the guidelines.
There is a vocal portion of Juniors who are struggling over the idea of making friends outside of college and have been seeking the work place as an option.
Yes, before the downvoters/extroverts start going on: Yes, in person meetings are good on an rare occasion. However, the claim that you have to be in person/"be social creatures" to work effectively is drastically overblown.
The peril is that you're missing out on opportunities and education that you don't even know about, because it happens when people can spontaneously interact in the same time and place. I say this as someone who strongly preferred to work from home as a junior, and now sees that I was misguided. Looking back over my career so far, the best stuff has happened when I was in the office.
A good portion of what happens in a high-performing office is spontaneous, and simply cannot be reproduced via asynchronous tools, even now. A lot of folks will tell you that this isn't true and that if we just somehow changed human nature and made everyone write every decision down (aka "a remote-first culture") there's no net loss, or mischaracterize in-office work as useless meetings or micromanagement or socializing (see sibling comment), but this is largely motivated reasoning. While there can be value in working that way, it's slower and less efficient -- a spontaneous 5-minute conversation will routinely save hours of writing and reading (which lots of folks won't do anyway).
There's always percentage of people who strongly prefer to just go into a silo and code (and those people are over-represented amongst junior engineers; and junior engineers are over-represented on HN), and there's definitely a lot of bad/pathological office environments, but the reality of software is that it's a team sport. Communication is the O(n^2) problem, and in-office communication is just more efficient, even if it leads to a reduction in velocity for any particular person.
One has to be nuanced -- everyone needs heads-down time, and that time can largely be done from anywhere -- but most teams benefit from spontaneous conversation, and most junior people benefit from this in ways that they don't realize.
This is true even for senior people: at this phase in my career I can go into a cave and be very individually productive, but that's not really my job now. Literally every time I'm in the office something happens where I'm able to catch or head off an inefficiency or mistake, or learn about some project that helps my own work. This is immensely valuable.
I’ll take that over the peril of ruining my health by driving an hour every day to be forced to stay inside all day and eat at shitty restaurants around the office.
My company has hired and grown many remote employees over the years… a few extremely junior. I’m sure some prefer in person but acting like it’s everyone is just ridiculous.
In person jobs will always exist, forcing everyone to be in person is not good.
My company decided to go the worst of all worlds approach: force seniors (full-time) employees into the office on a hybrid schedule while only hiring juniors as fully-remote contractors. It's insane.
Not in this job market. When all the plausible alternative employers are freezing hiring, many people will stay even if they don't like it.
Senior at FAANG means $400k/year total comp or more. You aren't going to get that at a startup. Only other large companies pay that well, and they aren't hiring.
Junior engineers are more likely to leave because a startup might pay them roughly what they make now. As a junior, salary is a larger part of your compensation. Once you are senior and have multiple years of RSU grants stacked up, it's very different.
Therein lies the paradox IMO