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Comment by lekanwang | Hacker News Reader

I'm finding with the teams I'm working with that the junior employees are the ones most impacted by not working from an office, but they often don't realize what they're missing -- the less formal forms of mentorship, stronger community, interacting with more people that's not on their team and in their role, overhearing context, the ability to have a 3-min quick chat with a senior person without a scheduled meeting, and developing that stronger sense of "what good looks like." I'm really concerned that we're going to have a two-tiered system where a bunch of people early in their careers are going to feel stuck in a few years and not even realize why.

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As a junior employee (1 year experience, entirely remote), you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. I've been having a miserable time working remote for all the reasons you've mentioned. It doesn't help that my team seems to really lean into independent work. The biggest thing that I wish I had was more opportunities to learn from senior devs.

Now that I feel like I have enough experience to find a new job, I will be looking for a workplace with a strong emphasis on in-person work & collaboration.

Most programming I have seen is independent work. You go off for a day or two and come back to share your results. For a junior dev, they need to be spending some time screen sharing to a senior and explaining what they have to get some feed back regularly.

Don’t give up because of the comments here or because of your experiences. There are still companies out there that believe in hiring juniors and believe in the merits of face to face work - they are harder to find these days, but I think it’s a competitive advantage. If you’re in Chicago, London, or Brisbane, reach out.

In my hybrid office, the juniors are also mostly the ones going into the office, so maybe they've appreciated your point.

I also observe that they are also the ones hanging out outside the office, so I would guess this is part of it too. Seniors tend to compartmentalize "work friends" vs friend-friends.

This seems like it would be taken care of fine by formalizing some remote training, mentorship, and pair programming activities. Something that better work environments already think about, remote or not. Not sure why this would be some sort of unsolvable problem.

Edit: also a remote culture of hopping onto a one-on-one voice, vid, and/or screenshare helps too.

This is true, so much so we just don’t hire juniors because we haven’t figured out how we’d manage, we’re fully remote. If We did hire juniors I’d probably want them co-located near me somehow.

Ultimately I think people will work more in offices again for this reason and for the reason that even the company I work for, which has always been remote first has a large group of people who live in the same city, they meet in person more often and seem to call much more of the shots and receive promotions more than others.

IMO, This is the biggest problem with WFH. I personally have avoided all internship/development programs since COVID started at my company because I know it will just make my life harder and be frustrating on both sides.

We're already starting to feel the effects of the reduced talent pipeline especially as we get deeper into the Great Resignation.

The career-related reasons why early-career employees want to go in to office are valid. But that is not the whole story.

For many early-career engineers living away from families in cities like SF, Seattle etc have better office spaces than personal living spaces - better buildings, better air conditioning, better TV, better restrooms, better kitchens, better stocked fridges etc. This factor does not apply as much to later-career employees who live in the suburbs.

Any ideas how we could fix this?

It can't be fixed industry wide. I guess it could be partially fixed at individual companies. But those are just band aids. It's just how it is. If you're not face to face, the relationships will be at arms length.

In addition to the mentorship issue, think about promotions. Especially to more senior levels. The people in the office or with pre-existing relationships will be the ones getting promoted and will be the power brokers. If you are someone who doesn't think that will be true, then (IMO) you are confusing how you wish the world to be for how the world is.

Don’t hire junior devs if you are a remote only company?

It's just about applying the existing communication technology and having policies that support mentorship or these other things that are supposedly impossible to do without being in person.

I believe that most of these supposedly intractable problems can be solved with a Discord/Matrix/IRC whatever and just enforcing policies about communication. Have a bi-weekly required five minute voice chat and at least one hour of time per day where people need to have the chat open. If juniors are not asking questions or seniors are not replying within X hours or whatever follow-up sessions from the five minute intro discussions is appropriate, then they get warned, and if the lack of communication effort continues, fired. And you make that policy clear.

You can also look into various types of 'multiplayer' virtual presence. Several different browser based or 2d or 3d (even VR) options for this.

I feel like people just stop trying to communicate more than a weekly meeting or something a lot of times when they are remote. That in no way proves that different types of communication or mentorship or whatever require face-to-face. People just need to show up online to communicate.

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