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“…however younger employees greatly benefit from in person learning and mentoring.”

Doesn’t require a permanent office. Temp cowork spaces or bundling working with a career mentor in the final stretch of college are two options I just thought of laying in bed while also thinking about making coffee.

More of the same is not an option for all the cost-benefit analysis that’s come up before.

Prior to world war industrialization, 90% of workers were independent. Post-war office life was a result of wartime solutions to logistics. A statistical outlier in human history.

> Prior to world war industrialization, 90% of workers were independent.

If you change that to “prior to the First Industrial Revolution”, and by “independent” you mean “worked on family or village farms”, sure, that's approximately right.

Just before even the first world war, there is no sense where this is true, even loosely.

Right, so, “prior to world war industrialization.”

I know what I wrote. Have a good day!

The first world war was almost a half century after the end of the first industrial revolution and the usual marker of the end of the second. Neither revolution’s work pattern changes were driven primarily by military logistics. (OTOH, changes in the patterns of warfare were driven by the same forces as the work pattern changes.)

So, no, your comment about 90% of workers being independent before “world war industrialization” is way off base.

You want to go back to when 90% of people were subsistence farmers on the verge of starving?

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm really not sure what the strongest possible interpretation of "lets go back to before the industrial revolution" is other than 90% of people being subsistence farmers on the verge of starving. People moved to cities because less agricultural labor was needed and people living close together makes them more productive.

> "lets go back to before the industrial revolution"

They did not say this.

> People moved to cities because less agricultural labor was needed and people living close together makes them more productive.

People moved to cities because more industrial labor was needed. Proximity made industries more productive. Now more digital labor is needed. And people living far apart can be highly productive.

People who have the skills to leverage a permanent WFO arrangement, actually benefit from a breakdown in mentoring.

Whatever sob story they may spin you, the ONLY thing corporations care about in the mentoring relationship is upskilling cheap juniors so they can replace their expensive mentors.

With a mentoring breakdown the seniors will stop getting sucked dry and fired at 50.

They become irreplaceable assets all the way through to retirement.

We don't have to do things exactly the same way we always did and offices will change, my point is only that a lot of these types of articles are outright dismissive of regular, in person communication at all.

> I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely.

I've done this a bunch over zoom.

> I haven't figured out a virtual way to give an intern a small assignment and determine if they're struggling remotely (yet) short of doing peer programming.

Ask them in standups? Have an "open door" policy towards them pinging you to hop on a zoom? You also probably don't need to be hovering over them making certain that they're never struggling, that's a form of micro management. Gotta let the kids fight with problems for awhile before jumping in and fixing it for them[*].

[*] and really don't fix it for them, teach them how to fix it. poor phrasing.

> I've personally worked with many junior engineers over the years and it's really hard to mentor someone over a computer screen. It's definitely possible, but being able sit down informally and talk about something that's hard to understand, or unclear is much harder remotely.

The senior+ I work with are nearly unanimous in disagreement and find remote mentoring as easy or easier than in-person. Pairing is easier on zoom, it loses the awkward personal space issues, it can be recorded, it can happen quicker and easier, and in general just works (a bit) better than in-person.

Socially, I definitely except the argument that in-office is better for young people. I can't imagine 25 year old me sitting by myself working from home, I would've turned into a very different person.

> What I've noticed is these kinds of workers absolutely thrive remotely

Thriving individually does not equate (necessarily) to thriving as a team, nor thriving as an organization. I see on HN too many people taking about how they personally perform better, which is (a) difficult to objectively self assess given all the biases involved and (b) ignores that the team might perform poorer or the organization might, due to a variety of frictions added by being remote.

It isn’t as black and white as some people like to claim.

Edit: I love how I am being downvoted on something as uncontroversial as stating that there’s more nuance than the current debate seems to devolve into on HN. Shameful.

> return to work

Return to office.