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Comment by amerkhalid | Hacker News Reader

> When our senior engineers are physically available I can put myself in their office or at their desk and demand they help me.

Wow, this seems like a horrible way to manage your people. A decent engineer will not accept this kind of treatment, remote or not. They will quickly move to better managed environments and you will get stuck with subpar engineers.

I never had a boss who did this. Even when I worked in office, all my managers were respectful and almost always they scheduled meetings ahead of time even when they needed to ask minor questions. Only time they would swing by my desk would be if it was truly an emergency (rare) or if they they just wanted to chit chat.

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You have it backwards. I'm not a manager, I'm an IC. I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product. If the alternative is that I need to spend half my day spinning on a reply, then I hope you get managed out.

Oh, this information changes a lot. I don't know if you're in a place to accept feedback right now but here's some just in case: you need to fix your attitude fast or you won't last long at any company, remote or not.

If you treat your coworkers with anything approximating the dismissive, demanding, and entitled comments you've been leaving here you are making yourself a lot of enemies at work, and if you're not the boss you won't get away with that forever.

I'm much nicer in person :)

That's good to know.

But just because everyone is in the office, doesn't mean you will get help. In our industry, sadly, there are very few companies with good onboarding/mentoring programs. I have seen new bright engineers who think their task is the most important task at the company and they constantly disrupt others eventually get ignored by everyone. I have been there, I was one of them, luckily, I had good mentors who taught me how to work with others without being disruptive.

Doesn't matter if you think you act nicer, this attitude is the problem:

> I make demands of my senior engineers(and managers) because their job is to enable me to actually make the product.

If this is how you actually perceive your relationship to these people then they will notice.

It's not my perception of the relationship, it's their job. But that's besides the point. In a healthy team people are not groaning every time they have to help someone.

I'm a lower level TL, and we just got an intern for the summer. They needed help figuring out how to set up SSH, and they came to me. Is my work more important? Yeah, but that doesn't matter. I don't want them spinning on this while waiting for me to grant them an audience. If I truly don't have time, that's my decision to deprioritize the work, or send it somewhere else. Same with the people above me.

I agree, I try to be a good mentor and understand new developers have higher level of anxiety and I help them as much as I can. But I also teach them how to get help without being too disruptive, remote or local.

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