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Comment by curiousllama | Hacker News Reader

New grads, almost by definition, have absorbed whatever they can from reading, the internet, and education; what they need is attention. How to interact in a professional environment; the details of the company, industry and role; the office politics... all are "unknown unknowns" to a new grad. I learned about them from mentorship, 1:1 conversations, and by reading the body language of people around me. It would've been a LOT harder to do that over Zoom...

(That said, anyone smart enough to be concerned about it is also probably smart enough to seek out what they don't know so I'm sure the author of the parent comment will be fine.)

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I have to agree with this wholeheartedly. When I was a new-grad (6 years or so ago now), I really appreciated being part of a really excellent work culture and environment, and built a lot of strong relationships and friendships that I hold to the current day!

The impact of these kinds of things seems to get lost in the convenience of working from home / remotely. Don't get me wrong, I like working remotely, but only for 2 days a week at most. Now that I've been forced to transition to full work from home for the last 3 months, it's been a much poorer experience overall and has severely hindered or completely stalled my relationships with pretty much all of my coworkers, despite frequent zoom meetings and the like.

These are also former coworkers that I've joined at other companies because we like working together. I really believe that this kind of relationship is impossible to build if you're remote-first.

I don't understand why all of that can't be conducted over the internet. I mean, we're having this conversation over the internet, right?

Plus, again remote first does not mandate working from home. One could still go into the office so the qualms are moot.

Because nonverbal communication is very important. There is a reason why people have to put /s on some posts [to indicate sarcasm]. In some ways emoji/gifs try to fill that niche, but I don’t think they are a sufficient replacement.

One big issue is that more experienced employees will be the ones to choose work-from-home as their default, while the newer employees seeking to learn the ropes will opt to come to the office.

Perhaps a solution is to somehow formalize some of these implicit knowledge transfer mechanisms in the workplace. Explicitly assign mentors to new employees, etc.. But I just don't see how it could possibly compare to a normal working environment if I have to do it all from home.

Some other complications:

> A lot of the benefit of in-person work is asymmetric (I benefit more from casual conversations with my manager than he does).

> I learn a lot by observing my coworkers interact. Remote work makes this very difficult, because it's not really possible to "overhear" workplace conversations, or to casually drop in on water-cooler chat. It's also not really possible to have brief side conversations in a team-wide zoom call, which is one valuable aspect of in-person communication.

> New grads tend to live in small apartments rather than a house in the suburbs with a spacious home office. I started my first full-time job remotely this week and I'm working from my dining table. Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day.

> Since school is out, I can hear my upstairs neighbors' children playing throughout most of the work day.

How is an open office any better?

For one, I can ask my coworkers to keep the noise down and they will politely oblige. Offices have pros and cons. My stance is that the pros outweigh the cons enough that we shouldn't eliminate offices entirely.

I can be, and am, pro-office but anti-open-office. I would much prefer an open office to 100%-remote work.

I understand that stance, but the current trend in tech companies, at least in the Bay Area, has been almost exclusively open offices. Saves money for mgmt. and so forth. Perhaps with WFH or at least mixed-WFH policies, with fewer people in the office there could be more available space so that there can be more individual offices?

At any rate, I brought it up because the fix for both noisy neighbors at home or in an open office is the same pat answer: get noise-cancellation headphones.

Again remote first does not mean offices do not exist. Once you start working you’ll see that there’s already a lot of collaboration over the internet. It’s nothing like school

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