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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the consequences of work from home culture will be less of an emphasis on how many hours you work, and more focus on what you produce, and how that can be monetized.

What this means is that a good manager will farm work out all over the place finding the right mix of quality / quantity / price.

People will not be paid salaries, they will be paid per unit of work.

Rather than interviewing people to join your family, businesses will be running a continual review of work producs and more carefully measure that mix of quality / quantity / price. Each cycle letting go the least desirable contractors and giving new contractors a try.

On-boarding new contractors will be streamlined, and how fast the contractor gets started will be the first quality control checkpoint.

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The future is apparently going to be impossible for new grads and people who would thrive with mentorship.

It's already near impossible for people not from top tech schools.

I don't know what generation you are, but for millenials, the 2008 crisis was a real doozy. Anecdotally, only maybe 20-30% of my cohort found stable, well paying full-time jobs in the 10-12 years since that recession.

Many of them put their life plans on hold due to not being able afford things that a family generally requires.

So the "future" is already here. And has been for about a decade.

I think you are in a hell of a bubble. I've worked at several large companies over the years and would have to say that many of the engineers i've worked with have all come from vastly different backgrounds. I've certainly worked with some people with very impressive academic credentials but the majority do not.. and that could mean an engineering degree from a run of the mill school, a degree in an unrelated field or no academic credentials at all.

I'm in a bubble because my group of friends is more diverse than just tech engineers?

What a weird peak HN comment.

Just onboarding a skilled/experience new team member has been painful all around. There is so much you can get in a traditional in person whiteboarding session, or that one has developed the skills to teach in person. I think much of the issue comes from communication limitations or lack of skills in remote communication. That could be as simple as a senior member with 30 years of xpeirence teaching someone in person and can read body language to understand when to slow down or go over a topic again. Without that feedback source they lose a major component of their effective teaching style. Even checking work or notes can take 2-5x the time, swapping presenters or losing side by side comparison from two different views. Anecdotally, I've found it easy to get lost in what I'm presenting and forget to slow my sentences for clarity over an often poor call or connection and some of the people I work with are not even able to view meetings at home due to poor internet access.

To your point, I hope students today are learning how to learn/communicate/perform at home and building the skills required to do so in the field or these issues will be compounded after graduation. It's super easy to slip under the radar or just get by, in many cases it was like that before the pandemic. I think there will soon be lists of interview questions related to how one coped with the challenges of learning/working from home, what difficulties thy overcame, and how they did so as an individual/team/company. It's not like I'll be at a vendor conference to compare those notes with other people any time soon.

Well, that would certainly be what it took to finally make me buy a farm and leave tech forever, so maybe I should be on board!

That's pretty much what the demonized CEO in the linked article is predicting, too.

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