Hacker News Reader

Comment by Oras | Hacker News Reader

While working from home is fantastic for many, there are some real issues coming up due to WFH:

- From my observations, people with commitments (family, partners, pets .. etc.) prefer to work from home while single people prefer to go to the office. This will create a noticeable gap between the two groups.

- While working from home can be productive for med to senior-level employees, I suppose it will be a nightmare for juniors and interns. They will have no one around to mentor them or at least to ask for immediate advice. When working from home (as pointed by others), we tend to get into deep focus on avoiding distractions from messaging tools.

To clarify, when I start hiring, the work will be fully remote, but I just wanted to list observations from different perspectives.

View on HN

1. Not going to get much advice if the mid and senior-level employees have all left.

2. "They will have no one around to mentor them or at least to ask for immediate advice." This is a meme most loudly heard in Cathy Merrill's disastrous Op Ed and has no basis in fact. When I sat in an office, a junior sat opposite me behind screen. When they wanted help, they could stand up and ask for help. Now, when they want help, they ping me on slack, and we start a screen share / voice / video chat. I have my own computer, I can find the necessary information using my setup and my tools, and guide them to a solution more quickly.

"Think of the children^H^H^H interns" is propaganda and we should push back on that nonsense whenever it is expressed.

Broadly speaking I think the future for tech at least will be junior people work in person, going to a tech hub and going into the office to learn the ropes/best practices. Basically offices will become somewhat like graduate schools for these employees, and they can bear the brunt of cost of living issues in some of the more expensive regions living like grad students. Managers will also be in office to facilitate coordination.

Once the engineers become senior and start families they will go remote.

I think the second one is a massive issue. In an in-person world, mentoring and role-modeling happen all the time. Junior employees see what their seniors are doing, even when the seniors do not plan on being seen.

In the remote work world, junior employees can only see their seniors at defined events. Lots of mentoring needs to move to explicit mentoring relationships, and people have to move from "showing the right behaviors" to "explaining the right behaviors". And that assumes the mentee/mentor even know what behaviors they need to focus on! In person, you just get to see everything.

> From my observations, people with commitments (family, partners, pets .. etc.) prefer to work from home while single people prefer to go to the office.

I also have seen the opposite.

Some folks with family want to work from office, so that kids can play loud without interrupting and when coming home it's clearly family time.

And I living alone like the flexibility. Got a new partner? - I work from their place. Want to visit some friends/family in a different town? I work from there. Want to hang out with some friends? I work from their office.

Very individual choices.

I'm full remote and mentored a recent CS graduate this last month. I put in the effort to send him a slack message at least once a day (I didn't say it was a lot of effort). And we do a mix of working together on tasks and working separately.

When we do work together we use a new code-with-me feature of IntelliJ and I'll lead the development but when I need a utility function or something I ask him to write it and he goes off and writes it separate from my current coding.

This is a legitimate help, not a burden. He wrote an interface to another service for me, and I never had to be distracted by it. I had a concern about something but he said he had read the documentation and that the way he wrote the code was correct. I trusted him, he turned out to be right.

In the editor this is like having 2 or 3 cursors moving around in the project editing things independently, Google Docs style. I flip tabs to check in on him periodically. If I want to show him something I just place my cursor and type, in contrast to telling him what to type with words which was never very effective in the office. This is a form of pair programming that is actually productive and enjoyable, imagine that!

If he were sitting 5 feet from me I would want to collaborate the same way. Two screens, keyboards, one codebase, casual voice communication. We have all this.

Facebook has started approving remote work but only for E5's and higher. I think that will limit the usefulness of having the more junior folks in the office but I guess it makes sense.

Mentoring is also possible when doing remote work, Why do you need to be in front of the person to do mentoring?

In our company all new joinees (during covid) were paired with existing employees and we were able to onnboard and get them contributing in a short amount of time. The new joinees included both recent graduates and experience people.

Single people can have plenty of commitments that don't include a spouse or pets. It is much harder to accomplish most tasks as an individual vs a team. The case you present seems to be closer to those who are codependent vs those who are committed

Odd, the person in our team who has a family is the one that wants to go in

This is what I don't get. Why do juniors need someone around to mentor them? That's just promotes lazy behaviour. I had countless times when junior asked me for help with something where all they needed to do was to just type same question to Google or search through documentation.

You just made 3 assumptions:

- Asking for help means laziness. There is a high chance that this is the first job for juniors or interns. They need someone to tell them how to find the answer. What is obvious for you is not for others.

- Everyone is working on something that can be Googled. Which is not the case. Even for tech, there will be some specific tasks that are related to the project, domain, company that can not be Googled.

- Documentation? really? If you're fortunate to work in a company that has proper documentation for every single task and are always up to date then not many people share this experience.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com