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Comment by FartyMcFarter | Hacker News Reader

In particular I'm curious on the impact to junior employees. Some people think that junior people are having trouble learning things when WFH.

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As a junior engineer, this is how I felt. Before the pandemic, getting help was as easy as sending a ping and rolling my chair over. Now, ironically, it's far harder to get help, as getting into a meeting (even a short, impromptu one) is a significantly bigger deal.

I go into a minor state of social anxiety and just struggle to get anything done for a good 10 minutes before a meeting. Mainly because there's far more of a "I'm interrupting this person" feeling when I can't see their screen.

There's a little bit formality with it, but I've also found that "hey, let me record this" is a super power. It makes it a lot less critical that you understand 100% up front and then it's there for reference.

I would tell you no thanks and suggest that we take things a bit more slowly while you take more notes and ask more questions in most situations.

Being constantly on camera without being recorded is already super demanding.

I don’t doubt that this helps you, but it’s not without a cost to those on the other end.

Send them a zoom link on slack, saying you want their input on something. Clicking on the link is literally their job. Source: I'm often the recipient of those zoom links.

(And if you don't get a satisfactory response, get another job where there are helpful senior staff).

To be fair this seems more on the mentor side than on your side (which is bad for the junior engineer)

Having been in both sides of this I try to be helpful when people need my help (unless I'm doing something very urgent, naturally). But yes.

I think we're going to see a massive knowledge gap start to manifest itself within the next 1-3 years. Employees that are junior or started during WFH are going to find it difficult to stack up against senior engineers who have been around since before WFH.

Now also consider all of the college students who received a substantially subpar learning experience during the pandemic. My team is already seeing the effects of this when trying to hire new grads.

I think that's an interesting point - most of us more senior folks either have an innate work ethic or have been trained for years to fear a boss looking over our shoulder when we're checking facebook or whatever... Training good work ethic into people who have never worked in an office is an interesting question society will face - but do bear in mind that there are plenty of jobs that are pretty much unsupervised from day one. While a super market might look really open and visible stockers can wander off for a bit without anyone noticing and a lot of the contractor-employee jobs (uber, lyft, roofing) have never had much on site oversight.

That is why facebook can do full wfh. They don't care if you look at facebook all day.

Businesses need to stop caring about if you're on facebook 8 hours a day. If you're getting your work done at the end of the week that's all that really matters.

The idea that the business owns your ass for a minimum of precisely 40 hours a week where you must be solely focused on the outcome of the business is both toxic and nonproductive.

I think that would be a great - but we also employ by the hour not by the task which I also think is great. Sometimes I get tickets marked with three story points and think "Ha, let me just push up a quick patch" and other times I discover a dark dark hole at the bottom of assumptions that eats away at days.

It's really hard to generally evaluate employees on productivity - especially in CS - and so our compromise is that we all lie a bit and say "We're paying you for 40 hours a week" and we reply "Yes - my compensation is tied purely to the fact that I am here for forty hours".

I think it's a much longer road to better employee respect.

Every place I've worked as an FTE, the focus was on the job, not the hours. In fact, I've had many bosses say as much, usually implying that after hours work might be necessary and they'd expect me to take it uncomplainingly.

And I have, though it's always tempered by two things, namely, A. If the job routinely requires > 40 hours a week, then the job is poorly defined and we need to modify expectations, and B. That if I'm working to the job and not the hours, it doesn't matter if I only put in 30 hours one week, if the work is being done (and, likewise, if THAT is routine, the job is also poorly defined, and I need to ask for more things to do).

> we also employ by the hour

do you punch a timecard or do you get the same check every month or whatever your pay period is?

For me pay by the hour means: - if the task will take much more work, company will still pay you and they will take the loses - if the task is done faster, you'll just get more work and company will take the profits

I think this is European approach, trying to eliminate the luck factor out of ones success.

That's not how this works - even if you get your currently assigned amount of work done your manager will always wonder: "how much more this guy could accomplish if he wasn't constantly distracted by Facebook?" Which is a legitimate concern.

I think that "they know everything you do online, including fing around on facebook all day" is closer to the truth

Why? I would think most tech related learning happens with out other people involved. Learning languages, self study, Stack over flow and simmiliar, reading books. Idk if junior employees need to coddled as much as people think. Maybe just the bottom doesn't cut it. Developing your knowledge on your own is a skill you need any way.

I’ve always felt this way about learning too. I’ve never had anyone offer to be any kind of a teacher or mentor long term. However there is a huge narrative around mentors and people talking about how much they learned from others so I have to conclude its either my personality type or just something that used to happen more in the past.

Perhaps, but this assumes that this information is available and accessible.

Many engineering organizations don't have full documentation on institutional knowledge, and many things travel by word of mouth.

I think even experienced people struggle in that environment though. I don't think any junior engineer is truly a blank slate. You've usually had internships, unrelated jobs, made it through college where you develop skills to be resourceful and navigate unclear situations.

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