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Comment by jasondclinton | Hacker News Reader

The solution is obvious: structured training and mentoring. When the pandemic hit, I was hiring a team of 5 new engineers. What was I going to do? Throw up my hands?

I implemented a weekly technical training program that morphed into the 250 person org official onboarding. Weekly, I literally just get someone on a VC for 30 minutes and record having a conversation about a technical topic at a noobie level. 16 months later we have 50+ training videos on every topic.

We implement mentors and formal onboarding processes with screen sharing and remote whiteboating sessions, too.

It's not hard.

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Actually it sounds like it is hard, but you pulled off something of great value by thinking about it, taking ownership, and iterating towards solving a problem.

It's a lot harder than giving an employee a laptop and having them shadow someone for a couple weeks before kicking them in the deep end.

Structured training may be straightforward to implement, but it takes many more man-hours than just letting the new employees sponge up knowledge on their own.

That said, remote work is here to stay, and you're right to criticize companies for being extremely lazy with remote onboarding. Companies that can quickly ramp up fully-remote new-hires will probably have a huge competitive advantage in the coming years.

What remote whiteboarding tools do you like? I do a lot less whiteboarding these days and it kills me.

Lucidchart has been my go to. Allows multiple users in the same whiteboard at once. Legible text as opposed to whiteboard scribble. Easily rearrange block diagrams. Permanent record of a diagram session that can be thrown in a design doc.

Excalidraw is killer. We use it extensively at work

I have a second webcam pointed straight down at my desk, and scribble with a pen on paper.

Frankly, this works better than any of the digital tools I tried, despite not being collaborative. (I tried a number of them, and have both a drawing tablet and a tablet pc)

Miro.com is a game changer.

The fact that you put work into the problem is admirable. However, I will say that from personal experience, I find it significantly less engaging to watch online training videos.

As a junior, the most rewarding learning experiences I have had in my career took place during off-topic discussions at the desk of an engineer who was way smarter than me.

You can't replace human contact with technology, it will never be an adequate substitute. We are social animals and I think the increased push to doing everything online will damage peoples mental wellbeing in the long term

The mentors and mentees meet daily for the first few weeks and then taper off to as-need screen sharing sessions. So, plenty of human contact.

You're missing the point though, which is that people need time with people to learn. Watching videos isn't enough. What happens when they have questions and need to have a conversation?

How am I missing the point with a comprehensive training program that explicitly allows people to continuously engage with their mentor and have face time?

Amen. Nicely done.

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