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I mean, here's the thing. Most new grads are drastically overestimating the importance that they're onboarded quickly. The median productivity of a new grad is approximately zero for the first year. Maybe even negative. Nobody really expects much of you anyway. So just, chill and focus on improving at a slow and steady rate.

The whole reason FANG companies hire new grades is because a small fraction will become superstars in a few years. And a small handful of those superstars will stay out of loyalty/comfort/inertia. New grads are basically deep out of the money, long-dated call options. Companies aren't going to care whether it takes them 3 months or 6 months to get acclimated to the org's culture.

That's easy to say as an experienced employee, but when you're a new hire and you have no clue what's going on around you because there are no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of, and no way to interpret your boss's apathy about your existence...

Plus reading here about certain companies' interest in pruning people ruthlessly...

I could see why morale among new hires would be problematic in this rather chaotic time.

>> no conversations to accidentally overhear, no one sitting 3 feet away to ask random questions of

That's all done in chat now. Which on a personal level, that's how I've done it for a quarter of a century, but it's like that at work now too.

Exactly .

I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats, or in specialized channels that particularly newcomers won't be a part of.

Additionally, someone who's new is much easier to spot and thus be reminded of when they're physically proximate. Someone new on chat who doesn't have much to contribute yet can very easily vanish, so while they may be able to pull information from others, much less information will be deliberately pushed their way.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but we have millennia of culture and evolution built around in-person interactions.

>> I have found that many conversations that would have been public in an office setting are now held in private chats

I haven't seen that. What type of conversations that used to be public are you seeing being moved to private now that things are done through chat?

Any time someone wants something from me specifically, or vice versa.

If you turn that 1 year into 2 years, though, you HAVE changed things dramatically in terms of the value of what you're paying for.

So if today's new grads are telling you "I'm drowning" and two years ago they weren't... maybe you should listen.

And measured productivity is only half of it if a sizable fraction of those frustrated new grads leave much sooner than they would otherwise.

Or if "new grad" experiences also tend to match "new hire" experiences even for experienced folks...

I think your advice to relax and focus on slow, steady improvement is on point, but imo you are really overstating the bit about low expectations for new grads. no reasonable company will make a new grad solely responsible for some critical part of their product, but most will be disappointed if your main accomplishment in your first year on the job was "got onboarded". the expectation is that you may need some hand-holding, but ultimately you will get stuff done. at my company, the people that assumed the expectation for their productivity was "approximately zero" were quite surprised to see the difference in second-year raises between them and their new grad peers.

I'm no longer a new grad, and was onboarded long before COVID. I think those same problems, lack of productivity, understanding unable to tell expectations all applied even in-person. It seems to be more of a supervisor problem than a remote work problem. And as dcolkitt said, unrealistic expectations on how fast that's supposed to take. A lot of new grads are used to an internship which is only ~10 weeks, or a 16 week semester as a timeframe when you should be able to get entirely up to speed and done producing what's needed. But that's not necessarily long enough to truly learn how a team works and what the expectations are at a lot of companies.

I can absolutely empathize why graduating into this could be a really bad experience for people. Was just talking with someone about this earlier in the week. I admittedly started work in a very different time with very different and more limited tools but it's hard for me to imagine.

IMO this is an institutional problem at your workplace. I know my company's grown a ton and I've actually put in more hours ensuring one-on-one, high-touch onboarding time with all our new engineers so that they never feel unsupported and unknowing what the expectations are.

It's absolutely vital to recreate the same onboarding experience (seeing someone all day, being there whenever a question is asked, etc) virtually, and that means putting in the extra effort in making onesself available, checking in, and being proactive.

Hmm ... I hear what you're saying. At the same time, I recognize some of the new-kid-on-the-block problems you describe here.

I was a new grad in the analog world. The same kind of uncertainty existed for me. Sometimes a coworker who was supposed to help me just didn't talk to me. Many managers were just as poor then as they are now, in person or online, at setting and communicating expectations.

And there were additional problems in person that don't exist in the same way online. Particularly for women ... bullying and inappropriate attention from the men; envy and criticism from the women.

Also, early on in this pandemic, people and companies were scrambling in general. So, the chaos of onboarding may not have been a problem with onboarding per se, or even with companies not handling it "well" but just a shared difficulty.

My first SE gig did remote days, and I used to dread those when just starting out.

Nurturing early career engineers in a remote setting is definitely something companies need to get better at.

> get instant help from coworkers

You helped your company by saving senior engineers' precious time.

Unless maybe the primary value of a lot of senior engineers is onboarding and coaching.