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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other way around when it comes to work and I wonder why. Is learning not happening at work as well, especially when you're at the beginning of your career?

For me, as a junior, remote work has pretty much been devastating on the learning side of things as well as being invisible to management when it comes to career prospects. Sure, it benefited the seniors as they could more easily dodge some of the annoying responsibility of tutoring the juniors and leave early when their work was done and they had enough time to rub shoulders with management before the pandemic to have guaranteed career prospects.

So, to whit, I'm wonder if the teachers also enjoyed remote teaching more to the detriment of the kids?

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> I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other way around when it comes to work

One group is composed of children, who we collectively agree need to be supervised for the good of their future and society at large. Kids are irresponsible and we cannot throw kids out of the system when they fail at those expectations. So to maximize participation, you need intervention. The other is not the same, because they are adults and held to different expectations or they are removed from the system. Attendance is not an effective measure of success in almost any work environment (where you can complete tasks remotely) so remote is fine, in these cases. There's nothing confusing about it.

I think some of it is the different priorities between children and adults. For themselves, adults might care more about convenience than learning, given that 1) they have many more important priorities than learning, and 2) adults don't have the ability to learn that much (compared to children). It's the opposite for children of course. Learning is the number one priority.

For me personally, I totally agree that remote work is worse for the learning aspect of the job, and is a total disaster for the social aspect.

>It's the opposite for children of course. Learning is the number one priority.

IDK about other kids but when I was in school, my number one priority was having fun outside with my friends or playing video games. Learning was never a priority as a kid, but a chore, a forced exercise on the hamster wheel.

"the" not "their"

> I'm confused about HN. Everyone here seems to agree that in person learning is best and not remote, but exactly the other way around when it comes to work and I wonder why.

Hot take: because school as most of us conceive it is fundamentally about soft-coercing children into ignoring that they're bored out of their mind so they can focus on something they don't really care about learning.

Remote school fails for the same reason old-school management can't be remote: because its efficacy strongly depends on the teacher's ability to coerce children, and it falls apart when you remove that ability.

(I'm curious how we'd determine if anything I just said is actually true. I'd want to look at how well Montessori schools adapted to the pandemic, but their philosophy is kind of remote-hostile too.)

> exactly the other way around when it comes to work and I wonder why.

Telework isn't ideal, but it offers us a chance to break the big city real estate hyperinflation trap. If all good jobs must be concentrated in SF, NYC, LA, and Seattle, then the choice is "no jobs or unaffordable real estate, pick one." Either way you lose. Everyone loses except property owners in those cities (who bought before the inflation).

Long term my hope is that telework and diaspora lead to re-nucleation of talent centers in lots of places all over the country, a reversal of the geographic consolidation trend of the past 20-30 years.

Of all industries, this is the one we would expect to be at the forefront of geographic de-consolidation. We could, you know, actually use this Internet thing we built.

Consider that it is not the same people that comment on every post, but those most invested in sharing their point of view.

From my anecdotal experiences, teachers did not like it, unanimously. And my N is about 50, so take it how you may.

Context: have been doing remote software work for 13-18 years (depending on whether you want to count part-time work). Had kids in fully remote school spring 2020, hybrid for most of 2020-2021 school year, fully back to school since spring 2021.

Remote work as a junior is _very_ hard, for most people. Even worse as an intern.

Remotely mentoring a junior is likewise pretty hard: you have to build in more structure than you would if you're sitting next to each other, and it requires more remote-awareness discipline on the part of the junior, which they may not have yet. Remotely mentoring an intern is pretty impossible in most cases. Taking on interns is something I have not really done, because it would not be fair to them...

For learning, remote learning in kindergarten with the tools we had last year is an absolute shit-show (starting with the fact that the kids can't read yet, so even communicating what they should be doing to them can be quite difficult). Not even the most self-motivated kids can make a lot of progress in that environment. And the kindergarten teachers I talked to completely hated it. They had to invest a lot more time than usual, for worse outcomes than usual. Of course these were teachers who cared about doing their job. :)

Remote learning in late middle to high school (think 13+) still has obvious challenges (science labs? access to equipment? a quiet space for the student to work at home?), but it's a lot closer to viable than kindergarten. The most self-motivated kids can do OK. Everyone else does somewhat worse than they do in-person, not least because they are sitting there at a device with endless temptation even more at their fingertips than in class in terms of social media and whatnot. Doing all the homework electronically can be a PITA compared to writing on paper (e.g. for geometry), but that may not be an inherent feature of remote learning.

In between, it's a gradient from the complete insanity of K to the sorta-maybe-viable-if-we-have-to of high school. Basically, remote stuff requires a lot more maturity and self-discipline, both for school and work...

I love working remote for various reasons, but there are plenty of times I wish I could just hop into the same room as some of my co-workers and sort things out on a big shared blackboard; the tech for this is just not there yet in practice. I would never claim that remote work is always best, or for everyone.

So maybe it's just selection bias, in terms of what you see on HN? Takes a lot longer to type something like the above than "remote work is the best"...

Because both of these things impact them in different ways.

Remote learning means they are responsible for the upkeep of their children during the day. There are more demands on their time and resources.

Remote work means they are less beholden to their employers. There are fewer demands on their time and resources.

So "remote learning bad" and "remote work good" aren't opposing opinions if you realize that their opinion isn't about the nature of "remote" but about the demands on their time and resources.

And let's not forget that all day primary school is a relatively modern invention. All the talk about socialization and whatever, somehow children got that before the invention of school.

People who complain about "the politicization" of a topic are themselves engaging in politicization of the same. But trying to use the accusation as a cudgel to get their way. It's almost as if they've defined "politicization" as "not getting my way". I've hardly met anyone who seriously used a politicization argument in a good faith manner. Not to mention, it's not a good argument either. Whether or not something is contentious is hardly ever a factor in whether or not it should or should not be done.

I mean, there are other things in his post that are telling, but he's got a certain worldview and he's going to interpret whatever data that comes through, mix it with some personal anecdotes, and spice it up with what he intuits to be correct so that his predetermined conclusion is reached.

And about whether or not teachers enjoyed remote teaching, it was a challenge. I'm sure some enjoyed it, but it would vary by grade level and socio-economic factors.

So while there are plenty of children who probably lost a year of education (although depending on the grade level, catching up isn't much of an issue), with over 700,000 dead and counting even with the precautions we did take (among those who took them, of course), it's hard to say what the effect of putting all of these kids in school along with the attendant support staff would have been. Because there's way more opportunity for cross-contamination when you do that. Especially with families with members working in public-facing essential jobs. Anyone arguing otherwise is just playing hypothetical hindsight games.

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