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Comment by snozolli | Hacker News Reader

Every element you mention as being part of an in-office experience has been completely absent from my career.

Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance, I was always simply given a task and expected to complete it. Company culture doesn't even feel like a real thing outside of HR blurbs. Spontaneous collaboration was outweighed by interruptions and meddling from management.

Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.

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I haven’t worked at a FAANG but I still hang with people from old jobs. Idk it’s pretty normal to be able to make friends at most jobs

I think you just had bad luck

If so, it's far from just him. I've never personally observed any of that, either. You have "work friends", but those relationships are work relationships and don't translate to outside of work.

Idk it’s pretty normal to be able to make friends at most jobs

I never said that I didn't make friends, I said that I never made a connection that proved valuable in the context of networking, i.e. career growth.

> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on. Never received any mentorship or even any guidance

That sounds awful, none of your senior or principal engineers offered/provided any mentorship?

What senior or principal engineers?

I graduated college with significant, real-world programming skills. I immediately went to work writing software. The only thing my first manager contributed was showing me where to find documentation, and even then, books that I found on my own were far more valuable overall.

It was no different the first year from the tenth: here's what we want made, go make it. No mentorship, no training, just self-learning and resourcefulness.

I can't even imagine what mentorship software people could need, besides general career or investment advice.

I don’t mean this as a slight against you because there’s a place in the world for every type of developer, but your description of work and collaboration is very cynical. You could be the most unlucky person in the world and thus you’ve never met anyone worth collaborating with, or, more likely, you’ve not attracted those people in your workplaces.

I’ve worked at great companies and awful companies, and no matter what, I have always met talented people in these companies who I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with. Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with — across all disciplines.

The most valuable work you can do when in software engineering is to help non-swengs in businesses achieve their goals: code is just a means to an end, collaboration is how we discover what to build.

your description of work and collaboration is very cynical.

One man's cynic is another man's realist.

In my opinion, OP's description of office life is idealistic, like a teacher describing the theme of Dead Poets Society or Mr. Holland's Opus.

I’ve been able to build meaningful professional relationships with.

I don't know what you mean when you say meaningful professional relationships, but despite having made many work friends, as stated previously none of them have led to career development (OP's mention of networking).

Even in the most toxic hell-holes, there’s people worth learning collaborating with

I STRONGLY disagree with this universal claim.

One thing I got out of mentorship is that it’s one thing being correct, and and entirely other thing having people actually want to listen to you. It happens often enough that you have one and not the other. Until you have both, you won’t have impact and will grovel about others.

Not every person works in a company organized this way, even IT people. In all my working years and all companies, I always had managers that were technically inferior to me (not bragging, most were not technical people at all, some had some basic tech skills). My only mentoring was for management skills, not guidance in any technical matter.

I’ve not had mentorship or real guidance offered in my career. I would say I’ve made connections, but my experience was very much just “you’re in charge of this team now because someone left. Why are you sucking at being a lead? Geez, we even sent you on a single day management course! I don’t get it!”. And the same for being a manager. People are very complimentary about me when I’m just doing programming because I don’t need any help, but as soon as I get into a situation I’m not very good at, it’s criticism all the way. I would bet this is pretty normal since many managers don’t seem happy being managers, and that only a minority get significant career development value from managers/leads.

Have you ever received constructive feedback that did not feel like criticism?

Yes, especially from clients/customers. Most manager feedback, though, is of the form “you need to/should do X.” If you press them on HOW to do X, they often don’t really know, especially when it comes to soft skills issues or personality clashes. They see their role as providing the feedback, and it’s your job to figure out how to fix it. It feels like criticism because you’re left with the critical part and no clear path forwards. Of course knowing the problem exists provides SOME value, but I wouldn’t call it mentorship, guidance, or even constructive.

I've never had any mentorship too from engineers in the company where I started my career. I learned a lot from books.

> Never made a connection that proved valuable later on.

Sorry buddy but that's on you. You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others. Then at some point down the road when they need to hire someone, they remember, hey 'snozolli' was a great coworker, let me see if they're available.

What about remote work prevents "being generous and helpful to others"? Or, put differently, what about being in an office makes it easier to be generous and helpful?

And before you reply: how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you? Keep in mind that a lot of people in tech (myself included) are literally digital natives who learned to socialize on the internet before adapting to doing it in person.

> What about remote work prevents "being generous and helpful to others"?

When you spend multiple hours together with someone day after day, you develop a bond. That leads to being generous and helpful and this connection is sorely missing in a fully remote world.

> how sure are you that whatever you come up with applies to everyone and not just to you and people like you?

No setup will work for every single person. But for most of the humans, in-person interaction helps create better bonds. Here are some research papers[1][2]. Yes, there will be a few outliers who do not like meeting people IRL, but that ultra-small minority should not be dictating policies which go counter to human nature.

[1] https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1038/s41598-021-045... - "In‑person attendance was associated with greater synchronicity in autonomic nervous system activation at the group level, which resulted in more transformative experiences and contributed to stronger identity fusion."

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756321... - "In both experiments, positive affect was higher after in-person support vs. texting."

Where did I say you can't be generous or helpful remotely? My comment applies to any type of work (until non-human AI replaces all of us).

Ah. I think you and I must have interpreted OP's statement very differently. I interpreted it to mean that being physically present in an office never directly contributed to making a connection, not that they literally never had anyone help them out later on.

That's on you only if the people you made friends with later advanced to positions of power that can make hiring decisions. I don't think I have to tell you how incredibly lucky that is.

Otherwise, they probably just moved on to be another cog in the machine that has no say over hiring.

No, you're short-sighted. You don't have to be friends with any of these people. You can be generous and helpful to anyone, people above and below you (or even people you don't work with!), it has nothing to do with "being friends."

And if you are under 40 (probably under 60), yes, some of your coworkers will advance to positions of power. Nothing to do with luck, it's just numbers. But you can certainly increase your own opportunities by directing your helpfulness, generosity and competency towards as many people as possible.

You're making some really huge assumptions.

The exact story of my career and many people I worked with. There's one guy I know who's had companies fighting over him because he was so great to work with.

>You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others.

In my experience all my valuable connections have come from me working really hard on the same team as them and being goals oriented and meeting those goals; not wasting time dilly dallying in the hallways. Making meaningful connections in the hallway sounds like a middle manager thing.

Working really hard and meeting goals == helpful and generous. I'm sure at some point you had a roadblock on a piece of code and a co-worker helped you overcome it, or vice versa. Or you covered for someone that one day when his kid was sick so the team didn't fall behind it's timeline.

Being sociable and taking an interest in other people via hallway convos is also a good way to build connections and/or friendships, but that has nothing to do with my earlier comment.

I've used my network for the last decade+ of work. I cofounded a startup because I developed a relationship with my cofounder in the break room at a former employer. We were in different orgs, we'd have never had the chance to develop our relationship in a Zoom-first world. And I say this as someone who's been part time remote since 2014, full time since 2016, and started freelancing remotely back in 2010. I love remote work but, IMO, there's a huge discrepancy between what can happen in-person vs. Zoom.

Being generous and helpful only makes people take advantage. You become the guy who knows things and does the work and you never get promoted.

>You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others.

Lol. Never knew that, time for me to to go into therapy.

> You make valuable connections by being generous and helpful to others.

Why do you assume he doesn't do that?

Man I feel ya. I hear all these idealic work life experiences and I'm like...man my first job I did 18 hour days and got essentially bullied by the 2nd in command. Next job, spent the entire time w seniors throwing spanners, yelling abuse, threatening to lock me in toolboxes and leave them in the sun (mine workers hate uni students it seems). 3rd job, forced to work w asbestos w zero health gear. Called worksafe basically got laughed at. Walked out of that one.

My first decade of employment had zero mentoring and was basically just a gauntlet of abuse and unsafe work practices. Only time it got good was working w big blue, no abuse there. Idealic tbh. After that back into the slums of normie business. Got fired for upholding security standards lol.

Business/work isn't as kind to some of us as it is to others it would seem.

> Maybe it's just because I've never worked at a FAANG or BigCo, but I have a hard time believing these points.

It's no different. American corporate culture has assimilated FAANG 100%. The only thing remaining is the free food and fancy offices (but not for long).

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