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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

I’m going to suspect that HN is dominated by more senior folks with somewhat more established lives (like me). Often remote work is preferred for us. We already see work as more transactional, have more mobility, don’t benefit from the same level of coaching as juniors, and probably live farther away from a central office. Many of us could join a company and hit the ground running.

What I haven’t heard much - here at least - is the fresh, brand new junior employee perspective. What does it mean to be hired out of college into a fully remote company? Without the structure required of an in person college? How do you become coached and mentored as intensively as junior employees need? How do you establish early professional relationships?

Maybe in office had the benefit of paying it forward for these folks? From the senior generation helping acculturate the juniors to the company, but more importantly general technology culture?

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Junior in that exact situation here. Works out way better than in person would. One of the key things is that by using Slack, domain language is findable. I don’t have to bug my seniors until I encounter something I can’t find a solution to or need clarification on. And the best part? That becomes searchable knowledge too by anyone since i asked in the team slack channel. I have regular 1:1 meetings with team members as I can ask for assistance.

The fact that I don’t have immediate access to my seniors means I actually have to try to get the answer myself before and after I ask asynchronously.

This is a good point. As a senior working remote, I can’t count the number of times I’ve searched slack for discussion about a problem I hit. It’s great.

Also, the juniors on HN are likely to be the very online, very self motivated ones who do their own learning and research.

These are non representative.

(based on my conversations with friends, family, and peers who started during and after the remote work boom, and my own experience switching from Eng to Product during the pandemic)

It depends on how your organization manages onboarding and communication. For a lot of junior emmployees, they don't get as much institutional support or ability to learn from watercooler conversations while being fully remote. When I started as a SWE, I was in the office and could pester experienced devs about this or that, and learn from conversations happening over lunch or over beers. While remote, that entire learning avenue shut down. In addition, most friendships are made thanks to the workplace. If you're fully remote, you aren't meeting other people and making friends. To some people that might be fine, but to others it's very restricting. That's a big reason why early-to-mid career (20-30) types prefer working in NYC over SF now - most other people our age are still there, while SF has become much older.

> making friends

At the workplace? It only works in large orgs where your friend might be in a different department altogether.

Very interesting. From my perspective I had thought HN was dominated by the younger crowd.

10-15 years ago, it was :)

Junior here. Joined my current company in june last year straight out of college and I already have great success doing mostly remote work. After less than a year one of my senior colleagues wants to recommend me for a mid position. I do have to note that I try to come to the office once a week and I only have senior colleagues who've been more than helpful in guiding me. It was pretty rough at first being remote and now looking back at it and comparing it to the experience of one of our new senior colleagues the introduction was a lot slower but on the other hand my mentor almost never came to the office so spending hours on a teams call was the usual.

On the other hand, you have nothing to compare your experience to so while it might be "working out great", it could be better.

Playing devil's advocate here.

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