Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

It’s possible the folks saying this phrase are genuinely clueless. It’s also possible that some of the folks saying this are just trying to be politically correct and not saying what I see as the real problem: some work same whether they’re remote or in office, some work better when they’re remote, but some, they work so much less when they’re remote. You can divide the last group into two again, with one actively taking advantage of the lack of oversight and slacking off, while another is where the lack of structure makes them slack off or go in circles around tasks.

I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.

View on HN

People hate it when I say this, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter why you aren’t producing results. If you need help, ask and I’ll be happy to help. If you don’t ask, I’m gonna be very annoyed when the thing you said you’d do isn’t done and i was relying on you to get it done.

Conversely I don’t much care how you get the results. As long as they’re there when you said they would be. If you can do 10h of Netflix followed by 1h of frantic work, respect. You do you.

There's definitely a category of people who 1.) Are more or less available during work hours, 2.) Do a good job of what they say they will do on or before the deadline because they work quickly and efficiently and 3.) Don't work a full day to the degree they probably would sort of have to in an office.

Haha, people do not have to work a full day in the office. Source: thirty years of archived Dilbert cartoons?

No. But there's generally a difference between what people can get off with at home and what they can routinely get off with in an office.

Does the company really care about whether they are vacuuming their floor or browsing hacker news?

Vacuuming is more restorative than hacker news. Gives your brain a break and gets you off the computer

At home people probably play games or watch netflix instead of just browsing forums, I don't see people do that a lot at work, and I can see that reducing productivity more than just browsing forums.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boss_key

I always think of a Dilbert from the mid 90s along the lines of “when working from home, do I owe the company 8 hours of productive work, or just the same 2 hours of productive work I’d do if I were in the office?”

(Found it : https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-02-06 )

in theory, the same 2 hours - but you need to be available the whole 8 hours as if you were sitting in the office.

> I'm not gonna try to attribute numbers but it's clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It's a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.

The issue is with hiring. When hiring remote junior, you need to look out for above average communication skills and debugging abilities. That's often not present for a lot of new grads entering the market because of a lack of experience or relevant work. Think of three month bootcamp grads where each week's assignment was spoon fed by the instructors who themselves are students who couldn't get a real job.

Some places that hired from that pipeline are finding out it's simply impossible to bring these programmers up to speed, but places hiring real engineers have way less issues (because a serious program will include challenging work and select for people capable of debugging and reasoning independently).

When leading/mentoring junior engineers, it's important to check in periodically and ask questions so that you know that they understand what they're working on and that they're not stuck. You can't expect them to raise those issues themselves. That's one of the things that makes them juniors.

So yeah, you've got to spend some time every day syncing up with them and making sure things are on track. That's true if they're remote or in the office, but if they're remote, managers need to be a bit more proactive in asking questions and following progress.

My personal opinion, after over a decade of remote work, is that the tools we have available to us to accomplish remote work are low-fidelity solutions to a high-fidelity problem.

I think juniors and, to some extent all technical new hires, are really vulnerable to the problems presented by remote work and these shitty tools we use like Slack, Confluence, Zoom, or God help you if you're in an org using Teams.

You need mentors and folks to on-board you who have a high EQ and can empathize with the position of the mentee/new-hire. That's hard.

> I’m not gonna try to attribute numbers but it’s clear to many that the junior members are more prone to not adapting to remote work easily. It’s a problem, for which we need to find a solution. Not necessarily going back to office tho.

It's also "clear to many" this is not the case.

Perhaps not all "junior members" are fungible. Perhaps this is a characteristic of their employer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com