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Comment by revlolz | Hacker News Reader

Propaganda piece from economists. Hello CBRE. I'm part of the demographic they claim and it couldn't be further from the truth for me. In remote env, if your seniors (management or peers) opt for their productivity 100% over training juniors then you have a shitty team and that's hardly unique to remote work. In fact, you will likely spend more years wasted commuting into office doing nothing as opposed to having more time to experiment, hypothesize, and learn. Good teams make it policy and process to lift everyone. They have networking events in person and remote. They accept the situations that as adults and leaders we don't need mom and dad to hold us so we can go down the slide and write a pr. Bad teams hyperfixate on metrics like cr revisions, drown newbies on complexity impossible, ambiguity black holes projects. Again, these things happen in the office too, so why is this study focusing on an issue prescribing it unique to remote? I don't know.

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Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely. It's just tougher to have off-the-cuff conversations. With fewer of those opportunities, that means what could've been a 5 minute conversation and resolution to a technical issue becomes a full day for a junior engineer, and they have fewer opportunities to ask seniors since they're worried about being a bother. I'm not trying to force people back into offices, I'd rather adapt, but I think anyone new to the industry is at a disadvantage in the interim.

> Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely.

I cannot think of a scenario where if I needed help with something I couldn't have a 5-minute conversation with someone.

Slack conversations I have several times a week: "Hey do you have a sec to help me? I can't seem to reproduce X bug" "Yea, wanna huddle?" "Sure!"

I don't know what new skills someone would have to learn in order to do that.

Be available and not appear busy. Frankly speaking, I love screensharing instead of sharing a screen/desks. So while physical meetings has their places, mentoring is not.

Yes it is almost just literally learning how to do this, vs everyone starts commuting in. Put another way, I get it’s a change, but Eng Managers make filthy money, and maybe they can add Slack comms and related mentorship to the excel and cross-functional working group wiki pages. Excel and email were new once as well.

>I don't know what new skills someone would have to learn in order to do that.

The skill to actually want to do that. Some people are shellfish and don't want to.

I've had a mentor who outright refused to do any screen sharing calls with me. He only wanted to communicate in chat. So things that could be cleared up in a 3 minute calls took over 30 minutes of back and forth in chats. I hated him to the core.

I am pretty sure that your "mentor" would be still be the asshole in an office setting too!

Actually he was nicer before the pandemic while we were in the office. He always came by to show me stuff when I called him.

I've noticed the behavior of several other colleagues (not everyone) changed while WFH. Many became more distant and hesitant to cooperate and lend a hand. Most wanted to lock themselves in a "don't bother me for anything, let me wrap my work faster, so I can sign out for the day early" kind of state.

Completely opposite experience to mine but I see how some work environment/culture could foster that behavior.

Terrible, but some mentors are just like that very reluctant. I will say though even if he only wanted to do chat, most services offer that asymmetrical ability where one is screensharing and both are in chat. Still would have taken longer than purely audio but certainly more immediate than pure-chat. So it's odd he didn't opt for that, it's the method with the least friction.

He wanted mostly async chat. So screen sharing into a void wouldn't not have helped.

This makes the assumption that people will respond on Slack in a timely manner.

Sure, there can be cultural hurdles there, but those exist in the office as well. "Jane has headphones on, she's heads down and will be upset if I bother her now" "I want to ask Steve for help, but he rolls his eyes any time I approach him" "Sam said they'd give me a hand this afternoon, but I can't seem to find them anywhere in the building"

Agreed, but the things you’ve mentioned would all clumsily be grouped under the “busy” Slack status even though they mean quite different things.

And further, seniors should never be upset that a junior is coming to them for advice, mentoring less experienced people one of the main responsibilities that comes with seniority. (This isn’t to excuse help vampires of course.) So I disagree with with the framing.

I have found that is a pretty good signal for how an organization's culture is set up in regards to helpfulness and camaraderie.

If you're one of the "solvers" that gets pinged by random people all throughout the day, you need to learn how to use "do not disturb" and to balance it out with dedicated open time. Otherwise it's easy to get stressed and overwhelmed. Totally learnable, but I've seen a few people on my team take psychic damage from this.

Once you learn this though, it's actually easier to do remotely than in-person.

> becomes a full day for a junior engineer

A full day of honing his own problem solving skills, which pay off quite a bit more over time than watching somebody else do it.

> Most mid-level and senior people have not learned the skills to mentor while working remotely.

I do not understand why you would choose to generalize to such an extreme degree. How could you possibly have the confidence to speak in such broad terms?

Reflecting on my last 6 years of experience as an engineer (which includes both office-based work and being remote) this is not true at all.

>I do not understand why you would choose to generalize to such an extreme degree. How could you possibly have the confidence to speak in such broad terms?

Not him but it also matches my experience. Many have not learned to mentor remotely or just don't like mentoring and it's easier to show their contempt online vs face to face.

gp is responding to a comment that calls the study propaganda based on their individual experience. Since everyone seems to be generalizing to an extreme degree it feels a bit disingenuous to call out this one just because you agree with gp.

One of my old bosses would schedule an hour a week between him and I with no agenda to help with these more natural unplanned convos. We'll probably only do 5min catchup and then bullshit the rest of the time about random stuff, but something always tends to come up that spurs an idea, provides clarity, or helps in some other way.

Our company added designated buddies (generally senior assigned to junior) to assist with this for new hires. If they're stuck on a problem, you have someone set aside to ask questions too. If they don't know the answer, they probably know who to ask.

Certainly what it felt like. A Fortune 500 company (sounds like IBM), 1 sales team anecdote, fear mongering over job loss for the remote’ers, and a very narrow study getting an op via the article to “suggest something broader.”

It’s fascinating, as well as disheartening, watching the massive pushback to labor advances in real-time by corporate owned news media and by their helpers on social media. The layoffs seem to be a catalyst to claw back power, even if it is a side effect and not the sole reason for occuring.

Ya I don’t think there’s something actively coordinated by some central party but definitely seems a bit close to manufacturing consent by a group of similarly incentivized parties. I never really bought into that mindset until seeing the remote work play out. Like NYT of all places, historically banging the gong for equality and progressive initiatives around the workplace, health , and environment, now covering zero of how remote helps all those.

> Propaganda piece from economists

Weird, propaganda doesn't tend to come from economists in my mental model. To be fair, the one economist I've seen seriously looking into this is Nick Bloom, whose research on the descriptive statistics side of things shows WFH Hybrid is here to stay.

There are some commercial real estate folks predicting a cratering of comm RE values if WFH is continued, but I'd argue that's just capitalist creative destruction at its best.

> Weird, propaganda doesn't tend to come from economists in my mental model.

In my mental model, propaganda can come from anyone with a political agenda, and that will certainly include economists from time to time.

> In my mental model, propaganda can come from anyone with a political agenda, and that will certainly include economists from time to time.

The person/people/groups writing the thing may not even be aware they’re creating propaganda. Arguably it’s more effective that way.

> In my mental model, propaganda can come from anyone with a political agenda, and that will certainly include economists from time to time.

As a central tendency or as an occasional but infrequent experience?

> Propaganda piece from economists.

I was under the same impression. The whole article is full of "but what about". If you follow the money this is not surprising, the managers, who also happen to own real estate in New York / California, want their workers occupying their expansive office space and living near it so the real estate bubble doesn't pop right now. So they had the NYT write an article about it.

It’s a bit bad practice to assume all research that promotes an opinion you agree with is truth, but anything against what you like must be propaganda.

It's not just the part about promoting an opinion that make it propaganda, it's the part about promoting an opinion that a. there is a problem at all, and b. advocating for a particular solution to the problem as defined.

A huge part of propaganda is about setting the terms of the debate. Ideally, as George Orwell wisely pointed out, a successful propagandist makes certain opinions seem obvious, common-sensical, and even inevitable, while making other ideas all but literally unthinkable.

So next time you read an opinion you disagree with, ask, "what would happen if that opinion were the dominant one in society?"

I'm not assuming anything except my main hypothesis which is simply following the corporate money interests. If I was a rich corporate owner, what would I do?

Well, I'd own real estate, I'd probably own it in expansive places such as NY and California, and I would use the media to influence public opinion and policies to advantage me.

Just because rich people might like something, doesn’t make it not true.

If they are losing money as fast as commercial real estate is dropping, it's guaranteed they'd do anything in their power to reverse it.

Not simply "like", but actually having a substantial vested financial interest and having the means and opportunity to do something about it.

It has been shown by numerous studies that donations and lobbying by big financial interests determine the vast majority of public policy than popular democratic choice.

My company provides a 24/7 onboarding voice chat, where experienced team members are always accessible for questions. This system significantly reduces onboarding time, with most questions answered within minutes and team members starting regular code contributions in days. While some people may be uneasy with this persistent voice channel, participation is voluntary. Newcomers can simply join, ask their question, and leave. The company culture prescribes an expectation that at least some seniors should be available for new people, but naturally the extroverted ones participate more often.

In my experience, the "remote work hindering junior employees" narrative hasn't held true. Admittedly, there is an initial managerial effort required to accommodate remote work. But then remote onboarding thrives. So, as you say, it's not a remote work issue, it's a cultural one. Or as I would say, it sounds like an issue with managers refusing to do their job and manage the remote company.

Wait a minute, a 24/7 voice chat with experienced team members? How is that staffed?

Are you in some sort of huge-team highly-distributed setup with offices everywhere, or does the company expect people to work 24/7? (I'm guessing somewhere in the middle, but would be curious to learn more.)

The voice chat is available 24/7 but members of offices that have someone to onboard are usually participating, which helps. If a new team member works office hours in California, someone from CA will usually be there, or someone from adjacent time zones. If someone new from Germany is there, usually someone senior from that same office will participate as well.

Most activity in the voice chat takes place on workdays, but we don't treat the channel very formally. Sometimes some people are just hanging out and others are working. I used to join it when I was gaming a lot in the past to just chat/help out. Sometimes people would play multiplayer games there after work and still answer questions for those in other time zones. There doesn't need to be a rigid structure for this, just a friendly culture and a voice chat channel.

let's talk about general terms, not the narrow hyper specialized sector that is tech.

many companies (I would argue most) would stop working if people are not reminded every day what their job is and asked what is the ETA for the task they were assigned to.

it's a real problem, people are usually not super smart, they are average, and tend to learn nothing on the job unless they are required to, trained regularly and their advancement measured in some way. They do not think about their work outside, they hardly do it while at work, they do not experiment, they do not hypothesize, they simply wait for the paycheck at the end of the month in exchange for a portion of their lifetime.

if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would have jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one would not exist.

> if WFH was really such a boon for productivity, while also costing less to both companies and workers, everyone would have jumped on board immediately and pieces like this one would not exist.

Perhaps, if it weren't for confounding variables like companies trying to justify the big shiny new buildings they spent a fortune on prior to the pandemic, middle managers working to keep themselves relevant, and forces in the commercial real estate market trying to mitigate price crashes from reduced demand for offices.

> companies trying to justify the big shiny new buildings they spent a fortune on prior to the pandemic

that's another problem entirely.

I am.not from US, I work for a rather large insurance company (> 12,000 employees) they invest in building because they need to have a capital reserve by the law.

Now if their buildings are worth less due to WFH, they will start buying other more valuable kinds of properties,with the consequence that prices will rise for everybody else.

you are not fighting the system by simply shifting where the money come from.

also: in my country usually people have between 21 and 28 paid holidays, paid sick leave and paid hourly permits. not exactly the worst end of the workers' rights spectrum.

WFH made people ask for less holidays, because they will use their absence from the office to fix issues that before required a day off or can actually go on holiday while also working a bit, if everyone is working from home, nobody actually checks if someone is working or not (ape shall not kill ape). if we don't use our holidays the company must pay for them (effectively paying those days double) so we are now required to use all the holidays and permits, no exceptions.

Meanwhile I am still fighting to get java 17 supported, we are stuck with 11 programmed like it is 8.

My job is exactly to bring people up to speed with modern technologies and am very well compensated for it, but with WFH the attention span has dropped dramatically.

Not my problem, honestly, but they don't understand the damages that are inflicting to their future self.

A lot of jobs are about being able to network and people-manage, not about being able to push PRs. It seems clear to me you are at a disadvantage being remote in these types of roles. Even for people in technical roles, or whose work naturally fits into being remote, these things are probably harder in remote environments. Most companies are not perfectly well adjusted, so it does not make sense to talk about what the ideal remote-first culture is, but what on average working remotely is like.

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