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Comment by 88913527 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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