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Comment by 49531 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

>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.

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