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Comment by paulrpotts | Hacker News Reader

I'm 55 years old and I have _never_ been mentored in person by a co-worker, despite having spent most of my career working on teams, and despite _trying_ in many different workplaces to set up mentoring relationships. For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that normies experience, but we don't, and it's also a minefield of things that can go wrong because the norms of social interaction sometimes elude us or we simply can't play-act them (I'll never forget being told by my boss that it always seemed like I was lying because I didn't maintain eye contact well). Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in person.

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Normie here, and I've always thought this was the biggest benefit of remote work. No more emphasis on what you look and act like. Only the value you add counts.

This has got to be good for racial, gender, etc forms of discrimination. In a wheelchair? Black? Female? Ideally nobody would care because they wouldn't even know.

I'm a couple of years older than you and I agree with most of this. Never had a "mentor" though lip service was paid to the concept in a few places, it never really happened in the tech positions.

"Team-building" stuff -- outings, retreats, games, that all the business folks seemed to love were painfully awkward experiences that seemed to be totally contrived. I tried to fake that I was enjoying it but pretty sure I never pulled it off very well.

I’m shocked that people worked in an office together and the junior person never got mentored.

It seems like if that was your goal that you’d have to go well out of your way to avoid accidentally mentoring someone. “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.” “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.” “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?”

I can’t imagine how I’d setup an in-person work arrangement to avoid mentoring.

It's easy:

> “Oh, here’s the trick I just used in the debugger.”

Don't ever talk to one another during debugging sessions. Pick up your bug ticket, fix it, close the ticket. Everyone else has their own work to do so they are not interested in watching you pilot your heavily-customized IDE setup, and the boss doesn't make them.

> “I’ll sketch the architecture change I’m proposing on the whiteboard.”

Don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture. If you must, definitely don't invite juniors. In fact, nobody actually writing code to implement the change will be in the meeting at all. We are architects and managers, they are merely developers. They'll write what we tell them to write. In many organizations, even the people called "architects" are left out of these meetings, and probably even line managers. These are Director Level Decisions, after all.

> “Why don’t you shadow me in this meeting or interview or presentation?”

Easiest of the three. Just never ever have anybody "shadow" anyone for any reason. They have their own work to be doing.

I'm not saying these behaviors are good, but they are pretty much the default behavior in corporate jobs AFAICT.

It’s the normal, default state of affairs when you have seniors and managers who feel they are competing with each other and so hoard knowledge and techniques, and assign themselves all the interesting work while juniors are left bored doing rite work. In several workplaces when I’ve tried to organize shared spaces like a commons, lunch-and-learns, etc., management had been actively hostile. I had one asshole manager who would even shut down any water-cooler conversation. I finally wound up mentoring a co-worker who needed help with C++ entirely off-site during lunches.

I mean...there are a lot of anti-social developers who truly want to believe.

But really, people are just going out of their way to resolve the cognitive dissonance: they know that important intangible collaboration is lost in a world of remote work, but they prefer it anyway, so they convince themselves that the human aspect doesn't matter.

Also, don't forget that HN is filled with junior engineers. It's true that a lot of what you do when you're a junior engineer can be done in isolation, and when you get to a self-sufficient junior level ("senior engineer" in modern parlance; achieved in about 3-5 years), it's easy to ignore all the times that someone with more experience made a one-off comment that saved hours of labor or headed off a thorny problem. They forget the number of times that someone wandered over to chat, "interrupted" them, and changed everything.

The sibling comment is a great illustration. I can't tell if it's parody, but it reads like it: "just don't have whiteboard meetings about architecture," indeed. Whiteboard diagramming obviously never happens at every company, ever.

I had a boss order me to take down a whiteboard I set up in a common area so we couldn’t discuss code during work.

I can see that because I've experienced it. That said, at most places I've worked at over the decades, there was a lot of mentoring, both formal and informal. One place I worked at, however, was just depressing. No one communicated except via emails. Informal discussions about how the system never happened. No one even went out to eat together No one was hostile... it was just... cold. To me, it was just weird and I got out of there ASAP -- but I suspect many there liked it that way.

> For neurodivergent folks - who probably make up the bulk of programming teams, if we're honest - the camaraderie and team-building and all that is a mythical thing that normies experience, but we don't

Please don't speak for all of us. I used to think exactly like you, but turns out I was just on bad teams in bad companies. My recent teams have mostly been composed of and managed by like minded programmers and the camaraderie, lunch conversation, and ad hoc collaboration that ensue massively help both my happiness and productivity. I'm as neurodivergent as you will see in public.

Fair enough - I’m 55 and describing the bulk on my career to date. Lately the culture of a couple companies I’ve been in have been much more welcoming to neurodivergent folks but this is post-COVID. I’m not planning to do in-person work in the near future; I already have long COVID and risk factors that make me want to make sure my family and I never get infected again.

I've a little younger than the OP and I've never had a proper mentor either. I had one guy I argued with a lot that I learned some tricks from that I use to this day, but that's about it.

I've never worked in a company with any type of formal mentoring that everyone talks about. The "let me take you under my wing and show you the ropes, kiddo," never existing in my world, it was sink or swim. I spent countless hours reading books (I'm old) and scouring the web for solutions. If I could debug it, I could figure out the problem, I just didn't always know what it was supposed to do. I did all this because I didn't want to fail. Do junior people still do this, or is it more, "I can't figure it out in 5 minutes, do it for me."

There are also plenty of us who struggle to reach out and benefit _greatly_ from a slow build up of relationships that form from in-person interactions, facilitated by coworkers.

There isn't a single remote versus meatspace answer, and it's incredibly frustrating to hear almost everyone pretend that there's a Single Right Solution and that anything chosen will be easy to implement.

> they can't bully and abuse us

Without at all denying that this happen, this is still a gross (in both senses of the word) generalization and insult.

>> Remote work levels the playing field, and normies hate it because they can't bully and abuse us as easily online as they can in person.

I'm not sure how remote somehow replaces social interaction in your world, but it sure sounds like you might have other factors at play as well, like categorizing every who's not in the group with which you identify as an abusive bully. I've never worked with you remote or in person, and the only conclusion you've let me make is you're difficult and unpleasant.

Your comment crossed into personal attack. Please don't do that on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

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