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Comment by jaggederest | Hacker News Reader

> Onboarding in particular is demonstrably more difficult to do remotely.

Is it? I don't believe it is. At this point, people just plug right in - once you're used to remote work, it's a matter of learning which chat platform they use, getting access to email, and away you go. It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days, precisely due to needing to accommodate remote onboarding.

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I'm now struggling to find the study I was thinking of when I said "demonstrably", but I can say anecdotally that our new hires ask fewer questions online than in person, despite my reminders that the worst thing you can do while onboarding is ask too few questions. Coworker relationships are more formal and compartmentalized online than in person and they can be more reluctant to ping people with questions out of fear of being considered annoying. This doesn't apply to everyone but it has a noticeable effect on the average new hire.

I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote. We'll just have to wait a few more years for more robust, large scale comparisons before we really understand how much an office is worth.

I don't have a counterpoint, I'm interested in other people's perspectives, honestly. I just thought it was a little absurd to gently move past the assumption that remote onboarding is obviously worse!

I can see ways it might be worse, obviously, and I've experienced good in-office onboarding. But I've also experienced absolutely crap in-office onboarding (a month of no working development environment!) - so I question whether that experience was because of the office/remote dynamic, or because companies that do a good job onboarding because they value it, regardless.

So it's interesting to hear stories and experiences from other people's perspective, both onboard-ee and onboard-er, since I'm just one dude with my own Unique Perspective™ and limited total experience based on that viewpoint.

Absolutely. I personally found myself less likely to ping someone over Teams to ask them a small question versus leaning over to the next seat to ask. I was assigned a work-buddy when I was on-boarded, but I think I asked him a total of 3 questions. I believe that if I was on-boarded in-person, and had a few lunches with him, it would have been quite different. Also, the fact that the only time I talk to my co-workers is over Zoom makes it necessary from a human relations point of view to start many meetings with a bit of chit-chat, which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.

FWIW i am FAR less likely to interrupt the person sitting next to me and yank them out of their current flow into a different topic. I'd rather send them a chat message that they can answer out of bounds when it does not interrupt their flow.

>which otherwise in face-to-face meetings can be skipped since we can chit-chat outside of meetings.

So in terms of time there is little difference? I find myself to spend much more time chitchatting in person - which is nice but also not the job.

> I'm sure you can come up with the perfect counterpoint to my anecdote.

Even if your interlocutor can, and even if the large scale studies run counter to your argument, that doesn't mean your experience is invalid.

Life isn't a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study. There is no control group consisting of you and your cohort to measure against.

The scientific method is, I argue, on the whole, the wrong instrument to bear in these scenarios, at least because measuring the metrics affects the study group and publishing the resulted affects the society in which the study occurred.

Absolutely agree. I just wanted to provide a counterpoint to the idea that it was just accepted and obvious that remote onboarding is worse - that doesn't mean it isn't, but I don't think we have to assume that it is.

I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences especially because I've been remote since 2011 so I have a clearly biased perspective.

Life feels a lot like a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled study sometimes.

Upvotes are not enough to express agreement here, don’t have much more to add other than it reflects my experience, too. Most people don’t know if they’re supposed to ask the most trivial questions so they implicitly default (wrongly) to not asking. This doesn’t happen in person because the most trivial issues are noticed without newbies asking. To replicate this fully remotely you need a purposefully designed process.

Increased difficulty doesn't mean impossible or unsuccessful. Personally, I think it greatly matters what sort of culture and tooling you have available at your companies. If you've always done remote onboarding, you have years or training and materials. Having started remotely at a company that was not really prepared to be remote (2021), it was quite difficult as often many questions were expected to be answered by someone sitting next to you. Seeing new coworkers start while being in-person has shown it to be a better experience than what I had.

If there's some thought put into the onboarding process, I believe remote can be effective however I would argue remote onboarding requires far more effort and planning for the same result.

I think onboarding is easier at remote-only companies because you can just search for relevant conversations, you don't have to puzzle out that the way to understand the wonky CI process is to go mountain biking because it's the drive home from the trail where they actually hash out the problems.

Good luck finding anything relevant in usual chat history older than a week.

Oh c'mon. Code is like the cosmic background. It's a picture of how the universe was back when it's author's we're only barely capable of making it work. They know better now, but it works, so they're off doing other things.

Therefore, if it's a year old and it smells bad:

- either it's still like that

- or somebody has since harvested its improvement into at least one standup update, which you can search for

At the very least, you're likely to be able to find who to ask.

>It's literally the exact same thing as in office these days

It's just not. In the office you're sitting next to a person you can lean over to and ask a question. Yeah, it interrupts their workflow, but that's ok when they're supposed to be helping you onboard. Remotely you've got to send a message, wait for somebody to reply, schedule a zoom call, whatever. It's async communication and it's slower, which is OK when you're not blocked, but when you're onboarding and blocked you need to be unblocked quickly because you don't have the experience to know where else to go while you're waiting.

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