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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Seniority is another factor.

People who have been in the industry and with a company for a long time largely have a network and don't really have problems connecting with people. (And at larger companies that network is often pretty distributed anyway.)

But the--admittedly not universal--consensus is that new folks struggle with onboarding and generally making progress in their careers. And even coming into an office doesn't really help if their managers and more senior co-workers are mostly not there. It's certainly hard for me to imagine graduating school and working remotely.

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I graduated from uni and all my jobs were 100% remote, and I don't really feel I had any serious problems in onboarding or advancing in my career at least yet :)

I'm not gonna pretend that every project had 100% coverage and up-to-date documentation, but you should overcome fear of appearing weak/dumb and just ask a question, not even waiting for the next daily meetup. If culture is good enough, people are gonna realize it isn't you dumb, but docs and processes suck ass and will do something about it, maybe even asking you to participate. If not, just leave when the next offer lines up, I did that once when people straight up refused answering to my questions directly, and instead nagging that I didn't ask them properly.

Building up network is obviously more reliable when meeting in person, but it doesn't defeat the idea of getting to know each other through daily interactions, retros, 1-1s, whatever. And moreover if you appear professional and capable in eyes of colleagues by getting shit done, they're would want at least keep in touch

A lot of that struggle has to do with what others point out already: the onboarding processes and documentation being of shoddy quality and relying on word-of-mouth to transfer knowledge and repeatedly check in.

If you start raising future generations to be, you know, adults, instead of mentally stunting them into being eternal teens well into their 30s, and companies make an effort not to have a horrible onboarding and rely on 3 year tenures (and paradoxically do nothing to keep said employees that long), the problem is far less prevalent. Heck, most CS students are expected to do far more complex things at school without any assistance these days.

It's hard to argue with better documentation and process. However, if I think back to my early time in the computer industry (admittedly with much more limited electronic communications and other tools), it's just really hard for me to visualize taking away the in-person face-to-face--including a lot of social and quasi-social activities.

And with many travel budgets so squeezed at the moment (and COVID of course), you have teams with people who have never met anyone else on their team in-person in their whole multiyear tenure with the company. And to your point about short tenures, maybe they never will. If I'm honest, even though I've been around for ages, I'm less connected with co-workers than I've been in the past.

From where I sit, needing the in-person face-to-face as your social activity for the day is a symptom of something that widespread remote work should at least help to fix: the splintering and atomization of communities that once existed outside of the workplace.

Once upon a time, it was considered the norm to find a job where you were, because you lived in a community that was part of your support system. Over the course of the last century, this norm eroded and was replaced with the norm of moving to wherever you got a job. More recently, the situation deteriorated even further, with the disappearance of the "job for life" assumptions that were prevalent in the mid-to-late 20th century, in favor of an expectation of changing jobs every 2-5 years—with a high chance every single time that you'd have to move.

One inevitable result of all this is the aforementioned splintering of local communities. Changing the employment norms so that a much higher percentage of people never need to move to work in person at a job would make it much easier to begin to restore local communities, and provide a much better chance of good socialization outside of work.

Now, there are caveats. This still relies on people not working too many hours, and while it would still help for the people who do work in person, and move in order to do so (those communities existing and being more prominent, and sustained by the people who stick around, makes it much easier for others to find them, too, even if they'll have to keep finding new ones every few years), it doesn't help them quite as much as the ones who can stay and grow their place in the community over many years.

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