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Comment by travisgriggs | Hacker News Reader

I'm migrating to a mixed mode. And glad to be able to.

One of the nagging questions/worries I have about the increase in WFH is greener employees. I've entertained summer interns for the last 11 years at work. And I've tried to help some older but newer-to-programming peers.

I can take "experienced" contractors/helpers up to speed in one of the many domains I have to work in pretty quick. Share some code. Some chats/emails. Couple desktop shares, it's usually enough to bootstrap an ongoing remote conversation.

With younger/newer/greener people, I have found this to be nigh impossible though. I don't like the optics of "you need to get some experience before you can work from home" and it also begs the question "who's going to show up in office to do the mentoring." I do see this as a problem that's not getting addressed.

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As a concrete example: getting an intern’s corporate proxy set up for a build system over video chat can be quite difficult. If they change the system proxy settings or change networks, the screen share goes out. You don’t face these day 0 mentoring issues in person.

OTOH optimizing for “day 0” of N seems counterproductive.

Companies have a steady flow of early career people that need mentoring. It's not just one time

Still early career people are only a tiny fraction of the company’s residents to whom all the WFH culture hugely benefits and the company as a whole. Nothing is perfect, but WFH comes closer than anything I’ve in my lifetime before.

Yeah I think most people would agree that a new employees first week would usually be more productive in the office with someone sitting next to them helping.

And? Just reconnect the call then. Oh, and talk to your IT guys so they fix their shit

Yes and if the intern who has never been behind a proxy before in their life just nuked their global proxy settings, that can be difficult.

>Just have the person who doesn’t understand what they’re doing revert their network settings perfectly across N esoteric config files for shell, npm, brew, gradle, cocoapods, the system itself, the video chat client itself perhaps, etc etc etc

IT departments can’t predict every build environment, and not every build environment is containerized.

Counterpoint: I work at a major tech company and I feel like our interns have been more productive since covid 19. It's forced them to establish a more diverse network of people to ask help from. Maybe it's harder for them, but they don't seemed handicapped by it at all.

The whole "juniors need easy help and struggle to get it themselves" seems like an artificially concocted narrative to me.

Edit: fixed a word

The last place I worked had full WFH and used Tuple (not affiliated) and it worked great for ramp-up and onboarding.

It basically lets you pair program where you and a remote person can control your computer (or theirs) more or less completely and seamlessly. There are competing products too, but that was the nicest I've used.

I tried it at my new job with a colleague in Brazil (I'm in US) and the performance was awful as it seemed to be routing it through the VPN for some reason.

My point is though, good pair programming software might be the solution. Zoom is inadequate in my professional opinion, though it's almost viable. Knowing how much better it could be it falls short.

For the mentoring experiences I've had, being able to observe the newer person allows me to make observations that can help them a lot. I don't need to tell more experienced people how to use their tools (shortcuts, etc) to be 10x happier. But newer employees would never know to ask that, and it's hard to pick up on those nuanced details without having them sitting across the bullpen, periodically sitting next to them, going to the whiteboard, etc.

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