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Comment by floucky | Hacker News Reader

Don't you think full remote is kind of selfish? I mean, I also love it, but what about new hires and junior? How are they going to learn and improve if each time they have a question, they need to post it on slack and just wait...

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I see this argument all the time, but I've onboarded like a dozen new hires and juniors since going fully remote in 2020. It's fine. The tools and processes are different, but fundamentally it's still just about communicating and working together. You genuinely do not have to be in the same physical room to do that.

That said, the problem I do see is that the folks hired into a fully remote environment have a significantly lower "attachment" to the company. Working together in an office fosters a sense of belonging to the group (over time) in a way that remote work cannot. This is the thing that isn't getting attention, IMO - but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we were all overly attached to our jobs anyway :)

Well, these people were lucky to have you. Unfortunately, many people just want to not be disturbed, and it's much easier to ignore someone through Slack than in person.

That's a question of culture and organization. Onboarding a new hire is a job, and someone has to do it. Same for mentoring juniors. If you're relying on in-office for that, because the newbie needs to tap physical shoulders to get attention, then I'd argue the setup is not good to begin with.

I've spent years now in a fully remote team, and we had no problem getting people integrated and productive, and bonding everyone into a real team. Likewise, I was the newbie in in-office teams before and have felt like an outsider who needs to beg for help for months.

In my experience, remote or not is not the deciding factor for onboarding and team building.

Slack is no different than the desk if you're using it like that.

You can hop as easily to huddle as you'd do an interruption. Of course, a junior interrupting ALL the time in real life would be a terrible thing so you definitely need to strike a balance.

But I see most arguments for office is better from people who just don't know how to communicate effectively through tools and potentially are bad at cross location team collab, which happens all the time in big companies.

I'd argue remote is way better, if you share screens over google meet or similar it is far far better than physically sitting around a single workstation. Also, by default it encourages respect of people's time rather than tapping people on a shoulder or an interrupting them (don't get me started on open plan offices).

Vscode live share beats the snot out of traditional pair programming. I can view where my colleagues are on the side while looking up something else, and vice versa. If a colleague is writing a function or something and needs to know how some system works, I can go and look it up while they're working, and not break their flow. Traditional pair programming, with a single terminal, makes this impossible

Mentoring, pair programming, calls, code review, etc

Did it occur to you that there are people who were hired during the pandemic, who had full virtual onboarding experience? How did they survive?

Actually I myself joined my current company after March 2020. I can't imagine a 5-day, in-person experience would be any more effective or productive. If anything, I was able to completely pay no attention the mandatory training of "corporate value" nonsense -- it felt great to be "in" the meeting but spend the time doing actual development or doing some household chores.

I joined a new company in September, and most of my colleagues were fully remote. I have enough experience and was able to handle myself, but when I imagine this situation in my first year, I'm sure it would have been much harder.

It’s different, and harder in some ways, but easier in others. I just think we need to get better at accepting the new paradigm which is clearly better for many people, instead of lamenting what we might have lost. Onwards and upwards!

New hires and juniors can easily learn by taking an active part in their own education. Firing a question into a public slack channel waiting for someone to answer is the laziest attempt to actually get an answer. Better is identifying someone who can help you and asking them a question directly. Take the time on your own to figure out what it is you don't understand, make a list of questions, and ask them directly, or better yet, hop on a quick video meeting and ask. The most effective way to learn in person isn't any different. What you are describing is in fact the laziest way to learn, which is to try nothing on your own, and expect everyone else to tell you exactly what to do.

Requiring everyone to be in an office because your personal learning style involves no personal effort and requires everyone else to enable you to be effective is in fact selfish.

A cultural shift needs to happen if people aren’t getting responses via Slack. If someone is reaching out for help, people need to respond in a timely manner, and it’s up to leadership to make sure that happens, ideally by being a good example.

I have many team members who work extremely well in this kind of environment, but there will always be some who don’t. It’s both a choice and a skill to function as a part of the team, and leadership needs to cultivate that culture. I don’t see this being any different in person, though it may not be quite as visible to the folks making the return to office decisions.

Nobody has the right to interrupt you while you are doing your job, to ask you any question they feel like, at any time. They can talk to you when you have office hours, they can schedule a meeting to talk to you, they can post it on slack, or they can interrupt you for critical concerns.

The lack of structured times to communicate and collaborate is a big reason working from an office is counter-productive.

fully remote requires rethinking collaboration and working together to some extent.

if slack is the only way remote companies communicate, they’re doing it wrong imo.

What other mechanisms would you include?

What's the big deal?

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