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Comment by zactato | Hacker News Reader

I know that the common perspective on HN is that remote work is good. Certainly, as a senior engineer and parent I appreciate the flexibility that remote work provides.

However I think there’s a huge problem that’s silently growing. New engineers are falling behind. We’re growing a generation that isn’t developing some critical social skills. They’re not learning how to effectively learn from their peers. Maybe this is simply a set of skills they’ll develop later, but I worry about their future careers. I don’t know the reasons that these big company’s are choosing to force RTO, but I do know that colocated teams have a better culture and perform better.

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> but I do know that colocated teams have a better culture and perform better.

Citation needed. I work on a remote team, we see each other once every other month or so, and we get along great. It's one of the best teams I've ever worked with. I don't know what this "culture" companies keep trying to foster is, I'm not building a civilization, I'm not trying to "change the world" I'm showing up to do my job and get paid. I'll do my job to the best of my ability, I'll be considerate and polite and try to get along well with my coworkers. But at the end of the day I'd rather see my wife and kids than spend more time with my coworkers.

Right, since when does culture always equate to making money? Amazon and Walmart have pretty shitty work culture and they make a lot of money.

Even if remote work is less productive than in person work, office rents aren’t free.

Meta leases millions of square feet in Manhattan for I can only assume is at a cost of over $50/sq ft. You can hire a medium sized company with that kind of money flying out the door.

The team's I'm talking about don't meet in person that often. Once or twice per year. Every month feels like a good cadence to develop and maintain good relationships.

I should push for more frequent meet ups. Given how spread out people are this is certainly difficult.

> New engineers are falling behind.

That's not my experience at all. Having onboarded new engineers (new grads) from pre and post pandemic, I would actually say onboarding experience has improved with the advent of remote work. We use many more tools and techniques to keep communication open and get new team members up to speed. Through a combination of live chat, jumping on a video conference, and a feedback cycle of asking questions to improving documentation - the whole learning lifecycle has been improved by the elimination of that awkward "need to walk over to someone's desk and interrupt them in real time to get an answer" barrier that caused junior engineers previously to get stuck for indeterminate amounts of time.

I will say that the one complaint I do hear from this cohort is the lack of an "out of work" social environment, especially for those jumping directly from environments like University - they are missing that "second place" social environment, but I question whether this should ultimately be tied to the workplace itself or whether there is a more appropriate solution which we will converge on with the advent of remote work. Assuming that the workplace is the solution for lack of social exposure seems misguided to me, in the same way that tying the workplace and gainful employment to health insurance is wrong - the workplace was a default social environment due to circumstances that have changed. Instead of shoehorning the workplace into that role now that it isn't needed for that purpose, we can come up with a better solution, and as new grads/junior engineers have evolved in their approach to remote work over the years, I have seen the seeds of these solutions start bearing green shoots - social networks of people with common interests which have met and mingled outside the workplace to fulfill their social needs. Honestly it seems like a much healthier direction as a whole in almost all dimensions.

we've actually had the opposite, insofar as we are leverging remote technologies to enhance mentoring and training where meatspace critically falls flat.

Things like (a) using remote screen sharing for facilitating pair programming (much better received than sitting next to each other), (b) slack threads for persistent (searchable) on-the-fly collaboration and documentation, (c) focus on async communication which focuses sync (e.g, zoom meetings) to be more impactful, vs meatspace meetings which often devolve into creation of cliques, time-wasting, etc.

I wonder if what you may be optimizing for, via meatspace, is actually socialization, vs productivity. I agree there is a role for meatspace, but I don't think that necessarily entails degradation in mentoring and knowledge-sharing, vs other benefits to socialization (e.g., morale, transmission of culture, etc).

Absolutely agreed. Some junior devs will always struggle, but I've seen FAR more struggling since remote work started. My current junior ICs are significantly worse at problem solving and lack significant context that they would easily get by sitting near more experienced engineers.

Heck, most of what made me a good engineer was that I started my career with my desk right next to a stellar senior dev. Watching him work taught me so much.

I see this bullshit being repeated ad-nauseam as if it was fact.

It is not. The more junior developers I work with are doing fine. They just need a different soft skill set to grow in a remote environment (e.g.: self-learning).

This is a phenomenal outcome for existing, entrenched technology workers.

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