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Comment by codegeek | Hacker News Reader

Yes great points. But most WFH advocates forget to talk about juniors or people who are just starting their careers or people who just cannot wfh effectively. The article talks about Management's arguments against WFH but fails to mention any of the points I mentioned.

The best solution in my opinion is hybrid especially for juniors and I will die on this hill.

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The only case where being in office is better for Juniors is when the organization is dysfunctional and doesn't know how to properly do remote.

I absolutely have worked in companies where my onboarding was such a mess that the only solution for me was doing hybrid. They sucked at remote work and if you were not in the office you were not seen.

My first Junior job was in a remote-first company and it was an absolute non issue and I don't think being in office would have helped in any form.

The difference is, with remote work you need to have processes in place. You can't just stuff people in an office and hope for the best. You need a mentoring program. You need to encourage pair programming. You need to build digital spaces where socialization can happen and people can just hang out.

> people who just cannot wfh effectively

Yeah but don't forget that for many people with special needs, WFH can be a huge blessing and allow them to work in the first place.

And yes, some people thrive more in a hybrid environment. Though often it because their home situation is non conducive for work, lacking space, too many distraction and so on. I think co-working spaces can be a great solution for that.

Not sure why you can't just teach juniors how to work from home effectively, just how you teach them how to do their job. It's all part of the same thing. I've certainly helped juniors over a video call just as effectively as being next to them physically. In one case I point a finger on their screen, in another I point my mouse cursor on their screen.

It's much harder. We are social animals on a whole. Nothing beats in person interactions. I am not against remote work btw.

And we continue to be social animals over video chat. Harder in what sense? I hear this a lot, but I rarely hear concrete examples. Feels to me more that people are just not accustomed to fully online communication at work rather than that it actually being harder. Change is hard, yes. But that doesn't mean that what you change into is actually more difficult.

Also, I'm not sure of newer generations where you're from, but here what I see is less and less want from people to have in-person conversations. Newer generations have everything done remotely. Ordering food, socializing (online video games, etc), that in-person conversations often are intimating to them. Which begs the question, have the people who say juniors need in-person help actually asked juniors what they would like? Or is it more that _you_ are more comfortable _teaching_ in-person, in which case again, the problem seems to be you, not the juniors.

All-in-all, I'm just not seeing the difficulties people seem to say they have. Just my $0.02.

The single biggest issue I've noticed is that body language communicates a lot, and in remote environments you cannot see this. You don't feel at all invested in the other person either, and I've noticed people multi-tasking instead of listening to what the other person is telling them - often followed up with a "Sorry, I missed that. Can you repeat it?"

As another example, I've worked with some people who are quite confrontational and dare I say, aggressive, on camera, and have raised their voice a couple of times in the past. This same person has very different interactions in real life, a lot more empathy, where it becomes apparent the other person is in fact, an actual person with emotions.

The disconnect is real indeed, and in my experience mostly solved with company get-togethers. After the first get-together, people have a much better idea of other people, vibe better together and thus have a lot more empathy as well.

That said, if a person is unable to conduct themselves professionally whether it is via a video call or not, I think it has nothing to do with remote work and all to do with that particular person being bad to work with.

You can be social over a video call. No one needs to suffer through all of the bullshit of modern offices just to lean over someone's shoulder to read some code.

Sorry to be all 'yet you participate in society' about it but it's notable that you're choosing to have this conversation on an international, text-only website on a Sunday rather than in a local public space. Nothing beats in-person interactions, except perhaps the ability to interact with a community with niche knowledge that's thousands of times larger than what's within a 30 minute drive.

At 3 AM when alerts are firing, documentation beats half-remembered talks with former teammates. We need to get over our aversion to writing stuff down, or at least recording our impromptu brain dumps.

And if anything, it’s much better remotely because you don’t have to be hunched over at the same time as someone else on a single keyboard.

Juniors are hyper-online, accustomed to COVID classes etc. Maybe it is methods of training that need to shift.

I've onboarded juniors and interns remotely at a couple of jobs and it's been fine. It doesn't work well if your onboarding process is osmosis-based & you want them to just pick stuff up by being around others. But if you are invested in the success of a junior and establish good patterns around how to communicate, there's no real risk there, and if anything it's healthier and more repeatable.

For the team I am on maintaining virtual office hours has really helped in this respect. One or more (but at least one) senior+ person just working/hanging out in a zoom call where others can drop in and talk about whatever.

With remote teams you have to explicitly solve this issue rather than just having it happen like it does for healthy in office teams. But, it isn’t like this is some unsolvable problem.

I spend a lot of time working with the junior developers on my team, mostly because that's part of my job. There's also a selfish component: if I don't help the new people get up to speed and improve, then I will be less confident delegating tasks.

IMHO, there is sufficient motivation for senior developers to work with the junior members of the team that are unrelated to physical space.

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