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Comment by pocketarc | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense especially for tech; what difference does it -really- make if your engineers are working in an office cubicle or at their home office? It's all just sitting at a computer.

I personally mourn the loss of a proper full-time office lifestyle, because I've always been remote, and now I will never know what it's like (hybrid is a joke because you're in the office but you still have to get on zoom calls).

But I do understand it.

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Hybrid is such a joke. I‘m seeing colleagues coming to the office to dial in to teams calls all day long and the rest of the day working quietly by themselves. Probably 10 minutes of social interaction in the office on a full work day. What’s the point..

It is what you make it. If you don't utilize the face time you have with people then you're leaving opportunity on the table.

The world won't end or anything if you don't network, but you'll have a leg up on everyone if you do.

I've had face to face meetings that cleared up 6 months of email/chat/zoom misunderstanding.

Sounds like a critique of distributed teams. RTO doesn’t help clear up blockers when my team members are on another continent.

I miss having an office with a door.

I also really miss my lab. I used to run what could be summed up as a giant advanced makerspace: we had chemistry fume hoods, a machine shop, electronics, hydraulic lifts, cranes, etc ... it was a really fun environment.

Cubes and open spaces suck.

We’re doing a three day in office, two day work from home split. I think it works out pretty well.

I do see an advantage being in office with juniors and interns. I definitely learned a lot when I was junior being able to ask the senior staff questions without having to schedule a zoom meeting or wait slowly on slack replies.

5 day RTO would be insane tho.

Mentorship remotely is really tough; nothing quite replaces sitting next to someone, discussing the code and working on a solution together.

...and it shows in hiring. Experienced seniors can still find jobs, juniors... can't.

For you two, maybe. Younger folks have zero problem mentoring online. They grew up online.

I grew up online and it isn't a problem if you have a process. You don't need a process if you're in the same physical place.

I expect you have a process in person, too, it's just the process has been "obvious" to you :)

I do not share the same experience. I've recently mentored someone from knew nothing about git up to

- what is version control [0]

- good commits and good pull requests

- working through pull request reviews [1]

- merging my PR into their PR [2]

- how to edit config files in a sane way (naming conventions are important)

- how to debug a few weird Arma3 config file errors

- how to deliver changes that satisfy some ... specific community constraints

- ways to think about solving a problem, before actually trying to solve it, and why

... and a bunch more. All on discord.

Direct messages. Audio only calls hanging out for a few hours talking / sharing screens, sometimes pair-programming. If I'm busy, I find some relevant documentation and ask them to read through it until I've got a chance to speak to them. A big mix of async and sync communication. Sometimes organised, sometimes ad-hoc.

I've got workshops mentally planned out to upskill the rest of the game server dev team. I've got another mentoring project lined up where we'll hopefully be able to dive into some functional programming things [3].

Remote mentorship isn't tough. It just requires

1. Prioritising the DMs from the people currently being mentored.

2. Manually creating the "sit next to each other and work on something" opportunities by clicking like four buttons to start a voice call and jump into it.

In essence, I make them the person sitting next to me in my online Discord office.

----

[0]: the "keeping a version of every single change in any tracked project file" lightbulb moment was fantastic to see.

[1]: the "always expect someone else to find something wrong because you're a human being who inevitably gets tunnel vision" lesson.

[2]: the "i'm going to make you responsible for merging into release branches at some point, so let's get you comfortable with it now" lesson

[3]: the person wants to learn how to be a "scripter", whereas the previous person was a Arma3 3DEN Editor main.

At the risk of being downvoted to goatse.cx territory, I get more useful "mentorship" out of ChatGPT than I ever got from colleagues.

When one door closes, another often opens.

Assuming all learning happens at the moment of discussion, which is very much not the case in coding.

Looms, pair programming, and Slack Huddles have worked great for us.

I’ve just finished mentoring an intern at a FAANG fully remote. They were able to get me in chat whenever they needed, it never felt like communication was a problem. They were actually in the office, though.

You have cubes? That sounds nice. I have been in an open floor plan for a decade. Now we don’t even have assigned desks.

I do sometimes miss working out of an office with my coworkers, but I don't miss the hour plus commute, the constant taps on the shoulder, spending too much money on coffee and lunch, etc. The collaborative nature of the office is hard to replicate remotely, though not impossible, and I think it's genuinely good for us to have human contact throughout the day.

>the constant taps on the shoulder

To me that is way more tolerable than the constant pinging in chats and putting my headset ON & OFF to jump on calls several times per day. Hearing the ringtone of Teams/Slack today still gives me PTSD.

A situation that can be figured out by a 5 minute face to face talk in person can end up as a 30+ minute back and fourth in the chat. You walk away from your computer for a second and you see 80+ missed texts in 3 Slack channels. The more people in the chat rooms, the worse it gets, as while one person is writing a long sentence explaining something, another is writing a long sentence asking about the thing that other person is just about to explain leading a lot of wasted time and effort with communication.

The worse part is those super long bank-and-fourths in the chat rooms then become "the documentation". Why did you break this? Didn't you know we changed X because of Y? It was discussed in the group Slack yesterday. Didn't you read it[the 100+ message papyrus]?

I much prefer WFH, but it can also be absolute hell, keeping up with the bombardment of chats that remote sync cooperation leads to. In my new job I'm mostly in the office and it's much less stressful.

RTO is not synonymous with a single-site team. The benefits you describe are impossible to realize for any company with distributed offices.

> The benefits you describe are impossible to realize for any company with distributed offices.

Oh definitely, but where I live in this small European country, large SW companies with internationally distributed teams are not really a thing, it's mostly local small and medium enterprises where the whole company teams are under the same roof. Not every SW employer is a large multinational.

Sure but you’re overloading the term RTO. You’re describing a single-office environment. There are real benefits to that, probably. And also to being small. But “RTO” is not only that. RTO can be part of it but what you describe also requires eschewing offshoring and embracing a homogeneous culture. That’s a much different conversation.

> I think it's genuinely good for us to have human contact throughout the day.

I like to choose who I have human contact with. You have no right to put people in a room against their will just to satisfy the shortcomings in your own life. I’m an engineer, not a surrogate.

I have friends, going to the office just cuts into my personal time.

Your coworkers are not your friends and your job is not a substitute for a social life.

We're hybrid and all have to go on in on the same days of the week - which management claims is in response to the "still have to sit on Zoom calls" complaint - but the reason it's all Zoom isn't because your US coworkers are at home, it's because 95% of the hires we've made in the last 4 years are at foreign sites.

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