Fully agree. I'm all for remote work. However, in my first 2 years of programming, being able to go the the office, put my laptop and notebook down next to a senior dev, point and say, "Help me," was so valuable.
With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help.
It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologies and techniques.
The "seniors" tend to be glorified salespeople whose job is to put together presentations and reassure clients that everything's going well, while the one or more interns/recent grads do all the technical work. Some projects there'd be one junior literally writing every line of code while the seniors spent their entire time in meeting rooms talking about god knows what.
Dressing smart, talking smoothly, and being older looking (to imply experience to clients) are the attributes that get you a senior role.
The companies would staff projects with a mix of seniors and juniors. Seniors to get started fast, in the right direction, and actually guarantee the delivery; juniors to keep the costs lower and to have a pipeline of new people. Hands-on from day 1, sitting with seniors in a project with clear timelines and deliverables, with projects and technologies changing regularly, tended to level up the newcomers fast.
This was in small to midsize (50-500) consulting companies where the projects did not come via CEOs being buddies with others.
And didn't know development at a high level; no one to guide, so I self-learned and acquired some bad habits that I'm now breaking, and didn't learn some necessary techniques that I'm now learning.
Anyone else open to mentoring feel free to chime in, the more the better - mentoring is highly individualized.
there’s the whiteboard element but i’ve gotten pretty good at exalidraw and zoom annotating
add in the remote makes it kinda easy to not be distracting in meetings so i can easily DM them context on the side to get them ramped up easier
In my experience the biggest factor in teams usually came down to the middle management layer. If their "style" was "watch over your shoulder, butts in seats" type of micromanagement then juniors didn't tend to progress unless they were self motivated to seek it out.
A picture prevents you from copying, but often that's not as important. One can use judgment to determine whether a picture or text can be better.
Receiving such messages can sometimes mean I need to transcribe a bit of what I'm seeing, but the added clarity to what they're trying to communicate can be worth it. I welcome it.
I tend to get things like 1/3 of a terminal window missing all of the context. No commands and only half of the error.
Ever receive a photo (not a screenshot) of a spreadsheet when they expect you to do something with the content? I have.
Another personal favourite is a browser window cropped so tight I can't tell where they are. No address bar, page header removed, sidebar missing, etc.
Send text as text! One of these times I am going to print the photo, annotate it, and fax it back. Or maybe I need better coworkers.
That's the bit I really notice I am missing out on when I work at home.
then we got acquired by a much larger onsite-first company, and their slack is dead. nobody posts anything unless they absolutely have to (i.e. "the men's toilet on the 3rd floor is overflowing" at least twice a week, or that some printer needs paper or toner). there aren't slack bots because nobody checks slack. everything else happens in person, in a servicenow ticket, or at most via email
their IT team has no idea how to support how we used slack before. in one case they told us to stop posting in a channel used by other parts of the company because we were generating too much disruptive activity. I can see the team cultures around it eroding week over week, but we're not in any office, so there aren't any in-person behaviors replacing it. we're all simply becoming increasingly isolated, losing track of each other both as people and in the work we're doing, and becoming unhappier and less effective
this shit isn't hard, but it requires effort and people who see the benefit of it. there's a perception that people with remote work skills can just roll up into an office and be as effective without changing any fundamental aspects of how they work, and vice versa, and it's all bullshit
It was a bit of drama and the person ended up leaving because they wanted others to adapt to them. I think they ended up in a remote-only company in the end. Very talented developer.
Similarly, being available to stakeholders and colleagues from other teams come to me at any time and get a quick answer was something that ended up being amazing for my career, got me a few lifelong friends and even a cat.