So true. I’ve personally experienced this with starting a new job in January 2020 and subsequently working on 3 teams.

Team 1: 3 engineers of various tenure already on the team. Built good relationship with 2 before pandemic put us in WFH about 6 weeks in. I still talk to both of these engineers on a regular basis, even though we no longer work together.

Team 2: Changed about 8 months in due to a reorg. Working with a different set of people who had all worked in this area together pre-reorg. Very hard to “break in” and ramp up. Things were not going well. Manager, another engineer, and my manager all moved teams.

Team 3: 6 months later. Brand new team with engineers all coming from different parts of the company plus an external new hire. Working well together but we’ve all been remote working together the entire time.

Team 2 was _rough_, and its situation is what most new joiners will face.

As someone who manages people for a living, the problems on Team 2 were entirely your manager’s fault.

That was my take at the time too. I do take some blame for not flagging the situation to my manager or my skip (their manager) earlier, and for not being more aggressive about it. It's so easy to think it must be you when things aren't working out.

I did not escape without a bad review. Somebody had to take the blame when things didn't work out. That was also some textbook bad management: my poor performance was first described in the meeting where the review was delivered. Never once in all the 1-on-1s we'd had. Skip said there was nothing that could be done because all that mattered was that I did not deliver compared to my peers.

My manager moved teams then left the company not too long after as well. I'll never really know what happened, but I assume they got a poor review themselves.

What are specific actions to address these problems the manager could have done?

I imagine a few small group tasks to help the new hire come up to speed on certain things might help. That is, assign the new hire and 1-2 other team members to work on a somewhat small task, something that the team members could easily accomplish in an hour or so, but will take a bit longer because the new hire is also being taught at the same time. Highly encourage them to use group video chat, and not to just have each be hidden behind a screen share. Being able to see the faces of the people talking is important to getting the right nuance of what they are expressing (sometimes that's the difference between something obviously being a good natured joke and an ambiguous and anxiety inducing statement).

Hopefully after a few of these ice breakers, everyone will have a better grasp of each other and more natural communication and relationships might come about.

Seriously. Some of the people in this thread... you need new managers, folks.

Yep. Team 2 was me 6 months ago. Went into the office for 1 week and that almost completely solved the problem.

What I’ve found is that I will work with people I didn’t previously know if there’s some forcing function but the people I randomly reach out to for working on things re mostly people I knew previously. Reaching g out to strangers for help/collaboration with something mostly isn’t very effective in my experience.

Yeah, I'd argue that this hasn't changed during/due to the pandemic.

Gravitating towards people you know happened already even in an in-person setting.

The difference is lack of opportunities outside of core work to engage with others and getting to know them, i.e. there are fewer and less diverse forcing functions. In the past it was getting lunch together a few times, now maybe the only forcing function is your manager assigning you to work or as a mentor, etc. Which is not as effective IMO to build healthy same-level relationships.

I have felt the worst for my Jr Engineers... usually you come out of college and you get sat with a few seniors, and we show you the ropes. We help you through it all, and defend, or attack your positions as we see fit for your learning in enterprise software. Suddenly you don't have someone sitting next to you that you can say does this look right... worse if you ask over IM client, you have no idea that they are heads down in some other totally more important issue. They suffer the worst since without them, we can't have more seniors.

It doesn't need to be so. I started in my actual company 3 years ago, NY based startup and I was based in Europe. The first months we had every day meetings with one of the senior engineers in USA going through the changes we implemented that day, how it worked with the rest of the codebase and systems, how and why this worked and that didn't, etc... It worked perfectly, considering we still work in the company and we are know the seniors. The system we started working on, that was freshly released then, is now smooth and stable. We did it full remote and also with a 6 h difference in time zone, and it worked.

The thing is the time investment may look big because you have to specify a meeting time and reserve a slot of an hour for it. But it is not different from having it spread across the day as the juniors find a problem, interrupt the senior, get the explanation, etc. I worked in both environments: in the office and full remote. And regarding work and knowledge sharing I don't see a big difference. The real difference is changing the way of working and interacting, but once that is done it works equally fine. The rest is a matter of preference related to interacting with people on a daily basis. But for me, that is outside working hours when I go to the gym, join activities like quizzes, sports, etc., with people I don't work with.

Also I want to add that I connect in videocalls with colleagues, when we have not much work for a few hours just to chat about work and out of work things. And we never met in person.