I wanted to do more of it. Sadly, the office was still mostly empty, so there was no point going in. I left the job. There were other reasons of course, but I want my next job to be at least in-person 3 days a week.
Ironically, I liked to go to the office when my team actually wasn't there! I like to socialise with people from different teams but seeing my teammates is sometimes stressful. Also, I'm a slow thinker and I often prefer to work on problems asynchronously.
I'm also slow thinker as well. I do terrible during those post-it note brainstorming sessions where you have to come up with ideas in response to something. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to work my way up to management.:)
Have you considered a coworking space? Some of the criticisms I see of remote work basically boil down to being completely isolated at home, or a home not being a conducive working environment (as opposed to feeling like they are more productive in office, enjoy being around their coworkers, etc.) I think in these cases the solution isn't necessarily to go into the office, but to simply get out of the house to work. For many this might be a happy medium, allowing you to get out of your home for a good chunk of the day, into an environment with amenities for working, and possibilities for socializing with others, while allowing flexibility to live far away from the office, shortening commutes or housing costs, and not having your daily social life tied to coworkers, which has downsides.
That's nearly five percent of my waking hours per week (does hit 5%, if traffic's unusually bad one or two of those days), including weekends. It's more than 6% of my waking hours on a weekday. That's a pretty steep cost, especially since the activity's in no way pleasant and I'm not compensated for it. Then factor in how many hours I'd spend working just to pay for the means to commute....
I do like that COVID has normalized WFH when I have an appointment or something else I need to get done during the day. But I do think that working in person is better and I'm glad it's returning.
As you alluded to, it's not just easier access to senior engineers. It's also feeling like you're part of something that matters. I've been lucky to have those kinds of jobs in the past. Now I just have a job, I'm fully remote, and I hate it. It would be even worse if I was just starting out.
I suspect that some companies will eventually migrate back to a hybrid model because of this. I can't be the only senior engineer who feels this way.
Maybe this assumption needs to change?
I do think you and the OP you replied to are correct about it being more difficult for junior engineers, but at the same time it selects for people who don’t need someone to tell them what to do, which would be a good thing for a company depending on the role and such.
All of this is a challenge over zoom.
As far as being a part of something that matters, if I'm going to do a job for 8 hours a day, I'd like for it be as fulfilling as possible. For me that means pressure, teamwork, and at least some in-person interaction. I realize not everyone is the same.
The nice thing about Slack/Zoom combo is that if you have a highly self-directed engineer and a self-starter then they can spend time working until they truly feel stuck and then connect and share code snippets and do screen shares and calls. Instead of everything having to be a “stop the world” Q/A session you get a nice async communication channel that allows for various levels of triage.
That being said I certainly find in-person collaboration to be very valuable, but not so valuable as to drive a car and sit in an office where I can’t wear sweatpants or get up whenever I want to make an espresso or run an errand if I’m stuck on a problem for a bit.
The best intern I’ve ever had was would hit me every single morning with a laundry list of questions, but, crucially they were almost 100% things she didn’t yet have the tools or context to find out on her own.
By the end she was asking me questions I hadn’t even thought to ask
That is becoming less true by the day, as forums, blogs, etc., are filled with AI-generated pablum or with simply incorrect content. You still need an expert to tell you right from wrong, and the best option is to have a senior person in your team be that expert.
This is a great guide to give to everyone: https://quick-answers.kronis.dev/
I’d contend if you can’t tell as a junior engineer that’s a problem.
Sadly, it's common with folks who learned programming with rote (they expect every answer to be somewhere they can just memorize).
Being senior means you have learned how to learn. You don't get this skill by asking a bunch of questions, you get it by answering your own questions without having someone else to rely on. This is a skill we should foster in our junior engineers as early as possible, and being available as a shoulder to tap on every 15 minutes actively prevents that skill from developing.
I think it is perfectly resonable to mentor a junior developer using a single, daily video meeting of 30 minutes or 1 hour. This is a time they can use to ask questions about their previous day, bounce ideas, etc. If a question comes up later, they can spend the day trying to solve it and report on it in the next daily meeting.
The best thing you can do for your junior engineer is to find a stream of work which challenges them at the right level (not too much, but just enough), and let them go independently while keeping some guard rails. This should not require many hours of 1:1 face time.
I understand this approach might not work for some juniors who can only learn in a highly social context with a mentor in the room. But I think it can work for many juniors, and actually be beneficial in the long run.
Even on-prem before 2020, this happened most often in slack at least in the tech startups I was in(?)
How many people are willing to pay an extra 1-2k per month to live closer to their job? How many of those people are the people you want to hire?
I dont think it is as simple as "willing to pay an extra 1-2k per month". It is with junior engineers w/o families. Once you have families, living closer to the job is way, way harder, esp for tech jobs concentrated in expensive cities. You cant just share a room with a friend when you have children. Also, things like schooling become considerations -- in NYC for example, you arent even guaranteed a seat in your local school (you're guaranteed a seat at "a" school.) It isnt surprising that SWE salaries ballooned in expensive metro areas and there are constantly "shortages" -- the huge premiums either go into super-expensive family housing near the city, private schools, a pied-e-tierre in the city, or some other acrobatics
Interest wage increases are going to decrease wage increases by softening the labor market
I feel the same way w/r/t something that matters. The trade-off there is when you look at when you
- Find parking at a commuter station
- Wait for a 6:50AM commuter train (which especially on the return trip can be mysteriously cancelled)
- Arrive at the city and then transfer to a subway, which some-times doesnt even run well
- Realize you've paid ~$48 for the day's commute
This is where I realise I’m dealing with a completely different mindset.
Work is something I reluctantly do to fund the things I actually care about. It sure as hell isn’t my entire life or cause for existence.
This probably explains why I love being remote.
Some of us prefer to care about our work. 40 hours per week is a lot of time to spend on something you don’t care about. Caring about your work isn’t the same as it being your “entire life or cause for existence”. Our lives can consist of many different interests.
But shouldn't mean I have to be in an office all the time for me to care about it
Nor is all work "things you care about" even if you love your job, unless you own the entity. Even if you had a passion for picking up garbage, you'd rather be doing it your way than the way your boss is doing it.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to spend non-working hours on something that isn't exploiting you...
An Exchange of someone’s time and focus for predictability, direction, and money.
Most people who do janitorial work would hate having to run a janitorial business. It’s a lot of work organizing everything, doing sales, dealing with legal issues, etc. etc.
If someone wants to do a days work and get a days pay, that’s all stuff that gets in the way.
It’s also a lot of stuff that is waaaay outside the skill set required to do the work they are able and willing to do.
that's objective reality, sport. That's what profit is - the surplus of value from materials and labor...
It's a trade in that if you don't agree to it, you're completely free to starve on the streets.
Are some companies run or managed by exploitive assholes? Sure. Are some folks doing labor exploitive assholes? You bet.
But it’s always more fun to tear down those who have what we don’t and blame them for every problem and isn’t it?
The paychecks came regardless, or they learned that labor has its own power too.
Never felt exploited about it either, and moved somewhere else or just took a break and did what I wanted if I started to feel like it might be. We don’t really need all the trappings we often convince ourselves we need, and it’s a lot lighter without them.
And never once starved for it.
But then, I’ve had to dig trenches before and change diapers and didn’t get paid for that, but then family is pretty communist that way. We all have to make our way, one way or another.
You’re welcome to look at life as harsh and nasty as you want, but you reap what you sow. And that outlook is sowing very bitter seeds indeed.
that society has a mechanism that allows for one to exchange something others have for something they want, without having to do all the things everywhere on their own, means that society is turning them into a slave somehow.
Which hey, maybe? But stepping back and looking at historical context, it’s pretty laughable.
And in the vein of ‘beliefs that help’ vs ‘beliefs that don’t’ - how does that help you or anyone else right now?
Not that it's done by people who aren't proud of the job they do, but most people don't really care about their work just the lifestyle it supports.
You can have "decent professional relationships" with coworkers while remote. Virtual beer (I prefer scotch) drinking sessions work great, for example. And also opens your circle to ppl continents away.
>Work is a significant part of your life and to be socially disconnected and emotionally discordant about what your doing is not good.
Physical proximity is not necessary for social connection. Especially when it seems every app has webconference (slack too).
Also, frequency of needed connection differs if you're an introvert vs extrovert. Larger society typically views the latter as 'normal' & the former as 'ill-adjusted', but I wouldn't expect that tendency on HN(?)
Does it work? Sure, mostly.
But why do that if you can enjoy it? And is it what the SO probably wants? Unlikely.
I think this is a cultural problem. There is no reason why you can’t pair or engage with people just as effectively in a remote setup.
But the change is not magical, it requires having a system for things that previously happened in an improvised manner.
Meaning, there is a little bit more friction. You have to harangue senior engs to pair, you have to be posting in slack more, you have to do all these little things. But when you're in person there is less friction and so it gets done more naturally.
Like if a task is taking longer than expected, sometimes its because it takes longer than expected. In remote world, you have to know when to ask for help. In person, you might be casually complaining about a task and someone who knows a better way can chime in and get you unstuck without you realizing you're stuck.
Nonsense. If you have a good boss, you’ll be mentored to success in person or remotely. Source: I’m the boss who’s done that!
Before you say “but but but”, all the buts will point back to a bad boss, who isn’t fixed by in-person presence.
At the end of the day, people should have full accountability for their career and actions, but at a junior level there is a poor baseline for what a good trajectory and a bad trajectory looks like, so room for mistakes is bigger...which should allow people to learn faster.
Orthogonal to my premise. Being in person doesn’t entitle you to pick your boss, either.
This reasoning is faulty and nearly circular. "Remote work can't be bad, because if it were, it'd be the fault of the boss, and a bad boss is going to be bad regardless of whether or not you're remote."
That's a neat rhetorical trick for making almost any argument. You're sidestepping the fact that remote work makes mentorship harder and less likely to work. A good boss can make up for that, but not all bosses are good. Most are just average, and it's certainly not the case that managing a fully remote team is easier than managing a fully in-person one. Mentorship, knowledge transfer, and values transfer happen automatically more often than not in person, but they have to be intentionally fostered in a remote setting. That's harder for a manager to pull off. Remote work just makes this kind of stuff harder.
When I worked in person, I could seek out mentorship myself in a natural way by making connections on my own, at lunch for example. Now, I guess what you're saying is that it's my boss's responsibility to schedule those opportunities for me, and if he doesn't, he's a bad boss. Okay -- how does that help me? Should I leave my job if I can't find a way to improve it? What if the next job has the same problem?
Working remotely as a junior or intermediate engineer is basically stacking the deck against yourself. Sure, there are ways to make it work, but on average it works less well, and it's also more likely to just not work at all. Sweeping it under the rug by saying it's the boss's job to make it work does not absolve it of its problems.
It is all that matters. You can even completely fuck up a la Southwest and be totally fine.
I used to think the same but realized it's more nuanced than that.
There are basically two markets for junior hires: those who can prosper in a remote-first environment (capable of debugging on their own, read doc and ask relevant questions) and those who can't. The contrast is striking. A lot of businesses tried to cut programmer salaried with junior hires from "diverse" pipelines (codeword for bootcamps and certificates) and are now struggling onboarding them in a remote-first environment because of the required handholding.
Of course, what the market hasn't figured out yet, is that there's a premium for the later.
This is very handwavy.
As a principal engineer, I've worked with junior engineers that have adapted just fine and thrived, even as their first or second job out of college.
But for that to happen, the company's culture has to be willing and able to shift to remote-first and/or fully remote. The more senior people need to role model the way of how to do remote well in a way that counters its (few) disadvantages.
There is definitely a personal component too though. I've also worked with junior engineers that do not work well remotely. But I think that is more personality-based or perhaps maturity-based than seniority-based.
i have different opinion. few college new hires already personal trait and past life experiences that give them solid work ethic and ability to focus.
some see themselves struggle and have awareness to really see this. many of most of them in my experience want to be in office.
then you have remainder who isnt able to dive into company (team) culture or influence it, understand need to deliver and have impact, and become independent contributors. these are good engineers but haven’t figured out that you do have to put in the work.
id say the company I was at and the company I joined are both remote first. remote first means different things to different companies, orgs, and even teams. there’s no canonical definition, if you know one please share it.
I think group 3 I described desperately needs to be in office. these are like the high school kids who didn’t get to experience high school during COVID. unfortunately the environment is so hyper politicized that this wfh thing is sensitive topic and many companies don’t want to properly address problem head on. its being told as binary choice without taking more nuanced approach
I believe that in-person office work is not about communication or mentorship but mostly about providing socialization benefits (chatting, going out to lunch) that are not needed for a company to succeed. "Less authentic relationships" has nothing to do with company success and everything to do with your own personal well-being.
The correct move is to build a social life outside of your work - family, friends, community. As a remote only worker my social life is excellent because I did not tie my social well being to any company.
I feel lucky to have been born and raised in SV. I can have my cake and eat it too - remote work, in person work, whatever - and I can still go out and have lunch with friends I've had for 30+ years.
That's a broad and unfair generalization and implication. People decide to move for all sorts of reasons, and then perhaps a job determines a destination. People who move to a cheaper location (which can be young people starting a family or retirees or any life stage in between) are also putting cost or quality of life "ahead of friends, community, and likely family."
If you are a person who makes friends you will make friends in your new community. Ubiquitous networking lets you keep in touch to the level you wish with friends and family. When I go back to my home country I see friends with whom we just pick up mid-conversation as if I'd just been over their home the day before.
Life has been so for thousands of years. Not necessarily a sacrifice as you frame it.
I'm pretty sure that most people moving to SV/SF or most high cost areas really do so because they (or their partner) got a good job offer there, and especially in the case of tech and northern California, because there's a high density of other job possibilities as well.
People do just decide they want to move someplace but I doubt a lot choose the Bay area unless there's a job offer attached.
Shouldn’t they be happy that they can have their cake and eat it now?
Move back closer to those friends and family and keep working your dream job!
I personally prefer WFH but think WFH is secure and don't want to unnecessarily hurt RTO but I'm not sure I'm right.
What happens when you loose your job or change jobs? What happens if you make a big mistake and the social network you relied on is now angry at you? It can be more of an emotional roller coaster.
Of course that’s not everyone! There’s still plenty of in person jobs for people who want or need in person but at least there’s more of a fair split now for folks who do not want that.
It's just that, your preference - it doesn't have to be sinister or heroic, more or less effective. Some people prefer an office and some don't. That's valid enough on its own, isn't it?
Junior/single/ADHD/work-is-social-circle: REMOTE BAD
Senior/married (esp with kids)/prefers-non-work-social-circle: REMOTE GOOD
Alternatively they could become such an attractive place to work via other factors that they can attract employees whether remote or not
I’ve been remote for 8 years now and doubt I could ever go back, but above would be like a bare minimum to even consider - that and a minimum of a 25% comp bump over a remote option.
For me, Senior/Single/ADHD/prefers-non-work-social-circle: REMOTE GOOD
But the issue raised in this thread is very real, with full remote I've see both junior training as well as new employee ramp up considerably slowed down, and there's no clear alternative to knowledge gained from random hallway conversations.
Work from home is vastly superior to the distractions of an office (especially open offices) for me. At home, I have much more control over interruptions and noise, and completely eliminate the constant activity around me.
I actually never realized how badly ADHD hurt my productivity until I started working remotely and the constant distractions severely decreased.
But I wouldn’t know what the breakdown would be between the two
I’m sure your experience is factual, but maybe it’s not a universal truth or something generally applicable about remote work.
One thing for sure I would feel down about is if I moved somewhere I didn’t like to advance my career, and then everyone there started working remotely making the whole move pointless.
I would bet a large amount of money your some middle manager trying to astroturf for less remote work because you can't micromanage your employees remotely.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't necessarily believe that "the office" and long commutes are the right way to employee workers, but I strongly believe that in person relationships tend to work a lot better for knowledge transfer and leveling up skills of junior employees. A solution, the feasibility of which I'm still actively researching, is a network of decentralized much smaller offices managed by a senior employee to meet other people in the area in person, at least once a week or more if deemed necessary by the group.
The other thing I completely agree on is that it's not employee vs boss.
Many of my colleagues have agreed to a cut of their paycheck to work remotely, which is a net win for every boss out there, they love to pay less for the same output, while also transferring all the expenses and the disadvantages of building a place suited to work at home to the employer. Kinda like a gig economy worker that has to buy a car, pay for the insurance and the maintenance to become a "self employed" Uber driver.
The other ones who love it are the vast sea of workers who chose to stay near family and friends rather than leaving to chase money in expensive coastal cities. Not being constrained to 3rd-tier-landlocked-city rates is great.
[EDIT] Ah, you mean specifically the ones already in (or recently-late-of) SV who love it. I'll leave the comment but it's less-on-topic than I thought on my first reading.
On the other side of the coin, if you're junior, what's it like uprooting your life and social network for a job at a location with probably much higher rent and no existing social network?
"Lamenting the junior dev" is pretty much the only compassionate argument for in-person work so of course it's brought up a dozen times on any remote thread on HN. It gets unnerving.
There are also a lot of people who just want to avoid the commute. With all its loss of time, cognitive load, wear & tear included. Even the non-introvert people do.
We don't always 'hate the commute' but what if you could just pop in and out as needed? No waiting? Pick up the kids, drop them at home, then back to the office if you want? Home for lunch? No brutal traffic?
And - people need their own spaces. The cost of squeezing in everyone on a bench is being born a bit in people not wanting to come back. I literally could not get anything done.
Being a senior dev also enables you to act almost fully autonomous, making you capable of carrying out a lot of stuff from idea to execution. Its naturally conducive to remote work.
> But remote work was isolating and lonely, mentorship went to zero
That's the one downside of remote work - one has to amp up interactions via online collaboration tools and also non-work social interactions.
> it has caused me a lot of stress realizing that remote work is never going away.
Take heart - you can eventually make remote work work out, or a mixture of hybrid that you prefer. Then the benefits outweigh the disadvantages a lot. Even being able to avoid the commute is a major win.