I guess I’ll have to tell the junior I’m mentoring that we are doomed.

Annnnnnyways, I’ve been having a great time mentoring a junior engineer at my company. We regularly meet to discuss his work and I constantly stress “please bother me if you have questions.” I reach out once a day to ensure he’s good to go and he often reaches out a few times a day for questions. We assign him work that is challenging, but within his skill set and abilities.

In summary, anyone saying juniors will suffer either has no idea how to mentor remotely or are just lazy. Adapt or die.

Edit: I will add that my company flies all remote employees into the office once a year for the sole purpose of team building. We did our hackathon in person and focused on building those bonds that can help people work better together. It’s technically optional, but who wants to turn down a free mini-vacation?

Finding a student/junior who is able to do well in your business environment at a distance does not imply that it is scalable across all workers businesses need to hire.

If you truly need an in-person job or employee, you can find one.

Not at all. Even if there was such a thing as "mandatory remote work", that does not preclude going to an office. Remote work allows working from anywhere.

The premise is that, absent of job obligation, there is little reason for the seniors to show up at the same place as the juniors. If such obligation is placed on them then you have an RTO mandate.

Might be possible, but most can't do it from what I've seen.

So if you go full wfh your pool of people who can mentor shrinks by a large factor (4x is my bet).

This is solved by having a structured mentorship program and guidelines, and really good onboarding.

Of course, this means businesses have to invest in this sort of thing, and of course, they don't, because they implicitly got it for free by having seniors covering for juniors for so many decades it obfuscated the problem

These are solved / solvable issues. Socialization at work can be facilitated in a myriad of ways, even remotely. Games are popular way of doing it, virtual happy hours, team building activities etc.

I wish I could emulate walking-over-there on zoom

There needs to be a normalization of "peeling off" the main chat room

at the end of the day after doing this I do feel more tired, but I get plenty of self-scheduled productive little discussions.

I still feel you're losing something without in-person (including social) interaction. I know for me personally, I would say I have much weaker connections to many people I've never met in person. That said, there are a bunch of other factors involved with building new connections as well that aren't purely about being virtual.

Separately, I hold what amounts to office hours 3 times per week, where anyone who feels like it can show up to ask questions—but new hires are encouraged to do so until absolutely certain they don't need to, and also to keep track of questions between sessions.

There's more, but this is the part that's easy to explain.

What didn't work... crucially, waiting for newbies to ask questions doesn't work; they won't. You need to actively go looking, and also bring up areas they might not even know they ought to ask about.

a lot more than three years. remote work goes back decades before covid.

GitHub, Shopify, and Stripe all started as remote companies.

the really annoying thing is not the legions of people who believe it all started in 2020. the really annoying thing is that there's a ton of excellent literature on how to do it, and when it suddenly became mainstream in 2020, the newcomers ignored all that literature.

There were remote employees before (especially in Production Engineering and much of Support), but R&D was almost all in person.

(Source: I miss the productivity of the Elgin Street office ...)

I think the effects are going to start presenting now, but because it's a new phenomenon for most organizations, it won't be recognized for another year or so. The next 2-5 years are going to be littered with stories along the lines of 'progress ground to a halt and nobody could put their finger on why, so we tried a bunch of stuff that didn't work and eventually realized it was a lack of any remote strategy'

The fact that senior employees are leaving for remote work ensures junior people are all they have left! Junior people are, shockingly, not as productive as senior people... who would have thought?

This is a genuine question. The RTO push has befuddled me for awhile because the money that's already gone into the offices (like the leases) were decided on awhile ago and will be paid out regardless if people come in or not. Perks like free lunch and snacks also cost more when you force people to come in. So I don't really understand the financial aspect of it.

Maybe it's management needing people in office to justify their jobs for some reason? I don't know.

Edit: I'm staff-level for what it's worth. I've also noticed that this article doesn't actually reflect reality; nearly every job listing I saw this year said that the applicant will have to be in the office 1-5 days a week.

you answered your own question. sunk costs fallacy.

As for your "well known fact", I'm not convinced it's either well-known, nor necessarily a fact (I can buy it happens some places, but would question whether it's an inherent limitations or an issue with management in organisations who don't know how to handle remote work)

Going by the principles of capitalism or game theory it would be more surprising if this wasn't true and board members overwhelmingly worked for the good of the company instead of their personal wealth

the one that made entire industries basically vanish? the one that no one was prepared for?

like, I been 100% remote since 2015 for orgs that were already equipped for that, and life went on just fine when COVID hit. Jr. Devs at orgs that weren't equipped for remote definitely suffered, in the same way that not having winter tiers or chains would screw you when a sudden blizzard hits Texas.

Doesn't this just prove the point, though? You seem to be saying it takes additional resources and time to make WFH work as effectively as normal, in-office work. Many workplaces are resource-constrained and may not be able to implement those practices.

> the well-known fact that junior employees and productivity both take a hit with full-time remote work

Not “some people were less productive, others were more productive,” which is obviously the actual truth.

Don't insult me like that.

I won't pretend I don't know people who only work 4 hours a week, but stop acting like you know me.

I love work from home because I can get actual quiet. Not music downing out distractions. Quiet.

If you want to insinuate that I don't work, or perpetuate a culture that assumes I will not work as hard because there's no hall monitor, then get bent.

And if this is true it just proof of the merits of WFH. If everyone is 'slacking off' and productivity is basically unchanged, it just shows what a waste of everyone's lives working in the office was.

Add in the new AI tools and productivity is getting another bump.

I guess you're just getting left behind.

We won't miss you.

WFH I'm expected to track my productive time and ensure it adds up to 8 hours. Maybe some people can get away with fudging their records but I think there's a pretty widespread understanding that coworkers who regularly have lengthy periods where they're neither responding to DMs nor producing output aren't actually working for the full workday.

In office, if I spent an hour to go for a walk and to a coffee-shop during my 8 hour workday, it was understood that I was probably doing some backround processing while stretching my legs.

WFH if I disappear for an hour, it's assumed I'm not working (and I'm certainly not tracking that as productive work time)

there are a lot of do-nothing, go-nowhere meetings that fill the gap and make it appear like things are happening.

WFH just shows that the emperor has no clothes and that a lot of time is spent doing BS tasks. there is still a ton of BS, but I can be chopping veggies and prepping a crockpot meal while on pointless 30+ people calls.

If we want to talk about conspiracies, let’s talk about management’s belief that everyone producing value is secretly trying to game the system