How to set junior employees up for success in remote

(quoting book)<p>Amanda Nock, a tech leader and devops expert who posts frequently to Twitter, offered this in response when I posted on Twitter about how to hire good people remotely, “When I hire remotely, I ask about their online friends.” Nock doesn’t need the details of anyone’s online friendships, but she needs to know that the person has developed a serious friendship online; otherwise that person probably doesn’t communicate easily and naturally online, so working with them remotely is going to be difficult.<p>Nock says, “I often hire remotely, and I make a point to ask about what people&#x27;s online lives are like. No details. If someone, for instance, has good relationships on Twitter or they&#x27;re active in a Discord server, that tells me they&#x27;re good at asynchronous remote communication. I don&#x27;t care if the Discord server they&#x27;re active in is a furry community or whatever, the details don&#x27;t matter — the skill for forming relationships and communicating in a personable way over asynchronous text is there.”<p>(end quote)<p>But I think the opposite is also true: a lot of people do not easily form friendships online, and they lack online social skills, so they are not going work well remotely. These people are more productive in a traditional office.<p>From what I&#x27;ve seen, many people struggle to truly express themselves in written form. This includes well educated people. And those who are extroverted need to talk. Remote work tends to put an emphasis on written communication, and that is only partly offset by having a lot of Zoom meetings.

For junior engineers it&#x27;s really easy to fall into the trap of trying to solve everything themselves instead of asking for help when they are remote. I say this as somebody who has spent the last five years working remote team-based gigs.

The only reason I got hired at MAGMA is because I was able to apply &amp; work remote.<p>I am pretty introverted + slightly autistic (not self diagnosed). I do a lot of customer facing work too, which I would never endure when not working remotely. But working remote means I can just turn off when I&#x27;m not feeling so great. Presenting is a lot easier... Approaching people, also, a lot easier. Just send them a message on slack&#x2F;teams&#x2F;discord. Before that I would have had to muster the courage to talk to certain people. It&#x27;s a lot easier to onboard as well, given the change in environment is much smaller.<p>I feel SO lucky that I just happened to apply for this job when COVID and remote work started.<p>I think this remote work has equalized the playing field in terms of attractiveness &amp; height aswell, as those qualities are far less visible when interviewing remotely. Wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if we see the average height of high paid workers decline due to this.

This is not a surprise to me. I think it also applies to some people who are senior and new on a project or team. Or people with a more synchronous working style. I think remote has been toxic to productivity in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of people. I think there&#x27;s in general a &quot;personality type&quot; that does really well with remote in a certain kind of job and thrives with fairly asynchronous disconnected tasks, and on HN I think there&#x27;s a bias towards seeing our whole industry that way.<p>But some of my best jobs were not like that. They were sitting down with people in very up close conversations and working out ambiguities and tasks. And mentoring juniors and working things through with them.<p>All that said, I won&#x27;t be going back to in person. I&#x27;ll be hunting for places that know how to make remote work, even though I don&#x27;t prefer it. Because remote is still better than the 1.5 hours a day I was spending driving and the toll that was taking on my health and sanity. And most of the local employers are crappy.<p>So it&#x27;s a real mix of stuff, we&#x27;re in a transition period. It&#x27;s going to take a few years for this stuff to shake out.

Very convincing methodology.<p>Ask people on subreddit and LinkedIn a question. Then write another article based on &#x27;I swear, dude&#x27;. Link it as a source for this &#x27;article&#x27;. Write the rest of the &#x27;article&#x27; by imagining what the world has to be like, given your poll is a source of truth.<p>Follows my favourite format of &#x27;journalism&#x27;, where there is some arbitrarily chosen data source, followed up by series of &#x27;interviews&#x27; mixed into one single &#x27;story&#x27;. I&#x27;d expect nothing less from a management and HR expert in marketing.<p>Hopefully we can see some ornithomancy next!

This is definitely something I&#x27;ve observed, even with young-senior people, since COVID.<p>If you&#x27;re set in your ways, remote work is a blessing - the office was just a hindrance to the optimal workflow. But if you&#x27;re adapting your workflow, then remote work is an extra barrier.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of reasons someone may need to adapt their workflow: maybe they&#x27;re junior, maybe they&#x27;re new, maybe they&#x27;re just a good PM&#x2F;salesperson&#x2F;manager who&#x27;s trying to clear the way. Remote work is a distribution shift in the difficulty of their work.

I can not relate to this. I found my first real job after university in a medium sized company (100-200 employees). This company is a truly in-office company by heart. Before covid everybody had to go to the office. Working from home was not an option. Not even for one day. The whole culture was built around the in-person work experience.<p>But due to covid everybody worked remote. So did I. I actually never met most of colleagues up until recently. But working remote was never an issue for me. On the contrary, my colleagues struggled with working remotely. I think thats because they are relatively old and never used messengers, mail, social media and co. to an extend as my generation (age &lt;=25). I think that people that grew up in digital spheres are going to feel quite comfortable in a remote environment.

Working in government, we&#x27;re seeing a larger amount of folks leave within a few months of hire. I had never heard of that before COVID.<p>When I started here years ago and not remote except a one day a month telework option, it took weeks to get involved in a project. Everyone is laid back and wants to give time to acclimate and understand the place and the project first. My PM told me basically, &quot;Hey I hired you for algorithm development, but just look around and see what&#x27;s needed, what&#x27;s interesting to you, and from there pick what you want to do.&quot;<p>That might sound awesome, and to me now with experience it is the reason why I stay here. However, as a new employee, it made me super neurotic to not have any sort of direct tasking. It felt like I didn&#x27;t have work and wasn&#x27;t being assigned any. I think if I had been remote it would have made things even worse; at the time, one of my saving thoughts was I could be there on time and be seen looking around Confluence or reading to learn about the research topic.<p>I would definitely be interested to hear how folks onboard freshly hired junior devs onto a project or team, how much direct tasking they give, how much time or how they allow for adapting, etc.

Our company&#x27;s new CTO held an all-hands meeting Friday where he stated something to the effect that he agreed with Elon (Musk) and that if it were up to him we&#x27;d all be huddled in the same office...&quot;but times have changed&quot;. What I heard was &quot;I really don&#x27;t like that we can&#x27;t keep an eye on you, but since the labor market is still so tight in tech, we have to deal with remote (for now).&quot;

I think there is something to this - as a junior you can learn a lot through osmosis just by being around seniors and more experienced people. This doesn&#x27;t just apply to software or tech - I have a friend that works for a bank that says just having new members of his team be within earshot so they can hear how he talks to clients and partners on the phone is a useful learning experience for them.<p>However, my experience pre-Covid was that the office was where I was the least productive. My team was already spread out across many office locations, so virtual meetings over Teams were already a thing. The company I worked for at the time had shifted to an open floor plan but without an adequate amount of conference rooms, so often for these virtual meetings we would all be dialed in at our desk, despite 4-6 of us on the call sitting right next to each other. Of course this created echo so meetings were a constant game of muting&#x2F;unmuting and minimizing how much you talked to avoid feedback.<p>Working remotely did not require a shift in tools at all, but instead has made these calls much more pleasant to attend and easier to engage in.

It’s certainly been a very long time since I was a junior, but I don’t think I would have succeeded at WFH as one.<p>I learned so much from the people in the cubes around me just via osmosis. Working from home the last couple years I have barely spoken to anyone without a reason to. Random chitchatting with people outside your bubble is how real growth happens, especially early on.

I don&#x27;t agree with this article about &quot;micro-tasks&quot;. You don&#x27;t learn accountability and how to break down problems into small tasks if someone does it for you. What junior developers need (actually all workers) is ownership of what they are making. And I don&#x27;t mean &quot;they own part of a code base&quot;. I mean literal ownership of the company. The best way to learn how to make decisions is to own a piece of the pie and participate in decision making process. This is true for remote and not remote workers.

Before remote, the office was already increasingly hostile.<p>Open floor plans, some groups having shared seating, and offices for roughly no one.<p>Now, it’s worse. Everything is “reservable equipment” of garbage monitors, windows keyboards, and 400 dpi mice.<p>I suspect it’s harder for a junior to succeed anywhere today vs 2012. The office is not built to foster development or innovation. It’s an exec’s idea of what a software factory looks like, and it’s a bad one.

Overall great advice, however if it only works under the following conditions then it&#x27;s not really usable advice:<p>&gt;New hires need to join a stable squad, where senior team members can take time to onboard and support them<p>&gt;Limit the number of junior employees to a certain % of your workforce: sounds harsh, but in a remote team, especially a startup, resources are limited. Don&#x27;t stretch managers too thin.<p>These points makes this advice not-actionable because by and large, these two items are usually out of the control of their managers.<p>Yes, ideally a team would be well formed and competent prior to even posting a job requirement, but we know that&#x27;s just not the way the world works.<p>&quot;Don&#x27;t hire unless you have everything in order&quot; is great in theory but I&#x27;ve seen only a handful of teams in my near 20 years of experience that can claim to be in such a state.

This argument has really become &quot;what will a workplace do to accommodate&#x2F;help people one way or the other&quot;.<p>For instance, I personally prefer going to the office at least sometimes. My job satisfaction went down considerably staying at home for nearly 2 years. The fact my job had travel pre-COVID also likely had something to do with that. I enjoyed being around people, getting out of the house, etc.<p>I&#x27;m also a huge gamer, and am constantly on Discord or some type of in-game chat. So it&#x27;s not like I didn&#x27;t have people to talk to or wasn&#x27;t getting any interaction.<p>My company is currently &quot;Hybrid&quot;, so most who are near an office go 2-3 days a week. We&#x27;re also pretty nationally and internationally distributed, so we&#x27;re going to the office to be on a bunch of phone calls. The people I see at the office are my direct manager and a few cross functional co-workers. It&#x27;s nice to be able to talk to them in person.<p>Now recently on a company town hall, the question came up, and our President said basically &quot;We&#x27;re going with the times&#x2F;job market, but at the same time if I got everyone involved in Problem X in a room together it would get solved in days not weeks&quot;.<p>From experience, he&#x27;s not wrong, but that sent me down another line of thinking:<p>- Are we willing to fly these people around to be in that room?<p>- If no, we should make it easier to do that.<p>- What resources do we provide to make at-home lives easier (monitors, webcams, better headset&#x2F;speakerphone).<p>- What learning and&#x2F;or help do we give to make people &quot;better&quot; at WFH or Office?<p>The last unique thing I&#x27;ll say about me, I live 10 minutes or less from my office. That&#x27;s a HUGE privilege, and one that has probably kept me here longer simply because I don&#x27;t get stressed out over commute changes from weather, etc. I can&#x27;t imagine what it would be like if I lived 45 minutes or an hour or more from work.

I don’t necessarily think that working remote is the end all be all for jobs that can do it. But the benefits of remote is just too good to give up. No commute, cheaper cost of living, less stress, etc. Don’t get me wrong there are cons, but the freedom is just too hard to give up. Even if you are struggling at it work wise.<p>I am able to work remote and live in a state that allowed me to buy a house. If my company wanted me to go into the office I would be fine with that but I would need to be compensated in such a way as to offset the huge jump in cost of living that would cause me. I calculated it and it would take a net increase in my salary of about 30-40K to get me to come back.

I fear that WFH is becoming one of those hot topics divided down cultural lines: workers who enjoy a life without commuting, bosses and older employees who are suspicious of it.<p>I&#x27;m happy to work from home and it&#x27;s a big benefit to me, but I won&#x27;t deny it sometimes has its drawbacks. I just think the balance lies more in favour of remote work than colocation.<p>Hopefully there&#x27;s a way to express that, yes, junior employees might benefit from some face to face support, but in such a way that doesn&#x27;t imply everyone else must be chained to a desk forty hours a week.

I had the unfortunate experience of working at a cubicle farm in Atlanta, and what really got me were the chairs. Crappy monitors, crappy equipment, par for the course, but the chairs hurt. Chairs that have been sitting around for a decade, and management could not care less. Gotta sit in a chair for four hours at a time, got back pain, too bad. That’s the only job in my life I’ve ever just walked out on. It was absolutely awful.

I&#x27;ve been saying this for over 2 years now, and especially seen this in action with teams in my own company which are a good mix of junior and senior folks.<p>- Junior folks on average spend longer being stuck before reaching out. We organized a few physical offsites where the whole team got together in-person and that helped reduce the friction quite a bit because folks interacted with each other outside of just &quot;We need to get X done&quot; which naturally happens because we never really got to know folks outside of &quot;planned&quot; onboarding&#x2F;weekly&#x2F;standup etc. Zoom calls.<p>- I learnt A LOT of Dev setup looking over shoulders of devs much better than me, be it interesting keyboard shortcuts, learning how to use tmux for split screen, ssh tricks, vim&#x2F;emacs setups etc. which in the long term made me a better dev. A lot of this is not &quot;mandatory&quot; to know but every dev builds his&#x2F;her own style of working by absorbing from those around them.<p>- Lot more friendships&#x2F;mentorships&#x2F;team-spirit were created in in-person settings than in remote where everyone feels a lot more &quot;replaceable&quot;. Sure, some folks probably prefer it this way, but I&#x27;m certain I&#x27;m not the only person who wants to look at work as &quot;just something I do to make money&quot; but also a place where I build meaningful relationships and work with smart folks to build something great together while also having fun (which have also helped me when switching between companies and having folks I know already there).<p>Personally, as someone with enough experience building software, I&#x27;m at a place where working remote is the &quot;best case scenario&quot; for me because it gives me complete control of my time, but I absolutely see the tradeoff on the other hand for the folks on the other end.

I agreed with the claim before I read the article, but as I read the article, it convinced me of the opposite, as the article&#x27;s arguments are really not that good.<p>That table of differences between in office and remote, for example, is ridiculously simplistic; much of the items listed on the right side are also important in the office. And not all of them are necessarily an issue remote (like timezones).

I didn&#x27;t read the article, but the title alone is obvious.<p>I am in favor of flexibility in the work place. Some people work better remotely, others work better in an office. We should let people do what&#x27;s best for them.<p>I like working remotely, but I can&#x27;t imagine being fully remote with my first professional job out of college. The foundational knowledge transfer that happens in person is invaluable. Not only that, but I find even now, as a more senior engineer with many responsibilities, at times it is hard to feel motivated when I&#x27;m fully remote. That would only be amplified as a junior engineers when you aren&#x27;t a stakeholder in any projects. How can you feel inspired to want to build great things if everything is so disconnected and impersonal?<p>I suspect this is much better at companies that are permanently remote - they hopefully have the infrastructure in place to properly ramp up and train junior engineers. But for companies that have transitioned to remote recently, the old way of onboarding a junior employee won&#x27;t work any more.

Supporting jr engineers comes with some specific needs IMO, regardless of remote or onsite :<p>1. Senior engineer time is the main constraint, in the sense, more experienced engineers need to be available to mentor them and break down tasks, concepts etc 2. clarity of purpose &#x2F; problem being solved (related to #1) 3. feeling safe, and ready to ask questions - have some kind of &#x27;office hours&#x27; on a daily basis<p>In an office environment , there are opportunities for hallway chats, in addition to physical meetings (where there is increased incentive&#x2F;pressure for the jr. engineer to bring up questions).<p>The remote jr. engineer also feels left alone, since seniors are busy. Seniors usually have tenure, so know the background, and are empowered with lots of info.. they can plough ahead, the breakdown of tasks is relatively tractable.. but not for Jrs.<p>An Org needs to create a daily &#x27;win&#x27; potential for them to take them forward .. instead it becomes for each his&#x2F;her his own (shell).

I’ve been permanently remote for almost a decade. I will never go back to working in an office. Despite all this, I actually prefer working in an office because it creates team camaraderie you don’t get remotely, but commuting is so horrid that it’s not worth it. Commuting, more than anything else, makes me a hardliner for remote work.<p>I think you can absolutely onboard people and develop juniors remotely, but you have to be intentional about it. So many companies I’ve been at in my career did onboarding or OJT by giving out tasks and letting the employee organically learn from those around them. This process fails horribly with remote work, especially for juniors. But if you intentionally onboard people, focus on remote first, have a reading list, assign an onboarding buddy, and are up front about expectations and timelines, it’s completely workable and I’ve been at companies successfully doing this for years before WFH was commonplace.

The worst mistake I think you can make with people is believing in an objective reality.<p>Take onboarding a team member. You see a bunch of different approaches to this. Some people like to simply throw someone in the deep end. Sink or Swim. This is an easy trap to fall into because it requires less effort. It becomes incredibly easy to write people off with no investment. This is often couched in language of like &quot;top performers will thrive&quot;.<p>Another approach is more hands-on. Small tasks to begin with. Tasks with a theme built to acumulate knowledge and experience so someone can ultimately take ownership of something. This requires more effort but (IME) works <i>way</i> more than the &quot;sink or swim&quot; approach.<p>The problem with remote work is that it becomes easier to fall into the &quot;sink or swim&quot; trap. Remote employees more easily become abandonware.<p>You can write this off and say it&#x27;s a failing of remote work but really it&#x27;s a failure in leadership.

Yeah, this tracks.<p>The casual interaction you get in a traditional office can be formative. Mentoring is easier. You can absorb norms better, and integrate better, especially as a brand new worker.<p>We are a 100% remote team, and we&#x27;ve been very aware of this in hiring - which is to say, we haven&#x27;t hired any &quot;baby devs&quot; at all.

This idea feels intuitively true but it would be useful to see some actual measurement, especially because &quot;fail&quot; is a strong word. The article neither defines it nor does it provide results that would demonstrate it. In short the article is much more speculative opinion than demonstrable outcomes.<p>This isn&#x27;t just nitpicking. If the intuition here is true then it&#x27;s important to understand the extent of the problem in more quantifiable detail. The general up skill table doesn&#x27;t do that, and their simple survey shows a pretty even split, so nothing conclusive there.<p>As a suggestion, the article lists benchmark developments where new hires progress from up skill to simple changes to regular work. This seems like a good starting places to measure how long it takes new hires, remote vs. onsite, to progress through that process.

This is just fairly obvious and I&#x27;ve probably posted something about it before in HN. It&#x27;s the same reason in-person school works much better than remote, students and junior employees need fast feedback while still giving them the room to work independently.<p>Real world example, I gave a junior engineer a bug that should take a day to research and 3 lines of code to fix. If I&#x27;m sitting a few desks away and I hear them furiously banging away at the keyboard, I might come by and ask how it&#x27;s going.<p>Today in the remote world I have 2 options, needlessly badger the junior engineer or wait for a big PR that I&#x27;m going to have to reject or ask for significant rework, both of which are going to make that person feel a lot worse than if I had just walked by, asked to grab a coffee and talked about it.

Question for anyone who&#x27;s had to onboard&#x2F;train Jr&#x27;s in a 100% remote environment, what&#x27;s worked for you? How do you maximize their chances of success? What are some common pain points?<p>This has been an issue at my org and we&#x27;re having a hard time improving it.

I don&#x27;t know if they&#x27;re more likely to fail in a company that understands how to work remotely. Although the article does seem to suggest this. My guess is that this is more a product of companies recently going remote and not understanding how to do it right.<p>I&#x27;ve been working mostly remotely for the last decade, both as a junior and now as a senior and this hasn&#x27;t been my experience at all. In fact, I&#x27;d argue the opposite is perhaps true.<p>I tend to define a junior dev as a dev who needs a decent amount of handholding where as senior devs are expected to be self-sufficient after a brief onboarding period.<p>If you&#x27;re a senior dev and you&#x27;re not self-sufficient then remote can be really hard because you have to constantly pester other devs for help over Slack and Teams, where as in the office asking someone for advise can be done less formally. What I&#x27;ve found is that it&#x27;s really obvious when a senior dev isn&#x27;t quite as senior as they probably should be when working remotely.<p>Junior devs on the other hand should be expected to need support and there&#x27;s no reason they shouldn&#x27;t be able to get that support if they&#x27;re working for a company that has a good remote working culture. Ideally every junior should have a senior dev mentor assigned to them and they should have Slack channels in place where they can request help. Code needs to be reviewed by senior devs and ideally you should be working with them to solutionise before they even begin to write their first line of code.<p>Still, I think most junior devs would probably benefit from some office experience early in their career. I&#x27;m not sure your first dev job should be remote, but I don&#x27;t think junior devs should feel they&#x27;re any more likely to fail working remotely as they would in the office. As a junior dev you can probably improve your chances by asking what support you&#x27;ll be given as a junior dev during the interview process. You should also feel confident to ask for help. At the end of the day if you&#x27;re not given the support you need as a junior dev, that&#x27;s not your failure, but your employers.

What companies want to avoid is to admit that commuting is <i>work</i>. These are hours dedicated to my employer but I am not compensated for them, and even worse they are not accounted in the total work hours of my day. My 9-5 job is really a 7 - 7 job.

I&#x27;ve speculated for a while that remote-first will reverse the traditional ageism of the industry, giving older developers a distinct advantage and making it harder for younger developers to get their footing.<p>(I am not saying that&#x27;s good, just observing.)

I&#x27;ll restrict myself to the software&#x2F;IT sector as that is where my expertise is most prominent.<p>Oboarding and successfully integrating juniors is fully dependent on having real seniors (not juniors that you sell as seniors) in the company <i>and</i> budgeting them substantial time (&gt;25% minimum per trainee supervised) to support this process. This further assumes that you had a decent selective hiring process, as no training&#x2F;onboarding will compensate for the senior&#x27;s productive time for complete misses.

Isn&#x27;t this an editorialised headline? The actual headline is &quot;Micromanagement vs. micro-tasks: how to set junior employees up for success in remote&quot;

Surprising no one who has been paying attention.

I don&#x27;t think being junior is the issue here.<p>Many people start their dev career with OSS and that was remote before it was cool.<p>They have a asynchronous remote first culture from the ground up.<p>This can&#x27;t be said for the average company. Those have mostly no processes and getting up to speed at the water cooler mentality. No shit that people with little experience fail there.

Are seniors who are hired remotely in a company productive almost immediately from day 1 with no orientation?

Good article, bad HN title. Of COURSE any new employee, especially someone with less experience, will flounder if not given proper support. The prescriptive advice here is also key. Give small bite size tasks, check in often!

Judging by the comments here, most of the comments posted here are not even by those that are &#x27;senior&#x27; themselves or are self declared &#x27;senior&#x27; and are certainly on someone else&#x27;s payroll.

Perhaps companies are doing remote wrong? Has this been the experience of companies that are historically all-remote (Basecamp, Gitlab, etc.)?

Work at a company that&#x27;s not going to PIP you doesn&#x27;t regularly PIP people. Opt out of the rat race and work at a smaller company.

I knew a company that would make junior employees keep a permanent zoom window open with their manager. Sounded terrible for both sides.

Its worse than this. Companies going fully remote are less likely to even engage with the idea of having juniors because of this gap.

The trick here is to have a senior person pester them constantly for voice calls and screen sharing sessions (both ways).

The insights could be valuable if they were introduced as an opinion rather than facts validated by a quick poll online

Very hard to mentor these days when average turnover is 24 months. I don&#x27;t know the solution.

I work remote now and love it, but I can&#x27;t imagine doing this straight out of college.

So more discrimination in favor of seasoned employees to come

today is the first time i&#x27;ve seen &#x27;remote&#x27; used like this in a sentence

Site is down - did we kill it?

While I can understand some of the arguments made about juniors getting some extra benefit from having everything close to hand, the sheer pace of the hit pieces against remote the last month or so is hilarious and very telling.

<i>&quot;I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway.&quot;</i><p>Ah, there it is, the bountiful blind arrogance I have come to expect from threads like this on HN. It&#x27;s like you didn&#x27;t even read my post, just looked for the hook to drop in and proclaim your superiority.

Junior employees working remotely needs some guidance.

SEO Spam. Junk article based on a reddit poll and conversations with colleagues.<p>&quot;junior remote employees are doing almost 2x the upskilling they&#x27;re doing in the office&quot; based on what?

Not a counterpoint, but something to keep in mind: if a junior employee requests to work remotely, please don&#x27;t force them to come in-person anyways. People need varying levels and types of mentorship. Signed, a junior employee :)