alt Hacker NewsThe trouble with hiring juniors now is it's much more difficult to get them up to speed so they can be productive. Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch. You can, on paper, do the same exact things over Slack and Zoom. But there's much more friction. And a junior that's struggling is a lot less visible than it used to be. So what ends up happening is seniors become more heads down, getting things done, and juniors struggle to get time with more experienced coworkers.
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So in the 2010s I was working in game development for a company that mostly did Facebook and mobile games. I'm an early bird, I would usually be in the office at 6-6:30am. The next person would show up usually about 10-15 minutes before the 10am standup, so I'd have 3 hours of quiet productivity.
Generally I'd get all my deliverables done by the time that anyone else showed up, so after standup I'd just circulate and see what everyone was working on, and if I saw someone who was frustrated, I'd see if they wanted help. This let me help train and teach the kids, which I really enjoyed.
That's the one reason I don't like fully remote/zoom jobs. I really enjoy the interaction and the ability to teach.
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.
We hired two junior devs just before Covid lockdowns. The lockdowns were quite strict here in Norway, so even when it opened back up we could only have a fraction of the people in the office.
We did indeed notice it took very long to get them up to speed.
They didn't really get going until the lockdowns were fully lifted and people returned to office.
Hard to tell what would have happened without the two+ years of Covid restrictions, but with a sample size of two I feel like it wasn't a fluke.
>Before covid, you'd sit next to them, get asked questions every so often, do some pair programming, and discuss ideas over lunch
the real glory days were the 70's when we all had to share a single multitasked computer, and the terminals (not enough for everybody) were all connected by wires and formed a sort of hive around the mini in a room called "the bullpen". Senior, junior, multiple unrelated projects sitting shoulder to shoulder, the shared tips and techniques, the humor, man it was so much fun. The day my coworker learned to play Ride of the Valkyries on the VT-100 keyboard due to a bug in the autorepeat function... music! the shared computer disk could not have held a single mp3 had mp3's even been invented yet
Office work removes corporate friction at the expense of personal friction (commuting, dress codes, etc), while WFH removes personal friction at the expense of corporate fiction in the way you've just described. It's an interesting dichotomy. Given who the power lies with in our society, I think we all know which one will win out in the long run.
Which is why junior and senior talent alike are forced back into the office. Except that tenured senior and staff employees from the boom times are in the San Francisco office, but all the new grad hires from the last 2-4 years are in various third world offices. And neither of them can get conference rooms, so everybody's on Zoom at their desk all day, trying to be heard over their neighbors.