[InertBrake]

Many of the comments on discussions such as these give me the impression that people are not considering this when they write, or at the very least omitting it.

I'm a college student graduating next year, and I just finished my first substantial internship ever in a remote arrangement. The past twelve weeks were my first real experience in my professional environment of interest, but I'm not even sure if I can call it that. I did the best I could and completed three of four of my projects, one of which was a competition where my team placed. But this was despite reassignment from my preferred original projects (in a physical lab), productivity, and general morale suffering immensely from pretty much every restriction COVID and the California wildfires have wrought on us.

I'm a young guy in the process of building myself in nearly every way. I have more "potential" than I do domain knowledge and wisdom. I'm less disciplined. I feel a huge need to get out into the world and see people in places to develop my career and every type of relationship. These have all been harder to work on in the current climate.

So when I see people extolling anecdotal virtues of no commute or not having to bother with seeing their coworker's faces in response to comments explaining why people may like the office, I get annoyed. I've literally never seen a single colleague of mine in real life or had a chance to get bored of my commute, and it was not a choice for me. Yes, adapting as things come is important. That doesn't change the assertion my demographic will have likely been more impacted by this when the smoke clears. I haven't had nearly as much opportunity as these people may have taken for granted in situating themselves so they can presently bank on their know-how and established relationships until we are out of this crisis. I hope my experiences in this regard will not be as bad as I go for full-time after I finish school in June.

[kelnos]

I feel absolutely terrible for all of our interns and new-grad hires this year, as they -- like you -- are getting a bizarre experience that we're not at all prepared to do properly, as we've just never done it this way before.

As someone who's later in his career, I'm totally fine and happy working from home (and was doing that most of the time pre-pandemic anyway), but if I look back to my early-/mid-20s and think about all the in-person mentorship I'd gotten, and how much I learned just by physically being in the presence of other people with more experience than I... I'm really worried about how we're going to effectively mentor a new generation of colleagues if we have to keep up this reduced amount of interaction.

Now, we do need to be careful to not equate the current situation with what "minimum office" might look like outside a pandemic situation. If we were all working from home but didn't have to isolate and socially distance ourselves, we'd still greet our interns and new employees with lunches and other outings, and we'd have plenty of random get-togethers in parks and bars. And I'd expect we'd come up with ways to get more-senior folks in the same room with the newcomers on a regular basis during the work day, whether in a co-working space or just a sparsely-populated office.

So really, it just sucks right now, but won't always. I know that's little consolation for you and those like you, who are entering into this mess before we've figured out how to do it right. I do expect things to be a bit better next summer after you graduate, but I'm sure there will be plenty of rough edges.

[ghaff]

I frequently thought, even before the current situation, that much as I've been happily mostly remote for something like 15 years now, it's hard for me to imagine being in that situation when I was starting out.

Sure, communications tools and practices were a lot different then. But, even so, it's difficult for me to see starting out working from my apartment.

[andrejserafim]

InertBrake - well done on your internship :)

As someone who's been through internships and many years of in office work this is worrying me too.

Our junior colleagues coming in without the little things they would get from sitting in a room with everyone else.

Without team lunches and social events. Because it's not direct impact this is hard to reason about and create artificially.

I chose to work remotely full time 4 years ago and I have to rely on my past years of experience quite a lot.

What I do see is that excellent mentors and senior colleagues still find a way to mentor less experienced colleagues. It just takes conscious effort from both sides and we need to support both sides more in this.

I'm very keen to study this in my teams and use the learnt experience to raise the base level.

[itronitron]

Right now you can idealize what you anticipate the social interactions in a work setting will be because you haven't yet experienced it (for any extended period of time at least.)

[InertBrake]

I'm glad you pointed that out as I definitely have thought of this before, and I obviously can't understand it in all the ways it may be meant yet. Recent conversations with my dad (also in the industry) have shown me just as much how there is still much in the planning and development environment I have misperceptions or lack of perspective on.

Just as everyone experiences some level of shock at the start of university for what it is truly like, I expect the same for my transition into the workforce, and that it may take a long time. It took me until last November of last year to truly fall into a groove in college, and that was in normal times. The harder recent period has been a strange juxtaposition for me of adult responsibilities with the stuck-at-homeness of my teens. In essence, it felt as if my life regressed in every way with the exception of a regular paycheck.

It's all the more jarring when you consider that my time at college was derailed in March just as I was the most at peace, capable, and ready to build others up around me. Now, I'll likely never see that environment again. I have lots of unfinished work in the labs and CS/CE student community which can only be realized in a diminished extent now. There are countless people I never had a chance to say goodbye to. I sadly expect my own graduation to be virtual like the class of 2020's.

In summary, I understand reality will rarely align with expectations. Sacrifice and adversity can be expected, and thus far I have been fortunate to have not lost anything truly irreplacible. However, there is room to lament lost plans and opportunity. That wave of momentum and self-esteem I managed to climb to the crest of towards the end of my in-person college experience will have to be rebuilt. I am and shall overcome the times we live in now, but it is also not unclear to me what I could have done and became if the pandemic didn't happen.