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by idrios 1698 days ago
Similar situation, WFH/lockdown massively degraded the quality of my life. Work became more stressful and metric-driven, social life died as all my friends & coworkers moved to their hometowns and I did too, and I've gained weight / fallen into a rut.

I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was at a later stage in my career I would have probably loved this, but WFH has been pretty terrible for me.

Also important to note, my commute was only about 10-15 minutes and I was extremely lucky for that.
1 comments
Steltek 1698 days ago
Sorry to hear that.

Any tips for mentors? I feel peer collaboration hasn't been too bad and honestly I strongly favor remote-style work even in the office. However, effectiveness in mentoring junior engineers has nosedived. There's more to programming than a pull request. Workflows, tools, and behaviors are also things that people learn from others. You don't get that over infrequent screen sharing and quick daily syncs.

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idrios 1698 days ago
By asking that question I think you've identified part of the problem, because around the time Covid started we lost a very competent senior dev and nobody has been hired to replace him.

Still, I used to have some pretty cool impromptu conversations in the hallway with people from other teams about projects they're working on at home, and they were great to learn from. With WFH I'd have never met some of those people. No idea how to recreate that environment.

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Cerium 1697 days ago
My experience is that impromptu mentoring has essentially gone away and only concerted efforts remain. When I was stuck on a problem or just needed a break I used to walk around the software lab and look for someone who looked frustrated and then try to solve their problem. Obviously I don't do that anymore. Instead I do have (probably not enough) screen sharing work sessions with other engineers when there is a problem that one of us needs to talk through. It is a good opportunity to learn about how others work and get some work done.
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