[jiggawatts]

HN is full of entrepreneurs, which by and large are more experienced, more senior people. A total beginner/junior would not be running a startup (I hope). Someone who struggles to write a function or a for loop isn't going to be hired by startups that have like... three developers total, and the success or failure of the entire company hinges upon their output!

The real world is full of juniors, especially in IT and software development, where the continuing growth of the industry means that juniors can outnumber more experienced staff.

I have no problem working from home solo, but I've noticed that juniors will flounder. Even if they find something useful to do, they don't get to "look over my shoulder" to see how I do things.

It's the little things too, things you might not even consider to be a skill because it's so automatic for you.

    Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V

Yes, really. Really!

I've lost count of the number of times I've stopped some kid typing something (with typos) and told them to do it again using the clipboard to avoid that.

    Tab

It's not even watching someone type out each and every character one painful keystroke at a time. It's that not using tab-complete means they don't get the implicit spell-check. They also don't get to rotate through the variants of the function names (or whatever), so there isn't that implicit act of "discovery" as they see what else is up for grabs.

Etc, etc...

There's a thousand things like that a junior can pick up by being present physically next to a senior. Zoom or Teams is just not the same, especially because by default these systems don't show the keyboard shortcuts used.

[jen20]

> Even if they find something useful to do, they don't get to "look over my shoulder" to see how I do things.

This is your fault. I work remote, and have an open video call when I’m coding. Lots of people drop in for that. The keyboard is neither here nor there: I promise you can’t tell what I’m typing from looking at my keyboard, yet jetbrains solved this decades ago with the shortcut presentation mode.

[whoopsie]

Can’t agree more. Mob programming alternatives to Zoom like Multi are also superior to in person because they generate summaries with files edited, branches, websites viewed so the junior / new employee can relax and focus on what’s important. If you aren’t actively sharing “how to work” tips with colleagues, particularly juniors, it’s your fault not an office’s. The whole point of being an engineer is to be clever and find solutions where others couldn’t to make the world a better place.

[jiggawatts]

I’m a consultant working for a 15K user enterprise. I don’t get to choose the collaboration platform and the developers wouldn’t be permitted to install anything not reapproved anyway.

This is the reality for many people.

[jen20]

Presumably they have some video conferencing software. If not, that’s probably not an organization that can succeed regardless of where people are located.