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.
I’ve never known the joy of sitting with someone more experienced to ask for help; I’ve either always been the most knowledgeable in the room (which is not necessarily saying much) or I was the only one in the room.
With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help.
It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologies and techniques.
Guessing you maybe work in the consulting industry?
The "seniors" tend to be glorified salespeople whose job is to put together presentations and reassure clients that everything's going well, while the one or more interns/recent grads do all the technical work. Some projects there'd be one junior literally writing every line of code while the seniors spent their entire time in meeting rooms talking about god knows what.
Dressing smart, talking smoothly, and being older looking (to imply experience to clients) are the attributes that get you a senior role.
Not at all my experience of consulting companies. What I saw was that they were very useful training pipelines for juniors.
The companies would staff projects with a mix of seniors and juniors. Seniors to get started fast, in the right direction, and actually guarantee the delivery; juniors to keep the costs lower and to have a pipeline of new people. Hands-on from day 1, sitting with seniors in a project with clear timelines and deliverables, with projects and technologies changing regularly, tended to level up the newcomers fast.
This was in small to midsize (50-500) consulting companies where the projects did not come via CEOs being buddies with others.
I just have never been in any kind of dedicated developer role. A sysadmin who happens to know development for the past 25 years.
And didn't know development at a high level; no one to guide, so I self-learned and acquired some bad habits that I'm now breaking, and didn't learn some necessary techniques that I'm now learning.
I don't know how much experience you have, and this also goes broadly for those looking but not commenting here, but if any of you would like a mentor, I'm happy to volunteer, contact info in the profile. Mentoring is, as far as I'm concerned, the most rewarding thing in the industry, and I want to do as much of it as I can handle.
Anyone else open to mentoring feel free to chime in, the more the better - mentoring is highly individualized.
I have the same experience. Getting hired with this background is weird. I don’t know how confident I should or shouldn’t be. And I wasn’t in consulting until recently. I like to put the focus on understanding the end to end workflows more than spending time worrying about my solution being the absolute best that would make HN drool over though
seems more like a culture problem, i have my calendar very public, all my junior devs know ill get on a zoom with no hesitation and they actually seem to enjoy the screen sharing, every zoom is recorded with AI summary/transcript so they’re more focused on asking questions instead of taking notes (and i think they’re really solid juniors and actually go back and watch)
there’s the whiteboard element but i’ve gotten pretty good at exalidraw and zoom annotating
add in the remote makes it kinda easy to not be distracting in meetings so i can easily DM them context on the side to get them ramped up easier
Tossing in my two cents here to agree with you. I worked remotely on and off from about 2014 onward until post-COVID RTO brought me into an office for 18 months before I became remote again. During that time (and across a bunch of companies) I went from desktop support to senior sysadmin to security on the cusp of senior security engineer.
In my experience the biggest factor in teams usually came down to the middle management layer. If their "style" was "watch over your shoulder, butts in seats" type of micromanagement then juniors didn't tend to progress unless they were self motivated to seek it out.
I'm sure this is quite a personal thing. I much prefer being in-person for that kind of interaction, and I don't think it's about efficiency as such, I just prefer being around people despite not being an extrovert - hybrid working is perfect for me.
Screen share on slack or teams gives you the same. I’d routinely work with remote teammates that way, and we’d jump in a control each others machines as needed. We’d do hours of that as a team, breaking into breakout rooms as necessary. Much more effective that a hot conference room
Even simply taking pictures of one's monitor and sending them along with text/whatsapp messages can be surprisingly practical, low friction, and effective. Adds the benefit of being asynchronous collaboration.
A phone's font is large. A picture let's you see code/logs properly formatted and in proper context. It also gives you the opportunity to circle/arrow and otherwise annotate the points of interest while displaying context around.
A picture prevents you from copying, but often that's not as important. One can use judgment to determine whether a picture or text can be better.
Receiving such messages can sometimes mean I need to transcribe a bit of what I'm seeing, but the added clarity to what they're trying to communicate can be worth it. I welcome it.
I don't think people are using any judgement, but if they are it is only poor judgement. I've rarely received a helpful screenshot like you describe.
I tend to get things like 1/3 of a terminal window missing all of the context. No commands and only half of the error.
Ever receive a photo (not a screenshot) of a spreadsheet when they expect you to do something with the content? I have.
Another personal favourite is a browser window cropped so tight I can't tell where they are. No address bar, page header removed, sidebar missing, etc.
Send text as text! One of these times I am going to print the photo, annotate it, and fax it back. Or maybe I need better coworkers.
Part of being in the office is that you pick up on what's going on around you. Coworkers might discuss some issue and you might decide to listen in, and so on.
That's the bit I really notice I am missing out on when I work at home.
working at a fully remote company, this happened all the time in slack. people used slack constantly, socially and professionally. channels filled up with context, and it was not only easy but asynchronous to search or even just go back through a day's unread posts in a channel and see what things happened, reply about something, copy it over to a colleague and get them involved, hell even spin off a ticket from it with an automation. people were in hundreds of channels, and it was a firehose, but teams helped each other make the most of it
then we got acquired by a much larger onsite-first company, and their slack is dead. nobody posts anything unless they absolutely have to (i.e. "the men's toilet on the 3rd floor is overflowing" at least twice a week, or that some printer needs paper or toner). there aren't slack bots because nobody checks slack. everything else happens in person, in a servicenow ticket, or at most via email
their IT team has no idea how to support how we used slack before. in one case they told us to stop posting in a channel used by other parts of the company because we were generating too much disruptive activity. I can see the team cultures around it eroding week over week, but we're not in any office, so there aren't any in-person behaviors replacing it. we're all simply becoming increasingly isolated, losing track of each other both as people and in the work we're doing, and becoming unhappier and less effective
this shit isn't hard, but it requires effort and people who see the benefit of it. there's a perception that people with remote work skills can just roll up into an office and be as effective without changing any fundamental aspects of how they work, and vice versa, and it's all bullshit
I've had a few situations where developers and made a lot of important decisions in person, and then the one person who was almost-always remote felt left out.
It was a bit of drama and the person ended up leaving because they wanted others to adapt to them. I think they ended up in a remote-only company in the end. Very talented developer.
Similarly, being available to stakeholders and colleagues from other teams come to me at any time and get a quick answer was something that ended up being amazing for my career, got me a few lifelong friends and even a cat.
With AI coding agents, I finally feel like I can tap the shoulder of a pro for help.
It’s not the absolute expert, and I know it’ll make mistakes. But much more knowledgeable than me at certain technologies and techniques.