In news that should surprise no one who's ever worked in an office, new research suggests that remote work is fine for experienced workers but bad for new workers. The reason is pretty obvious: Senior workers already know how to do their jobs and are slowed down by fielding annoying questions from junior workers. For them, being remote is great. Conversely, junior workers know squat and need to get guidance from senior workers to learn their jobs. They can't do that when senior workers are at home hiding in their basements.
This particular bit of research was done at a large software company, and one of the metrics the authors collected was the number of comments offered during code reviews. They found that after the start of the pandemic the number of comments received by younger engineers plummeted:
Among young engineers, the number of comments dropped by nearly half within six months of everyone going remote. The decline was especially pronounced among women:
The number of comments received by female engineers dropped nearly in half within two months of the start of remote work. This finding might or might not generalize to professions that are less male dominated.
The bottom line is that remote work might provide a short-term benefit by increasing the output of senior coders but a longer-term loss because junior coders don't get the training and mentoring they need. This causes more junior coders to quit in search of firms where there's less remote work.
This overall finding needs to be confirmed in other settings, but I have zero doubt that it will be. Remote work should be carefully deployed, not rolled out company-wide. Some jobs benefit from it while others suffer. Tread carefully.
This result is completely predictable. Seeing how successful people in your field approach there job, handle problems and setbacks, and relate to their colleagues is an important part of any young person's education
Agreed.
Also, early in your career is when you make contacts, get to know how an organization functions, etc. Much more difficult to do when working remotely.
Is it? How often do you get private one on one communication without the tools used in remote work?
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If this is true then it is just bad management, but it is probably also a bad study. Were they tracking private comments as well as public comments. At home and in person is the same. You find the person who is willing to help and you ask them questions in private and get the answer quickly.
Work from home wasn't a three month pandemic trial and then we went back to the office. It went on for two plus years, and all reports overwhelmingly say productivity went up. From personal experience of switching to a skill adjacent career a year and half ago in a completely new industry I was 100% trained at home by a team working at home. With modern collaboration tools like Teams/Slack it just is no big deal. You can be on with someone sharing their screen in seconds and it's just a much better way to learn than looking over someones shoulder. At first I posted my questions to the public channel that went to everyone, but over time I found the person who knew the answers and was willing to help, and that is who I went to privately. Everyone in management - a management team that is committed to work from home has been impressed by how quickly I learned.
They are also now investing the money from their downsized lease into more productive areas. I just have to wonder how much of this push back we would be seeing if leases could have been ended right away.
"If this is true then it is just bad management"
100%!
This is what I keep saying. If your remote team is unproductive or untrained, talk to the manager. This is very do-able. I have been remotely managing people for going on 20 years.
That said, I am a firm believer that at least some amount or regular face-to-face interaction is necessary (if only once a year for really widely distributed teams) if you want to have any sort of team cohesion.
And as for code reviews--these are almost always done remotely or via some online tool anyway. If code reviews became less wordy at the start of the pandemic it is because senior developers were either slacking off or just had other things on their minds.
Thank you!!!! A major component of my job is training new employees and contractors to my agency's accounting branch. Training is even better via Teams as in the past training had to be at the person's desk being disruptive of their neighbors and I had to beg for an extra chair as the agency had a thing about not having a visitor's chair in cubes - forgetaboutit on snagging meeting space - higher ranking mission focued meeting locked up the rooms.
As for the day to day mentoring? I try my hardest to impress upon the newcomers that I love taking their questions, it's my job to support the accounting system. Problem resolution is far more efficient via skype and/or e-mail and a person calling me over to their cube or their dropping by my cube.
Are you saying that I can manage everybody the same way regardless of what job they do?
Wow, I really need to take close look at how I'm managing people. I can't wait to see how people really start to thrive when I treat them all identically.
Plug-compatible resource units…
So we're extrapolating one bit of information (comments received in code reviews) in one specific field (software engineering) to the entirety of remote work?
Get real. Also, they show that comments received went down - is that a bad thing? Or does it not really matter? Maybe younger people actually got better at their jobs while doing remote work, so fewer comments were needed? Are the comments received all even about "training and mentoring"? I've done coding, sometimes comments are... extraneous. It's rare (more often, there aren't enough comments made by the person who wrote the code), but it happens. I scanned through the paper and looked at what they did - they used an algorithm to analyze comments for key words and assigned them to themes, and there was a marked change when the pandemic started, but I'm not convinced that this means it was a BAD thing.
That's not to say that it's not harder to onboard new people remotely than it is in person - there is a settling in period with all jobs, and maybe it's harder for employees new to the workplace to learn the same things as previous cohorts since they have to do it remotely. But that doesn't mean it's worse, overall. There are tradeoffs. And this paper certainly shows that collaboration (as measured by this paper!) went down - but it only runs through the end of 2020. It's been over 2 years since then. Has it gotten better? Have firms and management gotten better at promoting collaboration remotely? Have employees/workers learned how to better collaborate on their own? Anecdotally, I'd say yes.
If remote work fails to onboard or include people, it's more because management doesn't have the skills to do or facilitate those things than because of some innate quality of remote work itself. If there's one big area that we do need retraining, across the entire economy, it's management: people are generally terrible at managing, as generally managers are promoted based on their ability to complete the work rather than their ability to develop employees and manage the work of said employees (in direct contrast to managing the employees themselves, which is what too many people think managing is).
This narrative that remote work just can't work lets management and executives off the hook for things they're actually 100% responsible for, which further feeds class inequities.
I also don't think people understand what the modern work place with young people looked like before the pandemic. It was not uncommon to see 100 people working in a room all wearing over ear head phones. They were all furiously communicating on slack but no one talked to any one. If you walked up to a person to talk to ask them a question you would get dagger eyes back from them.
This.
If women were receiving vastly less comments (compared to their male counterparts) after the move to 100% remote work, why were junior females less likely to quit than their male counterparts?
What if it turned out, many of those comments were undesired?
The authors may have misinterpreted their data.
I am not a coder so I will ask, what are the comments everyone is referring to?
Almost any project in business today is tracked in a collaboration tool where the tasks of the project are listed. People working on the project can leave comments pertaining to the project in the collaboration tool. 90% of the communication around completing any given project happens in the tool - a tool that you can access just as easily from home as you can from a desk at work.
Feedback on code written. At least that is my interpretation. Kindasorta like proofreading and editing.
Correct and an accurate analogy.
Thank you all, I am enlightened!
An alternate reading of this data is that young remote workers are producing better code requiring less comments.
Fewer comments 🙂
Less hairsplitting.
Fewer hairs split
Rather it seems they’re too scared to leave comments on changes by senior engineers who they aren’t personally friendly with
Most comments from juniors are more like “I don’t get this, can you explain this” or “have you tried this other way, would that work” rather than “you have a spelling error”
Wonder how this fits for teams that were remote from each other in the first place. Meaning teams spread globally and having little need for "office work". Sounds more like bad management, if you can't ensure everyone feels enabled on a remote team.
Never had a problem collaborating with co-workers who are in no position to meet in person. So it's better when you can bother someone in person vs remotely? Short of sitting at the same desk, it seems nonsensical that folks aren't already communicating via chat, etc even when in the same building. And if you can't collaborate via video call and screen sharing, I'm not sure being in person would make a difference on your ability.
Those demanding their priors be confirmed are certainly running wild with a very limited data set.....
The authors appear to assume that more feedback is better because being in the same physical office leads to more promotions. But they also show that being remote led to greater productivity both before and after covid. They dont appear to address that piece of data in their conclusions.
Being in the office leads to less productivity but greater promotion opportunities is likely a conclusion that will surprise noone.
This looks like a super limited study.
That said, I do think remote work benefits older folks at the expense of training the younger. The thing is, this is not my problem. This is the employers' problem.
Employers used to do a lot of things that they decided was not their problem. Training and education was one of those things. It used to be understood that nobody knew how to run a business they didn't build themselves, and training was considered a competitive advantage. Now the expectation is that employees should be able to drop-in with no training, and a lot of scammy places make money by charging employees for "training". (The training is frequently regulatory environmental or safety information they're required to show.) The story became, employees are responsible for their careers.
So now things have changed again, and you want me to take on duties unrelated to my career for the good of your business? And you're not going to pay me more, and those duties involve uprooting how I've been living for three years?
That's not going to happen for free, and maybe not at all.
I do think it is a systemic problem. But it isn't my problem, and the ones with that problem are not charities and haven't been afraid to use their power unilaterally in the past. So now if they want to change things again, they can get out the checkbook and let me know how much they want things to change, or I can find a more flexible employer.
My employer had initial problems but made some changes so that senior people got some recognition for helping with new hires so that it just wasn't seen as slack time. Thing is the extra effort to help out another employee always took time out from an employees primary duties, it used to be that employers got this labor free as a result of social pressures.
Now those social pressures are largely gone, so you need to have this mentoring be reflected on performance reviews so that if the extra labor the employee is doing is causing slack elsewhere the training labor compensates for it. Continue to act like you can get thus training for free rather than recognize the employees putting in the time and effort to do it and you will have problems.
This makes no sense to me. Comments on code reviews isn't done in person whether or not the people are working remotely. Maybe the remote senior engineers were just creating fewer comments because they were remote and goofing off...
Too many corporate interests want workers back in the office. I can't trust any of these studies or the corporate media on this topic. My life has improved infinitely working from home and I wont be taking any job that requires onsite attendance every day.
The Washington Post got slammed by readers for an article that said federal workers should be forced back into the office because DC needs them to come back to save downtown DC.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/21/federal-employees-are-not-downtown-saviors/
Kevin's 3 conclusion:
"The bottom line is that remote work might provide......... (1) a longer-term loss because junior coders don't get the training and mentoring they need. This (2) causes more junior coders to quit (3) in search of firms where there's less remote work."
There is literally no support in this study for any of these 3 conclusions.
No support for a long term loss or a shortfall in training.
No support for a casual relationship with quits.
No support for the quits seeking out in person work opportunities.
Well I've seen the exact same thing. Junior people get overwhelmed or need help. They don't tell anybody (or don't know that they are in trouble). They become unhappy and quit.
A lot of training is informal and spontaneous - "Oh, you are having trouble with this? Here's how you fix it." You have to be in the room.
I mean, come on! We know that distance learning was a disaster. Why would we expect job training to be any different?
Something of note in the study data- Tenure at this office jumped dramatically after the shutdown and switch to remote working.
Given the change in tenure (very few new hires post shutdown) and the assumption that the company ( like most companies) had very few new hires starting in Jan/Feb, i would bet that the slowdown in feedback is partly due to the post-covid staff having fewer new employees.
I missed this, good catch.
This is certainly true to some extent:
"Remote work should be carefully deployed, not rolled out company-wide. Some jobs benefit from it while others suffer. Tread carefully."
But, as some commenters have mentioned, it's not just the nature of a given job, there's also the question of how that job is managed.
I've been working for years in a job and at a company that made an almost complete transition to remote work (in 2020) and has remained largely remote to this day. And the problem isn't so much the nature of our jobs as it is the nature of our management.
Some managers may be genuinely good at keeping in touch and supplying needed updates remotely. But, alas, not all managers are like that. And, in my experience, there's simply no question that remote work has been bad for many companies.
In my own remote work environment, there has been an insufficient transmission of info pertaining to the updates and changes that have rolled out over the last three years. And a lot of us have simply had to adjust to the brave new world of remote work where we have to try our hardest to figure out a way of extracting critical info from those who have it (rather than just talking to them about it in person like we used to do).
Careful deployment is, indeed, quite necessary, but often lacking.
I think sorry Kevin but you've been out of an office environment for so long you don't know the ebb and flow of a modern office with functional effective management. My Agency for a little over a decade has had resiliency drills where they make sure at least one a year they have a "remote" week where they stress tested systems and developed plans in case everyone but emergency personnel worked remotely. This worked beautifully when bad weather hit the every five years or so east coast monster storms. So we already had a plan to do day to day operations remotely. Agency leadership ignored the "everything is fine" message from the top in March 2020 and had us taking out laptops home every night by late February and so we were ready when the shutdown happened.
My boss surprised me, he actually became more approachable and we had more meetings to keep everyone on top of what our team was working on and what issues we needed to be working on. Our team actually got better working remotely. The only things we've needed to do in person have been renewing badges, laptop repair and replacement and recently a team building meeting and in person meetings with auditors to demo the processes they are auditing. Totally reasonable in person stuff and remote when it makes sense.
My spouse's company is completely remote and had the opposite results. But they have alot of women senior coders to begin with. And their product is a social media destination.
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Does nobody actually look at the graphs? Women received substantially more comments than men did, prior to the switch to remote work. The paper hilariously dances around this fact, making all sorts of comparisons -- but not that one. Furthermore, the disparity between follow-up comments (at least for teams in a single building - which seems important) was even more gendered, with women receiving massively more follow-up comments than men.
After the pandemic, women and men received similar amounts of comments. I guess when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
Also - why should I take seriously a paper that includes the following:
"We also find that the effect of proximity comes from both female and male commenters [sic]. This suggests that the additional comments are not solely driven by male colleagues mansplaining nor female colleagues taking other female engineers under their wing."
Got that folks - a man providing comments is mansplaining. A woman providing comments is "taking other female engineers under [her] wing".
To be blunt, a better fit for the data is that the female engineers built social relationships with mentors, which resulted in those mentors expending additional effort in training the female engineers. This hypothesis is also consistent with women on multi-building teams lacking the social advantages of women on single-building teams. After everyone went remote, the opportunity to build those relationships was lost. And so the playing field was leveled and the women received no additional support, as compared to the men. Sad.
You could also read this as remote workers coming up to speed faster and needing fewer comments regarding their code. Supporting this is the one building versus multiple building difference. Perhaps the big problem that new workers have is co-workers nit-picking their code as a form of hazing and as a display to management. When this is less convenient as when there are multiple buildings or remote work involved, those hazing / display comments are less of a problem.
There's a reason people hate business meetings. They're usually more about people trying to get boss face time rather than actual problem solving. Could boss's dislike remote work because of its focus on getting things done rather than having a good show to watch? I'd believe it.