Well, the data is the data. There’s no assumption that the current employee review process is reliable and bias-limited. I actually mentioned above that one of the possibilities is that new hires are doing great but just not getting credit for it.
There’s definitely something to having occasional face to face interactions. I think having some staff meetings in person is a good idea, as well as some days where everyone is around and you can have those informal interactions that can add some value to the workplace.
But I think just requiring another day in the office without an express goal for it is silly. If there’s work that’s not getting done, or areas being neglected due to people not being in, then fine. Set a schedule, and make that a clear objective. We need x amount of people in office every day to handle tasks y and z and they will effectively be on call to address those tasks on their assigned days. Great. Fine. But just blanket saying “We think you should be here 2 days, so we’ll all meet here on Tuesdays and then get your other day in on your own” doesn’t seem to make much sense. Have an objective you are trying to accomplish with it or just let people decide what works for them and have at it.
Yep
“Don’t ask don’t tell” seems to be our best path forward
Sorry to cherry pick out of your post, which is fantastic overall, but this one seems odd to me. Again, going only by what I know from my workplace and anecdotes about others, is that this behavior got much WORSE during the pandemic and WFH because people were desperate to join meetings and say something just to make sure they weren’t forgotten about. There’s some broad data to back this up, too.
The general trend at least through 2021 was more, shorter meetings with more people in them.
It’s never just as simple as “the data is the data” when the method of collecting the data can influence it. There are very few if any jobs where performance can be 100% objectively measured. There are only a few possibilities. 1. Your new hires are performing the same as before and you are measuring different, 2. You are doing a shit job of training your new employees in a remote environment, or 3. You are having a bad run of variance with new hires.
I think this post agrees completely with what I previously wrote?
The method of collecting the data isn’t influencing the data. Colleagues were evaluated and rated by managers before and after COVID. We looked at the pattern of the ratings after the fact. We didn’t feed to the managers any information that would impact their rating of employees. The impact is almost certainly due to the impacts of COVID one way or another. We hire thousands of people per year globally. It would be a one in a million chance that sampling error with new hires is the explanation.
I’m not surprised by this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true at most companies. But IMO we had a huge problem with too many meetings and too many people in them pre-pandemic. And maybe the people in meetings problem hasn’t gotten better, I’m just more blind to it since I hate fucking meetings and avoid them at all costs. But definitely the people who spend their days talking to the folks down the hall about what they’re doing rather than getting their own jobs done has gotten better.
Interestingly, in my field this is valuable time as often as it is wasted time because it keeps people engaged and keeps people from working at odds with each other by having no idea what is going on in the other teams. But it would depend a lot on the organization, and it depends a lot on the individual people. In the Before Times there were people that I would chit chat with about work and was delighted to do so because talking to them about what they were doing would give me a couple of useful ideas. There were also people that were idiots that I wanted to get out of office because they were useless.
My gut feeling is that for junior software engineers, not being physically around the people who you need to mentor you is a big impediment.
It’s one thing to say “companies will need to lean into making sure new hires stay plugged in and get the help they need in a wfh environment.” But how many are actually going to do that? It’s like how every company I’ve worked for gives lip service to proper testing, and none so far actually do it. If the real world is that 90% of companies don’t do anything meaningful to help new hires, that’s going to suck for them for a long time.
But I don’t see the companies suffering enough to immediately be forced to fix the problem. You’ll just wind up with new hires floundering and senior people getting more entrenched because no one else can do their jobs.
And on top of all that, there’s a human element of being physically in someone’s presence that I think is important to a mentee/mentor relationship. Being a good mentor takes time and effort. You have to like your mentee, and vice versa. It’s really hard to build a quasi-friendship like that fully remote.
Yeah, the mentor/coach/advocate role is really challenged by fully remote situations.
Could it be that it was previously harder to give a bad rating to someone you spent 40 hrs a week with in the office? now that it is WFH, there is no personal relationship, so it is easier to give them a shitty rating because they are not your friend?
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Yes, that’s possible.
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i feel like software engineering is relatively easy to mentor remotely. You are getting your work reviewed constantly which is instant feedback and your work can’t move forward until you make the desired changes. It is very easy to provide documentation/links to explain to someone what they are doing wrong. It’s easier to convey this stuff through written message, which is also a permanent record that they can go back to, then to just tell them something in the office that they forget in a week.
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I work ~1 day/week and my productivity/hour has skyrocketed.
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The spontaneous conversations, overhearing conversations, looking over and seeing that your mentee looks lost, and the human connection - going out to lunch, etc. - is missing. That stuff matters.
Also you’re describing an ideal workplace where a junior engineer is kept busy. At a lot of big corporations, just finding work for the junior dev and getting them plugged in is a big part of the challenge. Out of sight out of mind, it’s a lot easier for a junior dev to slip through the cracks. The employer needs to be proactive about not letting that happen. Which is my point, they should be proactive, but I suspect a lot won’t be.
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This has been the hardest part in our division. Especially when the new hires’ background doesn’t perfectly align with the job then they need a lot of hand holding which isn’t a bad thing but it’s easier to do in person because usually the person just posts up next to you seeing how your day goes, what to do when X happens, what to do when Y happens and hand holding on the basic stuff. Where as in a virtual environment you have to constantly remind yourself to bring the person into the conversations and you often need to have extra long conversations.
It’s still possible though.
I set a new rule in our office. Office is optional for everone, but every day you work from home you must watch that Gal Gadot Imagine video.
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Still can’t stop raging that they are going to make my report 2k miles away from us go into an office where they know nobody for 3 days a week. They have a small child and an hour commute. They started during the pandemic.
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Can’t imagine adding 6 hours a week to someones work routine is good for employee morale and productivity.
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We just lost an exceptional employee due to back to office mandates. 15+ years of experience, tons of institutional knowledge, just absolute idiocy not to accommodate their WFH request.
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