Agreed its not black&white, but theres more factors than IC.
For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it.
For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours.
Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing.
COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive.
Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.
I always tell my friends and colleagues new to remote work that remote, async collaboration is a skill to be learned.
You have to take a thought and distill it down to a diagram or written word before you share it. Personally, If I can't do that it tells me that my idea is still half baked.
It also teaches you to avoid throwing out incomplete ideas or asking simple questions you could answer yourself as the rtt for a response in a distributed team is too high.
Yes, and some see this as a plus / others as a minus.
For juniors, there is some learning done by being extremely annoying constant question askers of their seniors. The good ones find a balance of actually trying things & collecting their thoughts before doing so.. more quickly than others.
They can often be steered in this direction if you ask the same set of questions until they internalize the checklist themselves of how you tackle a problem before bothering others.
Often, sitting in an on open floorplan with too high a concentration of juniors is essentially productivity killing to the point of lopping 20 IQ points off.
Agreed, however some teams/orgs have skewed ratios such that the senior job basically becomes fielding interrupts all day and then coding at home after dinner.
Fine if thats the job, but don't call it senior engineer and treat as an IC role that is also expected to clear lots of Jiras (hey! seniors should be able to do 3X story points if juniors are doing X.. what are we paying them for!).
A lot of "flat organizations" delude themselves with 30:1 IC:manager ratios where what's really happening under the hood is - 5 seniors on the team each fielding 5 juniors worth of interrupts all day, with 1 manager on top whack-a-moling crisis management.
For example I think all new grads need to be house trained with some in-office period, as well as have made enough money/been subsidized to actually have a proper WFH setup. 22 year olds hunched over a 14" laptop screen on their nightstand ain't it.
For people who've done 10/15/20 years in office, we know how to manage our time remotely, and many of us have long had proper home office setups for weekends/after hours.
Further - many of us have long worked on globally distributed teams, so the concept of everyone getting around a whiteboard was literally never ever a thing.
COVID, remote, hybrid, etc have brought a whole new way of working and tools such that I can collaborate with my global teams in ways we never did 2019&before. It also means that even in-office, people are spending hours on zoom.. which seems counterproductive.
Anyway what we are really seeing is companies getting greedy. If you want to mandate in office days & hours, then maybe I don't need to check my email/slack first thing in morning, right before bed, and over the weekend. Maybe if I'm not allowed to work remotely, then I can't help with your urgent issues at 10pm or Sunday afternoon, etc.