Remote work brings hidden penalty for young professionals, study says
As someone who was still a junior employee at the beginning of the pandemic and has been remote work the majority of my career, this does not match my experience. Perhaps it’s the organizations I’ve been at, or the field I’m in, but I have had no issues getting feedback or up to speed on things. Stuff like code review, which the article mentions, benefit in no way from in-person vs remote work set-ups. Feedback in general doesn’t benefit from in-office scenarios in my experience, so long as the junior is proactive. The only junior employees that I’ve seen struggle in with remote work are those who<p>1) are woefully under-skilled, even for a junior level employee<p>2) don’t even attempt to solve a problem on their own. If something doesn’t work their first impulse is to ask someone else to fix it for them (which leads them to never fixing problem 1)<p>3) Always waiting for someone to tell them what to do. It’s easy to ask for feedback, or for problems that you can work on, or if you can pair with someone else on a problem they are working on so you can get some experience. None of that is really enabled or disabled by working from office&#x2F;remote.<p>If I had to guess, I think it might be related to people’s experience in school&#x2F;college. There are students I knew that were successful using resources that aren’t handed to them, like the internet. Others seemed to exclusively study via study groups, study guides, and going to the professor&#x2F;TA during office hours, and without these. Once you enter the work force, the second kind of student has those resources pulled out from underneath them and very quickly has to learn to be the first kind of student, or they will struggle. I think remote vs in office doesn’t make much of a difference for the first kind, but in office feels more like a stop-gap for the second kind until they become more senior and acclimate. That’s just speculation on my part though, and is exclusively based on my limited experience and field.